Serious fun defines the scene in this award-winning theatre arts professor’s workshops.

Elizabeth van den Berg's foot kicks out to one side and then another as her arms arch over her head in jumping-jack fashion. Circling her on the understage of Alumni Hall are 12 students, whose flailing arms and bare feet loosely mimic their mentor's movements.

The beat quickens – one…two…three… becomes fiftyfiftyonefiftytwofiftythree.

Fifteen minutes later, her students loosened and warmed up, the activity changes to humming yoga-style, then a few stretches and suddenly the assistant professor of Theatre Arts is tossing pillows, each shaped like a different symbol in the phonetic alphabet. “My little teaching tools” she calls them.

Watching her on stage with her students, even the casual observer would know that this is van den Berg's element. Here she is comfortable. Animated. Talented.

An artist and a teacher.

Then, there is no surprise upon learning that she recently was named one of 32 “Teaching Artists” chosen nationally by the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.

The award recognizes the winners' “outstanding commitment to their students and to the art of Theatre.”

The teacher in Elizabeth van den Berg lives for the “a-hah” moment when her students' eyes tell her they “get it.” Long term, she enjoys the follow up -- knowing what they do with all that they learned. Only occasionally does that include becoming an actor or actress.

“She demands a lot out of her students – but there's a whimsy to it,” says sophomore Jessica Behar, who has taken a class with van den Berg each of her four semesters on campus. “She's very hands on and her experience of living all around the world – knowing different kinds of people and different ways of thinking – makes her an asset to a liberal arts school like McDaniel.”

In fact, the college of the liberal arts and sciences is the perfect venue for van den Berg to teach the acting she loves. Theatre Arts encompass all of the liberal arts – to study theatre arts is to learn about life, van den Berg says.

“Theatre reflects life. We have to understand life to reflect it – that means using all of the sciences, literature, politics, history…” she says, sitting cross-legged in her bookshelf-lined office on the lower level of WMC Alumni Hall. Remnants of productions – both on campus and off – punctuate the books and manuscripts that fill the shelves.

We're all really acting every day, aren't we, she asks hypothetically.

Dialect is her specialty. Not accents, her students clarify. Dialect – not simply how to say it but what words to use and, the most difficult of all, owning it, according to Jessica. Unlike most dialect coaches, van den Berg's style of teaching is interactive. The actor is on stage with the teacher coaching from the sidelines. It is different from the conventional coach and student seated face to face with the student imitating sounds the coach makes.

This summer Jessica and senior Andrew Pecoraro will go with van den Berg to Scotland when she presents her paper, “Dialect on the Fly,” at the Voice and Speech Trainers Association (VASTA) meeting.

On campus, van den Berg is teacher, mentor, coach, educator. But away from academe, theaters in New York , San Francisco , D.C. , and beyond know her as actor, director, voice coach. Van den Berg is both teacher and artist.

It all began years ago in van den Berg's childhood, although she wouldn't realize she should major in theatre not music until her freshman year at San Francisco State University .

Daughter of a diesel engineer who kept the Voice of America generators running, she grew up in Morocco , the Philippines and Greece . She began kindergarten in Morocco and graduated from an American high school in Beirut , Lebanon .

But make no mistake, Elizabeth van den Berg remembers her first on-stage role. She was 5 and played the page to “good King Wenceslaus.”

“I had no lines – I just followed the king,” she says as if it happened yesterday.

In third grade, also in Morocco , she wrote a play about an “Aladdin-esque” young Arab girl and later, in high school, joined the after-school drama program, which provided the young actress with a variety of roles, including the secretary in “Pajama Game.”

When van den Berg walked into the Las Vegas ballroom at the reunion of her high school class, she heard a man's voice belt out, “Pi-I-I-c-t-u-r-r-re thi-I-I-s-s.” They had sung the duet together in “Pajama Game,” and he – now a minister – remembered the entire scene.

Still, she loved to sing, and joined the choir and formed a group that sang “Peter, Paul and Mary-type” music in coffee houses and other venues in Beirut . It seemed natural to major in music when she entered college. The first year she took music theory, music classes – and acting.

“I loved my acting class and hated being in the practice room by myself,” van den Berg says. “So, I switched majors.”

And never looked back.

For more information, contact Peggy Fosdick, director of communications, at 410-857-2293.