Maureen Chen and Chao-I Li, M.B.A. candidates in Pitt’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, look on as instructor Kathryn Spitz videotapes another student’s presentation during the workshop, Developing Your Business Style Using Theater Techniques.

The instructor and her five students stand in a circle in the center of the large, brightly lit classroom…stretching, breathing, and exercising their vocal chords by repeating syllables over and over.

It looks and sounds like a theater course, and it is—but the students are all from Pitt’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. And the course is a one-credit, six-week workshop called Developing Your Business Style Using Theater Techniques.

Taught by Kathryn Spitz, a Pitt Department of Theatre Arts teaching artist-in-residence and a professional actress, the workshop covers basic techniques that actors employ in communicating with audiences and one another.

“The point of this exercise is to warm up the voice and body as well as to relax and focus on the task at hand,” explains Spitz, who has appeared on television programs such as Mad About You, Designing Women, and The Young and the Restless, and who starred last fall in the Pitt Repertory Theatre’s Old Times and for the last two years in the theatre arts department’s Shakespeare-in-the-Schools touring production of Hamlet.

The course covers basic acting techniques, including listening and responding, choosing and achieving objectives, and improvisation, a valuable skill when responding to impromptu questions following a business presentation, for example.

“Recruiters tell us the primary thing they’re looking for in M.B.A. graduates is skill in communicating,” says Elaine Stolick, director of the Competency-Based Coaching Program at Katz. Communication skills have topped the list of sought-after attributes in the Wall Street Journal-Harris Interactive Recruiters Survey for the last several years, Stolick adds.

Recognizing the overlap between stage performance and business, then-Katz School of Business Dean Frederick Winter approached Pitt’s theatre arts department in 2004 about developing a course or workshop to teach Katz students basic theater techniques. Spitz, who had taught nonactors in community theatre classes for years, agreed to develop a workshop that would teach four key competencies—presentation skills, listening, creativity, and interpersonal savvy—to business students. It was first offered in fall 2004, and the next six-week session will begin March 7.

During one of the classes last term, Spitz coached her five students, all M.B.A. candidates, on making effective presentations. Students delivered speeches, original or written by others, and Spitz critiqued them.

“You did a very nice job of finding different moments, different ‘colors’—that’s an acting phrase—different colors and emotions inside of you,” she tells Erik Boone, 26, after he completes his monologue, a locker room talk by famed Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. “You found a harshness, a competitiveness, and a softer side. Very nice.”

After two of the three Asian American students in the workshop struggled with their English during their presentations, Spitz helped them to communicate the same message using words easier to enunciate.

When one student appeared nervous during his presentation, Spitz directed him: “Take all of that nervous, excited, heightened energy and channel it into your words, your point, your objective. What are you trying to achieve?”

Boone commented after the class that he was learning to become more articulate. “Speaking in a public setting, whether it’s in a boardroom or an elevator or over lunch—it’s an important thing in the business world,” he said.

Arts-based learning is becoming increasingly common in the business world, Spitz said, pointing out that The Journal of Business Strategy recently published a special issue titled “Arts-Based Learning for Business,” with articles ranging from how jazz can contribute to an individual’s business development to how dance, theater, and music can improve the academic performances of engineering students.

“The most important thing I want to stress to these students is to get across who they are,” she says. “Everyone is unique. I encourage them to discover what is unique or special about themselves and to be able to express it in any given circumstance.”