These artifacts demonstrate my competence in conceiving and developing new work and ideas.
Zoo is a ten-minute play I wrote in Beginning Playwriting following prompts and exercises given my the instructor Judy Tate. This was my final draft for the class, after receiving feedback from the instructor and fellow students.
These images are from a short play that I lead-devised, entitled Coming Home. I led a group of actors in an exploration of joy and growing up on Chicago's south side. This piece was a part of a larger project "50 in 50" led by Free Street Theatre, where we performed in every of Chicago's 50 wards on the same day.
...freedom; psalm 151:1 was commissioned by Black Lives Matter Chicago's exhibition "Our Duty to Fight", which showcased artists and activists working in the movement in Chicago. I wrote it based on my experiences of and as a celebration to the movement work I was apart of.
These artifacts demonstrate my competence in realizing artistic ideas and work through interpretation and presenting.
The performance stills are from a number of plays and web series I have acted in over the last several years with Chicago theatre companies.
How to Become a Protest Mime was my culminating performance for Nan Smithner's Physical Theatre Improvisation class. The document attached is a PDF of the slide show that I had an audience member/classmate advance while I mimed. My mime was a black power protest mime, and invited the audience to consider their silence in the contemporary black life movement.
The Image of Justice was written and performed initially for the Santa Fe Art Institute's SFAI140 event where resident artists have up to 140 seconds to present their work. I used this opportunity to explore what is now my proposed culminating project, Re-Writing the Declaration, and in this early performance, attempted to connect audience participation, our founding fathers, and the black woman experience.
These artifacts demonstrate my competence in understanding and evaluating how the arts convey meaning.
The article, games guide and workshop plan are all based on my work in Theatre of the Oppressed programs I developed and led from 2015-2016. The article illustrates how the youth I worked with responding to and grew because of the programs, as well as some limitations of the work in our context.
These performance reviews, completed for different Nan Smithner courses (Advanced Directing and Physical Theatre Improvisation), examine productions for their use of respective directorial and physical theatre techniques and evaluate how they demonstrate meaning.
These artifacts demonstrate my competence in relating artistic ideas and work with personal meaning and external context.
For my Verbatim Media Artifact project, completed for Joe Salvatore's Ethnoactor & Verbatim Performance course, I investigated, through performance, a pro-life advocate and activist to examine what of her strategy and rhetoric could be useful in my own artistic and organizing for the pro-choice movement.
Striking Color, a ten-minute play, was completed as a response to two courses I was taking simultaneously, Problems and Practices in Play Production with Joe Salvatore and Images of Women in Theatre with Nan Smithner. Striking Color is a contemporary response to Zora Neal Hurston's Color Struck, picking up on her characters' return to each other, and placing them n a modern conversation exploring how colorism and its effects have and have not shifted since the original play.
These artifacts, and the projects they represent, demonstrate my competence, interest, and experience in applied theatre, arts-based research, and practice-led inquiry, specifically through participatory, devised, and theatre of the oppressed forms and frameworks.
I developed these Theatre of the Oppressed-based programs to examine community issues with teens and adult community members. My goal was to work with these groups using theatre and TO as tools to investigate and begin conversations around issues that were important to them.
Each of these projects were devised with arts-based research processes, including a guiding inquiry that led each process. Each culminated in a series of public performances. I co-wrote, directed and lead-devised First and This Boat Called My Body, both participatory pieces about reproductive justice, and directed ob/li/ves/cence with first year acting students at DePaul University.
We Come From is the culminating project from my arts-based research from the Methods and Materials in Qualitative Research course, under Amy Cordileone. The poem combines research themes, direct participant responses, and is also designed to be performed with audience participation.