Creating

Conceiving and developing new artistic ideas and work

Pre-pandemic, I worked at the Kinsella Magnet School for the Performing Arts, a performing arts themed PreK-12 school in Hartford, CT. I taught Drama for five years from 2015-2020 in the high school (Grades 9-12), and developed a curriculum for the day classes based on the National Core Arts Standards for Theatre. Classes I taught at Kinsella included scene study, theatre history, playwriting, design, and devised theatre. Students were then able to apply the skills they learned with me during the day to the work we did on after school productions with our theatre company the students named the "Kinsella Drama Squad." I was very lucky at Kinsella to be given a lot of freedom as to the content and style of productions we were able to produce. Students were incredibly involved in the artistic process from conception to design to casting and staging. I saw our work together as an opportunity to teach students how to conceptualize and execute a production professionally and collaboratively, and I am proud of our work because it pushed students' and audiences' thinking outside of the box in terms of material, content, and creative expression. We were often told by other students and my colleagues in the community that the conceptual nature of our work pushed the boundaries of high school theatre, and that is definitely a mission I set out to accomplish in my time at Kinsella. We produced ten productions while I was at Kinsella, and I highlight two of those productions below.

Antigone

In Spring 2017, in the wake of the 2016 US election, the Kinsella Drama Squad produced a post-apocalyptic envisioning of the Ancient Greek play Antigone by Sophocles. I selected this adaptation of the text because it relied heavily on ensemble storytelling and layering of lines and dialogue to tell the story. With a cast of almost entirely young women, we used group movement to help tell the story and create this dystopian world. We leaned into concepts of authoritarianism and talked as an ensemble about the consequences of hubris. Students saw Creon as someone who was all bark and no bite, and used choral dialogue to poke holes in the character's tough exterior, elevating Antigone to someone whose voice could break the status quo. I also had a student create and produce original music for our production which was incorporated into transitions and specific moments in the play. This piece placed in the top two positions at the Connecticut Drama Association High School Drama Festival, and we were honored to perform it at the New England Drama Festival in Massachusetts that same year.

The Tempest

In the spring semester of 2018, I had one of my classes work on scenes from The Tempest by William Shakespeare. The students loved the story so much that a year later in Spring 2019, we decided to produce The Tempest for our festival piece. For this production, we set the world of The Tempest in a campy, sci-fi landscape of space travel and laser guns with a backdrop of disco music and queer ballroom culture from the 80s and 90s. We talked about the idea of "chosen family," and how Prospero as an outcast from her home planet uses the magic of music and performance to create a new community. The students researched ballroom culture, and a student choreographer took movement styles from ballroom and created show-stopping dance pieces with the fairy chorus that were incorporated into the story. The set and costumes were also completely designed and constructed by students based on dramaturgical research on campy sci-fi classics like Barbarella.

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