Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and With Communities

Welcome Remarks:

• Alexandra Socarides, Emerson Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs 
• Alexis Truitt, Executive Director, American Alliance for Theatre & Education

Framing and Goal Setting, Symposium Co-Chairs Lizzy Cooper Davis and Dana Edell
Community Grounding and Activation: Elisa Hamilton and Gillian Epstein

Re-Emerging Together
Elisa Hamilton and Gillian Epstein created "Re-Emerging Together" in the Summer of 2021, funded by the Sketch Model program at Olin College of Engineering. After experiencing prolonged social isolation due to the pandemic, Elisa and Gillian felt that reconnecting in groups was particularly meaningful. They wondered if there was a way to mindfully come back together, as a way to honor the significance of the moment, peel a few layers past small talk, and get to know one another in new ways. "Re-Emerging Together: An Activity" was designed as a mode for activating conversations, as well as a way for participants to share what they wondered, learned, and celebrated in the course of their isolation and re-emergence. Four years later, Elisa and Gillian have adapted this model to speak to our current moment. While the original activity asked participants to look back and consider their internal experiences of the pandemic, the updated activity has a more outward focus on the present. We ask participants to consider and share what they question, embrace, and imagine in our current time of uncertainty. In this playful workshop, participants will ponder timely questions, share, listen, learn, and leave with a tool to engage others in meaningful conversation in the classroom and beyond.

Black women educators inspire this workshop. In Progressive Dystopia, Dr. Savannah Shange, moves out of her way when writing to ensure Black children SHINE, despite the violence of schooling upheld by adults and community. She has a way of painting a visual of their brilliance. Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings and Dr. Lisa Delpit reminded me during "play time", at a Sisters In Education Circle retreat, that hand clapping and oral rhymes are a Black tradition that we must keep alive in honor of Black children. All of them inspire me, as a theatre teacher, to create a workshop that celebrates what can be viewed as the grotesque, but is ACTUALLY THE BEAUTY OF BLACK YOUTH. From the way they look, the ways they move and dress, and sound…I love Black youth in all their fullness. We’ll celebrate Black youth, who are the creators and innovators of Black culture and world culture, and who are constantly stolen from and poorly replicated. We will design grills made of play dough, magazines, blocks, and all types of unconventional materials, create hand claps about Blackness, and discuss how folks can show up for and with Black youth in spaces that feel authentic. We’ll also talk about how to be in conversation WITH them about anti-Blackness and white supremacy delusion and how to continue or start the journey of releasing that from oneself. Most importantly, we will discuss how Black children show us time and time again how to be in joy, resistance, and our humanity.

How can we interrupt assumptions we hold that may hinder the growth of students, who are caught in a system rife with racial and socioeconomic inequities?  How do artistic processes and experiences intersect with equity practices?  Where are opportunities to activate artistic innovation and processes to create joyful & liberatory arts education? How do we build organizational practices that continually examine, reimagine, and sustain this work? These are questions we at ArtsConnection have been delving into deeply for over 8 years in order to ensure we intentionally uplift all the humans in our education and organizational spaces.  At the intersection of history and the advancement of humanity you will always find the arts. So, we have been facilitating ongoing practitioner research focused on how we can engage our humanity and bring equitable practices to the forefront of how we work by activating artistic processes. One result is our new framework which activates key artistic approaches to build belonging, agency and cultural humility. Another is the journey we took to collaboratively design and apply this framework organizationally. In this multidisciplinary arts filled workshop, Facilitators and Participants will experience, reflect on, and offer feedback on ArtsConnection's new research-based pedagogical framework for creating joyful and liberatory arts education. The goal is to work collaboratively to activate artistic practices, examine how working as an artist can disrupt classroom power dynamics, build student agency, and deepen student learning and motivation to learn.

Through gender play, object study, queer reflections, sense memory, and repetitious failure, Rezes offers exercises and techniques in performance expansion for all theatre artists and educators to employ in rehearsal, on stage, or in the classroom.PART ONE:To begin, Fractals: Nonbinary Acting Methods is a workshop led by Jo Michael Rezes (they/them), who works as an actor and transmedia artist in Greater Boston. This workshop offers a nonbinary approach to the creation of character for performers and educators of all ages—with special attention to professional development for early-career actors. At AATE, Rezes offers theatre educators and performers methods for understanding the fractal patterns of gender in rehearsal. Workshop highlights: Yale Dramatic Association (virtual, 2021), Vassar College (2022), Lick-Wilmerding High School (May 2024), Massachusetts GSA Student Leadership Council (Aug 2024). This workshop was sponsored in part by a grant from the City of Boston Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture and with support from the Education Department of Company One Theatre. This workshop is dedicated to actor training free from binary ways of thinking, doing, and experiencing theatrical labor in rehearsal and the classroom. PART TWO: Rezes currently serves as the Curriculum Developer for The Theater Offensive's nationally award-winning True Colors queer youth theatre program. Rezes holds a Q+A about the incorporation of gender expansive techniques into classrooms and rehearsal rooms for all age levels, with special attention to QTPOC youth, as they have just completed a redesign of education programs at TTO. How can we teach queer methods in censored spaces or within queerphobic legislation? How can we support gender expansive students through and within the theatre industry? Can theatre become a space for play and imagination outside of the binary?

IMPROVing Medicine: A case study on Afro-Latin youth-led, theatre interventions for medical students
Presenter: Josephine Ross
The positive impact of using improvisational theatre (improv) to improve social skills among medical professionals has been demonstrated consistently. However, no study has been conducted that investigates the effects of including marginalized youth as facilitators in leading improv exercises with medical students. In September 2024, a workshop was developed for medical students to directly engage with youth of color and to understand the lived experiences of the teens. In this initiative, six Afro-Latin youth were selected to work with Josephine Ross at Hyde Square Task Force (HSTF). The youth collaborated on the design and facilitation of an improv-based workshop for medical students. Data suggests that the empathy levels of these medical students increased through participation in improv exercises and direct involvement with the youth. Substantial change also occurred in the youth facilitators. Specifically, these areas of growth included their perceptions of themselves as leaders and artists. More importantly, this case study has implications for future DEI-focused work. By bringing two groups of people who do not typically engage with one another together, the teens and medical students learned about and developed understanding for each other. Knowing of its effects on social skill acquisition, improv became the foundation from which empathy grew. In this workshop, we will discuss the procedures and findings of the collaboration between HSTF and Tufts University School of Medicine. Following this brief presentation, participants will experience an hour-long improv intervention led by two of the Afro-Latin youth facilitators. Seeing how the improv games and scenarios focus on the lives of marginalized youth, participants will experience how this workshop design allows for medical students to have a deeper understanding of the lived experiences of teens of color. We will end the session with a discussion about future work and how these findings could impact future DEI designs.

Change Makers: Empowering Students as Leaders of their own Education & Activism
Presenters: Raquel Duarte Hunt and Mark VanDerzee

In this session, presenters will share the "Change Makers" framework, a flexible developmental framework that utilizes theatre as a powerful tool for developing students into change makers. Participants will learn about Company One Theatre (C1), a Boston-based theatre company whose mission is to build community at the intersection of art and social change; and its education work focusing on the evolution of the Change Maker framework as a curricular tool and the North Star for all its education programming. Participants will engage with the five skills of the framework: Empathy, Build Community, Critical Consciousness, Agency, and Social Justice through hands-on activities and embodiment through play. Participants will be invited to reflect on what is essential when activating their students to social action and envision how they (as educators) might empower them (their students) to that action by considering the classes they teach, the content they chose, the scaffolding they build, and how their students are positioned as leaders of their own education and activism.

Hearing Our History: The Sonic of Historic Sonic Happenings

The Society of Historic Sonic Happenings
Presenter: Adrienne Kapstein

This presentation will profile The Society of Historic Sonic Happenings (SHSH): an immersive, participatory performance and sound art project about the hidden histories of our surroundings. At its core, SHSH is a playful invitation for deep listening, inspiring curiosity for what came before us. The work occurs in partnership with the communities it seeks to serve, engaging audiences of all ages and abilities in thought-provoking dialogues and workshops that occur in situ before the work is presented. We are guided by the question: how can a radically inclusive understanding of a local community’s past help it unite and imagine its future?

The Search For Signs Of Meaningful Inclusion Of Disabled Students In The Public High School  Theater Universe
Presenter: Marianne Pillsbury

This paper seeks to illuminate qualitative research conducted on intentionally including disabled students, identified for special education services, in a public high school theater context. The findings are based on the experiences of a theater educator, artist, and scholar running a "unified theater" program where students with and without disabilities come together to create and present an original devised play. The author dramatizes what "meaningful inclusion" of students with disabilities (particularly autism, ADHD, and anxiety) looks, sounds and feels like by creatively interpreting field log observations and participant interviews in the form of an ethnotheatre-inspired play referencing popular theatre forms including musical theater.

Reimagining Technique: Teaching Theatre Skills in a Changing World
Nigel Semaj
 As we face an uncertain world marked by divisions and transformations, theatre education holds immense potential to bridge gaps, foster connections, and amplify community wisdom. Yet, we find ourselves at a crossroads: How do we teach foundational acting, movement, and voice techniques in ways that resonate with today's learners while staying attuned to the urgent social and cultural concerns of our time? This session invites theatre educators, artists, and scholars to collectively imagine new approaches to teaching theatre skills that are experiential, embodied, and rooted in the realities of our students' lives. How might our classrooms whether on campus, in community centers, or other shared spaces serve as places where techniques are not only learned but also practiced as tools for connection, reflection, and change? How do we engage Gen Z learners, who crave immediacy, application, and purpose, while nurturing their artistry and critical awareness? Through facilitated dialogue and collaborative inquiry, we will explore how reimagining the ways we teach and assess technique can better reflect the cultural brilliance found in classrooms, schoolyards, kitchens, and street corners. Together, we will grapple with questions about the role of performing arts education in movements for justice, equity, and community-building. This session is not about presenting answers but about sharing questions, reflecting on challenges, and envisioning possibilities. How can our pedagogical practices foster artistry that both honors tradition and amplifies contemporary concerns? What can we learn from the beautiful failures and inspiring successes in our work as we adapt to meet the needs of this generation and the communities we serve?

Black women and femmes who exist on dis bitter earth do not except that we must be the caretakers of the world and of ourselves without the communal support of our village. We deserve to do more than just survive. "In Danger Species/Baby Girl, How Does Your Garden Grow?", follows Patrica Hill Collins invocation to start with the self andour interpersonal identities. Rootedin Kemi Adeymedi's lean theory, the digital interactive theatrical performance included me embodying a sunflower and giving my audience the role of "community gardener" to "water me" when they think I need it, to see if I would be cared for if I were a sunflower and not an Afro-Indigenous woman. This performance uses my angularity to the ground to signal wilting and co-performative witnessing my D. Soyini Madison, inviting the audience to perform with me in their role of "community gardener". This project asks what care looks like and if there is an urgency behind that caretaking responsibility. I wanted to take this on because I must go through the world outside of being a sunflower. And when in the wrong company, I must protect myself from wilting.

As legislation across states like Florida, Texas, Utah, and others restrict conversations around equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI), how can theatre education programs effectively train culturally responsive teachers? And how do we do this in our communities with the laws push against it? This session invites participants to collectively grapple with the challenges of fostering inclusive teaching practices within a rapidly shifting sociopolitical landscape. Through inquiry and visioning, we will explore how theatre education can remain committed to diverse voices and stories, even amid societal pushback and restrictive policies. This collaborative session aims to inspire actionable strategies and frameworks for addressing these pressing challenges. Together, we will explore strategies for equipping future theatre educators with tools to navigate and resist these barriers, including innovative curriculum design, advocacy approaches, and other ideas brought to the table by the folks in the room. I hope to explore ethical dilemmas and dream up possibilities for transformative education rooted in empathy, equity, and resistance. The session aims to create a space where educators, artists, and administrators can share experiences, learn from one another, and envision actionable strategies.

This session provokes questions about the roles and practices of researchers in educational and applied theatre. As members of a field that requires constant advocacy and justification, in this inquiry and visioning session we consider how philosophical and pragmatic priorities, expectations, and restrictions guide the ways we see ourselves and our work. We ask ourselves and session participants to navigate challenging questions about our own intentions, positions, capacities, and impacts to propose that we should consistently consider questions such as: "How can we identify research questions and explorations that benefit our communities?" "How do we determine if we are the right people to explore particular questions or the best ways of investigating them?" "How do we manage balancing research and advocacy?" We begin by reviewing the questions the session explores along with why we feel they are important to engage. To ground the session, we then briefly discuss using the questions to explore two of our own research projects: a study that surveyed the leaders of TYA theatres (Matt) and an oral history performance project, which explores the relationships between a university and the broader regional community that hosts it (Claire). At least half of the session will be an open forum for session participants to apply the questions to their own research studies and discuss the ramifications of posing such questions.

Theatre Education faculty and pre-service drama teachers will lead a gathering of educators and artists to collectively use drama processes and tools to play with Artificial Intelligence designed for the drama classroom. In our explorations we plan to use drama activities to identify the possibilities of developing drama curriculum co-created with our own minds and bodies and the popular but controversial technology. We are particularly interested in the ways that our collective embodied practice might inform our understanding of this new technology. We have planned a process driven investigation in which we will think about the ways that our bodies encounter the technology. Specifically, we will explore and use Artificial Intelligence tools through embodied engagement and active communication with AI together in real time. We believe that this will help us better understand the capabilities of this technology as we produce and refine drama curriculum. We also want participants to consider the ways that a GenAI-produced collaborative curriculum might function within the live space and place of drama classrooms. These constraints will inform our collaboration with the materials created using Artificial Intelligence. We hope that GenAI might amplify our curricular processes and products, but we also want to also maintain a critical awareness of the potentially serious ethical challenges present when using these technologies. To maintain creativity and critical alertness we have built in time for guided reflection that addresses the affordances and limitations of what we are making with ChatGPT. We believe that these reflective opportunities will help us to seriously consider the ways we might interrogate our curricular processes and products to better meet teachers' lived experiences in classrooms. Through our work together we hope to amplify creativity and collaboration as a means of reducing our community's concerns about the encroachment of Artificial Intelligence into drama spaces.

Data Theatre is a novel practice co-designed over the past two years by a multidisciplinary team at Northeastern University in collaboration with community groups in the Boston area. Our Civic Data Theatre process re-imagines what community meetings and data-informed democracies can include. In our process, community stakeholders collaborate with trained participatory theatre artists to examine, interpret, and create new information about a pressing local issue. Together, they translate quantitative data–a central language of government decision making–to stories, movements, feelings, and experiences that can be collectively examined by a broadly constituted group of community stakeholders. Read more about the project at https://camd.northeastern.edu/the-data-theatre-collaborative/.

Choreographing the Headwrap
Presenter: Joya Powell

Movement of the People Dance Company's Hair Ties is a multidisciplinary piece inspired by America's fear of Black power and beauty. Inspired by the innovative ways Black and Brown women ad(dressed) the Tignon Laws of the 1700s, which made it illegal for for them to have their hair uncovered in public in Louisiana, this evocative work is a celebration of Black beauty, creativity, and ingenuity in the face of perpetual oppression. In our workshop, participants witness the similarities between place and cultures through the pathways the arms take, the knots, folds and twists of fabric. In a circle, we start by introducing ourselves, and facilitate a name game with the prompt - how did you do your hair this morning? MOPDC shares the story behind our choreography Hair Ties, its connection to the Tignon Laws and reference to US Crown Act 2022. We lead everyone in a short warm-up garnered by vocabulary from Hair Ties. We ask participants about their references to headwraps, or covering their hair. MOPDC teaches our favorite headwrap styles, with participants doing them with us. We go around the circle, participants each share their own favorite style, teach it, and share their memories - where did you learn it, from who. We learn with the fabrics and then we collectively figure out the gestures that are created without the fabric, linking each person's movements together to create choreography and end by learning the MOPDC Shuffle. As a close out we share gems from the workshop and MOPDC's ritual of breathe and leave.

**Note: Please be prepared with a head scarf if you have one.**Designing Belonging: Somatic Scores for Reflection and Connection
Presenter: Jessica Roseman

This workshop investigates design principles for choreographed somatic scores that foster self-awareness and belonging. Grounded in my somatic research project, Nourish, this approach integrates personal reflection with responsive movement practices to promote agency through embodied themes such as breath, attention, and imagination. Drawing on expertise in Feldenkrais and GYROTONIC Methods, therapeutic massage, and Deborah Hay-inspired interdisciplinary contemporary choreography, I design culturally and abilities-inclusive scores that honor diverse individual needs. At Arrow Street Arts in Cambridge, MA, I engage in an autoethnographic process to design, document, and playtest Nourish scores. Participants in this workshop will engage in a series of guided movement explorations and then reflect through writing exit tickets, generating speculative insights into choreographic composition and somatic practice. Building on Haraes' participatory somesthetic design principles, this research explores choreographic composition as a site for relational engagement, offering adaptable frameworks for inclusive somatic practices. The workshop invites reflection on how embodied movement can foster belonging and contribute to personal and social transformation in contemporary choreography. 

The first radio broadcast of a president's inaugural address was on March 4, 1925, when Calvin Coolidge was sworn in for his second presidential term. To acknowledge the centenary of this broadcasting milestone, NYU's Verbatim Performance Lab (VPL) will explore how audiences perceive the inaugural addresses of US presidents when the words of the addresses are anonymized and presented as scored transcripts that reflect the speech cadence used by the presidents during their speech delivery. The workshop will use the 100-year history of broadcasted inaugural addresses to explore how identity impacts how an audience receives a president's message. VPL has experimented with a warm-up activity of sharing an anonymized scored excerpt of an inaugural address, asking participants to read it, and then sharing who they think was speaking. This workshop will expand upon that short activity and offer scored transcripts from multiple inaugural speeches from across the last 100 years for participants' consideration. Participants will interact with the anonymized transcripts in various ways, including selecting ones that resonate with them the most and then experimenting with speaking the text aloud. Participants will also explore how embodying the speeches using the scoring of the original speaker impacts their perceptions of the speech, its meaning, and its impact. The workshop will culminate in a reveal of each of the original speakers of the excerpts, followed by a discussion about initial perceptions from reading, discoveries from speaking aloud, and realizations once the actual identities of the presidents have been revealed.

Please join us for a pre-panel appetizer reception.

As we face an uncertain world with stark divisions and ruptures, what is our role as artists, educators, and scholars working with and across our multiple communities? How can and do the performing arts amplify community concerns, connections, and celebrations? How can we center arts and culture in movements for local and global change?

Join us for an inspiring discussion moderated by Michael Bobbitt, Executive Director of Massachusetts Cultural Council, and featuring:

• Giselle Byrd, Executive Director of The Theater Offensive
• Ronee Penoi, Interim Executive Director of the Office of the Arts & Director of Artistic Programming at ArtsEmerson
• Alison Yueming Qu 曲悦鸣, Co-Founder and Executive Director of CHUANG Stage.

Sponsored by the Dean’s Office at the School of the ArtsClick Here for Live Stream:
https://howlround.com/happenings/welcome-boston-keynote-panel-creative-practices-and-communities