Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and With Communities

(Re)Turning to Storytelling
Presenter: Alex Ates

The COVID-19 shutdowns, the violent political conditions in the United States, the corporate manipulation of social media, and the rapid rise of AI necessitate a return to the basics of theater pedagogy storytelling. In 2022, I introduced a new course, Storytelling and Performance, at Westtown School, where I was the director of the arts. The course was an introductory course to the grades 9-12 Theater program, designed to intrigue and attract students who might not typically foresee themselves taking an introductory theater course. It worked. Sixty percent of the students who enrolled in the course had never taken a Theater course or participated in a production. After a series of intimate, in-class "slams" (performances) of their stories, students compellingly performed themed stories for the enraptured school body. Performances were audio-recorded and evolved into an intentionally-produced podcast. Storytelling and Performance focused on the simple, innate human need and ability to share compelling stories that impact life experiences despite the "slings and arrows" of dehumanizing modernity.

Using Theatre Practices to Manage InfoWhelm
Presenters: Milly Schmid + Jackie Agliata
In the Spring of 2024, Jackie and Milly co-presented a six-session-long artist-in-residence program using exercises from Newspaper Theater to investigate media coverage of Climate Change and Climate Justice with 11th and 12th grade International Baccalaureate theater students at Snowden International School at Copley in Boston, MA. In this workshop, Jackie and Milly will highlight the moments of success and emerging tensions in developing the curriculum for the project and then lead symposium  participants through an embodied, Newspaper Theater-inspired devising activity. Session participants will unpack and reflect on the devised work and brainstorm applications to their own education or community context. Participants will receive a residency map and example exercises to explore media literacy with youth.

The Weathering Project: A Sensory Theatre Workshop for Connection and Inclusion
Presenter: Kaitlin Jaskolski

Step into a world where the senses reign, and connection takes center stage. The Weathering Project is a sensory theatre workshop designed to create immersive, inclusive experiences for diverse audiences particularly those often left out of traditional arts spaces. Just as weather can shift in an instant, this workshop invites participants to explore the fluid, dynamic nature of sensory theatre, where touch, sound, movement, and visuals combine to spark new forms of creative expression. In this workshop, we'll harness the elements of sensory engagement to foster connection over perfection. Participants will explore how sensory stimuli can be used to break down barriers, build bridges, and celebrate the beauty of shared experience. Together, we'll weather the storm of uncertainty, embracing the unpredictable and playful nature of inclusive performance. By focusing on creating experiences that prioritize connection between participants, their careers, artists, and teachers, we'll uncover how sensory theatre can encourage deeper, more meaningful collaboration. This workshop will also explore how these "weathered" experiences born from collaboration and sensory play can lead to transformative change in performance, community building, and education. Just as the weather can be unpredictable, the connections made in sensory theatre can surprise and inspire, creating powerful, lasting memories of shared creative moments. Participants will explore together new ways to amplify voices, celebrate diversity, and weather the elements of inclusion together.

Introduction to the piece and role of participants Practical Devising Exercises Warm-up Activity: Group movement or physical improvisation Story Creation: Participants will split into small groups and use improvisational techniques to explore themes, characters, or situations. Each group will then present a short piece of improvisation based on these ideas. Improvisation with Structure: Introduce a simple prompt or structure, such as a specific location, object, or relationship, and have groups devise short scenes within those parameters. Share out: Participants will share their short pieces Discussion and Reflection: How did the devised pieces evolve? What surprised the group in the process? Open Q&A where participants share their own experiences with devising or ask for advice on specific challenges.

Directions to the Elma Lewis Center (It is located on the same block as the Little Building.)
The Elma Lewis Center (ELC) is located at 148 Boylston Street, next to Piano Row. Look for large windows with plants and orange walls.  
We propose to invite participants into the Elma Lewis Center to breath and imagine together with us, a  group of community archivists and elder community members, about ways to meaningfully re-connect our Growing Up Roxbury (GUR) art and history installation with the flow of everyday life among  the intergenerational communities the ancestors created them for, decades and centuries ago. Currrently being tenderly and strategically cultivated by neighborhood and campus community members inside the Elma Lewis Center at Emerson, this GUR project involves the personal family archives of more than 150 elders. Many of them worked directly with Melnea Cass, Elma Lewis, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Nina Simone, Alvin Ailey, Talley Beatty and more. We will also facilitate discussions around what these archival practices offer community art practitioners, and what opportunities they present for the field of applied theatre. Participants are invited to bring their own ancestral memory or object to engage in an artistic memorializing activity, honoring people in their communities and/or their individual artistic and scholarly lineage. This pilot portal installation of more than 1,000 archival pieces, including photographs, sculptures, written word diaries, family albums, music recordings, paintings, essays and letters, itself is intended to be a three-dimensional experimental point of departure where families who are also in the photographs, community members who knew them most, and campus members can come together and concretely name meaning(s), what they want us to learn from the ancestors through these memories, and, what next?

I Got My Pride: How Exploring Identity Through Improv Can Increase Connection for Middle School Students
Presenters: Faith Soloway and Jaime Ullrich

In the dynamic landscape of middle school, connection is everything. The Urban Improv Residency Program has cracked the code, reaching over 1,000 Boston Public Schools students each year through a potent blend of music, improvisation, and meaningful dialogue. More than just an enrichment program, this innovative approach is a lifeline for young adolescents navigating the complex social terrains of middle school. By employing interactive games, nuanced role-play, and carefully crafted conversation starters, Urban Improv creates powerful moments of understanding, empathy, and personal growth. In this transformative workshop, participants will: Experience firsthand the techniques that help students break down social barriers Learn facilitation strategies that engage and inspire young teens. Discover how improvisation can be a powerful tool for social-emotional learning. Practice navigating challenging scenarios with sensitivity and creativity. Led by Urban Improv's most seasoned Teaching Artists, this session promises to be an immersive, eye-opening journey into the art of connection. Come prepared to participate, learn, and be inspired.

Their Issues, Their Voices: Creating Theatre of the Oppressed with Middle School Students
Presenter: Jordan Burnham-Bialik

How can Theatre of the Oppressed authentically address the systemic challenges middle school students face? In this interactive workshop, participants will explore practical techniques for helping young people create forum theatre about their lived experiences. Through hands-on activities, we'll demonstrate how to scaffold TO techniques that empower students to investigate issues ranging from academic tracking to family dynamics. Drawing from current examples of student-created forum plays, participants will experience a process that builds trust, maintains artistic rigor, and supports collective creation. The workshop provides concrete strategies for adapting Boal's methods to serve younger practitioners while honoring their capacity to analyze social systems. You'll leave with practical tools for implementing TO in middle school settings and approaches for helping students create theatre that matters to their lives. Come prepared to move, play, and discover how theatre can amplify student voices in your classroom. 

Hey you, yes You, watching Netflix, while scrolling through Insta, and checking your email, no worries; I do it too! You are invited to Laying Labyrinths: A Living Performance. A space to practice gathering. A place to participate in reconnecting to yourself, the earth, and the community we create. We will circle up, play, walk, dream, and remember how interconnected we are to everything! Laying Labyrinths is a participatory living performance in which the audience/ community that gathers will be invited to witness and play with the interconnections between ourselves, each other, and the earth. We will lay an ephemeral labyrinth together in collaboration with the space. That is the hope for each performance: that the community looks across the circle, sees each other, feels their feet on the earth, lays a labyrinth on top of it, and walks it together. As we re-emerged from the Pandemic, I found a deep desire to return and remember theatre's roots and connect back to the earth. From this desire, and my graduate research around improvisation, chaos and living systems theories, this performance was born. It is a space to practice gathering and activating communities.

Theater of Union: Our Stories as Life Sustaining Projects?
Presenter: Annalise "River" Guidry
As artists who inherit a lineage of empire, how do we create and cultivate life where systems of domination have left ruin? Inspired by mushrooms and informed by indigenous, feminist and anthropological notions of "knowing-with," and, "a love ethic," Theater of Union is a decolonized theatrical pedagogy and praxis- with love as the foundation and knowing as the practice- to contribute to life-sustaining, world-building projects with theater as the vehicle.

Storytelling as Empowerment: Voices from 'The Stories of Giving Birth'"
Bindi Kang

"The Stories of Giving Birth" (dir. Zhao Zhiyong, Beijing, 2019) is a groundbreaking theatrical production collaborated by professional artists and rural-urban migrant workers. Developed in a collaborative manner, "The Stories of Giving Birth" is a devised theatre work woven from archival materials gathered from more than 30 interviews with female migrant workers. This project illuminates the intersectional challenges faced by women at the margins of societal structures. Emerging from extensive community engagement organized by a local NGO Mulan Community Service Center, this production provides platforms for migrant women to voice their living experience that includes traumatic experience of abortion, persistent cycles of economic marginalization, and systemic familial and social neglect. Following the production's success, a subsequent interactive museum exhibition expanded the project's reach, designing immersive experiences that bridge diverse social backgrounds through personal narratives. After its initial success in the theatre house, in 2021, Mulan Community in collaboration with Beijing Yue Art Museum, launched an interactive art project called Personal History/Game Theatre + Exhibition The Story of Mulan Narratives of Grassroots Migrant Women Workers. This project featured the play, the women's stories, and their everyday items, documents, photographs, etc. Moreover, the creative team also designed an interactive game, inviting the museum visitors, to immerse themselves in the life journey of a randomly assigned female worker character. Through this method, the curators aimed to connect the experiences of the female workers with the largely middle-class and well-educated museumgoers. In my presentation, I aim to take this production as a case study, to survey how theatre serves as a consoling instrument among the members in the migrant wokers' community, as well as a communicative tool between this grassroots community and middle class art consumers.

This is My Body
Kimberly LaCroix

Working at the intersection of gender studies, theology, and philosophy, I am researching how applied theatre can be utilized to explore Judeo-Christian theology's influence on female embodiment. Then, in collaboration with the Gordon College theatre program in Wenham, MA, I will be working with a group of college students who both ascribe to the tenants of Christianity and identify as female. This work will culminate in an ensemble-devised production, performed on Gordon's campus, January-February, 2025. I hope this production will be a sort of Complete History of Female Embodiment, Abridged in the style of Reduced Shakespeare Company. In a world deeply obsessed with the differences between us- our gender, religion, political affiliation, all aspects of our positionalities- I am committed to joy, play, and common ground. This production aims to be a celebration of resilience, while likely also being a hobble through some difficult territory. ​​​​

In this Performance and Facilitated Panel Discussion, teen theatre-makers from Wheelock Family Theatre’s Teen Performance Ensemble will share excerpts from their upcoming production of The Lightning Thief, followed by a Panel Discussion as we invite the youth performers to reflect and unpack some of the actions and commitments that are necessary to create a Culture of Care. What is the impact on the individual, ensemble, and community? In what ways does how we work together impact what we create together? How do we balance the needs of the individual with the needs of the ensemble? What lessons can we learn about human value, interconnectedness, belonging, and collective creative vulnerability? Our young people are brilliant, and we are confident that listening to them will spark new questions, inspire new ideas, and reaffirm the importance of our work.

The Body Book
Presenter: Mariam Riaz Paracha

Body Book: A Performance of Stories, Spoken Word & Self-Reflection of a Desi Female Body is a 20-30 minute work-in-progress interactive performance blending personal narrative, poetry, and visual storytelling inspired by my MFA thesis. The project interweaves personal experiences, heartfelt conversations, and collected stories about growing up and living in a body subjected to scrutiny and patriarchal interpretations of religion. It reflects a journey towards reconciling cultural traditions with an evolving world. While some stories are drawn from qualitative research and interviews with women ranging from 18-60, the majority originate from my own life experiences, fostering honesty and vulnerability to bridge the hierarchical gap that can arise when facilitating workshops. The performance pieces explore themes of identity, family, and belonging shaped by the shared, multigenerational dynamics of South Asian cultures. Through spoken word, movement, and projected visuals based on the book's illustrations, it invites audiences into a playful and personal, yet universally resonant exploration. After the performance, participants will engage in writing, drawing prompts and performance exercises that explore their personal narratives through memory, metaphor, and sensory detail. This participatory process creates a space where stories, individual and collective are amplified through dialogue and artistic expression. Aligned with the theme Amplify & Ignite, the performance and workshop exercises highlight how reclaiming personal stories can inspire meaningful social change within communities by amplifying understanding, questioning, empathy, and advocacy through storytelling.

The Way Back Project 
Presenters: Brielle Fowlkes and Joye Prince 

The Way Back Project is a two-woman show comprised of autobiographical narratives as well as some fiction, and is designed to be accompanied by a post-show engagement workshop for audience members. The show chronicles a journey of shared exploration between the two women, as they seek to better understand themselves through remembering, grieving, and reckoning with their family lineages. The goal of this project is to investigate questions about how we, as individual artist-researchers, can tell the stories of our lineages and the stories that have been passed down to us, in a way that illuminates present and historic norms while also enacting a liberatory future through collective world-making. By positioning ourselves as microcosmic subjects of larger societal issues regarding race, womanhood, grief, and intergenerational trauma, we aim to open up dialogue with audiences that allows them to explore their own relationship to these topics. Hoped-for impact:1. For all audience members: Inspire dialogue rooted in ancestral inquiry and perpetuated narratives in order to provoke dialogue and collective dreaming 2. For audience members of color: Stir up a hunger to remember pasts we have chosen to forget as a trauma response, so that we may continue down a liberatory path of healing3. For white audience members: Initiate a process of reckoning with our harmful lineages as well as grieving what we have lost so that we may begin (or continue) down a liberatory path of healing 

Please make sure to add this session to your schedule if you intend to attend.

Communities of practice in drama education have been explored by Anderson & Freebody as sites that emphasize "the importance of integrating theory and practice to support the development of beginning teachers" (2012, p. 359). Professional organizations like the American Alliance for Theatre and Education (AATE), the NYC Arts in Education Roundtable, and the Educational Theatre Association (EDTA) consider their annual gatherings as a locus of professional development and networking, but in their relative infrequency, they provide only limited access to the potentiality of a true community of practice. So, drama educators often find themselves a department of one, set adrift to do whatever it is they do in the classroom without the benefit of a community of peers who can understand and support them in their work. They lack a true community of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Wenger, McDermott, & Snyder, 2002; Wenger-Trayner, Fenton-O'Creevy, Hutchinson, Kubiak, & Wenger-Trayner, 2014; Wenger-Trayner & Wenger-Trayner, 2015; Wenger, 2020; and Tummons, 2022).

Through this workshop experience, drama educators will develop a community of practice through the implementation of a case narrative project, based on a format outlined by Norris, McCammon, & Miller in their text, Learning to Teach Drama: A Case Narrative Approach (2000). The main intent of the case narrative is to serve as a tool to assist the educator in better understanding their teaching practice and should be drawn from their own experience, offering the educator an opportunity to reflect on and examine a problem, dilemma, or crisis, or frame a new perspective that has occurred in their practice.

This workshop will move us through phases one and two of a three-phase process. In the session, participants will outline their own case narrative, share the outline with two peers, and then get formal feedback from each peer using a response protocol outlined in Norris, McCammon, & Miller's text in which they describe, analyze, and apply (2000, pp. 111-112). [paragraph break]1 - Describe: Read the assigned case narrative. Set a timer for five minutes and write a continuous response without censoring yourself to what you have read.2 -Analyze: Review what you wrote. Respond by uncovering the issues in the original narrative and make connections to educational theory and the teaching of drama.3 -Apply: Review both the initial writing (describe) and your initial analysis. Write concretely what the teacher might do to extend these ideas into practice. This writing could be in the form of a lesson plan, a list of teacher activities, or a general set of statements on the teacher's stance. Application is the goal, so you need to provide the teacher with actionable recommendations grounded in your teaching experience and what you know from research or literature. [paragraph break]In this way, each participant will receive actionable recommendations (interventions) from two peers. This initial workshop will be followed in one month's time with a Zoom check-in where each participant can report back about the intervention(s) they implemented and consider next steps.

Please make sure to add this session to your schedule if you intend to attend.

Lunch Provided: In this workshop, Imagining America (IA) staff will create space for co-learning and collective dialogue at the critical intersections of public scholarship, cultural organizing, and institutional change. Inspired by an IA action research report Critical Intersections: Public Scholars Creating Culture, Catalyzing Change, workshop facilitators will introduce creative tools meant to spark conversation and support action about the joys, contributions, and struggles of public scholars and artists: the IA Public Scholar Conversation Cards and the Organizing Culture Change Public Scholar Imagination Guide. This interactive workshop will then give participants a chance to play with and learn together from these tools. The card deck encourages public scholars to consider why their work matters and how it challenges academic culture and produces critical knowledge to tackle pressing public issues. The guide provides a variety of reflection and action activities for anyone trying to improve their own practice and for those interested in making higher education a more hospitable, caring, and creative place to nurture public, engaged, and activist scholarship, artmaking, and design. Through facilitated conversations, peer sharing, and play, participants will develop a more expansive understanding of what kinds of knowledge matters and how to nurture supportive relationships and environments for public scholars to thrive.

Participants will then be invited to use the blank cards included in the Public Scholar Conversation Cards deck to strategize and co-create a new set of prompts drawn from collective exploration in the session, from participants' individual experiences in the performing arts, and from the shared engagement at the Amplify & Ignite Symposium.

The three, sequential Communities of Practice gatherings are an opportunity to engage with a more intimate group of symposium attendees over the weekend. These lightly moderated sessions will provide space to grapple together with core questions, inquiries, reflections and curiosities that emerge for your own creative practice throughout the Symposium.

Though we acknowledge that so many of us have hybrid-hyphenated-intersecting identities related to our practice, we request that you self-select one of the following communities with to engage over our three days together:

K12 educators (Matthew Reynolds)
Community-engaged artists and practitioners (Jo Michael Rezes)
Researchers/ university faculty or staff (Jonathan Jones)

NOTE: All attendees will join a Community of Practice regardless of how many days you will be with us.

[PLAY]ING THROUGH OUR DIFFERENCES: How Creating a Fictional Play Can Open Real Community  Dialogue Presenter: Taylor St. John
"SHAVONNE: In case you haven't noticed we live in the same hood, Einstein. BAKARI: Nah, we in the same hood living two different lives." An excerpt from We All We Got: A Binghampton Play By Ann Perry Wallace Over the past two years, I have been leading a new community-playmaking program in one of Memphis, Tennessee's most diverse neighborhoods. Binghampton (pronounced Bing-HAMP-ton) is one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Memphis (with over 27 languages spoken). It is also a neighborhood where national conversations about immigration, policing, gentrification, discrimination, and safety are all playing out daily on the streets. Through the duration of the project, community members shared hundreds of real stories about the beauties and challenges facing their neighborhood. These stories then inspired a fictional play, We All We Got: A Binghampton Play, written by local playwright Ann Perry Wallace that featured over 40 community members performing onstage. In this presentation, I will use this latest community-playmaking project to reflect on how working within a fictional context allowed a safe entry point that made it possible for participants from very different backgrounds to coexist along differences, build authentic relationships, step into other's shoes, and have discussions that simply may not have been possible within the limitations of "real life". In addition, I will provide analysis of the human, artistic, and operational challenges of engaging with multiple communities that often have conflicting needs. Finally, through stories from the project, we will explore the benefits of community-playmaking in neighborhoods.

A Collective Vision for a Future in the Arts through Community and Civic Engagement Programs
Presenter: Sharon Counts

The arts have the power to effect change and animate democracy by demonstrating the public value of creative work that contributes to a larger social good. In this accelerated moment of radical change, the arts are being more consciously used as a way to engage communities around achieving civic goals and to create positive connections. A major tension in the field right now revolves around how to galvanize our collective resources and knowledge toward building a more sustainable future for theater at large. This article centers the use of civic and community engagement programs as one prominent and effective method that can foster synergy with communities that arts organizations and theaters engage and seek to engage. Many theaters are using community engagement programs to ignite community conversations and address past inequities. A case study highlights how one regional theater, Mid-Sized City Theater (MCT), a pseudonym, used community and civic engagement programs to promote reimagining their organization as a civic institution and to rebuild relationships with their community. The pursuit to improve relationships between theaters and communities using community engagement programs is one way this sector is working to address historical inequities for cultural workers, artists, and participants in the arts.  

BBQ starter! This is to help us see each others humanity first and foremost as we create a safer container for each other. Breathing exercise and calling in of ancestors. Discussion of question "How much of your thinking is your thinking?"- Introduction of Internalized Racial Oppression and Indoctrination into the status quo's ideas of ourselves, and how that has shaped how we identify. Introduction of the 7 C's- Walk and Talks, shifting partners, as we discuss each of the 7 C's.7 C's protocol revealed and activated. What actions can we individually take to activate the 7 C's protocol? By when?Creating Accountability pods to help lovingly support each other in our commitment to building the NEW through our new learning. Closing circle 💜

Migration From. Migration Through. Migration To. Migration Back. This workshop will explore how applied theatre can be used to deepen learning around these themes of migration. The session draws on our experience developing and co-teaching a first-year college course at CUNY John Jay College called “Voices of Migration: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Global Movement.” Through embodied, on-your-feet learning, we will share best practices for how college classrooms can center student voices, familial histories, and cultural knowledge throughout the learning process. Throughout the session, we will guide participants in a series of applied theatre games and activities that can be used to explore key themes and questions related to migration and immigration. Together, we will practice creating lines of questioning that lead to deep conversation about those core class concepts. Participants can use these practices to explore the ever-more-important topics of migration and immigration in their classrooms and communities or apply them to other challenging topics. Whatever the case, this workshop will equip attendees with a set of concrete tools and strategies that can be used with young people and adults, in and out of school settings.

Limited Seats Available! Jump in and play with Central Square Theater’s resident performance ensemble, Youth Underground (YU)! Each year, YU serves an ensemble of economically and culturally diverse Cambridge & Greater Boston youth, ages 13-25, and provides opportunities for them to create and perform original theater that investigates social issues relevant to young people and our world.

In this workshop, co-led by YU youth and Teaching Artists, participants will learn about YU's approach to arts-based youth activism, get hands-on experience with some of YU’s activities and devising techniques, and see youth perform excerpts from their original work. The workshop will take place onsite at Central Square Theater, in the heart of Cambridge.

Limited Seats Available! Urban Bush Women (UBW) burst onto the dance scene in 1984 with bold, innovative, demanding, and exciting works that brought under-told stories to life. Originally founded by Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the company, now under the co-artistic direction of Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Spies, continues to weave contemporary dance, music, and text with the history, culture, and spiritual traditions of the African Diaspora.

A centerpiece of Urban Bush Women’s 40th Anniversary Celebration, This is Risk looks forward and back in celebrating four decades of operating at the vanguard of movement and social activism. This is Risk takes the audience through intentional storytelling to the next space of collective brilliance. This energetically charged evening includes iconic legacy works by founder Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Haint Blu, a transformative dance-theater work by Co-Artistic Directors Chanon Judson and Mame Diarra Speis. Haint Blu is an ensemble dance-theater work seeped in memory and magic. Named for the color that Southern families paint their front porches to ward off bad spirits, Haint Blu uses performance as a center and source of healing, taking us through movement into stillness and rest. It is an embodied look into familial lines and the movements, histories, and stories of our elders and ancestors. It reflects on what has been lost across generations and what can be recovered.