Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and With Communities

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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 

In this final full community gathering, we will reflect on the weekend and close our time together with celebrations and commitments for moving forward.