Amplify & Ignite: Creative Practice in and With Communities

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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.  

Over the past three years, the Student Voice and Engagement (SVE) program has undergone significant transformations to better serve the needs of students, teaching artists, and school communities. Funded by the U.S. Department of Education's Assistance for Arts Education (AAE) grant, SVE integrates theater arts and social-emotional learning (SEL) to enhance English Language Arts (ELA) skills and foster sustainable student engagement. As the only New York City-based program to receive the 2021 AAE Award, SVE has made a lasting impact in four schools in Brownsville, Brooklyn.This workshop will explore the evolution of SVE, highlighting the program's structural and creative adaptations over the past three years. We will examine how teaching artists and program leaders have responded to the unique needs of individual schools and communities, refining approaches to collaboration and engagement. Additionally, we will focus on the pivotal role of transformation in supporting students as they transition from 5th to 6th grade, using theater and SEL as powerful tools for growth and self-expression. Participants will gain insights into the challenges and successes of adapting arts-based education programs and explore interactive games and activities centered on the theme of transformation. This session invites educators, administrators, and teaching artists to reflect on the lessons learned from SVE's journey and consider how these practices can be applied to their own work to foster sustained student engagement and meaningful collaboration.