The Adventure Begins
On August 27, 2018, I met with the students of Advanced Acting Styles: Devising for Performance for the first time. Everything about this was a new adventure and experiment. This class has never been taught before at HWS. I have never led the devising process for a full-length play before, nor have I created highly fictionalized theatre (both Mosaic NY’s work and my own foray into solo performance come overwhelmingly out of lived experiences). And to the best of my knowledge, HWS Theatre has never produced a devised play created by students and faculty. I started that class with the short blurb I’d had to write for season publicity and a question I wanted to explore: What does it feel like to live in an era dominated by social media.
The video to the left is the end result of this exploration. It’s a far cry from the various experiments we took on the way to get there. Let me explain.
The process as I imagined it: Entering into the semester, I knew that at least a couple of the students in the class (Jack Canniff, Bailey DiSanto, Kevin Goltz, Jessica Hariprasad, Izzy Ingram, Jamal Lucas, and Thomas Perry) would be unable to perform in the departmental production due to their athletics schedules, but I was hopeful that the majority of the class would devise a version of the production that they would then perform with the addition of at least a handful of new students selected through an open audition. I imagined that this process would then unfold in the following way: We would spend the first half of the semester embarking on a series of approximately four different methods of devising material around the theme of life in social media and then the class would select the investigations they wanted to continue to pursue as they put together a performance of probably loosely connected scenes for the end result. I would then spend break figuring out what the connective tissue was and rewriting to clarify and add / alter characters as necessary based on auditions.
Thankfully, my syllabus and first class period made very clear that we were going on a wild adventure, and that other than the basic structure of grading (based on categories) everything was likely to change throughout the semester.
I’m not sure that schedule and outline lasted longer than three weeks.
The process as it happened: Although the specifics of the methods used changed from my original syllabus to the end of the course, we did use a variety of techniques over the course of the semester to try and set free our creativity.
The first few weeks of class we read and thought a lot about life in the current social media and online climate. We read Durrenmatt’s The Visit because I find a lot of parallels between his dystopia and online cultures. We talked about these parallels and what intrigued us about that script. We also did a lot of work to build ensemble.
And then the fun began.
We tried exploring issues around social media via a short foray into Newspaper Theatre.
We played with Table Top performances to think about perspective, scale, focus, and storytelling while telling solo fables about the impact of social media on our lives. (I was inspired by some of the stellar work my peers did at the Something from Nothing workshop.) All students wrote and directed performances that they workshopped with a partner before sharing them with the class. Although there were many strong performances, Jessica Hariprasad’s fable about a woman and a spider is not to be missed.
Then we had a magnificent 2-day guest residency with Rob Neill to learn about the Neo-Futurist approach to script writing and performance.
At this point, students put together their first scenes that they wanted to continued working on. My expectation was that these scenes would come out of the various workshops and showings that we had done from those first explorations (newspaper theatre, table top, Neo-Futurism, blank canvases). Instead, this class huddled together and wrote a first draft of a short script with a fully laid out plot called “The Blue Whale Challenge.” Inspired by the Blue Whale Game, this script moved the basic plot of The Visit (ex-lover returns home to destroy their former partner by convincing others in their community to bully them) to our current environment. It was compelling. It had potential. It was also far too closely identifiable with our current moment to interest me. Although I didn’t tell them so immediately, I began thinking about ways to break us out of a world that is so close we always already assume we know the answers to our questions.
But first, we tried working on character. Again, I returned to some of the work I’ve done in various workshops over the past few years. Students were asked to take the characters they started developing for “Blue Whale Challenge” and explore them through the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. They played with creating the physical character based on a series of slides of inanimate objects and landscapes. At the end of this segment of the course - approximately at halfway - students performed character monologues, like this one by Izzy Ingram, that they created.
Following this performance, I sprung on the class that I wanted to try and explore the world of social media outside of its realistic confines in the hopes of finding a more expansive playground for some of the ideas we’d found resonant over the course of the semester: bullying, connection, unedited communication, staying in touch, vigilante justice, building social movements.
We spent a week exploring their characters as children via an improvisation based in a 5th grade classroom. At the end of that week, students created scenes that explored what life on social media is like as if played out in 5th grade. It was pretty uncomfortable for all of us - let’s just say there’s a reason I don’t teach grade school - and we happily shook off that world at the end of the process. Although I still believe there is much there worthy of exploration as a parallel to social media, it was clear that no one was terribly interested in writing a script that would force us to explore this further.
Still concerned that the class was too accustomed and driven to creating immediately understandable plots and concepts, I took us to the other environment that feels like a fertile parallel to me - the fantasy world of the Wild West. We watched scenes from classic westerns and played out a few improvisations. Noting that we weren’t able to break out of gunfire and revenge, I broke the students into new groups and had them take a social media exchange word for word (although they were allowed to add to it to set the scene up) but speak the words via their characters as if in a Western. These scenes were playful, hilarious, and evocative and I truly believed we would wind up developing them for a final performance piece.
Shortly before Thanksgiving break, we sat down for two days of throwing ideas at the wall and settling on the shape of the final performance for the class. And somehow, out of all of those ideas, we wound up on the set of a reboot of a 70s sitcom where portals opened up and sent folks back into the 70s. Once again, the students in the class came up with a concept that was more fully developed than I had expected of them, and so as we headed into the final week of classes we had a frank talk about how to pare things down for the purposes of the class performance so that they could focus on their acting. On December 17, the students in THTR 340 performed their version of #TBD, which can be viewed at the top of this page.