Graduate School Year 2 Begins! My MFA in Devised Theatre adventure continues...

Ready or not, here it comes. Tomorrow begins chapter 2 of this new life journey I started a year ago. I wrapped up year one of graduate school in May. I survived the first year with a few scrapes and really looking forward to a summer break.

We put on our first show in March. It was really just the ensemble's favorite Friday Creation projects thrown together like a showcase of what we'd accomplished so far. I was pleased at the time with how it turned out, but like all things I look back on it (literally I watched the video) and thought--wow, we've come so far as a class since then. My pieces selected for the showing were from the creation prompts The Chase and One Place, One Event. I was incredibly proud of my ensemble for coming together and putting something up in such a limited time frame. Part of the pedagogy of the program we learned this year is to cram a lot of lessons into a short amount of time and to never stop generating material. I suppose the lesson is to do work, often, even if it's not good. Don't ever be afraid to produce work just because it might fail. That's never a good enough reason.

Border towns being created around churches before the border was established.

Quickly after that showcase, our ensemble took a trip to the northern borders of America. We crossed into Canada by train and saw a fantastic show in Montreal about the invisible borders between cultures indigenous to Canada and those there now. After just one night in the province of Quebec, we rented cars to head to Edmundston, Canada (province of New Brunswick) and Madawaska, Maine. These two towns are on opposite sides of a border that separates two countries. Yet their economies rely on each other for most things, and most people here have an Acadian heritage meaning they don't really consider themselves Canadian or American. They're so removed from the rest of their countries that they've grown very close together.

The project was to visit border towns and interview people about their experience there, and then to tell that story. The show was meant to be a foil to the national conversation happening about our southern border and the misconceptions people might have based on the national dialogue that every border is the same.

This is the bridge separating Madawaska, Maine and Edumndston, Canada with a frozen river running beneath it.

The train ride to Quebec

It was a fascinating experience. I had no idea that taking a trip like this could translate into a piece of theatre, and certainly no experience in making something like that come to fruition. But these are the joys of being part of an ensemble devised theatre program! Together we had some amazing experiences, met some fantastic characters, and managed to translate real life onto the stage!  This was the seminal experience for me in my first year. Everything I learned lead me to the moment of accomplishment and pride I felt when we were able to stand together and say, "We built this." I spent my entire year taking part in making short theatrical bursts; 3 minute appetizers to sustain me until I could learn to create a main entree. And while the entree was still less than 20 minutes in length, and was only given a few weeks to shape itself into a main course meal, and was admittedly still unformed because of the trial that is ensemble devising--it happened. I learned from it. My confidence in myself and my ability to create theatre experiences from nothing evolved and reshaped itself into a new part of me that I will carry into year two!

Snow falling at night

A crane we saw tearing down a dilapidated house in the middle of down town Madawaska right before an accident tipped it over into the basement. No one was injured.

This summer was full of real life trials and tribulations. But I did ultimately have the opportunity to help create an independent study to fulfill a credit I'll need to graduate. We're allowed to take any class the university offers, but after a fascinating workshop we were able to take during the second semester there was a small group of us that knew exactly what we were interested in pursuing.

Five of us took a month this summer to take a class on Gaming Theatre. Our amazing Voice teacher actually runs her own company that creates theatrical experiences for non theatrical audiences in the form of interactive and playable games. Some of these are site specific works, others are educational in nature, and a few have been actual card or video games. She works with community partners and organizations to create these experiences to fill a need, and usually has several projects going on at once. She's a wealth of knowledge and we were dying to learn from all of her experience. We were able to do a broad reach into the background of interactive and immersive performance experiences, the history of game design, and the impact of agency in theatrical applications. We also created our own games, tested them (in small doses), and learned the road map to creating successful gaming endeavors. It was quite honestly my favorite class I've taken yet!

It's the specialty classes that have really made this last year so special for me. I was excited to attend graduate school to broaden my knowledge of the ways that theatre can successfully be done. I knew I'd learn skills I wouldn't even know about before, or maybe skills I didn't think I could do. And that's exactly what happened. My music theory course this last semester became a composition course where every single week we wrote new songs. In an ensemble program I was desperate to have complete control over a finished product and this class gave me that opportunity. I'm so proud of the new skills I learned in that class. This gaming workshop was similar and is something I'm incredibly interested in pursuing in my future going forward after this program.

This next year holds a lot of firsts for me. Cabaret, clown, commedia, buffon, and other new styles will be learned. I'll be making another mask, adapting movies and books, and trying on genres for size. We'll be given dares this year, and then dare to create our own. What I'm most excited about is that this year is more performance based. Instead of performing for our faculty, we'll have many more opportunities to perform for the community, including a New York showcase in the spring.  This year I can see my future a little more clearly. Life after graduate school will sneak up on me fast, and I'm taking steps to test out what I think I'd like to do next.

First on the list? Try everything. And visit some new places to see how my art fits in. Here's to another year of ensemble training!

Mask Making and Circus School Taking

It's a new year and the start of my second semester of my first year of graduate school. Even months in, it's strange to use those words. Graduate school was a dream for a long time, and it's crazy to look back and think about where I thought I'd be. Certainly not in a physical theatre/devised performance program! Mostly because at the time I didn't know such things existed. And yet nothing could feel like a better fit.

This semester is off to a great start! We've been working with the larval masks, which are large, full-faced masks with no eyes to see out of. So you're moving blindly through the space as you wear the mask. It's a huge challenge, but so exciting to get to release the control an actor feels from trying to express with their eyes instead of their body. We've also been playing with expressive masks, which are much more human looking, and therefore very expressive. These are also full-faced, but with eye holes. And with these we've begun to move towards costuming and props, which are new elements we didn't play with during neutral mask and larval mask. Learning to 'show the mask' (which means keeping the sight line of your eyes up and out towards the audience so they can read you) while not being able to see below your eye holes to the props you're using is an interesting dilemma. It reminds me of when I was first learning stage directions and the confusion of upstage vs. downstage. Sight lines are like a whole new language!

We've also begun a mask making workshop that's been taking a lot of our time. It's so exciting to start creating characters from the mask up. We plastered our faces and made molds in our first 4 hour session. Then we put clay on them and paper mached them with five layers for the second session. We just finished taking the paper mask off the mold, reinforcing the sides with more paper mache, and sanding the paper down to prepare for paint. It's a long process, and we could use a lot more time to do it, but I'm excited to see the finished product. Hint--my mask has 3 chins.

Yesterday we took a field trip to circus school where we walked beams, pipes, and wires. We learned tricks on the Aerial Slings (or silks depending on who you talk to). We tried our hand at trapeze, which I learned is extremely painful without calluses. And of course, we worked on tumbling and partner acrobatics. It was one of my favorite days of graduate school so far. We take acrobatics twice a week, which is always a blast. But the opportunity to use a new apparatus that we don't have on campus was so fun! My entire class agreed we'd love to take classes regularly on trapeze and sling, which we don't have access to on campus. It's a fantastic full body workout, and in some ways easier to see progress than in partner acrobatics and tumbling.

We have a trip to the border planned for Spring Break. Half the class will go to Texas to the Mexican border, and the other half of us are going to the Canadian border. We'll be going as researchers to observe stories, and then we're going to create a piece of theatre about it. Notice I didn't say write a play? We're going to devise a play, which (for those of you who don't know) means we work as an ensemble to craft a piece from the ground up with our bodies, voices, and usually improvisation. Sometimes we throw in text for inspiration, and in this case I can imagine we might use direct text from certain people we meet. Every devising process is different. But the one thing that holds true through all devising is that it doesn't stem from a playwright's words first. It is discovered. And then later potentially written.

In music theory we've moved on to writing songs every week this semester. First week, we used a piece of text that already existed to craft a melody with a pedal played underneath. Last week we were given a specific chord progression with the option of lyrics or no lyrics. It's terribly difficult for me to write a song with no lyrics so I challenged myself to do that last week and it went pretty well. This week we've moved onto the blues. We're using the Twelve Bar Blues, and we learned the blues scale. We'll see how it goes! The best part of class is listening to everyone perform their pieces. It's so invigorating being surrounded by talented individuals. Everyone is so different and their styles and voices always surprise me!

Off to class. Enjoy the pictures!