Support

This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing

Our five-person ensemble (Jada Cadena, Lina Chambers, Sam Provenzano, Kriston Woodreaux and me) staged a production of This Girl Laughs, This Girl Cries, This Girl Does Nothing by Finegan Kruckemeyer. Using a cross-collaborative devising model, our ensemble crafted the piece without a singular director, choosing to share responsibility for staging and producing the show. We first performed the show at the University of Texas at Austin in Spring 2018. After a local regional theatre, ZACH Theatre, expressed interest in producing the show at their space, we collaborated again to remount the show at their venue.

We approached our process with the following questions:

-How might we disrupt the traditional director-performer hierarchy by employing feminist pedagogy within a cross-collaboratory devising model?

-How might we invite young people into our creative process to honor their voices and artistic impulses?

-What new possibilities for TYA might emerge when we commit to a rehearsal space built on a foundation of trust, authenticity and support?

From this collaboration, I learned:

-A supportive collaboration process makes your ensemble more likely to take creative risks that offer new imaginative possibilities. Because we had committed to trying out each other’s ideas (good, bad and ugly), we felt empowered to voice those ideas in the first place.

-Support looks different for everyone. Some of us needed to thoroughly talk through possibilities with the group as think partners. Some of us needed to just dive in and try. By acknowledging the different ways we each felt supported, we helped each other do our best work.

-Support is sustainable. Because we had established support as a foundation for our collaboration from the beginning, we were able to adapt the production to a new venue and institutional partnership with relative ease (and even joy!).

Photo Credit: Lawrence Peart