This April school break, seven teenagers joined two WAM Teaching Artists (myself and Tatiana Godfrey) at The Foundry in West Stockbridge for an intensive week of collaborative art making. The paid experience brought together a group of diverse students from across the region. Inspired by the visionary works produced within the genres of Afrofuturism and science fiction, we used devised theatre methods to envision and build new worlds.
Ensemble Building: We all came from different towns, backgrounds, and schools, so we began the week with a series of improvisational theatre games intended to build trust and create ensemble. Drawing on her background as an improvisation artist and holder of a seemingly endless number and variety of improv games, Tatiana led us through activities that began with simple energy passes and built to complex self-created webs that we were challenged to uphold. Despite complaining every morning of being tired and lacking in energy, all the ensemble members arrived open and excited. They inquired about each other’s lives and creative work with genuine curiosity and generosity.
“I learned a lot about collaborative creation. Bouncing ideas off of each other, supporting others’ ideas, and building ideas off of each other.”
Physical Theatre: One of our goals for the week was to teach devised theatre techniques and then give the teens a chance to experiment with them to create new worlds together. Physicality is a great place to start because people are less likely to edit or second guess themselves and are more open to simply responding. Tatiana introduced us to the basic principals of Viewpoints, a technique developed for the theatre by Anne Bogart, so that we could all use the same vocabulary, and then we immediately put this into practice with an evolving sculpture activity that proved very popular indeed!
Visual Art: Devised theatre draws on the creativity, imagination and skill sets of the people in the room as well as the prepared environment (i.e. resources that are placed in the room for the participants to interact with). One ensemble member told us early on that she preferred to draw her responses rather than write them. After we were all wowed by her fast figure drawing, we provided her with a large roll of paper and markers, and gave her the space to sketch from the physical activities that the rest of the ensemble was engaged in. The delight from them when they saw the result was evident and empowering “Hey, that’s me!! That one there! I remember being in that position!”
Similarly, after noticing some paper masks, markers, and colorful pipe cleaners that we had placed on the resource table, the ensemble members began creating masks for themselves and each other that incorporated some of the thematic ideas that had come out of our improvisations.
Song writing: I must admit that I was dubious that we were going to get a group of teenagers who had only known each other for three days to be vulnerable enough to write music together, but I was happily proven wrong. After a series of rhyming and rhythm games, they leapt into writing verses, adding in voices and instruments, and within two hours had an original song titled “The Space Left In Between”. It included the following verse:
“I look around the room and see something many overlook, next to, besides and over they loom, hiding what they took.”
World Building: Our theme this year had been world building and probably my favorite memory from this year’s Teen Ensemble has to be when they gave us guided tours of the future worlds that they created—worlds in which animals and plants were prioritized, worlds in which money had been abolished, worlds in which you were allowed to spend your days creating rather than working. We began with a series of writing exercises, then they came up with a slogan for their worlds and flags or symbols or avatars, then they wrote a monologue from the perspective of someone living in that world, and finally that character gave us a guided tour. What a privilege to be able to be given a tour of a future world that only currently exists in someone else’s imagination! And what a reminder of the power of imagination and collaboration!
“What I will remember most about Teen Ensemble is the Community feeling. There isn’t any particular moment, but just a lingering comfort of being supported and affirmed by others along with supporting and affirming others.”
WAM is grateful to the Scarlet Sock Foundation for generously sponsoring our 2022 Teen Ensemble, including giving us the resources to pay the participants.
All photos by Talya Kingston except for the lead photo, which was taken by David Dashiell.