Acting and Performance

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I taught the workshop "Where We Come From As Performers" with freshmen students in Professor Lizzy Cooper Davis' Acting Fundamentals course at Emerson College. This practice of engaging with performative cultural traditions through work with gesture, Viewpoints training, and movement-based sharing and receiving represents one of the techniques I used to guide a devised theatre process with an ensemble of Emerson students as part of my MFA thesis.

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In this workshop, "Movement in the Flow of Life," co-created with colleague Víctor Gacitúa, actors are challenged to experience and explore the connections between movement and character through solo work and physical "dialogue" with others. 

 

"Out of Character," an adaptation of a lesson I taught with several groups of K-4th graders in Arlington, MA, invites students to participate in two exercises in creating character: a structured improvisation and text-based scene work. 

 

Devising and Playmaking

I taught "Shape and Spatial Relationship in Story" with the teenager youth leaders at the Hyde Square Task Force in Jamaica Plain, MA. The techniques were designed to facilitate the creation of material and the physical exploration of character as part of an ongoing playmaking process. I taught a similar workshop, "Movement and Shaping Narratives" with theatre educator Molly Karlin, with high school juniors and seniors at Cambridge Rindge and Latin in Cambridge, MA.

 

This lesson comes from a two-day playmaking class I taught with junior high and high school students at Zion Academy of Music in Stockton, CA. We centered the devising work on questions that the participants "have always wanted to know the answer to." They created beautiful scenes from this work. This is the plan for our first session.

This seven-week playmaking process, "Home is Where?" centers on the experience of being “away from home”: What is it like? How can communities support each other when we are away from home? How can we support others who are away from home? The lessons  incorporate explorations of poetry and stories about immigrant experiences including texts written by Juan Felipe Herrera, Claribel Allegría, and Ray Bradbury. This unit is also designed to facilitate the creation of original material through process drama methods and Boal image theatre techniques. This unit outline includes considerations for formative and summative assessment.

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Understanding Text and Performance

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As teacher artist with ArtsEmerson's Play Reading Book Club, I led groups of adult community members in a table reading of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure in preparation for viewing a production of the play. This is an excerpt of my plan for our second session.

Also from my teaching with the Play Reading Book Club, this plan guided our post-show discussion of Triptych: Eyes of One On Another by korde arrington tuttle and Bryce Dessner. In this session, this group of adults shared their thinking about the piece and devised a staged reading of sections of this play for a community showcase. This is the script for the showcase performance we created, adapted the libretto by korde arrington tuttle.