I learned a lot as an artist creating this performance. Previously, I didn’t have much experience creating a performance incorporating media and a physical track. English is more about the text and interpreting the text—something that someone else has already created. Occasionally a teacher assigns a creative project that requires a little more expression and work but it isn’t very frequent. However, this performance has been about creating something from an idea that helps to convey a message to someone else and it becomes their responsibility to interpret it. We’ve had to take some feedback and think deeply about how we want to represent things and how we want the audience to see our performance. This has given me some experience in preparing these and collaborating as a group to create something from a simple idea and a guiding principle.
As an educator, I’ve learned some about how to guide students in their own creation process. I’ve learned the importance of being clear in expectations and giving them feedback. Sometimes in the creation process, students stray from the original guiding principle or they forget the original basis for the project. That’s why it is so beneficial to give them an opportunity for feedback where there isn’t as much risk and they can get help from their teacher and their peers. This is something that can be applied in any subject matter. It’s important to give students an opportunity to hear feedback for their work and to then have an opportunity to continue work and to revise so that they can improve upon their ideas. It’s a learning experience and a process.
I contributed to the final product by taking pictures, recording video and audio to contribute to the media. The media helped us to create a script as well as take the ideas as inspiration for our final performance. The ideas from the interviews all were combined and meshed together to convey a specific idea to our audience. I really enjoyed collaborating with my group members in order to create our devised script and incorporate the findings from our interviews and other research. In preparation for our final performance, we also all contributed to the props and the creation of props that we used.
I was really interested in the idea of devised theater because it was new to me as an English major. I love that we had the opportunity to do interviews and then take inspiration from them to create and incorporate them into a theater piece. I think that this is something that I would enjoy doing with my students. It would be an interesting project from them to interview or examine media that contributes to a specific topic or idea. It would then extend their learning even further to require them to incorporate some of these ideas into a piece of theater or performance. In English, the performance itself wouldn’t necessarily be a demonstration of an understanding of theater, but it would provide students with an opportunity to share their learning with other students.
Overall this was a performance that I really enjoyed working on and I feel like I learned a whole lot. It was especially informative to be able to work with my classmates who have more experience in theater than I do and more experience in devising a performative work. It gave me a new perspective on the type of creative work that I can have my students do in the classroom.
