Session Block 7

Saturday, August 1st

Network: High School

Digital Stage Management  
Session Chair: Steven Barker

The ancient arts of stage and theatre management meet the cloud and the digital age. How can you maximize the tools of technology to set your productions/programs up for success and gain time back for your personal life? Using Google Drive, Docs, Calendar, Tasks, and more, bring your laptop and figure out how to make google work for you and your theatre program.

Network: Applied Theatre

Visible Relationships, Feminist Frameworks and New Hospitalities  
Session Chair: Karie Miller

This workshop questions the primacy of the hierarchical rehearsal model, and proposes, in its place, a feminist rehearsal/making/learning space that prioritizes caring relationships. Such spaces thereby generate performances that use true radical hospitality in which the spectators and performers visibly and care-fully partner in the creation of the performance’s meaning. In this workshop, we will address the potential for an aesthetics of care in three areas of contemporary performance: audience immersion and engagement, a feminist rehearsal room, and trauma-informed performance hospitality. To fully envision the broadest range of possibilities, this workshop features an interdisciplinary collaboration with mental health professionals. Our goal is to incorporate established hospitable and caring-for practices that recognize the ways everyone in our rehearsal and performance spaces carries and responds to trauma. Using examples from practice-informed-research accomplished in Dennison University’s 2018 production of Information for Foreigners and Dickinson College’s 2019 production of We Are Pussy Riot (or) Everything is P.R., we will explore the collaborative potential and reciprocity of interdisciplinary approaches to hospitality and trauma-informed care.  

Network: College/University/Research

Visionary Communities: Supporting Individual Identities within our Theatre Education Community  
Session Chair: Kris Peterson

In the summer of 2019, we traveled to Finland to conduct research for our university’s theatre teacher training program. Finns are highly regarded for their visionary educational system, and we felt inspired by their community of learners. After our visit, we sought to bring that vision back to the theatre education communities both at our university and at AATE. Since then, in collaboration with our students, we have utilized some of these practices in a strategic plan to raise the quality of our pre-service educational community. We wish to continue this momentum by also sharing this vision at AATE. Using the vision and community-based support of Finnish education, this workshop will not only provide participants with an opportunity to discuss Finland’s world-renowned approach to education, but also an opportunity to actively explore practical application of the research for theatre education programs and communities. Participants will work collaboratively to develop plans for their own practices. “For the citizens of the Nordic countries, the most important values in life are individual self-sufficiency and independence in relation to other members of the community.” -Anu Partenan, The Nordic Theory of Everything: In Search of a Better Life. 

The Detention Lottery: Using Immersive Theatre to Teach Immigration Studies
Session Chair: Mary September

Learn how to deepen your students’ understanding of US immigration past and present using student-led immersive theatre. 8th grade U.S. History teacher, Anne Kiemle, developed an immigration curriculum using immigration attorney Margaret O'Donnell's play, The Detention Lottery, as the culmination of a 4-week study unit about past and current immigration trends and immigration law enforcement. The unit also serves as a starting point for deeper conversations and learning about the history of BIPOC communities within this country. 

The Detention Lottery presents one hour in an immigration detention center courtroom, with students playing the roles. Students rehearse and then perform the play for a school and community audience in an immersive performance. The session will feature a pre-recorded excerpt of the play directed by theatre director and educator, Ana María Campoy, and performed by young people. Following the presentation, there will be a discussion of the curriculum and Q&A with Anne Kiemle, Ana Maria Campoy and facilitator, Hestia/Mary September.  

Network: K-8

Crafting Chaos: Enacting a Vision of K-6 Student-Driven Creation  
Session Chair: Leah Towle

How can we give young actors the tools they need to confidently navigate the process of devising work and making strong choices? In this session, experience and analyze mini-lessons designed to hand control of the artistic process to the makers themselves, in this case, elementary schoolers. Explore a structure of tying bite-sized games, reflections, and applications together through hands-on scaffolded lessons. Walk away with tools in three student-focused contexts - devising scenes, process drama, and play-building. Participants will also be invited to share their own strategies in giving young makers the reigns in their performance work. This session will address both virtual and in person settings. 

Network: Youth Theatre

Developing Impactful Sensory Friendly Theater Programs through Collaboration with  Occupational Therapists
Session Chair: Caroline Umeda

This session will provide participants with practical evidence-informed strategies for collaboration with occupational therapists (OT) to develop impactful, inclusive sensory-friendly performance programs for children with disabilities and their families.

Participants will be introduced to occupational therapists’ unique consultative roles in supporting theater access and provided an overview of current research on sensory friendly theater programs developed with OT consultation. The session will focus on translating research findings into evidence-informed strategies for developing and executing sensory friendly programs. Strategies for developing partnerships with OT consultants, selecting key sensory friendly program components, and supporting theater staff and actors will be addressed. The session will include a slide presentation and interactive problem solving to give participants the opportunity to apply presented information to their own settings and formulate actionable steps toward developing sensory friendly programming. This session is well-suited for participants desiring to 1) develop and pilot new sensory friendly performance programs in community or professional theaters and/or 2) incorporate current research findings to support and enhance existing sensory friendly theater programs.

Network: Playwriting

Are Women People- Theatrical Anthropology for Trying Times  
Session Chair: Andrew Vaught

In August of 2018 four student writers from Hendrix College began the process of adapting Are Women People, a lyric satirical evisceration of Anti Suffrage politics, by noted feminist, Alice Duer Miller. Over the course of one month they conducted a workshop process to select, explore, adapt, and update Miller's already pertinent poems to reflect the interests and struggles of women in the present day. Through support, criticism, and play these writers created a document that reflected the concerns of young women as they prepared to engage with the world at large. Through humor, solidarity, and lyricism Are Women People? provides an example of how the past speaks to the present and clears a path for the future.

Network: Various

New Guard Debut Panel
Session Chair: Jenna Nilson and Kendra Ball

This year’s annual New Guard panel includes a diverse collection of researchers and practitioners exploring topics from a trama-responsive workbook to autoethnographic research on teaching practices. Come check out these first time AATE presenters as they share their amazing work.