Social Justice Projects:
Agency, Authorship, and Ownership for Youth
Performance, itself, is an act of self-determination.
As a voice teacher committed to supporting educational/artistic spaces for marginalized voices, I define these projects in terms of my pedagogy. With my role as a catalyst rather than a knowledge bearer, the participants are the keepers of expertise and wisdom.
The Odyssey Project
A leadership initiative for incarcerated youth.
The participants leverage storytelling and theatre modalities to look at their lives through a heroic lens rather than a criminalized one.
The Going Home Project
A story-based initiative that responds to the national crisis of youth houselessness.
Self-representation and autobiography centralize the youth experience of who they are and what their world is, using theater, drawing, mapping, photography, digital storytelling, spoken word, poetry, and rap.
Trojan Women
Conceived and executed during the COVID-19 pandemic as a remote learning video course for incarcerated females, this project is an empowered talk-back to the oppression that the characters in Euripides' tragedy.
Home. Belonging. Finding a center to find your voice within and without.
In voice work, the idea of center as the source of breath, impulse, and energy is key to effective communication. To find one’s center often means to find one’s power.
Center conjurers up the idea of home. Having an embodied home center, a place of integrity, and personal power can provide a vital base that allows us to walk with presence and conviction as we face life challenges. Finding the vocal center within can be an exercise in self-knowledge that is potentially healing and empowering. In the process, we connect our breathing, voice, and expression to a place of origin, identity, essence, authenticity.
Marginalized voices are frequently dismissed, disqualified, devalued, rationalized away, and forgotten.
These projects deploy the arts for social change through accomplishing equity and inclusion for diverse de-centered populations. In the projects, the participants use art (particularly theatre) to recover, redefine, restructure, and realize their inner centers. Their investigations may position them to encounter and examine their outer homes–their communities and cultures–with fresh perspectives to recenter themselves in the world.
I define these projects as:
Theatre seeking solutions through artistic metaphors springing from the problem-solving efforts of the participants.
Youth pro-active programs–building on their resources rather than criticizing their deficits or emphasizing a welfare approach.
Seeking a balance between youth self-determination and responsibility with a look through their lenses at the kinds of social stigma, pressures, traumas, and personal demons with which they have struggled.
An approach that considers the navigation between supporting youth efforts to construct high standards for themselves with an ethic of care from facilitators.
An approach that considers the balance between fate: circumstances imposed (class, race, cultural and educational exposure, genetics, family dynamics) versus free will, self-determination, responsibility, personal aspirations, and commitments.