T wo years ago, I graduated college and began my journey in Minneapolis and St. Paul as a theatre artist, grabbing any paid opportunity I could find. As a performer and international student from Singapore, financially stable jobs in the theatre were not always the easiest to find; and I worked as a front of house manager, assistant director, performing arts educator, and actor. I was overworked and exhausted, but my creative soul was happy. Fast forward to 2018. I will be making my return to Minneapolis in formal black pants, roaming the hallways of the beautiful Hyatt Regency hotel. My name tag will tell you that I am a graduate student in Theatre for Youth MFA program at Arizona State University, and a presenter at AATE. Never would I have thought that this is what two years would do for me.

My entry into theatre began while I was in junior college in Singapore( Grades 11 and 12). In Singapore, it is mandatory for every student to join one extracurricular so I decided to try for the drama club. I had grown up watching a lot of theatre with my family and wanted to find a way to get involved. However, I was too afraid of performing on stage and was bent on joining the drama club but only as a part of the tech crew. Little did I know, the director for the first production of the season wanted everyone in the drama club to audition for the show- A Pair of Star Crossed Lovers Take Their Life- a 30-minute version of Romeo and Juliet. I went through the audition as instructed with little fear since I had no intention of being cast. To my surprise, the director had cast me in the roles of Ensemble and Nurse. Although I only had four solo lines in the play, I was so nervous during the first read through that day that I couldn’ t stop my hands from trembling. I had to put my script down on the floor just to follow the lines. Being a part of that production showed me what it felt like to have a closely knit community and be confident in my own voice- how it sounds, my accent, and its louder than usual volume. Following this production, I continued to perform in more shows in junior college and began to act again in my sophomore year at Carleton College in Minnesota.

Today, I am a more confident theater artist than I have ever been. As an international student, I have spent the last six years pushing against the walls of immigration – trying to make the system work for me as a person in the performing arts. Frustrated and feeling trapped, I went to my theatre professor, Roger Bechtel, for help and asked him how I could produce a senior thesis production that encompassed all of my training and interests and a performer in dance and theatre. It was then that he introduced me to devised theatre and its ability to create live performance that builds upon the strengths of the ensemble. I then began eagerly researching about the history of devised theatre and where it is now, delving deep into companies like Frantic Assembly and Gob Squad. Come senior

Photographer: Eva Chong Venue: ACT3 International, Theatre, Singapore Date: May 26, 2018 Performance: " Paperbelle " by Frozen Charlotte( Scotland) Performer in photo: Robert Stanley Pattison

year of college, I rose up and embarked on a yearlong and( emotionally) painful journey of stumbling through my first ever fully produced devised theatre piece, Perpetrators – a work that explored what meant to steal and be stolen from.

My entry in to devised theatre had added a new layer to my experience as an intern with the Guthrie Theatre Summer Camps in 2015. It was there that I first learned about the role of a teaching artist and realized how much teaching drama is very much like devised theater; the teaching artist is continuously working to create a healthy and safe creative space for the students, providing opportunities for new ideas and talents to enter the space, and being continuously flexible in their teaching methods to accommodate the students in the room. Being a teaching artist felt like the

Incite/Insight Spring 2018 Volume 2 | Page 18

Devising: Constructing By Sara