10 Incite / Insight First Time Presenter Spotlight
Spring 2018
Devising : Constructing By Sara
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