16
I n c i t e /I ns i ght
W i n te r 20 1 9
“What Do I Call Myself?”
Blurring Roles, Sharing Responsibility, and Expanding
Possibilities Through Collaborative Theatremaking in TYA
WR ITTEN BY JADA CADENA, LINA CHAMBERS, SAM PROVENZANO, ALLY TUFENKJIAN,
AND KRISTON WOODREAUX
I
n April 2018, five
theatremakers
put on a play: This
Girl Laughs, This
Girls Cries, This
Girl Does Nothing by Finegan
Kruckemeyer. From the start,
we knew we loved this play
and felt in our bones that we
had to produce it some way or
somehow before we split ways
from the University of Texas
at Austin. The trick was—we
wanted to produce this play in
the same way that we might
if we were devising it from
scratch. Kruckemeyer’s play is
written with a poetic storytelling
style wherein characters move
between the present and
the past, narrating action of
each scene, and often directly
addressing the audience. We
felt that as an ensemble, we not
only perform, but also direct,
design, and market ourselves.
Within our rehearsal and
performance process, we found
the difficult, joy-filled, and eye-
opening experience of working
as a collaborative ensemble: all
as leaders, all as followers, all
serving this story.
To reflect on our collaborative
process, we asked each other
the following questions in this
interview. We were excited to
share ownership and agency of
the writing process just as we
had with the devising process,
honoring our ways of working
in the rehearsal room and the
lineage of collaborative writing
from past practitioners.
What was your role in this
project?
Sam Provenzano: How is this
both an easy and impossible
question to answer? When I
walk into the rehearsal room
each day, I know what my role
is: to have an eye on and in the
play, know my lines, imagine
what the best version of the
moments are, try to accomplish
those, listen to my colleagues,
consider their feelings while
also considering the story,
offer ideas, know when to
stop talking. So a role? Maybe
dir-actor-turg? Or just theatre-
maker?
Kriston Woodreaux: We
found our roles as the project
evolved. For example, I design
marketing materials for every
production I work on as a way to
keep my graphic designing tool
sharpened. I happened to share
them with the team and before
I knew it, we were ordering
posters of those designs and
laser printing shadow puppets.
Everything we had in our tool
belts went into this production.
Jada Cadena: I was hired to
do a very particular job: create
music for the show. I decided
to call myself an integrated
sound designer because the
music for this show was both
live and pre-recorded audio
tracks, with both digital and
natural foley sound effects. My
role transcended “musician” as
I became an outside eye in the
rehearsal room and helped my
ensemble members navigate
the collaboration process.
Lina Chambers: I play the role
of Beatrix so I am an actor in
the show, but I also contributed
directorial insight. If someone
were to look at every moment of
the show with a dramaturgical
microscope, my thumbprint
would be over many of the
performance choices, the
aesthetic design and even
logistical emails back and forth.
However, all of my collaborators
had just as much input on those
areas. The process was a stop-
and-start-and-rewind-and-
try-and-try-again dance that
each of us moved through with
different amounts of ease or
difficulty depending on the day.
Ally Tufenkjian: Defined
roles can certainly be helpful
in making sure that labor is
distributed fairly and that
expectations are clear. But
at the same time, I wonder
how they limit us. What I find
noteworthy is that this process
has asked us to both define
and redefine ourselves based
on what we did as opposed to
what we were called.