Steppenwolf Theatre Company Blog – Chicago Theater, World-Class Ensemble

Hi everyone, my name is Safiya and I’m part of the Young Adult Council. I’ve never written a blog before and I’m not exactly sure how this works, but I’ll give it my best shot.

For the past month or so, 3 members of the Young Adult Council have worked with CPS teachers in the Immersion 2 workshop, “The Chicago Ethnography Project”. The Chicago Ethnography Project interviews people about their culture (ethnicity-aha! Word roots!) and puts those interviews together to create an original piece of theatre. Since we were working with teachers, Emilio, the workshop director, spent some time talking about how to apply the theatre or writing exercise in the classroom. We learned and participated in fun warm-ups. We learned new catchphrases, like “marinate” and “juice”. Both students and teachers felt that the role of “student” or “teacher” really didn’t apply and everyone was just a person. In the final performance, the casting was pretty colorblind (or… ageblind…?). Our ‘informance’ (our purpose was to INFORM, not PERFORM) about class, family, and race, was pretty successful. And we had some awesome Mediterranean food.

This entry was posted by Safiya Nygaard on Monday, April 14th, 2008 at 8:45 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.