by Victor Vazquez
Almost everyday the Institute participants go to class. Starting at 8:30 or 9am is a 30 minute warm-up lead by one of the students. Thereafter, we sit in a circle and attend to the day’s topic: Creating community-specific text, Directing on a community based context, Collaborative-Community Dance and Choreography, managing, fund raising, budgeting, Designing a Community-based show, Auditioning, Community Engagement, Story circles, etc. The four-hour class slot is never nearly enough to answer all of our questions, but we’ve realized that our hypothetical questions become answered outside the classroom because Eureka continues to be our classroom. Daily, as we interact with community members, hang lights, run chords, stand on rooftops, listen, hammer, saw, bundle up, hug, hold hands, give notes, share in circles, check in-and-out, smile, cry, run, trip, meet, talk, hang posters and high-five we experience the lessons outside the realm of hypothetical. We engage community, we dance collaboratively with community members amongst the Sequoias’, we audition, build, and witness the magic of community-based theater.
Why isn’t this happening in our schools, in our theatrical studies? Of course we always partake in communities, but the magic of entering a community, listening, and telling a story (not the story) of the community with the community as part of the process is both gratifying and intense. In our nightly company checkouts, which most times occur at 11pm, we have shared our daily stories and lessons. Each day feels like a week, and these past three weeks have felt like seven years. The amount of work and investment that a project like this requires is giant. The passion, and the determination that this project requires is endless. But the rewards are abundant. And the product is inspiring.
Someone here said
“Building the set was easy, building the theater nearly killed us”.
The staff, institute, and community hands have all build a theater where there was none before. The Moulder Building of the Blue Ox Millworks which contains two large machines with a thousand variations of blades work to cut wood into any form and shape you desire- has been transformed into the new stage for “Jason in Eureka”. We, the hands, have all acted as these blades, shaping the building into the theater space of this years Cornerstone Theater Company Institute project. Where else can you find a classroom that will allow you to shape theater outside of conventional space?
Liz Parker (institute participant/actor) and Stacia Torborg (institute participant/Community engagement/photographer) work together to saw wood beams to build the second half of the stage.
