'My Great-Grandma Slept With Al Capone': A Theatrical Excavation of Family History is a creative project based on a true family story. My great-grandma was a nurse in the late 1920s and ended up having Al Capone as her patient. From this story, I developed a fourteen-page script and a concept trailer that discusses the heart and soul of my project. The goal of this project going forward is to create a limited series and/or a short play about my great-grandma's experiences as a nurse during Prohibition and The Great Depression. Artist's Statement: This art piece embodies the power of connecting with your roots and using that as inspiration to both become closer with family and create art that can be dedicated to those you love. There's something incredibly emotional about parading your heart and your family's heart for all to see, and I can't help but wonder how the Capones have felt about their father, uncle, etc. being constantly subjected to creative impersonations. Because of this, I strived to be as truthful as possible in my portrayals of these legends, while still inviting creativity in to fill the gaps. What results is an art piece that allows these humans to be who they are, wholly and completely, with all the ups and downs that come with learning how to live within your given circumstances. - Hannah Hutchison

Shakespeare’s Case for Vulnerability: Giving Voice to Pain and Suffering is a combination of two pieces of work. The research centers around understanding the communication of pain and suffering and how this factors into our everyday lives, in combination with an interview and video project called Evolution of Woman. This project sought to determine the different facets of pain and suffering and how, specifically, Shakespeare communicates these concepts in his work. This work also explores how the representation of pain and suffering was different between male and female roles in Shakespeare’s writing. From this research, questions were developed to interview Shakespearean experts and actors. These interviews explore the details of portraying Shakespeare’s characters and how gender plays a role in the characters’ expression of pain and suffering, as well as what it means to be a female actor in plays that are dominated by male characters.

Theatre for social change, or more generally, theatre that addresses political issues in a community, often leans on participation as a way of democratizing the theatrical space and opening the conversational floor to more than just the traditional creative team. In practice, participatory theatre nonetheless can and has been used as a tool of propaganda rather than a tool for democratic social change. These seemingly-incompatible applications of participation in political theatre present a problem for those who want to use it: what versions of participatory theatre provide a space for other voices, and what versions of participatory theatre ostensibly appear to, but ultimately only function as tools to justify an ideology? To explore this question I examine a common form of participatory theatre: interactive theatrical trials. Specifically, I analyze the agitation trials of post-revolutionary and early Soviet Russia using Augusto Boal's frameworks from his devlopment of Theatre of the Oppressed.

Those who are in or have aged out of foster care, most of whom are queer, Black, brown, and low-income, are represented by social workers, educational advocates, behavioral health specialists, and the mainstream media as “at-risk” for criminal behavior, teen pregnancy, homelessness, and lower levels of educational attainment. Current and former residents of foster care and their experiences must be understood beyond these deficit models in order to restore humanity to and bring about positive change for this population. This project traced the strategies for survival of those in and aged out of foster care in Arizona through artmaking and critical qualitative methods.

Using borderlands theory and medicinal histories, I demonstrated how system involved youth paint a picture of foster care as a dehumanizing borderland creating una cultura mestiza – a hybrid culture that youth learned to navigate as both healers and healing. Additionally, I argued the foster care system is inherently disabling by way of the processual (re)narrativization the system dictates in order to make those in the system legible to the State through the labeling of mental and physical disabilities. Lastly, I explored insights garnered about foster care through ensemble-based devised theatre. I found it is important to have systemic representations of foster care in tandem with embodied experiences of said system. Collage-making served as an accessible mechanism for relationship building, material generation, and material knowledge. I discovered meaningful ways of representing absent presences of system involved people through feeding forward their artistic creations into the devising process. Taken together, I found foster care system involved people survive through art and creativity, connection to people and places, and keen resourcefulness cultivated in the system.

Performing the Electrical traces the histories and futures of electrical discovery and knowledge through cultural performances, socio-political assemblages, and the more-than-human worldmaking functions of energy in general and electricity in particular, or what I refer to as energy-as-electricity. This project seeks to transform how energy-as-electricity is perceived, and thereby to re-vision the impact that energy-rich relationships might have ecologically—in both the social and environmental senses of the word. As a practice-led inquiry I use my scenographic sensibilities in combination with performance studies and energy humanities lenses to identify how energy-scapes form through social performances, material relations, and aesthetic/ritualistic interventions. This approach allows me to synthesize vastly different scales of energy-as-electricity performatives and spatialities and propose alternative framings which work towards decolonizing and re-feminizing energy-rich relationships. This research considers the way power flows, accumulates, and transforms through performance as embodied expression, practice and eventful doings of human and more-than-human agents. It asks: if place is practiced space (Henri Lefebvre), how can decolonizing and re-feminizing energy-rich relationships transform normative power relationships (or power geometries, as cultural geographer Doreen Massey refers to such globalized interconnections)—which are formed through electricity, technologies and colonial-capitalism? I ground this inquiry as an ecological intervention in order to investigate how performing with electricity differently (both in collective imaginations and quotidian interactions), can change the ways that electricity is produced and consumed in the time of the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plasticene. The following study produces written and tacit knowledge that expands the framing of energy-rich relationships shared between human and more-than-human performatives. My provocation is that experiential encounters are critical for expanding the ontological plurality of energy-as-electricity with ecological a/effect. Drawing on the insights of performance scenographer Rachel Hann, I demonstrate that scenographic methodologies in an expanded field, along with embodied sensing, provide productive insights into this endeavor of expansion. This project both serves as a space making/space keeping provocation and offers a methodology for devising more desirable futures.