Jenna
Alstad
performance artist
The Warehouse Project & Gallery
community arts collaboration
Making Waves has been in partnership with the Warehouse Project and Gallery since 2016 when they met at the Theatre of the Oppressed conference. They discovered that community arts organizations have a lot to be gained and learned from working together, and have since shared techniques, practices, and performances in an effort to bridge divides and create a deeper sense of national and global community. The Warehouse Project and Gallery is a youth arts organization practicing Theatre of the Oppressed work in the Chicago suburb of Summit, Illinois. Since 2016, both groups have traversed the distance to discuss social justice practices in community arts building.
Pedagogy & Theatre of the Oppressed Conference
summer 2018
WPG and Making Waves partnered to present at the 2018 PTO conference in Indiana, Pennsylvania. Together, they lead a workshop about gathering stories and script material. Jenna led the Making Waves portion of the workshop, demonstrating a devising technique she created to gather personal stories from the people in the room to create a poetry piece about the concept of "place". The activity was entitled "Where I'm From" and emphasized the importance of telling your own story in activist work, rather than co-opting the stories of others
PTO Script Workshop
spring 2018
In the spring of 2018, WPG made the journey from Summit all the way to St. Paul to participate in a script development workshop. At this workshop, WPG presented their work in progress that they would be bringing to the PTO conference in the summer. They performed and Making Waves artists gave feedback to the youth performers. Afterwards, the WPG youth work-shopped Jenna's script on youth homelessness and displacement. Through a staged reading and talk-back session, the youth provided well-needed feedback on the script and gave first-hand insight through their personal perspectives and experiences.
Youth Devising Workshop
summer 2017
Over the course of a week long workshop, youth from WPG participated in a workshop co-led by Carolyn Levy, Jenna Alstad, and Laura Mann Hill. At this workshop, youth participated in image theatre based activities exploring the recent changes in their schools policies on discipline. As a part of the experience, youth were asked to speak both from the perspectives of themselves and the perspectives of those whom they strongly disagreed. The youth utilized the images they created in the image theatre activities to create scripts depicting the problems they saw and their solutions.