performance artist

 

 

Social Justice Reflection

Jenna Alstad - 2019

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When I came to Hamline, I knew little to nothing about the field of Social Justice. Growing up in an isolated community in Northern Iowa, I had never been exposed to the concepts or the theories, but I had a deep sense of justice embedded in me from childhood. Though often misguided, I desired to make the world a better place. This was deeply rooted in the experiences of my childhood. Growing up in a home built on the structure of domestic violence, I saw injustices committed against my mother and myself. I saw how an abuse of power could leave a person isolated, impoverished, and without support. I saw the power of my mother, her resilience to keep going, and I saw the ways in which patriarchy and capitalism continually undermined her every step of the way. At school, I saw kids in my school sent away on drug convictions, never to complete high school. I saw teen mothers who could not support themselves, victims of sexual violence rendered voiceless, queer teens forced into closets or fist fights, and I knew this was not the way things had to be. I was poor, I was queer, I was a girl, and though I didn’t have the full picture of inequalities in the U.S., I saw them all around me and felt them in my everyday life.

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I thought I knew who I was and what I wanted when I started college; I wanted to study psychology and criminal justice to eventually work as a therapist in prisons. It took only a semester and an introduction to Professor Valerie Chepp to completely upend my understanding of the roots of social inequity. It wasn’t merely that people who commit crimes lack the personal emotional support to succeed in life; it was that the entire system of inequality imbedded into the institutions of the United States perpetuated these great criminal injustices. I came to realize that what I loved about psychology was looking at the human condition, and what I loved about the idea of criminal justice was the hope that I’d be able to create change. I found those qualities to be deeply ingrained in the Social Justice program, and within the first few months of being on campus, I changed all of my plans and declared a Theatre and Social Justice double major. In my youth, I had found home and safety in my community theatre, and I wanted to learn how to create theatre spaces rooted in building that safe community. I had known for a long time that theatre could be a powerful vessel for voice, and I wanted to use that tool in my toolbelt to create the social change I sought in the world. These passions combined to create my area of concentration within the Social Justice major: performance art and social change.

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Through my experience at Hamline, I spent time exploring systems of injustice and the ways in which people have and can upend those systems. I primarily focused on looking at the way art and theatre could be used to fight these systems. The most formative point in my career at Hamline was when I chose to take part in the HECUA Art for Social Change program. Through the program, I spent an entire semester delving into the ways art can transform communities. We presented three major projects as a culmination of our learning, bringing our work into the community so as to explore how this work can impact the public. I presented two public performance pieces (“The Gardens She Grew” & “Violence and Forgiveness”) surrounding the topics of domestic violence and womanhood, and one visual art project speaking to the topic of street harassment. As a part of the experience, I interned at Pillsbury House Theatre, working with their youth programming director to organize and facilitate programs for youth experiencing social inequities. Outside of my HECUA experience, Hamline’s social justice theatre troupe, Making Waves, has also deeply impacted my practice. Through Making Waves, I was introduced to Augusto Boal and Theatre of the Oppressed, learning of the ways in which theatre can be a vessel for the people and by the people. Forum, newspaper, and ethnographic theatre all deeply transformed the ways in which I thought it was possible to create art. Another deeply influential experience was my ethnography class with Valerie Chepp. Though not a theatre course in any way, this class opened my eyes to the world of ethno-theatre, giving me the tools and skills to be able to both conduct social research and create sociologically based performance pieces.

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In the future, I hope to use my theatre and social justice knowledge to create scripts and performance pieces surrounding issues of injustice with people in my community. I seek to use my relative leverage in society as a tool to grant others a position of power. Social Justice has granted me the ability to critically analyze my own life and the systems in which we all participate in every day. I can truly say that Social Justice has not only granted me knowledge, but made me a genuinely better human being. For that, I will be forever grateful.

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