Membership Spotlight – September 2023

I was recently part of the LabWorks cohort through the New Victory Theater where I developed a new piece titled “un lugar imaginario to meet a loved one.” It’s an interactive Spanish/English bilingual theatre piece that explores grief, the death of a parent, for upper elementary school audiences. In the play, a nine-year-old girl creates an imaginary world filled with objects that hold the memories of her dad. The play explores the relationship between Girl and Mom as they navigate their relationship to each amidst grief. The audience is invited to be part of the imaginary world. They give advice to the characters on how to talk to each other and share their feelings. The audience is then provided space to reflect on the memories of people that are special in their own lives. It’s been a really special piece to devise with a group of artists and continue revisiting. I really appreciate our audience members’ willingness to share their own stories during every performance.

Linda Popp’s art work. I saw some of her work exhibited at the Tennessee Arts Academy this summer and I was really connected to these miniature collections of stories and time. From her website “Linda creates narrative found object assemblage sculptures. She uses artifacts and symbolic objects to convey stories about relationships with family, place, love, faith, nature, and self.” I am really interested in how we tell stories through the objects we interact with in our everyday lives. Whether it’s to remember a loved one or to connect to a memory of a place. You can learn more about her work here: https://www.lindapopp.com/about

I am developing a new piece titled “I am/Yo Soy: A Museum of Memorias”, which continues my exploration of objects and memories. This time, however, it’s in creating an interactive piece that explores a young person’s family’s immigration stories. Each object is connected to a person in their life or is a way for them to learn more about their past, why their family moved to the U.S., and build a connection to their heritage. This play is a Reimagine TYA finalist, and I received an Aurand Harris Grant from CTFA to help in the development of this piece. I hope to lead story circles to learn about our relationships to objects in our lives when immigrating to a new country. Inspired by my mom’s

I appreciate the way theatre for young audiences interrogates the world with young people. The pandemic itself is the best example of the creative and inspiring work that happens in this field. When the major theatres shut down, theatres still reached out to their youngest audiences. Creating interactive theatre on Zoom, pen pal plays through the mail, or audio plays with art kits for young people to explore. Theatre for young people pushes me to think beyond the traditional theatre of putting on a play and having an audience silently watch. Theatre for young audiences meets the audience where they are, but it’s not afraid to ask the tough questions. It understands that kids are listening and are ready to engage with what is happening in the world around them. Creating work for kids and families will push me to lower my walls and be open to asking those tough questions too.

Madeline Calandrillo is my partner in creating theatre. We co-founded Jugando N Play together because of our passion for multilingualism and accessibility in theatre making for young audiences. There is something magical that happens in a room when we are brainstorming a new theatre lesson, idea, or play. There’s a bubble of energy that moves from the laptop screen, to speaking it out, to embodying it in the space. All of a sudden we are pretending to facilitate in the room or SHOWING how we envision a dream world coming to life. There’s more than one project we’ve worked on together. I think the best collaboration has been creating together from grad school, through the pandemic, and in dreaming of possibilities for Jugando N Play.

Mino Lora, the Executive Director of People’s Theatre Project. I have been so fortunate to work with PTP in Upper Manhattan since 2018. Her theatre was also started as a result of her thesis project in grad school. That theatre is now over 10 years in action and helping to bring a performing arts center to our community. When I was starting Jugando N Play, I reached out to her immediately. She has always been someone I can reach out to with questions, with ideas. She is an inspiring artist activist mother Latina. Grateful to have made this powerful connection in NYC.

Visit www.sindyicastro.com or IG @jugandonplay or @sindy.i.castro

I am currently producing a family-focused, all-ages event called READ ME A WORLD for the Fringe Festival in Philadelphia this fall. The event is an experiment in bringing the intimate, connective act of reading aloud into public space–it’s an exploration of building common, public infrastructure for both play and intimacy for children and adults alike. The work is largely inspired by my past collaboration with theater artist, voice actor, and read aloud advocate Amy Jensen. READ ME A WORLD involves an amazing crew of Philly-based “Facilibrarians” who will lead participants through some games and activities to (re)connect with our expressive voices and faces, as well as a team of five incredible visual artists who have created immersive, themed reading nook spaces within which attendees are invited to spend some leisurely time reading aloud to each other and enjoying the opportunity to connect through text and pictures. This work has received such a wonderful outpouring of support from folks across my communities, as well as a few Philly-based granting organizations. I am so excited to share it with families in Philly! READ ME A WORLD will run four consecutive Saturday mornings in September @ 10am — Sept 9, 16, 23, and 30. You should come!

I’m deeply immersed in books these days–especially picture books–and it’s really hard to pick just one. But I recently find myself returning to Oliver Jeffers’s anti-imperialist kids’ book “The Fate of Fausto”, Robert Munsch’s irreverent feminist fairy tale “The Paper Bag Princess”, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s “Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals.”

Over the coming year, I’ll be collaborating with some local farms and garden educators to make a kids’ show about tomatoes. I’m anticipating that it will be colorful, messy, and joyful!

I love young people. I think that children are, by far, the most adventurous and the most honest theatergoers. They are observant, curious, playful, imaginative, responsive, unabashed, and unafraid. They ask the wildest, most unexpected questions during audience feedback and hearing from them always blows my mind, broadens my horizons, and shifts my orientation as a creator. I want an audience that will scream, giggle, gasp, dance, wiggle in their seats, and say exactly what’s on their minds. Even when I make work for adults, I hope to elicit these sorts of responses. Young audiences are simply the best–and, in my experience, artists who make theater for young people are such radical creatives, so collaborative, playful, wildly imaginative, deeply invested in awe and wonder and healing and imagining the culture towards more equity, liberation, and joy. These are the kinds of artists I want to collaborate with, always.

I have too many favorites. Of late, I’m feeling especially grateful for my creative companionship and friendship with the inimitable Ana Cantoran Viramontes, with whom I’ve collaborated on The Seven Ravens Project and on Spellbound’s Wink at the New Victory Theater. I also want to celebrate the BIPOC in TYA cohort leaders with whom I collaborated on facilitating affinity spaces for BIPOC folks in the field in 2020 and 2021, all of whom also led or supported the creation of the Anti-Racist and Anti-Oppressive Futures Guide for TYA: Val Ramirez, Khalia Davis, Shavonne Coleman, Tiffany Maltos, and Min Kahng, as well as Shavanna Calder and everyone else who contributed to those rich, transformative, and necessary conversations. There is still plenty of work to be done, and I’m always happy to know that we have each other.

Janine Nina Trevens of TADA! Youth Theater, who was the most consistent, reliable, and supportive adult in my life throughout much of my childhood, and Barbara Ames who was my music teacher and the director of the 40-child-cast-member musicals at Hunter College Elementary School for a whole generation or two of kiddos. Her teaching legacy includes a certain Mr. Miranda and also ME!

My website is www.marisolmakes.com.  You can also learn about my creative explorations and imaginative shenanigans for youth and adults alike over on Instagram at @marisolmakes and @the.exuberance.

The world premiere of Forgotten Girl at First Stage in Milwaukee.

Anything that Kiese Laymon writes, these days! Especially his memoire Heavy. Particularly his chapter about Black Abundance!

A dream project that I’ve had for a while would be to combine the Anansi the Spider stories that I’ve accumulated over the years into one show. I love pieces that blend Myths and Folktales with our everyday world, and then blur those lines.

In my opinion, it’s the most honest theatre for the most honest audience. Young people engage with live performance, especially if they’re with their peers, with a kind of electricity that is unmatched!

Big ups to my man Idris Goodwin. I directed a production of his play “And In This Corner; Cassius Clay!” before we met. Then we worked on the world premier of his stage adaptation of Jason Reynold’s Ghost, in 2019. Now he’s adapting India Hill Brown’s Forgotten Girl for First Stage in Milwaukee, and I’m along for another adventure.

Jette Halladay was my advisor and TYA professor in college. I owe so much of what I’m able to do now, to her guidance and encouragement. She’s the teacher that made me a director, because I was her AD on multiple shows. She used to run after school and summer drama classes in the community and hired her students to teach. Those were some of my first experiences of being a teaching artist. She’s had a profound impact on me as a storyteller and a human being.

I’m working on a website that should be up by January of 2024! In the meantime I’m on linked in, and Instagram @jonroyal323