Arts-based Engagement Project: Strain
As an institution committed to the development of the emerging leaders, thinkers, artists, and entrepreneurs, Dean College’s Schools of the Arts and Dance are embarking on an interdisciplinary project which will find its expression in full-length, interpolated, and devised theatre work Strain; Private Struggle and the Pandemic.
About Strain
Strain is a purposeful integration of the arts into the fabric of the core baccalaureate curricular experience, while we infuse core subjects into the arts. This is to enhance awareness and a renewed appreciation of how the arts can affect change, and translate it into high-impact practices that benefit students, the campus, and the greater community. Art is one of our major points of contact.
Dean has a history of bringing the campus and the community together to celebrate art that excites and connects us. Believing that the arts inspire, inform, and engage, our motivation behind Strain as an arts-based engagement project is multi-faceted. It goes beyond a typical artist’s residency, beyond student learning, audience enjoyment, or the development of a new play.
Veteran theatre artists Bobby Bermea and Jamie Rea of Sojourn Theatre, a company characterized by its international reach, arts-based civic dialogue methods, and consistent innovation, were chosen to work with topflight theatre and dance majors to ensure artistic excellence. They will direct both the creative development and intellectual processes that will give rise to expanding dialogue and civic bridge-building through this high-caliber theatrical event.
COVID-19 magnified both latent and acute issues throughout, particularly regarding access, equity, and inclusion among underrepresented populations and along racial and cultural lines. The pandemic forced many people, ostensibly social creatures, into prolonged isolation. As a frightening future unfolded, their functional situations became dire, while their physical or mental health was taxed. Telling the stories of frequently invisible populations in congregate care facilities or the elderly, front-line workers, teachers, business owners, students of all ages, and parents, gathered from records or transcripts of interviews, the theatrical inquiry of Strain will plumb facts and experiences of participants. As good art does, we know it will change the ways we see each other, the world around us and ourselves within it.
Rather than appropriating individuals’ narratives or being merely didactic, it is our goal to also engage in critical discourse with our audience. Through the boundless scope of perceptions, felt ideas and increasing knowledge, through devising this new play, and by mounting and presenting its production, we may be able to lament, come to recognize disparities and acknowledge strains, reconcile differences, celebrate hope, and perhaps, eventually heal.