Kendra Miller, newest AFT Artistic Intern, shares her thoughts on the XYZ Festival of New Works.
For me the XYZ Festival is the chance to create a dialogue between the community and the theatre and to reinvent their relationship. I’m fascinated with the “firsts” that are happening in the creation of this festival. I believe that it is only through continual experimentation and rebirth that theatre as an art form can succeed. In a world linked by super fast connections and impressions that often don’t depend on any physical presence or significant time spent, an hour or two spent in the dark with complete strangers becomes a highly unusual experience.
I’m interested in the creation of a festival that reaches beyond it’s own physical space and immediate audience to create an experience in many different ways for many different people. The rings of involvement spread outwards from the people who wrote these plays all across the globe, to readers across the country, to the roots of our theatre here in Chicago. Everyone has their own idea of what the XYZ Festival should look like, and a synthesis of these ideas and inputs is slowly emerging in a very organic and exciting way.
Queer theatre, new theatre. Reinvention is survival for both. One of our plays brought up an interesting question: “Why would it be important if this person were gay?”. Why wouldn’t it be? Shouldn’t it be? Does it matter? The process that we have created for the selection of these plays doesn’t let us have easy answers, and helps us find the plays that ask the hard questions.
I love the focus being put on the creation of the process itself because as we muddle along and experiment and discard, we’re always learning new information and constantly breaking down preconceived notions of what we think the process should be, what queer theatre and new theatre should say.
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