#ryan conarro

[therealculturebot]

THIS HOUR FORWARD

Photo by Adam Nadel this hour forward is a personal piece that speaks about a pressing social issue. The underlying theme is equality, the specific topic is gay marriage. Through an immersive atmosphere and a minimalist narrative, theater maker Ryan Conarro invites us to experience and dissect what it feels like when public policies intersect with your personal life. After spending some time…

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[therealculturebot]

Expediting Intimacy: The Foundry’s “Living Here: A Map of Songs”

Expediting Intimacy: The Foundry’s “Living Here: A Map of Songs”

Photo by Julieta Cervantes

On a recent Sunday, my boyfriend Nick and I visited the living room of a stranger. The place was on Duane Street in Tribeca. We took the elevator to the 10th floor and turned left down the hall, toward the sound of a little crowd, and we found an apartment door standing open. The hostess—busy and smiling—happened to be standing near her entryway as we dropped our coats.…

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[evvy-o]

The other night i went to this one man show and during the show he quoted  The Queer Art of Failure by Judith Halberstam, and was talking about this sense of failure that queer children experience and then further in the piece(and somewhat over all) there was this theme of gender/self-identity and where one fits in the world and something about it all just really struck a cord with me. as just in my own personal life recently I've been playing with ideas of who i am, where do i fit in life? sexuality. self identity, and whether I want to put a label on how i define myself. and I keep coming back to this idea of Asexuality and Aromanticism, because I've always have been much more invested in platonic relations and i rarely experience anything more than brief 'crushes' (if they could even be called that) but, every time i express these feelings/musings/thoughts, around a certain parental figure, the main response i receive is 'that's just because of you intimacy issues.' what? 'that's because you ignore your feelings.' blah blah blah. which ties back into that sense of failure and feelings invalidated. because who are you to tell me what I'm feeling? like yeah okay, maybe it is intimacy and fear of rejection or whatever shit you're saying, but those are my issues to figure out. I'm not looking for a definitive label anyway, because frankly. I dont care. but to say things like that to me about 'its just my fear of rejection' or 'issues with letting people in' just is... hurtful? insulting? makes me not want to talk about my personal feelings? like, I'm 17 and trying to figure out myself and my place in the world. don't fucking tell me that my possible perception of my sexuality is wrong just because it doesn't include romantic intimacy.

and this is really just a personal rant post because I've been playing with these feelings and going to see that piece just got me thinking. yup rant over

[teachingartists]

Deep, Rich, Wide & Timeless [2013 ALT/space Retrospective]

ALT/space is about the work of artists who teach in schools, communities and prisons. ALT/space contributors advance the teaching artist field by writing specific, concrete, and powerfully personal stories about what they do and how they do it.

2013 on ALT/space gave us a deep, rich, wide, and timeless swath of stories about teaching artist practice. To celebrate the New Year, let's take a look back at some of the most evocative and relevant ALT/space stories from the past year.   

As you read, I ask you: How can you ignore the deep expertise and passion for art and learning evident in these posts?  Some question, some observe and ponder, some struggle, but ALL show the power and impact teaching artists have in schools and communities everywhere. Please consider your role in advocating for the teaching artist field and the work we do by sharing ALT/space with others. I also encourage you to consider adding your own stories to the mix in 2014.

Happy New Year!!  --Malke Rosenfeld, ALT/space Editor

______________________________________ January brought us Working with Children on the Asperger-Autism Spectrum by Holly Adams.  This is perhaps the best, most nuanced piece of writing I have read about working with students on the spectrum. Holly's expertise in this area is applicable to all classrooms, arts-based or otherwise.

In February Ryan Conarro wrote a highly nuanced and helpful post about what it means to collaborate with teachers. Read his thoughts in Listen to Your Teacher. This is a must read.

In March Alison Holland wrote Taking My Daughters to Work which highlighted the struggles of balancing family with a freelance lifestyle. I hope 2014 brings more discussions like this one.

In all her posts, Anna Plemons reminds us and herself to question one's assumptions about art making in prison. In May Anna told the story of Poem Number 99, about a writer wrestling with the unspoken expectations about what he should write.

In June, in her post Head Spinning, Kate Plows shows us that the world of educational technology may be upon us but what we do with it, and how we think about it, is up to us. 

In July, Jeff Redman brought us the third of four stories on collaborating with a humanities teacher to create theater about modern day slavery. Read Bamboo: Tools of Storytelling--it's a fabulous story.

Speaking of which, in August we celebrated two years of ALT/space online in the post The Well-Told Story!

In September I shared a series of interesting conversations I had with artist J.E. Johnson that proved to be generative and instructive on a lot of levels, especially about what it means to call yourself an artist who teaches. Read all three posts in the series: Beginning of Something New?, Interactions Between Art and Craft, and Wondrous Things.

In October Victoria Row-Traster brought us a story about the power of live theater...and all the work leading up to the magical moment when eleven-year-olds spontaneously began speaking the lines of Romeo and Juliet with the actors during the performance. Truly a marvelous story: Now You're Really Speaking My Language.

In November Anglea Gallo shared a story about college dance students working to find their own unique artistic voice in This is Hard.

Finally, December brought the excellent first post from new ALT/space contributor Meghan Zanskas called Planning for Play. She writes, "As an artist I find pleasure when playing around in the studio. As a teacher, I have long wanted to afford my students the same sense of creative freedom within the classroom. As a researcher, I've decided to see what happens when I try giving them that freedom." 

What a great year.  See you in 2014!

……………………………………

Malke Rosenfeld is the editor and curator of ALT/space online and its associated print section in the Teaching Artist Journal.  Find out more about Malke’s work as a teaching artist at www.malkerosenfeld.com.

[teachingartists]

Three Hearts: Puppets Come to Life in the Lower Kuskokwim School District | Ryan Conarro

Puppets bridge the uncrossable chasm between what’s alive and what’s not; what’s sentient and what’s not. They allow us to physically inhabit a reality that’s a reality of the imagination.  -- Eileen Blumenthal, Rutgers University Theatre Arts Department

The puppet is a synthesis of reality and illusion. It is at the moment when I believe in the figure’s autonomy and yet remain aware of its theatrical mechanics, that I experience the power and transcendence of the puppet. --Richard Termine, National Puppetry Conference, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center

Students from Bethel Gladys Jung Elementary perform their story 'Raven's Secret Ingredients'. (Photo by Greg Lincoln)

“A puppet is an object to which we give imaginary life!” Over one hundred young people from around the Kuskokwim River delta stand in a circle, moving and chanting. They’re reviewing key terms and concepts in visual arts, digital arts, and puppetry—and, I hope, they’re building a sense of collaborative trust at the same time. It’s early April, the culminating week of a year-long arts integration project in the Lower Kuskokwim School District’s Project Pilinguat. Here in Bethel, Alaska—the hub community of this Yup’ik and Cup’ik Native region—these students have gathered from various remote schools to piece together the finale performance of the year: Qanemciput Piliaput-llu: Our Stories and the Things We Made.

A puppet is an object to which we give imaginary life. In my role as puppetry teaching artist in Project Pilinguat, I opted for this short-hand definition of the central figure of our art form. As I visited various schools, we illustrated the power of our imaginations to invest anything with life: a piece of paper; a classroom stapler or dry-erase marker; fabric; some sculpted clay. We also experienced our own creative capacity as audience members to accept a performer’s fantastic proposal that the inanimate object they’re holding is, in fact, alive.

Select students at each school have integrated our arts project with writing by creating stories for their puppets. There are rod puppet wolves with heads of felted wool, telling the story of “The Naughty Wolf,” written by a student at Akiuk School. Newtok high school students collaborated to write “How the Stars Learned to Fly”; the stars are made of papier-mâché in the fanciful “blatch” puppet design of Jim Henson. Mekoryuk School students wrote a story called “Allaneq (The Foreigner),” about a non-Cup’iq visitor to their village who learns traditional dance from three Cup’iq elders. Each character in the story is represented by a four-foot-tall bunraku puppet, operated by three puppeteers. The puppets are painted white, and they glow under blacklight

A student from Akiuk School with his felted wool wolf puppet. (Photo by Katie Basile)

High schoolers from Newtok perform their story 'Agyat, How the Stars Learned to Fly,' using three blatch-style puppets and one bunraku-style bear puppet. (Photo by Greg Lincoln)

Mekoryuk School students practice movement with their in-progress bunraku puppet.

The puppet performances are coming together this week in Bethel. They’re woven together with stop-motion animations created by other school sites under the leadership of media Teaching Artist Katie Basile. As we rehearse, I’m reflecting on our shared definition of “puppet.” What is a puppet, really? Are we, the performers, really doing the work of giving life to these objects? Are these objects really the energetic heart of these performances, or is there some other force at the center?

I think back to my first memorable experience of live puppetry. I was a junior high student at a summer fine arts camp, called Firespark, near my boyhood home in north Georgia. I filled my two-week schedule with creative writing and drama classes. I remember that when I registered, I noticed the class “Creative Movement/Puppetry” on the course listing. I imagined a studio where students explored elementary movements and then used socks and stuffed animals to tell kids’ stories. I wasn’t interested.

When the puppetry students performed at Firespark, I was transported. A pitch-black stage was suddenly illuminated with glowing black-lit worms made of flexible plumbing hoses. Primal-sounding music filled the space. A huge dinosaur skeleton appeared, made of pieces of foam carved into the shapes of interlocking bones. Each foam bone was supported by a long dowel, and each dowel was carried by a puppeteer. I could see the performers, black-clad figures in the void. There must have been six or ten of them collaborating to perform the dinosaur. To me at the time, it seemed like there were dozens of them. I loved the beauty of the visual craftsmanship, and I was enthralled with how the actors animated their puppets with motion. I was thrilled, too, by the fact that I could see how the magic was happening. There was no attempt to hide the puppeteers here. It was as if they and their instructor were saying to us in the audience. ‘Here we are. We want to show something to you, and we dare you not to be impressed.’ Because those performers were visible to me, I could see their investment, their intention, and their collaboration as an ensemble.

I realize that that experience of puppetry as a kid initiated my eventual impulse to explore puppetry as an adult. I can even see the direct influence of the dinosaur piece on our design of the Mekoryuk School performance here in Bethel, with its glowing black-lit bunraku figures. In fact, none of our puppet performances this week include puppeteers who are hidden from view. The power of a puppet performance for me is less about the “object” and more about the human performer’s effort and intention of “giving imaginary life.” I’m interested in creating events in which the audience sees the mechanics of performance, and accepts the illusion even still—events in which we witness the focus and cooperative energy of young people telling stories.

Students from Tununak rehearse with a large Yup'ik mask-style puppet, designed with teaching artist Tina Harness.

Akiuk School primary students perform 'Pissurqta Pissurqta' ('Hunter Hunter') using shadow puppets.

In an article in this spring’s journal Puppetry International, puppeteer-scholar Robert Smythe suggests a different central player in a given puppetry event. The most important element, he says, is neither puppet nor puppeteer, but audience member:

The process of constructing a [puppet] narrative is a shift away from representing the real world by showing everything, and toward constructing limited and therefore imperfect descriptions of reality, such as moving shadows on the wall or a wooden figure of a person, that prompt [an audience member] to build a rich and personally fulfilling world in her imagination, beyond the immediate scope of her senses. (Smythe 4)

Smythe bluntly calls the puppet “imperfect” in its limited, unrealistic portrayal of an actual living being. He compares the puppeteer to a novelist or filmmaker, who presents an “edited reality” (Smythe 4). By choosing puppets, the puppeteer invites the audience to play a more active role in creating the imaginary world of the story. Our wolf puppets from Akiuk School are mere balls of wool with bodies made of fabric. When the students rehearse at their table-top, I can see their arms reaching up into the puppets. Near the end of the piece, the students stand and reveal themselves fully as the controllers of these objects. All the while, the audience must create the full imaginary world of the wolves: the snowy tundra,  the dark den,  the herd of caribou fleeing the hunt.

An object to which we give imaginary life. Both the puppeteers and the audience members do the work and magic of investing these objects with life.

This definition worked well for most of the year. However, at a visit to Bethel elementary school Mikelnguut Elitnaurviat, a first grader pointed out that there’s a third force at play in a creative puppetry event.

It was my first visit to Ms. McDaniel’s classroom, where the students were creating a morality play about two bear cubs who disobey their mother. We planned to tell the story with shadow puppets, using cut-outs designed by the students after lessons on form line, silhouette, and contour line. For my first day with the students, I used a Peeper Puppet—a plastic set of eyes that hooks onto a finger like a ring—to illustrate basic concepts of puppet movement.

Students at Eek School manipulate Peeper Puppets.

I chanted my now-established definition for the students, and I asked them to repeat me: “A puppet is an object to which we give imaginary life!”

A round-faced boy at the middle table raised his hand. His name was Mehmet (MEH-tee), though it took me some time to learn to pronounce it properly.

“Yes, sir?” I gestured toward Mehmet, inviting him to speak.

“No, you don’t give it life,” he said. “It’s your heart.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s your heart. Your heart brings the puppet to life. Your heart, and the puppet’s heart. Two hearts!”

He spoke these words matter-of-factly, as if this were a commonly accepted truth and he was gently reminding me that I’d forgotten it.

I looked to Ms. McDaniel to gauge her reaction to this nugget of wisdom. I was unsure whether Mehmet might be a student who parrots obscure movie or video game sources, or who spouts conceptual ideas without really knowing what he’s saying. But Ms. McDaniel was looking at him intently, her mouth open a little.

“Wow, Mehmet,” she said. “Wow. That’s really good.”

“Yes, thank you,” I offered. I put my palms together, following the gesture Mehmet had demonstrated as he spoke. “Thank you, Mem-tee.”

“It’s MEH-tee!” he said.

And so the puppeteer and the audience members might be important factors in bringing puppets to life, but according to Mehmet, the objects themselves bring a creative force to the process as well.

I like this idea, and I’m eager to consider its import as the finale puppetry event takes shape in Bethel. I note the different tonal energies of each piece—simple, serious rod puppets from Nunapitchuk; playful fabric marionettes from Kwigillingok. Certainly, several factors contribute to these variations in tone: the music, the narrative, the audience’s feedback, and the performers’ movements and intentions. But as Mehmet suggests, the objects themselves must bring their own particular energies into the space. Perhaps some mystical circuit of “heart” plays out between audience, puppet, and puppeteer to make each performance its own unique experience.

Students from Kwigillingok in rehearsal with fabric marionettes.

Ryan Conarro with a student from Nunapitchuk School and his rod puppet. (Photo by Katie Basile)

My next puppetry residency will be this fall at an elementary school in Juneau. When I meet those teachers and students, I’d like to revise my standard definition of the term “puppet”: “An object to which we give imaginary life, in order to spark a story.” This addition will bring our attention back to the audience members, giving them the right and the responsibility to create an imaginary world. Perhaps I’ll add even more to the new definition, incorporating Mehmet’s profound perception:

“An object with a heart, to which we bring our hearts, in order to spark a story in the hearts of the audience.”

Nunapitchuk rod puppets in progress.

WORKS CITED: Opening puppet quotations from: Malkin, Michael. Puppets: The Power of Wonder. Atlanta: Center for Puppetry Arts, 1995. Smythe, Robert. “Peculiar Possibilities: Narrative Theory and Puppetry’s Ability to Edit Reality.” Puppetry International, Issue 31. Atlanta: UNIMA-USA, 2012.

 Ryan Conarro is an actor and director living in Juneau, Alaska. He works regularly with Juneau’s Perseverance Theatre, and he’s performed with Juneau’s Generator Theater, New York’s Theater Mitu, and Aquila Theater Company (national tour and Off-Broadway). As a teaching artist, Ryan works with the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Alaska Department of Education, collaborating with teachers and students to support arts-based education practices. Between school days and rehearsals, Ryan enjoys hiking, kayaking, and skiing. He earned a BFA at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Contact Ryan   

Also on ALT/space by Ryan Conarro: Wait Time: Communicating Through Puppetry in a Rural Alaska School Really Worth Something Like a River: Surprise Moments of a Rural Alaska Arts Ed Project

[teachingartists]

Really Worth Something / Ryan Conarro

From the air, the village of Kwigillingok Alaska in LKSD, with the school in the foreground Aug 2011

This school year, I’m facilitating a puppetry-based arts integration project in the Lower Kuskokwim School District in southwest Alaska, as part of their grant-funded Pilinguat (“Making Things”) Program. I’m a theater teaching artist and am new to puppetry work myself. After a series of professional training experiences in puppetry last summer, I felt a sense of anxious anticipation about the task ahead. I stumbled upon the writings of Waldorf educator and puppeteer Bronja Zahlingen, and her words stayed with me:

It is important for the development of the child’s senses that he can watch a [puppet] play take place in actual space—otherwise his sense organs are easily made passive…The simplicity and transparency of our table [puppet] plays calls forth the child’s powers of imagination, and he is right in the midst of all that takes place. Through this, the creative power for his own play as well as for his own movement and language development are stimulated. (A Lifetime of Joy, Waldorf Early Childhood Association, 2004)

I appreciated Zahlingen’s articulation of the importance of steering young people away from the television screen—her assertion that raw, unrefined storytelling might serve young people.  And I wondered whether puppet work might have unique value in rural Alaska, where the American education system arrived as an essentially colonial enterprise, imposing itself on the Native cultures here, and—along with Christian missionaries and the rise of a cash economy—resulting, in some communities, in a sense of disenfranchisement among village adults and young people alike.

LKSD Eek students experiment with puppet dialogue in a writing integration project Aug 2011

Students are required to stay in school, but often the education they’re getting there doesn’t feel relevant to them. They watch television and cruise the internet and glimpse a world beyond their own, which is presented as seemingly more appealing than the place they live in. They muddle through school and, too often, they drift into passivity—as do many of their teachers and parents.

In the past few decades, local communities, school boards, and school districts have rallied to fight this insidious, slow motion wave of inertia. The Pilinguat Program is one such effort. Its administrators and artists posit that if we can inject into the classroom aesthetic sensibility, physical action, and a valuing of individual creation, then we might grow the rate of “success” of our students, whether they choose to leave the village for college, or stay to become leaders in their communities.

Could Zahlingen’s words be true, that a student’s “creative power” might be “stimulated” by puppets? On the eve of my first day working with students and teachers in the classroom in this art form that’s new to me, I suddenly felt nervous.

Kwigillingok primary students design shadow puppets with geometric shapes in a math integration project Aug 2011

LKSD Kwigillingok high school students build a bunraku puppet using rope, paper, and tape August 2011

…A few days later, I was in the high school classroom at Kwigillingok, a village near the Bering Sea coast. By this point in my visit, students had built simple bunraku-style puppets: small human figures made with rope, paper, and tape. Each puppet required three students to operate it.  Today, the task was to choreograph the puppet’s movement across a table-top obstacle course, demonstrate a brief conflict, and then exit the puppet.

The classroom teacher pulled me aside and pointed to a group of three boys. “Look at them,” she said. “I’ve never seen them that focused before. That’s really worth something.” As they moved their puppet across the pile of books, the high schoolers were all gazing intently at the puppet. On occasion, one of the three would break the spell and introduce a creative idea to his partners: “Maybe we could have the puppet do push-ups here”; or, “Let’s try jumping all the way across the desk.”  I watched as the group attempted each idea, laughing, smiling, and listening to each other.

When the boys performed their bunraku piece for the rest of the group, it was a delight, both for them and for their audience. The first few weeks of classroom puppetry projects continued with similar successes. I was thrilled with the positive experiences I was sharing with students and teachers, and buoyed by the sense of true collaborative learning I was beginning to experience as I found my way through facilitating projects with puppets.

Our puppet projects will continue this winter with visits to several other schools in the Lower Kuskokwim School District’s Pilinguat Program.  My initial concerns have been replaced with an eagerness to discover the else I might learn, and with growing faith in the possibility that puppetry can engage students’ “creative power,” that perhaps the young people involved in puppetry “can also be helped to become [people] of independence and creative activity.”

Ryan Conarro demonstrates bunraku puppet movement with LKSD arts program administrator Julie McWilliams & Kwigillingok classroom teacher Kathy Harsch Aug 2011

LKSD Eek middle school students perform with fabric marionettes August 2011

Ryan Conarro demonstrates shadow puppet movement for LKSD Eek primary students August 2011

 Ryan Conarro is an actor and director living in Juneau, Alaska. He works regularly with Juneau's Perseverance Theatre, and he's performed with Juneau’s Generator Theater, New York’s Theater Mitu, and Aquila Theater Company (national tour and Off-Broadway). As a teaching artist, Ryan works with the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Alaska Department of Education, collaborating with teachers and students to support arts-based education practices. Between school days and rehearsals, Ryan enjoys hiking, kayaking, and skiing. He earned a BFA at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Contact Ryan   

Also on ALT/space by Ryan Conarro: Like a River: Surprise Moments of a Rural Alaska Arts Ed Project