Spells of the Sea at Pegasus PlayLab

Xinyue Zhang, Community Engagement for Spells of the Sea at the Pegasus PlayLab

Metro Theater Company’s upcoming production of Spells of the Sea was recently chosen as one of four plays in development at Pegasus PlayLab. We asked Xinyue Zhang, a second-year M.F.A. student in Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities (DTYC) at The University of Texas at Austin, a few questions about the Pegasus PlayLab experience. Be sure to read MTC Artistic Director Julia Flood’s thoughts on the process as well in a past blog post.

“Together with Claire Derriennic from The University of Texas at Austin and Sage Tokach from University of Central Florida, I was in the Community Engagement team for Spells of the Sea. My involvement in this project has been very inspiring. It helped me see the multiple entry points and possibilities of community engagement work in the long process of new play development.

In rehearsals, we started with observing and engaging in conversations with every creative team in the room, from actors to designers, from choreographers to dramaturges. We gathered information about what each of them would like to learn from young people. With these questions and curiosity in mind, we invited young people to a one-day new play development workshop. We used theatre games to introduce them to the four creative teams, CHOREOGRAPHY, DRAMATURGY, DESIGN, and AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT. After a reading of the first half of the play our young participants took the roles of the four teams and workshopped creative responses to the reading. There were dance and movement vignettes, design drafts, dramaturgical charts, and ideas on pre-/during/post-show audience engagement. We ended the workshop with a group devising session to imagine possible endings to the play.

Their brilliant ideas have now been compiled into a much-valued document that would accompany the play into its next stage of development. Before the actual reading, we also created the pre-show activity according to the design of the youth participants, where audiences were invited to create their unique magic potions and put them on the shelf of the magic shop mentioned in the story, New Light Life 24/7.

Participating in the Pegasus PlayLab for Spells of the Sea was such a unique and precious experience for me as a theatre artist. I appreciated how it valued multiple perspectives in the process of new play development. Not only did it involve a wide range of creative minds from the early stage, but it also made sure there was space for young people’s voices in each of them. As always, their visions and imaginations are mind-blowing. They responded to the genuine curiosity of our creative teams with equally genuine passion, honesty, and inspiration.

I deeply respect and admire how humble and graceful Gwenny and Anna were throughout this process. With their incredible artistic vision as a solid foundation for all of us, the team danced with all the possibilities and ideas to make the story stronger and all the more magical. It was such a delight and honor for me to have contributed to this collaborative space and been a part of this exciting creative dialogue. I am taking away a lot of new ideas for building a collaborative and creative space for my practice of theatre-making in non-conventional spaces.”

— Xinyue Zhang

Pre-show activity according to the design of youth participants, where audiences were invited to create their unique magic potions and put them on the shelf of the magic shop mentioned in the story, New Light Life 24/7.

Xinyue Zhang is a second-year M.F.A. student in Drama and Theatre for Youth and Communities (DTYC) at The University of Texas at Austin. As a performer, writer, and teaching artist, Xinyue is a co-founder of Stages of People’s Palace Project (London, UK), and worked with A4 Art Museum (Chengdu, China), Art Space for Kids (Shanghai, China). Her research and practice are located at the intersection of drama-based pedagogy, early childhood education, museum studies, and storytelling for environmental justice. Xinyue holds an M.A. in Theatre and Performance from Queen Mary University of London (First Class).