A party vibe of a nightclub made its way into a quiet Saturday on a midnight L train. Rainbow lights, refracted through a disco ball flashing, and whimsical shadows thrown on the blurry windows, suddenly turned the greyness of the ordinary subway car into a whirlpool of color, sounds, and festivity. This scene could have been out of a Hollywood movie, but it is actually part of Evan Reed’s TV series Being Here, featured in the 2018 BFA Dramatic Arts Senior Festival.
“It is a show that gets New York strangers to step out of their everyday lives into being in a social stunt that my friends, called Sparkle Flowers in the show, and I put on,” said Reed, 23. “For the pilot episode, we all went into the subway with 3 cameras, a portable speaker and blasted some 70’s disco music while handing out mini disco balls. People were very eager to get up and start dancing.”
The BFA Dramatic Arts Senior Festival opened on March 6th and runs through April 26 every Tuesday and Thursday in the Glass Box Performance Space of Arnhold Hall. It presents the final projects of the 21 drama students, who are presenting work on a range of topics, from criticism of socially-inculcated fear of one’s body image to the shortage of serious dramatic roles for women.
“The idea is to take all of the creative technique, creative passion, creative energy and creative talent that they have developed over four years and apply it to a specific situation to create interesting dynamic work,” said Kitt Lavoie, a playwright, and director who is one of the instructors of the course.
“There’s definitely a lot of collaboration for direct research across the board,” said Judith Edlund, 21. “I have Jessica Pomeroy, a junior in BFA department helping me stay on track and meet deadlines and Bryan Berrios, a sophomore in the Parsons photography department who has come onto the project as my cinematographer.” The collaboration helps everyone involved: working with Edlund serves as a valuable experience for Berrios, who hopes to work in a film industry and Pomeroy, who will prepare for her own thesis class next year.
For her project, Edlund created a short documentary film, We Love Lucy Forever, which honors the comedian Lucille Ball and her loyal fanbase. Edlund used Facebook to reach out to friends and admirers of Ball who shared the stories of their connection to the comedian. For Edlund, this work bears a special significance since she has admired Ball since childhood.
Some students address social issues that relate to campus. “It’s teaching me how to be working as a part of a community. I feel like I have a really unique position of being able to write for young women,” said Hunter Cagle, 21. “It’s hard to find a role that’s really juicy and not just daddy issues or like ‘my boyfriend broke up with me.’” Her project is a play based on an adaptation of the Greek myth Narcissus and Echo and its setting in a circus. There are eight characters and six of them are young women. As Cagle said, she did not initially plan to enter a debate on gender politics but felt compelled to address gender issues when the #MeToo movement developed.
Rae Haas, 22, is presenting a work that explores the phenomena that occurs after an audience witnesses the death of an actor. She created a pseudo-satirical Ted Talk titled “How to Die (without actually dying)” which features ridiculous deaths (from death by masturbation with a science trophy to drowning yourself in your own vomit) to “represent deaths of your innocence, traumas, fears, pride, idols, all leading up to the death of the ego.” In some cases, students use their projects to reflect their own experience. “As a person who has come from a past of disordered eating, my project is dealing with my own relationship with my body,” said Charlotte Durkee, 22. Durkee made an animation based on an interview with two individuals reflecting on their relationship with their bodies and projected it onto a body cast.
As seniors work on their projects, they develop practical skills that help ease their upcoming transition to the professional art world. “We really build this festival to be a proto-professional experience that will resemble filmmaking, theater, design, and play development experiences that they will have in the professional world,” said Jerzy Gwiazdowski, an actor, and instructor of the course. Students also get a chance to create an impression on industry professionals who are invited to attend the festival. “Based on last year’s class, at least three students have already taken what was the content of their senior drama project and staged it as a part of a theater festival or independently as alumni,” he added.
Photo by Orlando Mendiola