This upcoming week, the Theater and Arts Department is putting on a New Works Festival, where 10 new works written, produced, and directed by students will debut. The works include musicals, plays, and even a puppet show, ranging throughout different genres.
The festival runs from Thursday, April 23 through Saturday, April 25. A day pass ticket costs $5, and each day has three to four productions. Loyola offers students a space to expose their work and to network with others seeking careers in a shared field. Through working on a piece written by a student, to producing, directing, and acting on it, Loyola makes one shared space for students and faculty to work together towards one singular goal: giving students a platform to showcase their creativity.
All students were able to submit their work to the festival, and ten were chosen.
Makhi Jenkins, a Loyola student who wrote “Jasmine with a Capital J for Jesus,” said that their works were chosen for production in January and that set everything into motion.
“I was a little hesitant about it, because you’re putting forth your work to be reviewed by someone else,” Jenkins said.
According to Jenkins, these nerves are accompanied by great excitement.
“This is just a really good opportunity to test the waters and see how people will react to something that I wrote,” Jenkins said.
When asked about the process of putting on the play, she expressed pure enjoyment saying.
“All of the TAD department is really supportive and they make the process really easy,” Jenkins said.
As her first time working with new works, she said the most challenging aspect of putting on her work was going to and from different rehearsals, as several students from the department can work on different plays across the festival.
Writer of “Terror Best Felt,” senior Hyacinth Downey, let us into their creative process writing the work. With a lot of concepts in mind, Downey incorporated aliens, outer space, and humans for a play described as: “space, drama, puppets.”
As a writer, building the puppets for the play set out to be the most challenging part of this experience; visiting different stores and figuring out how to accurately transform words to reality.
In their own words, the real challenge was “finding the hyper-specific things that you need.” Though it has been a long time in the works, and building props has not been the easiest task, Hyacinth said that the most enjoyable factor of working in this festival was getting to share their art with so many other people, and watch the cast and others interpret their art.
Emauni Johnpire, who wrote “Almost Intersecting,” said that she was driven to write her work from a class she had her first semester of college where she learned about a concept called experimental theater. Through this new concept, she was able to create her work.
“I am not able to decide on just one thing to write about, I have so many feelings about a lot of things, I want to talk about a lot of things that are wrong in society,” Johnpire said.
Knowing she had so much to say and having found a way to express it, she started putting her work together.
“I learned about a concept called experimental theater, so, how am I going to combine poetry into something I love writing?” Johnpire said.
After playing around with a lot of her poems and transforming them into scenes, she created a work she was proud of. As a freshman, she described being overly grateful for her first time working with new works.
“The process has been beautiful, just like working with everyone. I think everyone has really put in their weight, even my director of theater and Arts, she’s been so open, and so helpful,” Johnpire said.
Emauni shared this was a learning experience for her as well, now being exposed to new people, works, and concepts, such as “trigger warnings.” Though putting her work into action was in her own words, exhausting, given the chance to describe her play in three words she said: “Healing, uncomfortable, comedic”.
