AMERICANS ONLY READ THE HEADLINES
AMERICANS ONLY READ THE HEADLINES
americans only read the headlines is an original devised piece of mine performed by Nathan Ayala. It was part of the ET series at The Sargent Conservatory of Theatre Arts in the Spring of 2022. The piece is based in the practices of Agosto Boal, and his Theatre of the Oppressed, and is a response to the increasing data that shows that many citizens of the US do not read past the headlines. Dealing with the onset of the war in Ukraine, migrant deaths at the southern boarder, women’s rights in Saudi Arabia, and much more.
The process
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Starting every day by bringing in our favorite and most complicated news articles, our writing process began by extracting actual lines of news. From there we would mold the text into scene or monologues using Boal’s Newspaper Theatre Techniques.
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Once we had the text, we would immediately get on our feet. Basing our practice on found object, mask, and martial arts work, we crafted simple and repeatable physical forms to compliment the text.
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Having text and shape, we would look back at the work we had done and investigate what we had made. By scrutinizing the work we were able to ensure that we were not veering away from our intentions, and look inwards to see what biases we might have superimposed.