Viva la Revolucion!
Viva la Revolucion! was a semester-long collaborative project between two humanities classes employing the production of a theatrical performance as a track for examining the impetus and impacts of social movements throughout U.S. History. Inspired by the work of Luis Valdez & El Teatro Campesino, who utilized amateur theater as a means of advancing the culture, education and mobilization of California’s agricultural workers during the 1960s, our team considered various historical and contemporary efforts for change as the content foundations for our learning. Further, we employed personal considerations of our relationships with the institutional powers that were challenged during these movements as occasion for incorporating our own calls for social transformation into many pieces of this project. Drawing on the idea that producing a theatrical event would require, beyond an authentic understanding of social change and power structures, the use of teamwork, communication, and diverse individual talents, our team embarked on this project of functioning as a professional production company to research, write, edit and assemble our plays for the community.
We began Viva la Revolucion! by giving some important initial attention to contextualizing our final product, the forthcoming plays, as real art that would be exhibited for a real audience. Our team developed a preliminary idea about what this would mean by putting ourselves into professional art & performance settings including an urban art exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, a viewing of Yellowface, by Tony Award winning playwright David Henry Wang, and participation in a script writing workshop generously sponsored by Mo’olelo Performing Arts Company. Attending these, as well as several other, exhibitions helped us generate realistic ideas about how various mediums of art can be exhibited in, and have an impact on, society. Each also catalyzed some initial attention and enthusiasm toward the scripts students would write and produce later in the semester. While attending each of these events meant a certain amount of focus re-prioritized from the content learning needed for this project, it is a crucial aspect of project based learning to give students a tangible idea about where they are heading with any product they have been tasked to create; immersion in these real-world settings provided us with inspiring models for our own work and helped to construct a class culture that valued creating plays we would be proud of. While these experiences were indispensable elements of the eventual success of our plays, they also generated important connections about how the skills utilized during this project could find real-world application and, as importantly, got everyone really excited about taking on the hard work before us.
Moving past the contextualization of our project, we challenged ourselves with the focused research needed to provide dependable content foundations for the plays we would author. We approached on this process with attention to developing a personalized direction for each individual’s research based on recognizing connections to social movements that thematically, or in certain instances literally, had affected the circumstances of our own lives. This approach involved considering how institutional powers - such as race, media, capitalism, economic class, gender, sexuality & state authority - were influencing our experiences as individuals, and then looking in-depth at movements initiated as organized responses toward the social, political, and other conditions established by the existence of these powers. Utilizing these personal connections to guide us toward particular topics created a real concern toward the changes that were pursued, and the impacts that were realized, during the movements we explored. Further, it also created an important purpose for the plays we would write and produce: sharing their important messages with our community.
Following the conclusion of our research we began the process of turning our knowledge into artistic expression. In partnerships we wrote scripts that captured the historical context, key figures & significant events, impacts and overall messages of the social movements that we had examined. These collaborative efforts went through many critiques, required careful revisions, demanded further research and drew on our imaginations, all which led toward polished, powerful scripts for our plays. After several days spent reading, discussing, debating and voting, we narrowed our pile of options down to three impressive scripts that were green-lit for full production. Revolving around issues of World War I resistance, gender equity, and labor rights, it was clear that our production would have a powerful social purpose and a real reason to be presented to our community.
Particularly rewarding about the process of assembling the final production was the teamwork demanded by our goal. Students quickly fell into roles based on their particular talents and interests ranging from acting, directing and crafting costumes to set construction, lighting, and creating promotional media. Allowing students to pursue contributions fueled by their intrinsic motivations, while remembering that what each personally created would eventually be contributed to our team’s single production, was a powerful part of ensuring the individualization and community cooperation that can be achieved through project based learning. After months of hard work, hard learning, hard rehearsing and hard cooperation, the sum of our team’s talents amassed into three impressive plays, contextualized during our performance by audio recordings of excerpts from our writing, that were performed for our community. While the learning, entertainment, and hard work all climaxed at this well-received event, the social messages that we worked hard to understand, and then to share with our audience, will undoubtedly have a significant life beyond the parameters of our stage.