Read Spunk Program - California Shakespeare Theater

Triangle Lab Activities at the Bruns
Dwight Huntsman
and Traci Tolmaire
in Mirrors in Every
Corner at Intersection;
photo by Pak Han.
BY TRIANGLE LAB DIRECTOR REBECCA NOVICK
In the Triangle Lab, Cal Shakes’ joint project with Intersection for the Arts, we’re
dedicated to the idea that everyone has a story worth hearing. Furthermore, we
believe that inviting a wide range of people to tell those stories—by shaping them into
performances, writing, photographs, or videos—connects them to the power of their
own voices, enriches our understanding of our neighbors, and unleashes the possibility
of building communities across divides of difference.
When we decided to create a set of Triangle Lab experiments connected to Spunk, we
were inspired right away by Zora Neale Hurston’s well-known dedication to collecting
and sharing stories, by her anthropological approach to gathering African-American
language, folklore, and song. We wondered what it would be like to invite youth in
different communities to become anthropologists of their own neighborhoods and
families. With this in mind, we started with a series of story circles led by Spunk
director Patricia McGregor. We met students at Oakland Tech high school, Cal Shakes
inviting a range of people to tell their stories...
connects them to the power of their own voices, enriches our
understanding of our neighbors, and unleashes the possibility
of building communities across divides of difference.
subscribers living all over the East Bay, and residents of the Mercy Care Alliance senior
center in Oakland (some more than 100 years old!). We heard stories of people’s
childhood homes, their journeys to the East Bay, and their impressions of daily life in
their different neighborhoods.
Next, we joined with media trainers from San Francisco’s TILT (Teaching Intermedia
Literacy Skills) to develop a curriculum teaching young people to create low-budget
videos on cell phones or fl ip cameras. Two groups of students, one at Youth Uprising
in Oakland and one at City Crossroads in San Francisco, met with instructors for nine
weeks, writing, shooting, directing, and editing short fi lms about their lives. The two
groups collaborated with each other via online sharing tools, met halfway through the
process to exchange ideas, and then screened all the fi lms during a special event at
Intersection in June. Simultaneously, we created an intensive residency at the EC Reems
Academy of Technology and Art in Oakland. Cal Shakes’ teaching artists worked with
third-, fourth-, and eighth-graders to create short performances based on Hurston’s
anthropological approach. They learned about Hurston’s work, interviewed family
members about Oakland history, wrote about their homes and their daily journeys
to school, and turned these stories into performance pieces that they presented to
classmates and families.
As you may recall from English class, every story is a journey that starts somewhere,
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