Winifred Ward Award Acceptance Speech

Check out the acceptance speech Jacob gave at the AATE conference after Purple Crayon received the Winifred Ward Outstanding New Children's Theatre Company Award!

---

“At an AATE workshop in 2008, members of Purple Crayon Players were asked to pretend for a moment that they were teenagers. We didn’t have to think back very far.

To be considered colleagues here is an honor in itself. To receive this award affirms one of our essential beliefs: not only can people of all ages connect with Theater for Young Audiences, people of all ages can create a brighter future for Theater for Young Audiences.

Thank you to our ardent proponents, Sandy Asher and Drew Chappell, playwrights who tell the stories of our field. Thank you to our steadfast mentors, Rives Collins and Betsy Quinn, who have inspired our story by sharing theirs. Thank you to our tireless peers collaborators (some of who are sitting right over there) past and present. Thank you AATE for validating our emerging voices.

Here’s to more songs, more stories.”

- Jacob Watson

Artistic Director (2010-2011)

Purple Crayon Players

AATE Photos

Check out a few awesome pictures of some of the Players and friends as who took on AATE 2010: Playing on the Fault Lines this past weekend!  

 

Some of the Purple Crayon Players and their friends jammed out during a night of songs and laughter in the presidential suite with Rives Collins and Don Doyle.

Some of our friends discovered the conference's I-Booth!  (From left to right: Jeff Glass, Anakin Morris, Briana Bower)

The board and friends have one of many dinners with the legendary Don Doyle.

Master Storytellers Don Doyle (left) and Northwestern's very own Rives Collins (right) captivate their audience at a Storytelling session.

  

And a big congratulations to Purple Crayon Players on the Winifred Ward Outstanding New Children's Theatre Company Award received at the conference!

 

 Jacob Watson, the board's current Artistic Director, accepts the award with a rousing speech (left), backed by the stunning Kelby Siddons (Artistic Director '09-'10), Abby Schwarz (Literary Manager '10-'11), Allison Finn (Team Education '10-'11), and the one and only Rives Collins (right)!

 

 Congratulations, PCP!

PCP Takes on AATE

If you've been keeping an eye on your calendar, you know that today is the first full day of events at the 2010 American Alliance for Theatre & Education Conference: Playing on the Faultlines in San Francisco!  Be sure to check back soon for updates from those Purple Crayon Players attending the conference, and take a sneak peak at our very own session, Shifting Ground on College Campuses: Exploring the Undergraduate TYA Model, scheduled for this Sunday, August 8th at 9:15AM.  If you're there, say hello to Jacob Watson and Kelby Siddons, who will be facilitating the session with Sandy Asher!

For a closer look at the conference as a whole, check out their website here!

Intern with Purple Crayon!

Purple Crayon Players is thrilled to announce its first-ever internship program for high school students, held in conjunction with our fall mainstage production of The Wrestling Season by Laurie Brooks.  Interns will have the opportunity to be a part of this exciting and dynamic production!  Internships are available in both acting and production, and occur for about 10 hours per week, from early October through November 21. 

Internship types:

- Acting Internship: Under the guidance of Purple Crayon Players teaching artists and directors, acting interns will write, rehearse and perform a short piece exploring themes found in The Wrestling Season. 

- Production Internship: Production interns will work alongside members of The Wrestling Season team to learn what goes into designing and creating a full-scale production. Production interns may specify an area of interest (costumes, scenery, lighting, sound, publicity, etc.) to learn about in greater detail.

Details:

- All interns will be paired with Purple Crayon Players team mentors to answer questions, advise, and help make the internship experience unique for each individual.

- All interns must be current high school students in the Chicagoland area, who have access to transportation to and from Northwestern University.

- The deadline for program applications is Friday, Oct. 1, 2010. This program is completely free—all you need to provide is your own transportation to and from Northwestern University and the enthusiasm to learn about theatre!

To download an application, go to our website (www.purplecrayonplayers.com) and click on "Internships" under the "Get Involved" bar.  For more information, please email purplecrayonplayers@gmail.com, subject line, "INTERNSHIPS." 

We look forward to reading your applications!

Summer Session I - "Theatre literally became the only language I had."

Welcome to the first edition of Purple Crayon Player's Summer Session!  Just because school is out doesn't mean the Players' passion for TYA has come to a halt.  Join us with updates on our members' adventures all over the world as they spread the love of theatre to young audiences of all kinds.  

First up, take a trip with Abby Schwarz, our Literary Manager, to Thailand where she arrived as a performer and educator, and left having learned just as much as she taught.

-----

I have spent a good portion of my time at Northwestern planning, creating, and dreaming up theatre for young audiences (TYA) for our university and the surrounding community with Purple Crayon.  This summer, I did pretty much the same thing but under very different circumstances - with a community based theatre company in the lush green countryside of Northern Thailand.  I lived and worked with a group of international and Thai students for three weeks, learning about traditional Thai performance and about Thai culture of the past and present.  I learned so much from this experience:  about theatre, about Thailand, about life.

I found myself thinking about Purple Crayon a lot while I was there, as the majority of the work we did in the community was with and for youth.  Working and playing with young people was an unbeatable way to learn about where I was.  Every person I met and every experience I had in Thailand was enriching and life-altering in some way.  But the interactions I had with youth as a facilitator, as an actor, and as a friend were the ones that I believe wills tay with me the longest and affect me the most.

For me, working with youth is always an unpredictable and eye-opening challenge.  But I faced a challenge in Thailand that I had never aced with Purple Crayon or anywhere else:  the challenge of working and performing across linguistic and cultural barriers.  And huge ones at that.  But from the elementary school where we performed children's books to the concrete pavilion where we performed a show our ensemble had written and staged, I communicated with the amazing young people I met through song, dance, and play.  We could not pronounce each others' names or have anything resembling a "conversation," but after the exchange of workshops and performances, we were humming the same songs and sharing laughs over the same experiences.  Theatre literally became the only language I had.

It is the official opinion of Purple Crayon that young people are brilliant.  No matter how many lesson plans we write or educational shows we produce, they will teach us just as much (and oftentimes, it seems, even more).  In Thailand, this rang truer than ever before.  This was due in part to the design of the program I was in.  When we stayed in a remote hill-tribe community, doing workshops with and performances for local youth, they were given space to lead workshops and present performances for us, too.  While we taught mask performance and physical theatre, they (with the help of some of community adults) taught us traditional dances and songs.  While we performed skits with puppets, clowning and the Thai art forms we had been learning, they performed sword dances and beautiful folk songs.

Just as Purple Crayon has an annual touring show which we bring to schools in and around Evanston, on this program we created a show to go on a kind of mini-tour around the area.  The show was an entertaining and heartfelt story about an ant who goes to a bug-school and it not accepted by the other insects there.  The ant falls ill and the other insects decide to help her.  They embark on a perilous journey to get the ant help on the sun.  We focused on Western performance forms that transcend language barriers (like dance, puppetry, and acrobatics), combined with Thai theatre skills and language that avoided these barriers altogether.

As I recover from the most intense case of jet lag, I am meditating on all of these memories, and letting this incredible experience soak in.  I am so excited to jump into our 2010-2011 season and see how my experiences in Thailand will fuse with my work for Purple Crayon!

--Abby S.