NYTW 2024/25 Youth Artistic Instigators on Creating A TRIPTYCH OF TIME

After months of collaboration, it’s finally here! A TRIPTYCH OF TIME, a new piece created and performed by the 2024/25 Youth Artistic Instigators premieres this week. The Workshop’s youth ensemble is comprised this year of twenty-four students from across the city, who have been working together since October to devise a story to speak to and for their generation in this present moment.

“It’s been really fun!” said Cora Diadhiou, one of our ensemble members. “In the beginning, we did a lot of team building, and it helped us get into groups and build our chemistry.” This fall, we focused on some introductory devising skills, while learning the skills and experiences we had within the ensemble. Our Lead Facilitator and Director, Claudia Acosta, introduced students to Laban movement and acting techniques, and as our Assistant Director and Dramaturg, I taught a variety of improv games and skills.

In December, we introduced the ensemble to Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Written in 1993, the book paints a variety of dark, yet hopeful images of the future. Strikingly, Butler begins her story in 2024, a coincidence which felt too meaningful to pass up. We felt compelled to bring the themes and excerpts of the book to the students as source material for our devised process. We asked the ensemble to compare Butler’s vision of our world with our reality–what did she accurately predict, and what did she miss? “It was kind of reassuring for me,” said ensemble member Ruby Hagan-Shor on having Parable as source text. “I didn’t know what were going to do for our show, and then we introduced something we could base it off of and I was like, this is so interesting, there’s so much we can build off of this!”

Playwriting session with Nikki Massoud

In an exercise led by Psacoya Guinn, Director of Education and Community Engagement, students created original characters within a Parable-esque community and then interviewed each other in character. Their responses revealed students’ own forecast of our future, and its contrast of dystopian fears and resilient hope. Through a variety of exercises including Tectonic Theatre Project-style “moment work,” improv, and a writing workshop led by 2050 Artistic Fellow Nikki Massoud, we started exploring our own version of a future world more concretely. “I loved all the games we did during rehearsals, and I felt like interviewing each other about our characters was really helpful,” Cora said.

Ultimately, the ensemble decided to create a story that takes place during a triptych of three times: the past in 2020, the near future in 2028, and the far future in 2045. With this framework, students wrote scenes together, which we collectively edited and ordered into the set of vignettes we see in our final product. Seeds that the ensemble took from Parable of the Sower grew into fruitful, powerful scenes in A Triptych of Time. Like Lauren in Parable, characters in Triptych prepare survivalist strategies and find themselves on the run from disaster and persecution. And like Lauren, they reconcile the past, present, and future, leaving us inspired by the power young people have to drive change. 

“What excites me about the show we’re making is the different aspects of society and humanity that we put together and that we added into different timelines,” third-time ensemble member Kayla-Marie Forrester expressed. “I like history, I like retro stuff, so I got to write something set in the future that brings the past into it. It was kind of difficult but I think I made it work, especially with the vocabulary. I might have looked at a dictionary.”

Claudia Acosta (left) directing during tech

Throughout this week’s technical rehearsals, lighting designer Josh Martinez Davis and projection and sound designer Luke Santy added even more layers of depth and dynamism to the project. Like the ensemble’s writing, the design combines reality with speculative fiction. In part one of the triptych (the past), we see pictures of the students and their experiences, news coverage, and photography of real events. As we dive further into the future, tension builds, both in the questions the ensemble asks and the design that helps us feel the impact and stakes of the issues they are investigating. The triptych of storytelling is woven with students’ skills and experiences, including writing about their own memories, live music, dance, and even a moment of audience interaction, all of which makes the play ring with humanity and truth.

“I’ve been so inspired and deeply moved by what these talented young actors and writers wanted to bring to the stage,” Claudia said. “I am incredibly proud of this courageous and ambitious work. Together, we have bravely confronted valid fears and questions of their future world. It’s up to us to listen.”

Join us in listening to and experiencing this journey through time, explore the resilience of humanity throughout times of uncertainty, and question what knowledge, hope, and community looks like in our future. A TRIPTYCH OF TIME runs this weekend, April 18-20, and you can reserve a ticket or learn more here.

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Categories: Uncategorized. Tags: Education, Marty Chandler, and Youth Artistic Instigators.