This past Sunday, 6 JMU students, together with their professors Ingrid De Sanctis and Jessica Del Vecchio, presented their solo performance pieces on the Mainstage theater. Marisa Turner, Caitlin Foster, Camden Gillespie, Jazmine Frye, Natalie Garcia-Ruiz, and Aya Nassif each performed original pieces that they had developed in the JMU Solo Performance class, and the performers, along with De Sanctis and EMU’s theater professor Justin Poole, presented a talkback following the last performance.
The event, supported by CAC, boasted Krispy Kreme donuts, a convocation point, and the thought-provoking pieces were forewarned to include mature content such as “vulgar language, derogatory language about women, and graphic descriptions of sexual assualt, rape, and violence.”
Junior Veronica Horst was glad there was a talkback afterwards, “because each performance was so conceptually dense that there was a lot to unpack.”
Junior Ani Beitzel shared, “Each woman showed incredible strength performing the hard topics last night. I would say the creativity last night was using comedy to bring awareness to huge issues that are often hard topics to discuss.”
This was exactly the intention of the artists themselves. Turner said of her piece, “Jane Doe”, “It’s really easy to stay with material that you’re comfortable with but those aren’t always the stories that need to be told…I just hope that the audience takes away the fact that they’re not alone and that the stories, as difficult as they are to tell, need to be told in order to provide victims with a support group and just knowing that they’re not alone in their experiences.”
Foster, playwright and performer of “Moment”, shared similar sentiments. “We all hold hate for different reasons, and we’re all the same in that, and I hope that people will take from my piece that there is a way out of this pain.” Foster also spoke of being true to the experiences portrayed in the piece, which was a theme Garcia-Ruiz also touched on.
When asked about the inclusion of the self-declared mature material, Garcia-Ruiz said, “because it’s been so prevalent in my own life.”
In addition to the common thread of finding connections in the midst of pain, De Sanctis noted all the pieces dealt with content that was meaningful to the students. “Jessica DiVecchio and I – what we try to do is get them to go after material that has meaning for them and whatever that meaning is… And it just so happened it was all mature but I think that told us a lot about what they wanted to say.” De Sanctis went on to share hopes for how the pieces were received. “I hope that it moves from their piece to your piece and that’s why we do theater: so we feel less alone.”
Professor Justin Poole is leading a Solo Performance class here at EMU next fall. If you are interested or if you have any questions, you can reach out to him at justin.poole@emu.edu.
