Meet Jena! Jena is going into her final year of an Applied Theatre major at University of Victoria. Jena describes Applied Theatre, a term many may not be familiar with, as “theatre for social justice, social change, community-building, and education… but really, what is that? Basically, we’ll go into community groups and either interview them or work with them to create a performance out of that, or go and do workshops with them – depending [on] what the subject matter is.” Applied theatre allows for highly collaborative and interactive projects through which she can meet and create art with people from diverse backgrounds. Through applied theatre, Jena is involved in many theatrical roles at different times, including acting and directing. Of directing for applied theatre, she says, “I like to think of it as facilitating, personally.” This process of collaboratively creating a piece of theatre that doesn’t exist yet is termed “devising.” The devisers don’t have to be in applied theatre – they might be from other theatrical disciplines, or even from another background, such as history.
For Jena, the most satisfying aspect of her major is “to see theatre become accessible to people who wouldn’t [otherwise] be able to see live theatre.” It also means a lot to her to be able to generate discussion around the topics covered in her performances: “when people leave a show and talk about it, and talk about what we were trying to get them to think about, it’s really satisfying.” She appreciates the potential that theatre has to incite discussion, awareness and positive change.
When asked what the most challenging aspects of pulling off a production are, Jena says that it can be hard, when working with groups of devisers who are all passionate about the subject matter and have a lot of concepts to share, to pare down ideas to a few focal points. “Deciding what is important to say,” says Jena, can be a tense and difficult project, but is ultimately satisfying.
Among Jena’s previous projects is a reminiscence theatre piece for which she and her applied theatre colleagues interviewed seniors in a seniors’ home and created a piece based on their lives. They then returned to the seniors’ home to perform the piece; Jena says that this is one of her favourite pieces she has worked on. More recently, Jena worked on Paper Girl, a site-specific theatre production that highlights the history and historical contributions of women in Victoria. Jena points out that, particularly in light of the current political climate, we need to honour women’s history in order to empower modern women. This semester, in a class about residential schools, Jena and a group of other devisers worked on a piece intended to work towards reconciliation in an appropriate way. Jena says, “I was really, really happy with the way that it ended up turning out.” They performed the piece for a group of schoolchildren.
Jena says she loves her major. When she isn’t working on school or theatre projects, she works, spends quality time with friends, and is a member of The Warren’s staff. She also enjoys gymnastics, and was a gymnastics coach for around five years. You can most likely find Jena in the Phoenix Theatre, or at any of the various site-specific theatre locations she’ll perform at in the future. Say “hi” if you see Jena on campus!