Growing Up: Stories, Scripts, and Performance

This program is about creative expressions of the universal experience of growing up. It’s about how authors, performers and other artists, including you, represent the personal process of a life unfolding in time and place. This brings into play the conditions of history and culture that shape the act of growing up. From a classical-mythological perspective, the story of Persephone represents individual transformations that take place in a life, while contemporary writers, such as David Sedaris and Lynda Barry, make sense of the human experience in evocative, emotional and humorous ways.

In this program, the dynamic unfolding of life will be explored by reading and writing stories, by viewing films and observing how that medium portrays lives over time, and by composing and acting out scripts crafted from students' own life stories. Growing up, as a universal experience, might be perceived as a pattern or a set of stages that elucidate the human experience. Movement workshops and theater performance workshops will allow program participants to explore these patterns and stages.

This program is designed for students who are curious about the process of growing up and are eager to read, write, create, and perform in serious ways in order to act on that curiosity. Students in this program will work in groups and they must collaborate, support and encourage the bold act of inquiring about the personal experience of growing up. At the end of the quarter, a theatrical presentation of these stories will summarize the experience.