#1mpf

On the Road with Dominic D’Andrea (‘13) Interview by Michael Wilson (’11)  Photo by: Juan Carlos Pelayo

What are you up to, Dominic?

I am the Producing Artistic Director of a company called the One Minute Play Festival. And we do just that. We make one-minute plays. But more than that, we are a social organization. We work at the intersection of social justice and education and community engagement and theatre making.

We did a project two years ago in collaboration with Oregon Shakespeare Festival, called The Every 28 Hours Plays, which is based on that very contested statistic that every 28 hours in the United States a black person is killed by the police or a security guard or vigilante force. We took a cohort of 50 artists from around the country to Ferguson, MO, exactly a year after the Michael Brown shooting. We spent time in his high school with his teachers and his classmates. We spent time with his family. We went to where he was killed. We talked to Black Lives Matter Activists and to the police force, and we, based on community conversations, made a body of work that we staged in Ferguson and then in St. Louis proper. And then a year later, this past fall, between October and January, 140 theatres, universities, and community centers did their versions of the plays.

I run this huge youth program in Miami called Next Gen. I go down five times a year to work with young people. They’re from communities in South Florida that don’t have theatre in their schools, so we’re looking at the framing question, how do we design a future we want to live in? And what does that look like?

Currently we’re about launch a thing called No Wall, which is a collaboration between United States and Mexican artists, where we are taking twenty Mexican playwrights and twenty American writers and we’re pursuing the idea of this wall: what keeps us together and apart?

And in addition to that we’re doing about 25 projects annually. I’m on the road about 30 weeks a year.

So why the MA in Applied Theatre?

Theatre schools always look suspiciously similar. You go in and you’re working on plays, doing scene work, and this and that. You’re making work in a vacuum a little bit. I was really grappling with some larger questions about my role as an artist, and existential questions, about what it means to be making work, and how we can use our power as artists to make the world a better place. I felt like I had a better chance of answering those questions in the Applied Theatre program than I did going to a traditional theatre school. And that turned out to be a correct assumption.

Let’s talk about that. What did you learn in the program?

Well, I can compartmentalize it into two silos in my brain. One is practical training. The majority of the work I do in this One Minute Play Festival is about serving as a community facilitator. So facilitation skills…the practical aspects of how you split people up quickly, how you ask questions, how you design a session with some flexibility to account for what you don’t know in a room. That became the aspect of my education I use on a daily basis.

Part two is about the way in which we do things together. What does it mean to work with a Freirean pedagogy? It’s the way in which we work. Sitting in circles. Negotiating with each other how we speak. The act of praxis. Constantly reevaluating what we’re doing while we’re doing it—and constantly being challenged to do those things while hearing perspectives that are challenging to your person and your values. For me, it was a really transformative experience.