ær’d

Issue 25 - 3/21/25


Table of Contents


hot aer: things from the editors

campbell mccormack, coralie lyford, desmond jones, and lani okewole


the plan

guest editors! BOOM! (foreshadowing.) this month we’re celebrating manifesto-mini-issue-march for the second year in a row – it’s an aer’d tradition! in this issue, you’ll find four artistic manifestos, written by yours truly (we the guest editors): meditations on making art, making worlds, bodies, gender, beach days, your neighbor nancy, lists, footnotes, etc. read well, dear friends, and look out for some typical aer’d programing next month!


the good

tech week, jake’s little red chair, dreaming big and stupid, spring break, honey coughdrops, seventy degrees (!!), buds on all the trees, jules’s photoshop skills, impossible dreams, the radiator


the bad

tech week, tripping hazards, self-censorship, hitting the trumpet player with a bucket, coralie getting lost forever in the bermuda triangle, shutters, “speaking of poop…”, “meeting houthe”


the ugly

tech week, cold sores, flight to estonia, whiplash spring weather, the plague, max/min problems in calculus, reading the news, clichés, wet salad from the cafeteria, fluffy floaters


a brief note: two of the manifestos below are visual/format-based, and have been published as google drive links. they should hopefully be accessible to everyone, although they may pose a challenge to readers using mobile!


playing god

desmond jones


“The painter has the universe in his mind and hands.” -Leonardo Da Vinci


Part of Your World


Delusion is the most important aspect of art itself. Art is, and always has been the mind’s opportunity to escape reality, for what purpose does art serve if not to take us somewhere? Artists and consumers alike yearn to be so completely immersed in something that we are able to momentarily forget about the realities that being a real person in a real world presents. We all long for something more. We all possess a little pocket in our gut that truly believes in all of our wildest fantasies. This is your delusion. Art is what allows you to access it.


Living in the digital age, it is not so difficult to comprehend art as a completely immersive experience. As technology has advanced, we are able to be more sensorially stimulated whilst consuming art, from the shift to “talkie” movies from silent films in the 1930s, to the introduction of video games in the 60s and 70s, perhaps the newest art medium which uniquely adds individual control over the consumer’s experience. Now, with tools accessible to us such as VR technology or stereo sound systems, disconnecting from reality is simply a matter of effective noise cancellation and blackout curtains, requiring a remarkably small amount of effort to engage the imagination and become completely engrossed in the media being consumed.


While it is easy to assume that immersion in art developed alongside these relatively contemporary technologies, the immersive experience has existed for as long as art itself. Large paintings like Remrandt’s The Night Watch, for example, exemplify how, without current technology which helps us experience art in a multi-sensorial manner, we can feel immersed within the art due to the combination of its sheer weight, scale and beauty. When standing in the same room as the painting it is impossible to escape its grasp as it draws you into the world of the Dutch militia, creating an experience that is most likely alien to you, but also trapping you in that unfamiliar world, granting you a beautiful sense of belonging. This is true immersion, sans speakers or LEDs, this is simply beautiful art.


Beauty is an essential part of the immersive experience as the audience. I personally believe that for art to be worth experiencing at all it must contain some amount of beauty. However, there is a popular misconception about what beauty truly is. People tend to gravitate towards the idea that beauty corresponds to ‘prettiness,’ as in, the purely aesthetic pleasantry of something, something completely subjective that is derived from simply materialistic attraction to something. Beauty, however, is a different kind of attractive force, it is the quality that feeds the carnal desire to feel anything. Something beautiful is something tantalizing, something that holds your attention, something inescapable. By this definition, not all beauty is pleasant, in fact, most beauty is not, as stated by Donna Tartt in The Secret History “Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” Experiencing ‘true’ beauty is feeling trapped, being unable to look away from something as it triggers some feeling deep within you, something akin to terror or shock, leaving you disembodied and alienated from the experience of reality. In this way, beauty can be pretty, but it is also violent, dangerous and ugly. It is also the reason we, as  humans, value beautiful, or good, art in such a profound manner. Art that is able to make us feel so intensely reminds us of our humanity in a way that can only be described as beautiful. It satiates our innate desire to be a part of something larger, to understand a world in its entirety, which is the key to a truly immersive experience.


A good artist will exploit their audience’s delusion and invite them into the world of their art. Artists are manipulative in this way, they aim to strip their audience of their control over their emotions. The best of artists can entrap audiences without them even realizing it, creating art that plagues the mind for hours, days, even a lifetime after bearing witness to it. They employ the technology of their time to create an immersive, beautiful experience, tricking the consumer into accessing their delusion to travel someplace else.


The Toymaker


At the heart of creating art is making toys. More specifically, the kind of toys that combine, or add up. Think: building blocks, LEGOs, KNEX, etc. Now, forget about instruction packets and labeled bags, and imagine the torso-sized box of reject and misfit pieces stored at the back of your grandmother’s closet. Creating engaging art is manufacturing those, less specific, pieces. As an artist, you should not aim to deliver a finished product, nor a jigsaw, where all of the components lead to one sure answer, but you want to let your audience respond to your art creatively. In your art, you want to give your audience something to conceptualize, providing them with the foundation of your imagined work, and letting them fill in the blanks themselves. This is the power of engagement, and what I call the ‘bodiless medium’: imagination.

In the universal sense, art can never be finished. No artwork is ever truly complete if there are more eyes to fall upon it in its future. Art as a personal concern, however, can be finished only once you stop thinking about it. This means that art is created via the simple act of thinking, and that art can be a completely incorporeal product when experienced through the lens of an individual. To summarize, the imagination, once fueled with some sort of external fragments derived from existing art, becomes its own medium to create art within the mind’s consciousness. Additionally, the imagination is by far the least limited medium in terms of its creating capabilities, while also the most constrained in outward expression  given that most artists, at one time or another, have grappled with the imagining of something, but are not able to express it exactly how it appears in their mind. Essentially, we are each our own audience to the most beautiful works of art, while remaining unable to share it.


Artists do much more than create art, they build worlds. Here is where the concept of ‘world building’ really comes into play, with the combination of immersion and imagination. In my opinion, the most beautiful and effective, in a general sense, the ‘best’ art will draw you into the world the artist has already created, and then make you feel so emotionally connected to it that you begin to expand that world past the original work, and you begin to create your own work in your head. This is the kind of art that draws you back to it, that you can’t stay away from. The book from your childhood that you read every few months, the painting that you make your phone homescreen because you can’t bear to not look at it on command. It is the compulsion to understand so much about the art itself so it informs your own imagination. This kind of art is so powerful that it can draw people together, create communities of appreciation and discussion that fuel your own imagination using the ideas produced by others’.



Cheerleading - An Interlude


Now, I would like to take a moment to talk about the exclusive world of artistic circles, or communities, or however you may choose to refer to them. These communities created by existing art have, as of recent, become known as ‘fanbases’ or ‘fandoms.’ The majority of these communities exist online as a means of sharing and discussing the art itself and creating new art inspired by the art that the community is based on. ‘Fan creating’ speaks to the potential that digitalization holds in changing the way we share, perceive and understand art, by creating space for artistic discourse. Though, from a modern perspective, it is so easy to be caught in the notion that these spaces did not exist prior to the internet, when that is simply not true. Artistic forums and circles have existed as long as art itself, even before they had a name, because art will always trigger a response in humans. Whether the art is good, bad, beautiful or ugly, we will want to be able to discuss it with others.


These communities of fans are what fosters the survival of the original work, and what facilitates the creation of new art. As I spoke to before, a piece of art will never remain static while people continue to think about it, therefore, communities can help to keep a piece of art alive when simply discussing it with peers, what this relies on, however, is in the common understanding of what that art is. While each individual has their own world that they have created in their imagination, which may infinitely vary between minds, there is a shared knowledge of the foundational aspects that can only exist by bearing witness to the original art itself. This is where theatre begins to suffer as a medium.



Inattention Span


Theatre is a fleeting art, and it must come to terms with that reality. In a world where we are increasingly expecting to have copies, replicas, original work mass produced and on demand, we have begun to stop appreciating the untouchable delicacy of an beautifully impermanent experience. When was the last time you looked up a song that was stuck in your head? Reread a book on your overflowing bookshelf? Bought a movie instead of renting it, because you thought you would like to come back and watch it again later? These are all examples of accessible art. If you desire to experience a work of art, it’s likely available to you in one way or another. This is not a bad thing. Both audience and artist benefit from this system of art accessibility, a direct economic retribution and instantaneous appreciation for one’s art can both provide the artist with the means to create more art and the motivation to produce more rapidly. From an audience standpoint, you are no longer required to buy a ticket and wait in an hour-long line in Manhattan if you are interested in seeing a Rothko hung at the MOMA, a novelty which I’m positive society will not miss. Either way, increasing accessibility in the artistic world is a blessing for nearly everybody, but to theatre-artists, it has proven to be somewhat of a kick in the shins.


Theatre runs away from us. We, as a digitalized society, are unfamiliar with the experience of losing a memory. We have photos, videos, recordings that are capable of capturing our experiences and perpetuating them. Theatre, reliant on the space it is viewed in as part of the art itself, is unable to be permanentized in the same way. Think of everything from ProShots to YouTube bootlegs; when experiencing theatre through a camera lens, it loses its life. We forget in the moment that a work of theatre is impermanent, and that we will always lose the feeling we had in the moment of witnessing it unfold. 


With increasing reliance on convenience in our society, theatre has begun to suffer as an art form. Theatre depends on the audience’s willingness to play the role of an audience. It requires its viewers to be reactive people, to have personality and to be able to respond to the art in real time for it to be appreciated. Instead, we are often made hyper aware of the experience of being in a theater,  distracting us from being drawn into the art. The issue with theatre as a matter of convenience is that it asks the audience to essentially trap themselves in a box for hours at a time and to be solely focused on the performance. In a world where people have learned to pause and rewind, you can imagine that this may prove to be a challenge for many. A distracted audience detracts from the experience itself, which is essential to the medium of theatre.


The experience of live theatre is incomparable to almost any other form of art. Live theatre is an experience that is unable to be replicated in any capacity, as a completely dynamic form of art, that interacts with the world around it as it is being created. Theatre is always in motion when it doesn’t cease to exist. Any performer can tell you that a live performance is always substantially different to the art created in rehearsal, and that each performance varies from one to the other. This is also experienced as an audience member, and when viewing theatre it is expected that you are viewing, in some way, a different piece of art than another audience member watching a different performance, even of the show. Possibly, even during the same performance, as your experience may depend upon where you are sat for example, an audience member with an obstructed view will likely have a different experience than someone who is seated in the front row. Theatre is a medium that is necessarily experiential compared to, say, reading a book or looking at a piece of visual art, where the experience does not certainly affect one’s perception of it. This, while it separates theatre from other forms of art, making it possibly more powerful in the moment of watching it, impedes its ability to to create community surrounding a single piece of art, therefore inhibiting its world building potential as a medium, due to the community it creates lacking a shared perspective on a single piece of art, instead creating a community based on the medium as a whole.


There is immense power in the fleeting form that theatre takes, it forces us to cope with the reality that even beautiful things will eventually meet their end, and that the past is unattainable and unchanging, our own pasts remaining within the ever-distorting world of memory. Let’s say, for example, you see a show on its opening night, the show is the best you’ve ever seen, and because of how much you loved it, you go back and watch it, time and time again. Sometimes it’s worse than that first experience, occasionally it’s even better, but either way, you know it’s never exactly the same. This is the visible power of a truly dynamic art form. Theatre, as it relies on humanity as its creator as well as its medium, must always be in motion in the same way that humans are. The humanistic quality of theatre means that it is forever changing and unreliable on a performance-to-performance basis. You are entirely aware that that first experience cannot be exactly replicated because each time after will have been altered via the space it exists in at a different time.


Theatre can be greatly immersive when it embraces its impermanence. The solution to theatre’s world building issue is to bring people into the world within the limited time the audience shares with the art. I don’t know how this can be done, just that it has been done before. Otherwise, creating an immersive experience is entirely the choice of the artist, and must be interpreted genuinely to be effective.



Genesis


How does the potentially ‘world-building’ quality of art have any impact on our actual world? So much of what I have discussed has remained within the bodiless state of the imagined world, though it is undebatable that art also has a hand in shaping and changing the physical world around us. Art, in all its forms, has taught us what ‘beauty’ means. It has shown us that the world is not a dull one, and that there is value in feeling, however unnecessary, as some nihilists may claim. Art gives us new life, stories to make and worlds to imagine. My goal as an aspiring artist, employing architecture as my medium, is not to build new worlds, though I have nothing but respect for artists that do, but rather to transform the existing world into one that is beautiful. 


Beauty, as I defined earlier, is the quality that makes one feel. Surprising as it may be, despite the raw power of beauty, it can often go unnoticed in our world. Here lies the question of form vs function. Form, falls under the umbrella of ‘prettiness.’ The aesthetic attractiveness of something. Function, however, is, in my opinion, extremely beautiful as a concept. There is so much power in considering function. Even in your obliviousness, someone is thinking about you. The way you move through the world. Even without realizing it, the art that surrounds constantly is immensely influential to the way you act, the way you feel.


I want to create art for humans. Art that they use and love and interact with. Art that is not for specific people, but for communities, society, for humanity. By harnessing the space that art takes in our physical world, we are able to become part of the imagined world. Instead of creating art that lets people create intangible worlds on their own, I want to reverse engineer this process, using the imagined world to transform the physical one. We as artists have the power to create, to ‘play God’ and build real, beautiful worlds. All it takes is a little consideration.



portrait of the artist as an aspiring optimist

campbell mccormack


In my chest, music becomes a feeling more than anything else. It swells like my breath and it pounds like my heart and it speeds through my body like signals from the brain. Music has a shape. All shapes have a melody. Music is like a racetrack or a water droplet or something else with a cyclical lifespan — it is always unmaking and rebecoming and moving, above all else. I prefer to feel things before I see them, when inhabiting the world of my body. In comes a bassline, and so my hips cut through the air and my head tips toward my shoulder. I don’t have time to see the shapes I’m making because all of my energy is directed toward feeling them. I like to close my eyes. Music is how I breathe. 


I am made of music. Imagine the sound a newborn baby makes: wailing, squalling, screeching like a windstorm that has been trapped within a tiny ribcage and is now forcing its way into the sky through the canyon of the throat. That sound is a current, carving through the rock of the body. What is crying if not a precursor to song? I came into the world with music on my tongue. We all did. 


Music gives me power in a way few other things do. When my body fails me in the mirror, when my bones feel birdlike and hollow, when my intellect dries up like wine grapes and my lungs shrivel and my blood curdles, I still have music. Deep within me — beneath my belly and my heart, tucked safely between my uterus and the softness of my stomach — there lies a song. It is always there, because music is made of breath, music is the act of touching noise to air, which means that music is physical. If I am breathing, I can sing, too. 


Poetry — and therefore lyrics — gives voice to the things that prose collapses under. Love confessions, inner battles, the mind’s childish follies; they can all be wrapped neatly in verse and made charmingly abstract. The poet appreciates their own writing when no one else can, but when they lay that poetry atop the great green meadow of song, it becomes universal. My most personal thoughts are made ubiquitous when I set them before the temple of melody. Music — whether it’s the songs perched high atop the Billboard charts, or those that will never leave my bedroom — belongs to all of us. Music is made of feeling. It is public property because it is a language that everyone speaks. 


The shape of every song I’ve ever heard is tied to a breath that I have taken. Music is a conduit of memory stronger than smell or taste or touch, because it envelops all of them and becomes the verb to feel. Close your eyes and listen to the radio. Pay attention. Slowly, life stands up around you. I’m in the car. I’m driving down the Schuylkill Expressway going east, toward the rapidly rising sun. Then, like the thousand shining crystals of an ancient chandelier, the tinkling melody of “touch tank” by quinnie filters through the stale speakers of my Subaru Outback.


My eyes are still open and seeing nothing but the sedan in front of me, but my body is deep within the ocean of memory, wrapping my chest in the rip current of the past. In the instant of darkness that is my blinking, I am pulled below the surface: Virginia sunshine coats my skin, coarse astroturf beneath my back, and I hear Sydney and Kylie beside me, cawing like crows with back-breaking laughter. It is 2022, and I am learning how to breathe in a body that doesn’t reject language. I am learning how to write. Poetry has crawled into my hands like a creature rejected by its mother, seeking nothing but the nearest gutter rushing with warm blood. I am privileged to be that gutter. I am learning how to bend words to my will. 


All around me, as though her voice is leaking from the very sky, quinnie sings: You took my breath away, so now I can’t suck in my stomach around you anymore. 


I open my eyes. The blink has ended, my vision restored, but the memory remains roosting upon my fourth rib, beside my heart. As an artist, I am nothing but the pile of scraps left over from all that I’ve been before, which means that I am everything. 


If I, the artist, am quilt-like, then so too must be my work. Inspiration often finds me in the body of another person’s art. Pieces of dialogue. Bodies moving in sequence. A breath, framed in an image. The swell of many instruments. All of it is like discarded bits of string that are thrown around inside of my chest and become so tangled that they create an entirely new textile. 


Think of a coin, sparkling up at you from the sidewalk. Think of fragments of light, tossed about by evening time sun. There is goodness everywhere we look. There are pieces of the world tattooed on the inner lining of my soul, the place that my thoughts rise up from, the little bason of song at the bottom of my spine. See them there, swirling about in the whirlpool shape of my personal melody: 


Appendix A. 

Dickinson, Emily. “I dwell in Possibility — // A fairer House than Prose —” (pub. 1919) 

Fornes, Maria Irene. “Life is theatre. Theatre is life. If we’re showing what life is, can be, we must do theatre.” (1978)

Hozier-Byrne, Andrew. “Was it that or just the act of making noise that brought you joy?” (2019)

MacLaughlin, Nina. “If you have voice, cry out.” (2023)

Mt. Joy (band). “When I loved, it didn’t have to be a language // No written rules or commandments // It was enough to be alive.” (2018)

Sappho (poet). “And I am greener than grass.” (c. 600 BCE)


It is possible that these, the words of others, paint a more complete picture of my person than a photograph or the smooth surface of a mirror. 


And what is art if not the product of its context? My art, born from fragmented moments and words, is cradled by all the years that surrounded me and them. To me, the context a piece of art is held in is just as integral as the medium, or the message. History becomes art. History becomes me. Through my art, I intend — above, not all, but many things — to churn history into a frothy mess that grabs present day attention. We must not forget. In the act of remembering our past, we are laying an offering at the altar of the future. 


History resonates with my humanity. I read of all the havoc that my forebearers wrought and feel as though I might live another day. As a young person in a world as tumultuous as this one, I anchor myself with history. I remind myself: we have survived before, and we will survive again. History, with its many wars and deaths and failures, keeps the flame of my hope alive. History brims with lessons unlearned and, in my opinion, with possibility. Just because something has already happened doesn’t mean we understand the machine of its moments. Art is but one medium through which we may begin to make sense of the past. So I am history — I am the spaces between Sappho’s fragments, unfailingly alive and breathing, and I feel obligated to make art that might allow others to become history as well. 

Appendix B.

Schwartz, Selby Wynn. “There is the hope of becoming in all our forms and genres.” (2022)


The hope of becoming. The reassurance that there is always more to be, that goodness thrives. The anticipation of the dawn, which comes again and again and remains a comfort. That is what I want to inspire. I want to remind my audiences that the world remains good in many ways, and it can still become better. Light lives on, always. 


This is not to say I never fall into the trap of pessimism; I often need reminders of the goodness that surrounds me, gentle nudges toward the warmth of hope. Take, for example, the windowsill in front of my desk. The place where I write is sacred to me, and so I cushion it with mementos of Schwartz’s hope of becoming: Emily Dickenson, stylized as a saint, her image wrapped around a tall, thin candle. A picture, myself and my siblings this past summer, underneath a sign that cries See the magic of yeast! Three different jars of matches. My tarot deck. Scrawled on post-it notes and taped to the window, three mantras: don’t let it become wasted time; inhale love, exhale love; and it will all turn out. 


These small things, trinkets, become art in the context of my life. They are my little sunrises, the hope of the morning twisted into objects. They become the context of my art, which then becomes the art itself. Like melody, memory, and shape, my art and my life relate cyclically to one another — when flattened out, they make a mosaic, the sharp edges of its many pieces smothered with clay.  


There is a tradition in Japanese ceramic art called kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired and its cracks are lacquered with gold. Like patches on an old jacket or darning on a favorite sock, kintsugi is a form of visible mending, which treats fractures as part of an artwork’s history. What a thought — that the places where we were broken can be made more beautiful than when they were whole. I think often about where my past would be visible on the surface of my body, were I to be clay spun wildly into shape. 

Appendix C.

Clavicle, left. Toward the center, an upward ridge. A place of unevenness. (2021)

Forehead, left. A neat, vertical scar. (2011)


My injuries, aside from the above, have left few marks on my person. This is not to say that I am unhurt: beneath the layers of skin and fat and muscle and organ lie my joints, tied to one another by faulty ligaments. Moving fluidly within the cage of my body, they often get lost. My knees are like trains derailed. My right scapula is permanently homeless. I crackle like a fire and soak up atmospheric pressure like a masochistic sponge. 


All of this disappears when I see myself in a mirror. My surface is relatively unblemished, aside from the acne and self-doubt necessitated by adolescence, and I dress it up in skirts that go on forever and dangly earrings and the word whimsy. It is easy to see myself and think that my constant pain is nothing but a trick of the light. If my disability cannot leave through the door, it must escape through a window, and thusly it finds a home in my art, the version of myself that has been turned inside out and had its entrails made visible. 


My body is more than just disabled: despite my transness, it is unfailingly female and so it bleeds but it bleeds wrong — too hard and too much and for far too long. That song-place cries out every month. My femininity fits me badly: my great-grandmother’s Polish physique, her average height and wide hips, makes me bottom-heavy. I sink into the swirl of my back rolls and cellulite and I try to love it like I love art but I can’t. When does the artist become art themself? Do they ever? 

As posited earlier by the playwright Maria Irene Fornes, I believe that “Theatre is life.” As an actor, I am not escaping out of my body when I step onstage, but rather waking up within my own skin. I become aware of my every breath. I relearn the taste of certain sounds. I breathe newly. The theatre that I write and direct is meant to imitate life, but not in a naturalistic way. I don’t hope to recreate images or characters exactly as they might exist beyond the page or stage — instead, I want to inspire a feeling in my audience and my performers and myself that is reminiscent of the searing realness of being alive. When we feel hugely, we are shocked back into our bodies. There is no dissociating, when we are truly affected — only tingles up our spines and small earthquakes in our lungs.

Appendix D.

Vuong, Ocean. “I never wanted to build a ‘body of work,’ but to preserve these, our bodies, breathing and unaccounted for, inside the work.” (2019)


The cascade of feeling that is theatre forces me to live inside my pain. I cannot be anywhere but exactly where I am. In that, theatre has taught me how to be at peace with my body. It is has soothed my broken places with gold and mended me visibly, and it has forced me to acknowledge the history of myself and my skin. Again, there is history, and so there is light. 


Making art is where I feel the most at home. Art makes me warm. It makes me soft. Like a stern matriarch, it keeps me honest. In my honesty, I am able to exhale and then I make my realest art. 


The art, too, exhales. The art is alive. My art is personal and specific: I write songs for myself, direct scenes as I have imagined them, conjure the images that affect me most, and I consider it a beautiful coincidence when an audience resonates with my artistic vision. It is with specificity that I inspire the deepest feeling, because when art is specific its resonance is more than coincidental. My art is purposeful. It is made purposefully, by me and by my context. All of that together — the personality, the specificity, the purpose, the context — fosters connection between art and artist and audience.

Appendix E. 

McCormack, Campbell. “Theatre is connection.” (2025)


First, there is the making: a deeply personal, living thing wherein something is born. Making can be many things: first, it is me, alone in my bedroom with my many window trinkets to guide me, writing. Often I am writing music. Sometimes dialogue or prose. From my bedroom, I take the seedling of my idea and plant it in the minds of friends and mentors and fellow makers and have it returned to me after it has blossomed in the fields of their imaginations. Their beautiful, tender hands take my art and begin shaping it into something that exists beyond me. Those blossoms are planted anew as actors, musicians, words on a page. They are tucked into bouquets and given to the audience as memories. 


The making within high school theatre changed me as a person — not because it awoke an earthshaking talent within me, or because I dropped out to be on Broadway, but rather because of the people it exposed me to. By pure coincidence, I landed in an auditorium next to my best friends. I encountered teachers who would impact me on a fundamental level. It is trust, implicit within my theatre education, that has fostered these essential connections. 


Educational theatre gave me not only the opportunity but also the confidence to exist within my own body. It taught me that I am more than just trans, or disabled, or teenaged, but that I am all of those things and also an artist. It gave me the chance to make theatre of my own, rather than just play-act inside the art of others. As one of my classmates so rightly put it, we’re making art for real, not just for practice. What a privilege that is — to have an adult look beyond the smear of my youth and see me as an artist in my own right, not just someone with artistic potential. 

After the making is the performance itself. The connection between art and audience blurs existing lines that divide the public and the private, making the deeply personal experience of viewing art into something that is shared: amidst the audience itself and between artist and observer. Theatre is inherently communal. In particular, the theatre that I make — personal as it may be! — is intended for an audience of everyone, because it is based on feeling, rather than a moral or a message or something otherwise condescending. We all feel. We can’t help it. We’re human. And so, my theatre is human, also. 


Yes, the feelings I try to cultivate are specific. Again and again, I return to Schwartz’s hope of becoming, because it crystalizes exactly what I reach for with my art. I am — I aspire to be — an optimist. Even when it betrays me. Even when it leaves me vulnerable to the realities that surround me. I refuse to be bogged down by the possibility (or existence) of the negative — when shadows loom behind me, when pain wrings out my body, I turn to those bits of dawn that litter the windowsill before my desk: Dickinson’s flat-faced image, See the magic of yeast!, inhale love, exhale love. I remind myself that the world is vast and so am I. When an audience has my art in front of them, I hope they are reminded of that, too. 


I want many things for my future. I want to be an educator and continue passing down the torch that lights the flame of hope. I want to foster connection through artmaking. I want to always strive toward and reach for the hope of becoming, because such a thing is kept alive by being slightly out of reach. I suppose I won’t ever become, but I will never cease hoping. I will never cease to be surprised by the sunrise. 


Future aside, the essence of theatre forces me to live in this exact moment. Not only in my body, but in the whole world, good and bad. Theatre asks me to come at that world from an angle of love. Theatre lives deep within my body, swimming in that sacred pool of song. Theatre tells me to keep a light on. I can call it hope, or sunshine, connection, or melody, or love, but the truth is this: theatre is all of those things. Cyclical, made of memory and music and touched by every other artist who has ever brushed past my life, theatre has made me who I am, which is everything. It is the light.

i am (working title)

coralie lyford

I am (working title).pdf

the very peculiar case of brain-rot

lani okewole


the very peculiar case of brain-rot.pdf

#, vol. six

julius d. levy, et al.