Winter 2022 Newsletter

Artistic Partnership and Engagement with Daemond Arrindell

In 2022, Freehold Theatre Lab/Studio is resurrecting programs of old and expanding into new horizons. Between reinstating our Studio Series, which has been intermittent over the last few years, and instituting our inaugural Curated Residency Program, we’re thrilled to be able to provide students and artists with the space and resources to explore their artistry, take risks, and be vulnerable in the creation and collaboration of art. As we continue to assess the best ways to cultivate a space where anyone can tap into the transformative power of art, we are also finding ways as an organization to take risks and be vulnerable on our journey towards equity and get more voices in the room as we broaden our artistic vision.

To continue to inject new ideas into Freehold and reimagine what we can create, we’re expanding our artistic leadership circle to include Daemond Arrindell, a poet, playwright, Freehold faculty member, and associate partner who has spent over 15 years with Freehold. This week, we sat down with Daemond to discuss this new aspect of his partnership with Freehold, his current goals as partner, and how he finds joy in the midst of our current uncertainty....read more

Creation and Collaboration: An Introduction to Our First Curated Residency Program with Jennifer Moore

Artist residencies provide both freedom and restriction: having a physical space separate from one’s own to create art opens the door for creativity and experimentation, but there is often an expectation of a completed work or exhibition by the end of the residency. The pressure to create, whether intentional or not, can crush creativity. Inequities across race, gender, class, and other identity markers have also restricted who can even access residencies and environments to explore their craft. To support the winding roads that artistry can take and to open our space to a vibrant community of artists, Freehold Theatre Lab/Studio and Jennifer Moore have collaborated to form the new Curated Residency Program. With an emphasis on providing individual and communal support through free use of our studio spaces, resources, and one-on-one sessions with Jennifer, we are excited to see what artists can create when their focus is only on the process and not the end result. The program begins this week with our first group of artists; to dive into the process of creating the program and to learn more about our first artists-in-residence, we sat down with Jennifer, a DJ and musician who collaborated with Freehold previously on Daemond Arrindell’s Auntie Val, for which she created the music....read more

Morphing from the Page to the Stage: New Play Lab

In which playwriting instructor Elizabeth Heffron magically transforms herself from interviewer to interviewee.

So, Elizabeth, how can the New Play Lab benefit an emerging playwright?

What a great question! I would say there are two big benefits. One - being the chance to work on a 20-minute segment of your play with your fellow writers, find the build to the scenes, your forward arc, extricate what is unnecessary and really hone it. At which point you are ready to – Two – take it off the page and pass it over to other living participants and midwife the journey that happens from there. Once the piece is in the hands of your actors and a director, you discover where the heartbeat of the play really is and how hard it is beating.

 Sarah Harlett and Suzanne Bouchard in Richard III, coproduction with upstart crow collective and Seattle Shakespeare Company. Photo by: HMMM productions.  

Introduction to Shakespeare: From an Actor's Perspective

My approach teaching Shakespeare is to give students those tools and to dive into detective work together. I also try to look at them as if they are new works. To examine the problematic language, stories, and characters that Shakespeare wrote in the late 1500’s to early 1600’s and interrogate - why this play now? What are new frameworks we can put on these plays, new prisms to look at them through that allows them to be fresh, live experiences?