For my senior undergraduate thesis project, I wanted to create a unique experience for my cast of peers while challenging myself with material that was outside of my personal comfort zone at the time. I was introduced to Student Body by Frank Winters, which allowed my peers and me to explore a sensitive play about college sexual assault while working closely with the playwright and several on-campus organizations during our process.

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Throughout our rehearsal period, we heavily incorporated Anne Bogart's Viewpoints Technique to build ensemble and establish a common language among the entire cast. The basis of Viewpoints work relies on impulse, where nothing is falsely created and everything is reactionary. The individual viewpoints gave the actors a toolset to draw from and the terminology to describe what they were doing onstage. After about a week of ensemble and Viewpoints work, I had the cast sit in chairs in a circle and told them to do an “impulse run” using the circumstances we had established. Within five lines, they were out of their chairs, performing the play with full conviction.

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Much of what happened in that first run ended up in their performances. We expanded on those impulses and explored how we could specify the character dynamics and relationships to tell the strongest story. Our discoveries led to the decision to forgo any fixed staging. Instead, our ensemble became so confident in their characters, relationships, and the story that the cast could perform in any location while the production remained true to its form, emotionally and physically driven by impulse and an understanding of the world we built together.