ALWAYS BOY
The Project
Always Boy (working title) is the story of a woman haunted by her best friend’s ghost. One day, Tommy’s ghost interrupts Jackie’s life. He takes her on a journey of forgiveness as they reenact scenes from their old high school theatre productions in various venues across the city.
A multimedia performance piece that integrates live and digital content, new and old technologies, and was initially conceived to be performed in multiple venues.
Artists
Two people stand side by side in a blurred out garden.
-
Jk Jk is married couple Jenny Larson-Quinones (director/writer) and khattieQ (composer/performer). They create collaboratively-devised queer performance to magnify stories of the disenfranchised and disrupt the status quo. khattieQ, originally from Puerto Rico, learned to love performance through music, including serving as guitarist and vocalist for punk band BLXPLTN (2013-2015). Jenny, from South Dakota, grew up in new play development, including serving as Artistic Director of Salvage Vanguard Theater (2008-2019). In 2020, their first Jk Jk collaboration Catalina La O Presenta: Now With Me won the Vancouver Fringe New Play Prize from PTC. The performance-film screened in November 2020. In the spring of 2022, Catalina La O will premiere LIVE as an associate production of Neworld Theatre and a co-production of the frank theatre company. Currently, the couple is developing the play Desperately Seeking Comfortable Shoes, with support from The Arts Club. khattieQ is one of their 2021 Bill Millerd recipients, and Jenny is one of their 2021 Emerging New Playwrights. khattieQ is also an Arts Leadership Fellow with the Belfry Theatre in the 2021-2022 season. In the fall of 2022, Jk Jk co-directs Adrienne Dawes’ Casta at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin,TX.
The Residency
Before the DDI
The Always Boy group aims to explore how to create work that is accessible for younger age ranges and a large geographic area, while investigating the questions: where do people watch their stories these days? How does one write a story that can exist fluidly in multiple mediums simultaneously? How do you write a story that is meant to be enjoyable on YouTube and Instagram, where things are consumed at a breakneck speed? And enjoyable in the theatre, which engages its own unique manipulation of timing and pacing?
Coming into the residency, the production of Always Boy was pictured as a multi-venue performance-film adventure, with the live film-performance hybrid informing the text and music composition. The group conceptualized the work as taking place in four physical venues: a site-specific kitchen, a high school auditorium, a large repertory theatre, and a small warehouse space. Each venue would have an audience that experiences the performance as a film, a live show, and an interactive spectacle. A digital stream of the performance was also planned to be accessible by phone and laptop, through social media or YouTube. The cast and two film crews planned to travel between locations. filming on cell phones.
During the residency
There were multiple parallel focuses of the residency period: the group decided to simultaneously map characters and technologies so that characters could serve as a bridge between old analogue and new technologies. The group also investigated ways of spreading the story through different media and mediums and connecting people through technology and interactivity.
The group decided to work with YouTube as a method for streaming. The group learned about the importance of being strategic with audiences for their message and worked in collaboration with youth groups to build the fictional character through Instagram while targeting specific audiences as a tool. Numerous issues of accessibility and targeting were raised, with research on how to contact specific audiences based on need: geography, age group- how to find them and continue the outreach.
Finally, the entire creation process led to distinct design discoveries, since the target audience was meant to be teens and young adults, conversations were had around what community resources needed to be added to the project as a means of community support.
The group considered how services like counseling could be added and available for teens and the process became an important aspect of the development. It became clear that bringing in partners in early stages was vital, making sure the discussions and the training were available to the creative artists.
It was important to have the resources be part of the design process from the inception of the work.
Post Residency
The group will continue the development of the project in New York City in Autumn 2022 and has the following research questions: How can genre videos and YouTubeinfluence the development of artistic production? How can technology function as inspiration but also as intervention?
Finally, the group is going to dive into mapping out this Instagram character through social research; they plan to conduct interviews with the teens and their families in rural North America to see what the most pressing issues are currently, to use in their plot development.
Tools Used
OBS
Instagram
