Editor’s note: The name of the organization has been corrected to reflect its proper spelling as seen on social media. A source’s name has been corrected to reflect the individual’s preference.
OCU STRIPPED has begun rehearsals for their first production this semester.
OCU STRIPPED, a student musical theater organization dedicated to creating stripped-down productions of musicals, has opted to create two virtual performance studies this semester instead of a traditional musical production.
This year, STRIPPED is led by director Simón Gómez Villegas, music theater/music composition senior, choreographer Meghan Rooney, music theater senior, and artistic director Lisi Levy, acting senior.
“To be even in a Zoom room and sharing has been euphoric. This is giving me the opportunity to remind myself of why I love this art form and what it can invoke in myself and in other people,” Rooney said.
Levy said the structure of the piece isn’t firm, but it follows a cabaret-like construction with a through-line that ties one piece to the next. She said the songs assigned to each performer were intentional and based heavily on what the creative teams thinks could best serve and challenge the performer.
“I am most excited to see these artists do something they’ve never been able to experiment with before,” Levy said.
Gómez said he wants to take this opportunity to challenge the biases and format which are typically tied to traditional musical theater.
“We spent the first few days of rehearsal taking about the actors themselves: what kind of boxes they’ve been put into, the type they’ve been told they should play and what they wish they could portray,” Gómez-Villegas said.
Rooney said the piece is all about revisiting dismissed, forgotten, hokey or underrated pieces of theater and music. She said she wants this to be a deep-dive into the humanity of characters that may have become caricatures rather than people.
Gómez said creating a performance via a stream or Zoom call presents its own challenges, both personal and professional.
“I find that I’m fighting my own mental weight,” Gómez said, “Sometimes I wake up, and I don’t feel creative at all, but working with an awesome team makes me feel like I’m not alone.”
Levy said the uncertainty of the world she currently lives in is part of how they are building their production.
“I’m someone who likes having a pretty, sparkly plan of every single thing we want to do. This time around, it’s very fluid, which is freeing in a way, but it also is a little bit scary,” Levy said.
Rooney said putting together a completely virtual piece comes with certain technical hurdles that must be sorted out in order to keep on-track.
“There are lot of cool technical things that can be done to make this look more cohesive, like arranging the actors so that it looks like they are looking at each other or sitting back to back,” Rooney said.
Rooney said Stripped is known and loved for ensemble work. While trying to build that over Zoom, she said she noticed some evident differences. After some research, she said there is science to back her feelings on the subject.
“There was a study I read that compared the serotonin levels of people in a room to those on Zoom. When a someone would walk into the physical room, the serotonin levels of the other people in that room would go up. When a person would log into a Zoom call, the levels of the people on that call tended to go up very little, if at all,” Rooney said, “That really mimics what we’re trying to work with.”
Gómez said his priority is to give the performers a place to move forward in their training. Though nothing replaces human interaction, he said they aim to create that environment in a different way through the screen.
Kate Waldron, music theater sophomore and Stripped actor, said this virtual show presents a very unique opportunity for both the creative team and the actors.
“It is teaching us that there are way more ways to share art that we haven’t even explored yet. This opens doors for people looking to experience theatre because it makes this accessible,” Waldron said.
Gómez said putting the performance together this way actually reflects the questions that Stripped poses to theater-goers.
“It’s been so thrilling to tackle this from the angle of: ‘Well, what do you actually need to put on a show?’ We are constantly exploring the best ways to connect with our audiences without truly realizing how many options we have,” he said.
Rooney said that she is so grateful to get to explore these new questions with these students in an environment where there is so much communication between the leadership team.
“I’m so inspired by what they’ve done so far, and I am so blessed to be working such generous and smart leaders. I can’t wait for you all to see it,” she said.
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