So I’m embarrassed to admit that I went to bed last evening without watching any of the Democratic National Convention.  I thought about turning it on, but then I got sucked into an email vortex instead.  I woke up this morning to the tweets of Andrew Sullivan, Anderson Cooper, and others, proclaiming the strength of Michelle Obama’s address last evening, and proceeded to kick myself for missing it.

In the final days of the applied theatre course in Ireland, we conducted a series of debrief conversations with the students and facilitators as a way to find some closure on an experience that flew by.

One of the main assignments for the applied theatre course requires that two groups of students work with facilitators on a devising process that could be used to create a community-engaged theatre project. Our facilitators, Declan Gorman and Jenny Macdonald, each take a group and spend about five days modeling their individual devising processes in a concentrated experience. It’s important to note that these processes usually occur over weeks or months, but because of the short duration of the course, Declan and Jenny find ways to telescope their processes so that students achieve strong results in an extraordinarily short period of time. It helps that these students are talented and game to be working in this fashion, but it’s still a superhuman undertaking.

The final week of the Ireland applied theatre course began on Monday with some input from Chrissie Poulter. Chrissie has served as an academic tutor and a devising facilitator for the program in years past, and after a three-year career break, she is back as a faculty member at Trinity College. She offered to share some of her thoughts about the longer history of applied theatre and community arts in Ireland, and I thought that her experience and expertise could provide valuable insights for students as they began to consider their final project for the course: a prospectus for an applied theatre project partnering with an organization in the United States.