Kiara Dispa

Internships

• Bonte hond: a youth theatre company in Almere, where I was an intern educator. This meant I helped develop educational programs related to performances and, for example, also visited schools as a drama teacher to teach lessons about a performance.
• International School Laren: a secondary school that offers the International Baccalaureate to international students. This is where I completed my teaching internship, which involved independently teaching English to various classes of students aged 12-16.
• Linea Rekta: a committed theatre company that creates contemporary theatre with the new generation. I interned there as an assistant director on the production "Enigma," which was about Alan Turing's life story.
• VSO Mozarthof (VSO - "Secondary special education"): a school for special needs education where students with intellectual disabilities aged 12-20 receive education. At VSO Mozarthof, "Special Needs" stands for "As Much Learning As Possible." During my final year, this served as both a work placement and an internship as a drama teacher.
• (Module) Common Synch: In this module, we explored terms like "embodiment" and how to create a different kind of theatre in the here and now, together with artists from the Wild West in Utrecht. We did this through improvisation evenings where anyone who wanted to join was welcome. This brought together a wide variety of audiences, from ISK students and local residents to ArtEZ students.
• (Module) Theatre = Ritual: the module in which we investigated how ritual relates to theatre and/or performance art, and to what extent theatre itself is a ritual.

Performances & projects

• Before Life: a performance I created about six people in the making, thrown into the afterlife. They blindly follow what happens to them, until a voice tells them there's a different way. What do you do then? Do you continue with what feels familiar, with what everyone else is doing, or do you choose to enter life unaware? This performance was a collaboration with six students from the Rijnijssel MBO acting program in Arnhem.
• PROP plays PORTION: Everything is crammed together and nothing fits. If you don't understand, I'm happy to explain. 3 comes after 2 and 7 a few seconds later. Enormous, gigantic, and tiny, tiny, super small. And later we die because otherwise, cemeteries would have been for nothing. What then? What if? What's the plan? What are you going to do then? This performance is part of the X-OVER graduation project.
• (Graduation essay) Dear art and science, shall we connect?: the title of my graduation essay, in which I explored the importance of combining art and science in education. Over the past few years, I've found myself in a friendship bubble of scientists from Wageningen and artists from Arnhem. The scientists indicated they gained a great deal of knowledge about their fields, but lacked practical application in their teaching. While I myself felt I had to put a lot of practical work into practice during my studies, without a foundation of knowledge to understand why I do things the way I do. It frustrated me that these two forms of education didn't seem to go together. For me, this also symbolises a larger problem in society: how binary thinking leads to polarisation. Something is either light or dark, for example, and thus the coherence of two apparent contradictions seems almost impossible. As soon as this is applied to people in relation to each other, connection is excluded, which I find worrying, given the societal conflicts that keep recurring as a result.

My graduation project emerged from the need to connect two seemingly opposing worlds. I wrote my essay as a theoretical basis for research with Wageningen University & Research alumni Maria Theodorou. We are currently creating the performance "The Library of Our Scientific Artistic Mind," in which we are exploring in practice how to bring our two worlds together. We asked ourselves what happens when a scientist and an artist share the same mind. In the performance, we blend factual knowledge from my essay research and Maria's scientific knowledge, sharing our feelings and thoughts. It's fascinating to explore how our worlds converge because it also confronts us with our own black-and-white thinking and challenges us to explore connections with each other's work methods and fields of expertise.

Who are you as a creator/artist?

For me, theatre, like life, is about a shared responsibility to consciously shape it. I take that responsibility personally by acting as a performer in the here and now, and as a creator, by consciously considering and choosing how I want to shape the whole. As a creator, I magnify reality, or the thoughts and feelings I have, to make them tangible for myself and others. I prefer to work from worlds where everything and everyone is white, for example, the performers live in someone else's mind, the people walk strangely, everything is symmetrical, or a Mediterranean tune constantly plays in the background. A world where a single element is magnified in detail, allowing the minimalism focused on one element to be developed into many different forms. I enjoy exploring this together with others, because I believe it's important to keep questioning your own perspective, thoughts, and feelings through/with the other person, so you don't become stuck in your own beliefs.

How do you define the concept of Artist Educator in Theatre?

For me, theatre inherently offers learning opportunities. Whether it's about your feelings, your place in the world, your thoughts, other people, the environment you live in, or social issues. Even one thing in a theatrical setting can be new to you, and then you've learned something. That theatrical environment could be a theatre hall, a drama room at a high school, a bunker in the middle of a field, an old nuclear power plant, or the café where someone suddenly stands on a table. As an Artist Educator in Theatre, I see it as my responsibility to take the lead in creating a safe foundation for collaboration with/among those present in all these environments. I believe that, from that safe space, theatre can be a way to invite people to open up to each other, especially to the unfamiliar. You don't have to be the same or understand each other to share space and connect. For me, that's what being an Artist Educator in Theatre is about: facilitating that learning and meeting space in a lighthearted and playful way.

Where do you draw inspiration from?

For me, it's the small, seemingly insignificant things in life that bring me happiness and inspiration. Think of pausing for a moment during a walk, eyes closed and face turned towards the sun, enjoying the warmth. Or buying a beautiful, smooth-writing pen. Wearing a cardigan from someone you love, which gives you a momentary sense of togetherness, listening to music on the train or while cycling, seeing someone enjoying an ice cream, or watching a fellow student's research presentation. It's often during those moments of inner peace and enjoyment that an energy is unleashed within me that inspires new ideas.

What are your ambitions and plans for the future?

In the future, I'd like to combine everything I've done in recent years. Ideally, this would extend beyond the Dutch borders. An ultimate dream is to create a performance that I could take out into the streets anywhere in the world. To spark conversations about themes like those of my graduation project, where we can connect our different stories. Even if it's just by acknowledging each other's presence and accepting that we're allowed to be different. That's precisely what makes meeting so many others so interesting for me. Besides creating and performing myself, I'm also interested in how education can support an individual in their personal development through theatre. I'd also like to continue exploring beyond theatre, thinking about delving into pedagogy, starting my own business, or learning languages.

In short, I can't and won't choose. The only thing I can choose is constantly finding new focuses.