Shannon Leigh Woolley

Shannon Leigh Woolley is the Artistic Director of Looking for Lilith Theatre Company in Louisville, KY.  Looking for Lilith is a non-profit women’s theatre company that is dedicated to re-examining history from women’s perspectives, and creating original plays based on that history.  Shannon received her BFA in Acting from Southern Methodist University, with a minor in Women’s Studies.  She went on to receive her Master’s in Educational Theatre at New York University, and has since served as a teaching artist for Women’s Project and Productions in New York City, The City Lights Youth Theatre, Putney Student Travel, Stage One, Blue Apple Players, and Actor’s Theatre of Louisville.  She recently returned from a Looking for Lilith Community Outreach trip to Guatemala, where she worked for two months with Guatemalan women using Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to aid them in telling their own stories of empowerment.

Sample Residency:  “Living History:  Creating Theatre from Our Lives,” Grades 10-12 

• Project Goals and Teaching Format. Playwright and actress Shannon Woolley will work with one class of theatre students and one class of writing students (or two sets of English classes) during her two-week residency. Assuming all classes are 1.5 hours in length, Ms. Woolley will lead each class for 6 sessions (a total of 18 hours), and will also lead up to two professional development and/or parent workshops.  Ms. Woolley is the Artistic Director of Looking for Lilith Theatre; a theatre that creates original plays based on oral history through group collaboration.  She will use her expertise in this type of play-creation to lead the writing students through the process of taking oral histories from their family members and using specific writing exercises to turn the raw interviews into evocative and dramatic short plays.  She will work with the theatre classes on the skills necessary for collaborative playwriting.  Activities will include creating “graffiti boards” of issues important to teenagers, using physical theatre activities to improvise scenes around the topics chosen, and learning a structured format (The Critical Response Process) within which they can improve the scenes they have created.
• KY Core Content.  This residency will clearly address the following Humanities Core Content Standards:  1.12—Students speak using appropriate forms, conventions, and styles to communicate ideas and information to different audiences for different purposes.  1.15—Students make sense of and communicate ideas with movement, 2.22—Students create works of art and make presentations to convey a point of view.  2.23—Students analyze their own and others’ artistic products and performances using accepted standards, 2.25--In the products they make and performances they present, students show that they understand how time, place, and society influence the arts and humanities, and 2.26—through the arts and humanities, students recognize that although people are different, they share some common experiences and attitudes.
• Parental Involvement.  The parents will be integrally involved in the residency, as the students will be required to use oral histories taken from family members as the fodder for their short plays.  By involving families as the subject matter for plays, we hope to re-enforce parental commitment to arts education. Parents will also be invited to attend a sharing at the end of the residency to observe the students’ work.
• Creativity/Creative Thinking Skills.  The experiences offered within this residency will differ greatly from the traditional writing exercises that the students may be familiar with, because they will engage their bodies and voices in the creation of a script.  Students will be working on their feet for 60% of class time, and topics will be discussed using physical, socio-metric exercises.  One such exercise might be the “Human Barometer.”  In this exercise, one end of the classroom is designated to mean “yes” and the other to mean “no.”  Students pose questions to the group such as “Do you think violence on T.V. leads to violence in real life?” and students place themselves on the spectrum set up in the room between “yes” and “no,” depending on their viewpoints.  Structured improvisation will be used to turn the discussions that arise from this into dramatic scenes.  During the intense collaboration and communication that will be necessary to create a play as a team, students will be led through discussions and socio-metric activities in which their differing backgrounds and diverse opinions will be heard and reflected upon.  These diverse experiences will then be turned into a piece of drama that allows the audience to be exposed to the diversity of the ensemble.
• Written, Visual, and Dramatic Expression.  Students will be encouraged to express their work in a multi-disciplinary manner.  The writing students will be asked to draw an outline of the family member that they have interviewed, and write words/symbols on the inside of the outline that represent how the character sees his/herself.  They will then be asked to write symbols/words on the outside of the outline that represent how the outside world sees this character.  Both the writing and acting students will be led in activities in which they create characters and scenes physically, using “tableaux” (still images made with the body.)  Although the scenes created by both groups will begin with improvisation, the students will be asked to draft a hard copy of the script by the end of the residency, that will be available for use in their writing portfolio.
• Relevance to Teachers/Education.  Teachers will be provided detailed lesson plans and supplementary activities to use in furthering the students’ experience with collaborative play writing.  Ms. Woolley is also eager to lead one or more professional development sessions as part of her residency in order to train the theatre staff in these skills.  By exposing the teachers to a new set of critical thinking and improvisation skills, she will provide the teachers with new tools to use throughout the curriculum.