An Interview with Jette Halladay
Are you a cat person or a dog person?
Yes! I have had two cats, and one dog. Both have something different they add to life. I sleep with my cats, but my cats are independent, whereas my dog is loyal and is always seeking to please me.
Describe the genre (or genres) you write in.
I wouldn’t describe myself as an author or a playwright because what I do isn’t necessarily considered [air-quotes] “writing.” I work in a genre called devised theatre, although I’ve been doing that type of work since before the genre had that name.
In the show American Tall Tales, we took various tall tales in American history like John Henry, and we toured in Russia and Latvia. A lot of my actors wanted to deal with words and dialogue, but I knew that we were performing in Europe in the Baltic region, so a lot of people wouldn’t understand English, so we needed visuals to be the primary action in the play. And this is why it’s important to have actors that are willing to work hard on the project because we do a lot of improv. A lot of the writing comes from the collaboration of the actors. And in a way we kind of went backwards from the way most scriptwriting goes. Usually when the director gets the script, the words are what carry the primary action of the play, and the blocking is there to complement whatever the primary action is. But I wanted the audience to be able to understand from what they saw, not necessarily what they heard. So instead we had the blocking carry the primary action of the play, and the words complemented the story. Eventually we do set down a written script, but it’s not necessarily concrete. Things will change as we go along and discover that some words work better with others.
Any favorite projects?
Story Bandits. What we are doing is gathering and reading stories written by children. Some of them are on YouTube, but I want to be able to perform these shows live, so we are brainstorming ways to be able to perform these shows for children. One of my students actually came up with the idea for “cul-de-sac theatre”: We will have the actors play in the cul-de-sac, and the children will come out and watch from their front porch. We have gathered a lot of stories from children, and I have one student who is working on finding how these stories connect together.
Can you walk me through the basic writing process you go through?
The idea for a project usually comes several years before I do any actual writing. For example, I got the idea for Story Bandits from a project I did where we would take books written by children and read those books to an audience of children. After seeing those children’s faces light up at hearing their stories read aloud, I knew that I wanted to bring the words of children to life. Once when we read a child’s story in the classroom, the other children in the classroom jumped up and hugged the child who wrote the story.
For Appalachian Roots the project took a different form. I knew that I was going to have another show touring in Ireland, so I was trying to figure out what I wanted it to be about. We gathered different stories from Appalachia, and we got Nancy Boone, a music professor, and Carol Ponder, a teaching artist from Nashville, to help us write our own music. Carol also performed and toured with the show. We had to figure out how to string all of these stories together, and we decided on the setting of a schoolroom in Appalachia. A bell rings, signifying that there has been a collapse in the coal mine, but the children are not allowed to enter the mine yet, so the school teacher has to keep the children entertained while they wait. The stories told by the children in the classroom become expressions of their individual fears and anxieties — wondering if their parents are alive or not. At the end of the play, the bell rings again, telling everyone it is safe to enter the mine, and for the children to find out if their parents survived the collapse. And that’s where the play ends.
Where is your favorite space to write?
I like to do my writing surrounded by collaborators that can all contribute to the idea we’re working on. We’ve worked in writing spaces all over campus in different classrooms, on stage, in dance studios, outside in parks. I will work anywhere as long as I am surrounded by my people.
What advice do you have for any young or aspiring authors?
Listen. Listen a lot to other people. Absorb. Be changed by what you hear. Don’t get set on a specific script or a specific way things have to be. Don’t be rigid. Be flexible. Isn’t being flexible great? Not just being physically flexible, but also internally flexible. When you’re flexible, everything becomes exciting. Everything is a story. I knew one writer that would go out in public places and sit and listen to people’s conversations and write them down. That’s the best way to learn because everyone has a different way of speaking and a different way of seeing things.
