From January 14-17, 2025, Pitt’s Theatre Arts Department has the honor of hosting the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival (KCACTF) – a national theatre festival that tours the country to promote collegiate theatrical productions, provide professional workshops, and celebrate students’ works.
This esteem goes beyond providing physical spaces for this distinguished event. The Theatre Arts Department will be integral to running the festival – with production team members involved to bring visiting productions to life across Pitt stages and to present in a variety of theatre arts workshops. As a host, Pitt is not guaranteed production selection for the event, yet another honor was given when the 2024-2025 Pitt Stages season show The Inseparables was chosen to be presented for theatre excellence. The full cast and crew will return to remount and perform the production.
Familiar faces from Pitt’s Theatre Arts Department will make their mark on the regional festival. Teaching Assistant Professors Kelly Trumbull and Howard Patterson will be among them. Trumbull will be directing one of the Playwriting and New Play Program readings and conducting a workshop on Active Analysis, while Patterson will serve as Design Technology & Management vice-chair for the event and sound designer for The Inseparables. Patron and Rental Services Manager Jeremy Seghers will be leading a directing workshop “Staging Site-Specific and Immersive Work.” Head of Performance and Teaching Assistant Professor Ricardo Vila-Roger and Visiting Assistant Professor Tom Pacio will work alongside as Musical Theatre Intensive Selectors. Vila-Roger will also return as director in the production of The Inseparables while Pacio will teach a generative script workshop geared towards aspiring actors, directors and writers.
In addition to faculty and staff involvement, Pitt undergraduate and graduate students will also contribute in their own way to the festival. Graduate students Freddie Miller, Audrey Pernell, and Jeremy Kahn are participating. Miller will be a respondent for the Musical Theatre Intensive Scholarship Competition, observing auditions and coaching students during the preliminary round of auditions. Kahn will be leading a workshop called “Believe in the Ball,” in which participants will use the session to draw on the collective imaginations of the group to transform an imaginary object in their space over a course of time. The work is geared towards developing increased specificity when handling objects (real or imaginary) that can be applied to students’ work in the classroom or on stage.
Pernell will be presenting the lecture-demo “Decolonizing Vocal Pedagogy.” Pernell shared that the lecture “delves deeply into the spirituals, the improvised secret folk chants of enslaved African Americans. As no recordings of these rituals exist, we cannot know for certain how the spirituals originally were sung.” Drawing on historical accounts, Pernell will propose “theatrical practices to engage the imagination and embody the cultural contexts that gave rise to this tradition in the hopes of recovering elements that speak to Black heritage: embodiment, emotionality, spontaneity, creativity, agency, community, and faith.” In summary, the lecture-demo will seek to “decolonize vocal pedagogy and reclaim Afrocentricity in Black vocal performance,” according to Pernell.
Political Science undergraduate major Tamanna Khan will participate in the Stage Directors and Choreographers Intensive (SDC). Khan is one of six student directors from the region competing in the cohort. She will be attending workshops, receiving feedback, and will conclude the experience by directing a short play Arbor Falls with a Pitt student cast that will be presented at the end of the event.
Khan’s involvement is an example of the Theatre Art Department’s continued mission to make theatre arts an accessible and welcoming community for all students at Pitt. Students don’t have to pursue a theatre arts major or minor to participate in Pitt Stages mainstage productions, student organizations, or national-scale festivals such as KCACTF. Several of the cast and crew members returning for the festival’s run of The Inseparables hail from majors across Pitt, including Clinical Psychology, Architectural Studies, Business Analytics, Professional Communications, Marketing, Molecular Biology, Linguistics, Neuroscience, and more!
Looking for ways to get to know the Theatre Arts Department at Pitt? Check out the upcoming Pitt Stages and One-Act Play Series productions, and learn about upcoming theatre arts courses.