Arlington Students Collaborate Remotely On Joint Theatre Project

ARLINGTON, VA — Turns out there was something positive that came out of Arlington Public Schools' decision to have all students start the school year studying from home due to the COVID-19 restrictions.

"With the pandemic and everything kind of going virtual in the beginning of the school year, the Arlington County theatre teachers — the upside to the lockdown was that we were meeting a lot," said Hope Lambert, threatre arts director at HB Woodlawn High School.

These meetings, many of them done remotely, gave the teachers a chance to discuss how they could collaborate and navigate through the world of virtual theatre.

Coincidentally, Carol Cadby of Yorktown High School, one of the theatre arts directors involved in these discussions, was contacted by a former student who had an idea.

"I reached out to Carol asking her if she had any interest in doing something virtually," said Andres Luque Turriago, technical theatre consultant with Arlington Cultural Affairs. "That's how we ended up kind of brainstorming the idea along with my fellow coworker Jared Davis, who runs the scenic studio here at Arlington Cultural Affairs. With Carol's guidance and our brainstorming sessions, we were able to come up with projection mapping as our baseline for the project."

The result of this collaboration was a video mapping project that high school theatre tech students could complete without ever having to meet face-to-face. Instead, students at the four schools would meet virtually to create separate videos that would be combined and projected onto a cutout of a large head and word bubble.

"With our expertise here, Jared being a graphic designer, we were able to create a template for the kids to essentially put over the created videos," Turriago said. "They were able to pick from a variety of different methods of creating digital art, between stop motion, doing two embedded videos, and one single video that was covered by the entire mask that we provided. It gave them flexibility as to how they wanted to tell their story and their message"

On behalf of Arlington's four high schools, Lambert and Cadby pitched "A Pop-up, Drive-by Video Mapping Installation: 'Collaboration During Isolation'" to the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts and received a grant to pay for the project.

In April, students projected the final, combined project onto the cutout on different nights at each of the high schools.

"I've used projections in shows, but not to the extent that we did this time and with the expertise that we've gotten," Cadby said.

The project not only gave the students an opportunity to collaborate on a group project while they were studying from home, they got to learn something new in the process.

"I know nothing about video production, so that was great for me," Cadby said. "It's been fabulous because they now have a skill set that I could not teach them. They also have this understanding of where where art is going, because I think projections are the thing of the future."