Shannon Litzenberger had to come home. The former Melville resident is developing a new dance production called HOMEbody, a portrait of her prairie roots, which will premiere in Toronto on September 12. In the process, she's the first artist-in-residence, working with students at the Yorkton Regional High School (YRHS) to explore their own ideas of home.
"I wanted to be able to come home and work on the show here, but also in tandem with the production we're doing an education program with the Grade 10 and 11 students. We're working with them so they can develop their own ideas about home, and shape them into performance pieces," she says.
Litzenberger and her colleagues director Marie-Josee Chartier, actor Jef Mallory and writer Lindsay Zier-Vogel each work with a different aspect of the work, something which she says is helpful when working with students who have different interests and aptitudes in how they want to express themselves.
"All of us have a really diverse set of experiences that we can share with them, and hopefully we can give them some advice and information for the next step," Litzenberger says.
"The advantage of this project is that it's multi-disciplinary. If there's a student that doesn't gravitate to, say, writing as their form of expression, there are other options available to them, a whole range of opportunities... In theatre production there's collaboration between a lot of different types of artists."
The students have been a joy to work with, Litzenberger says, and their perspective is one that's interesting to see.
"It's so interesting to come back and talk to students who are approaching that time of life when they're making that big decision, whether they should stay or leave... To hear their perspective on that now is really fascinating, and I'm so impressed by how open and candid they've been when talking about their experience of home up until now and it's very diverse.
Very few of the students have lived in the same home their whole life, many of them have had multiple homes," Litzenberger explains.
She also praises the students for being open to many different forms of expression that they are asked to work with, whether it is movement, spoken text, or working on camera.
"This has been a new experience for them... They're all generating their own content, it's all about them and this is what's unique about what we're doing with them, and a lot of them have never done this before. It's also reflective of what artists do, and it's giving them a taste of what a real creative process is like."
She says that the work generated by the students has been very youthful and inspiring as she works on her own work that's being presented in Toronto in September.
"It's been a really fruitful experience, for them and for us," she notes.
"I would be hard pressed to find a space like this in Toronto. The school and the theatre have been so generous to let us work here in residence, which is really invaluable to us as we work on this production."
On January 26 at 7 p.m. both Litzenberger and the students will show what they've been working on during the three week residency. Tickets are available at the door and are $10 for adults and $5 for students and seniors, and free for YRHS students. She would like to thank Sask Culture, Sask Lotteries, the Good Spirit School Division, the Yorkton Arts Council, the Yorkton Film Festival and the Godfrey Dean Art Gallery for the support for the project, saying that it's an example of a community coming together to make the project the best it can be.
