Teens Create Immersive Theater Piece in Burlington 

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• Luke Awtry
• Ella Stadecker

Last Friday night, I was one of 25 people awarded a TIPS certificate of achievement, which certifies that I completed Level 1 training in Time, Infinity, Portal and Space. My fellow TIPSters and I received our diplomas in the basement of 208 Flynn Avenue in Burlington's South End. I'm pretty sure my trainers would say it's OK for me to call my hot-pink printed certificate a diploma. After all, they encouraged us to take risks, to be creative, and even to find new ways of perceiving and understanding.

The awards ceremony was the conclusion of an original theater piece, "TIPS: A Guide to Everywhere & the Rest," that was conceived, created and performed by four local teenagers. And I mean original.

The students, ages 14 to 18, created the show through Epoch Generation, an afterschool program of In Tandem Arts, a Burlington-based nonprofit whose artistic director is arts educator Trish Denton.

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• Luke Awtry
• Trish Denton

Starting from scratch with no script, costumes or set, the ensemble developed a project that explores the nature of creativity and collaboration, of imagination and possibility. The immersive theater piece invited audience members to consider those themes, too. If that seems like a lot to take in on a Friday night, relax: The performers welcomed audience members and led them on their quest with warmth, generosity and humor.

The TIPS ensemble consisted of Shannon Rose Kelly (Time), a first-year student at the Community College of Vermont; Ella Stadecker (Infinity), a first-year student at Burlington High School; Mathieu Munaba (Portal), a junior at Winooski High School; and Dilly Siki (Space), a senior at Winooski High School. Each brought their own theater or performance experience to the project — including playwriting and ballet — but none had ever devised a work from its inception.

The ensemble led its audience into several rooms in the Flynn Avenue building, where we watched smaller performances that formed parts of the larger piece. Besides moving to different settings during the performance, we also traveled to various "realms." Or, in TIPS parlance, we went "realm jumping."

The realms we visited included a machine realm, an outer realm and a rest realm, where we stopped for tea and reflection. (Recall the name of the play: "A Guide to Everywhere & the Rest.") I'm not sure which realm I was in when we watched young aerialists join the show for one scene to perform with Infinity under a moony glow. But I wanted to stay in that one.

Our travels were aided by a bag of goodies we received at the start of the show, a tool kit for realm jumping. The burlap bag held a collection of essentials, including a Tootsie Roll, a pen and a slab of clay. At one point, we were instructed to make a "totem of gratitude."

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• Luke Awtry
• Shannon Rose Kelly

I fished out my piece of clay, which happened to be red, and formed it into the shape of a heart. As I worked, Space walked past me and glanced at my effort. I'm pretty sure I heard her say quietly, "I want to see more creativity than a heart."

Yikes! I found a sparkly blue pipe cleaner in my bag, twisted it into a hook and made a supremely uncreative Christmas tree ornament. (Still, I got my diploma.)

The interactions between the ensemble and the audience, and the ones that the cast encouraged among audience members, made for the most interesting moments in the piece.

For example, Time seemed to intuit, correctly, that Friday was the birthday of an audience member named Margaret. (We all wore name tags.) Then she picked out another woman from the audience who cheerfully sang Margaret a short birthday song.

As Time said in a Q&A session after the show, the ensemble wanted "the audience to form a connection with us or the show or other audience members. We wanted to have a strong piece that would pull people together."

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• Luke Awtry
• Mathieu Munaba

The TIPS performers achieved this effect in an organic way that felt almost mystical — while demonstrating a substantial amount of creative work.

We received our diplomas in a space called "the well." As we descended into it, we each crumpled up a letter we had written to our future selves and dropped it into a piece of a fabric that represented a wishing well. I stole the core of my message to myself from an audience member named Janky, who, earlier in the show, had been asked to describe his dream day. Though only I knew of this pilfering, I sensed that similar connections were playing out elsewhere in the theater piece. It seemed to me that Time, Infinity, Portal and Space made that possible.

Denton of In Tandem Arts said her role in the production was to provide space and guidance for the teens, who are naturals at "breaking from traditional narratives." At a rehearsal a couple of weeks before the show, she told Seven Days that making this kind of theater piece can be a risky proposition.

"This is why people don't make original work," Denton said. "It's far more risky, because you push right up against what's possible. But I think it's far more meaningful."