Bio: Jessica Hughes is a junior Pre-Professional Musical Theatre Major at Emory and Henry College in Southwest, Virginia. This liberal arts education has encouraged her to explore offstage opportunities in addition to her performance work in 44 Plays for 44 Presidents, Pericles, and student showcases. Her introduction to dramaturgy was a dive head first into the role of production dramaturg for the E&H production of Talley’s Folly in fall of 2013. After being nominated to go to KCACTF for her work, Jessica connected with other dramaturgs and became passionate about exploring the possibilities of a dramaturg in the academic theatre as well as professional theatre. In addition to her dramaturgical work, Jessica has worked professionally in Portstewart, Northern Ireland. She spent a summer at Big Telly Theatre Company as a Creative Arts Trainee, after receiving a Ledford Research Grant from the Appalachian College Association. Her time there gave her hands-on experiences in devising, street performance, educational theatre, and workshop facilitation, to further her development as a professional theatre practitioner. Jessica is also an Honors Program scholar at E&H as well as a brother of Alpha Psi Omega, the National Theatre Honors Society.

Focus for the week: My focus for this week is dramaturgy in a collegiate setting where theatre students, and the general public have no awareness of the field of dramaturgy let alone what the role of a dramature does in a production. My window installments for Kindertransport and the lecture I am holding, are some of the first student dramaturgical work that my college will encounter. Therefore, I really want to take this week with LMDA to talk about my expectations and the actual reactions that I get from the work that I have done, and receive real time suggestions on how to improve my interactions with our audience during our performances.

Questions from LMDA:

What is your definition of dramaturgy? Dramaturgy is a scary adjective to say for a role that asks, explores, and answers the questions of a play, in the hopes of better connecting the production team, audiences, and the general public to the unified vision of the final production. Or you could say, dramaturgy is the guild of people who are masters of a finger in too many pies, and use this superpower to boggle the minds of practitioners and audiences in a productive way.

What is your dream project? As a student dramaturg, my dream project would be to devise an immersive production through inter-departmental cooperation, in order to create a production that invited every student, no matter their discipline, to ignite their imagination and claim art as something they can call their own.