Photo courtesy of Andre Perez

Just this past Saturday About Face Theatre held its multigenerational event at the UIC campus. Everyone arrived and we got into introducing ourselves and had a little ice breaker. Everyone seemed really awesome and excited to be there.

First, we started with an activity that involved us all splitting into groups of about four or five people. We then got together, some in different rooms, and discussed four questions we were given by Sara and Tony. The questions were pretty interesting, for example one question asked us about how we feel our LGBTQ identity has changed over the course of our lives and how it has changed our personalities. Another was about who we think of as a role model and who inspires us now. Everyone shared their thoughts on the questions and we were able to get to know each other better as well as able to identify narratives that repeat throughout the LGBTQ community.

Next, everyone spilt from their groups into pairs. Each person shared their story as a member of the LGBTQ community, with their partner. Once everyone had shared their story with their partner, bigger groups were made again and stories were picked by each group to be presented to the larger group. Tony and Sara made sure to keep the method of sharing the story very open to encourage creativity and the outcome was really interesting. Everyone did an awesome job presenting and sharing their stories, which is a brave thing to do.

And last but not least we all met in the Behavioural Sciences Building on campus to hang out and have pizza! Overall, it was a really fun event and it seemed like everyone really enjoyed themselves.

A big thank you to everyone that attended. If you couldn’t make it but are still interested in being involved, we encourage you to come join us for the Summer Intensive in which we will doing more work with developing the next About Face Youth Theatre show based on real stories!