From Story to Stage: God's Work

Introduction: The Creative Process

APTP ensemble members serve as both ethnographers and artists, seeking out a wide range of stories, nearly all of which originate from people living in Chicago's Albany Park community, but which have taken us and our audiences to countries around the globe and have reached generations back in time.

Image from God's Work Ensemble members nurture the stories they collect into performance through a unique play development process, during which we analyze the story and conduct research to situate it in a cultural, historical, and political context; consider multiple possible staging strategies; devise text, movement, and music ideas; and eventually reach consensus about how to bring a story to life on stage. This process of developing a performance concept and generating raw material typically takes months or even years and involves several dozen youth artists and a handful of adult artists, with the ensemble frequently working on multiple projects simultaneously.

Once we have conceptually developed a work, the script is assembled, choreography is set, the score is composed, and three months of formal rehearsals begin-all drawing on the wealth of raw material generated during the play development process.

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