April 3, 2020
Dear Community,
Brown/ Trinity Rep returned from Spring Break on Monday, and began creating and learning together on a fully digital platform. We’re acutely aware of the privilege of gathering in these new spaces, of presence, and are grateful to be able to reconnect with the work and with each other.
Many of you in our larger social media community of alumni, family, colleagues, and friends know that Brown/ Trinity has a phenomenal faculty and staff. I’ve been reminded of this firsthand over the past few weeks. They have immediately stepped forward into the technosphere to envision what this distance learning might become, and I must thank them again for their prodigious imaginations, for their network of support for the students and each other, and for the tentacles of dreaming that have sprouted outward from the necessity of marrying curriculum with digital mediums. For their truly invaluable wicked and wry senses of humor.
I wanted to share with you the following principles that our community is coalescing around as we embark and journey forward together.
Community is everything. Our priority is in connection with each other, in nourishing ourselves with the work and with presence. We will support each other as humans and as artists. Though we are gathering to work and learn, our collective and individual health and wellbeing is always our priority, and connection is a key ingredient.
Assume everyone is bringing their best. Each person’s physical circumstances are unique, each person’s day-to-day capacity is too. Let’s assume that we’re each present in as full a way as possible on that day. Let’s celebrate that presence.
Let’s engage in active support for each other’s work. This is one that the actors of 2022 created, and I lift it forward here. It’s a stunningly simple sentence that puts one of the pillars of a healthy community in bas relief: we must actively lift each other up and purposefully acknowledge each human’s work/ daily contribution/ milestones.
Reach out. Reach out to each other. Reach out if you have support to offer, an idea you want to brainstorm, if you want to eat a meal virtually together, for a phone call. Reach out if you have a question, a need, if you read something and want to share it. Please, don’t hesitate to reach out to one another- students, faculty, and staff.
Flexibility is key. We’re navigating sometimes wonky technology, we’re navigating different time zones. We’ll learn that an assignment isn’t working and get a better idea and scrap the first one. Students, you’ll have ideas that will make projects better. Many of us are working with our own loved ones and roommates in the house with their own needs and schedules. Let’s be flexible in order to accommodate each other’s needs best.
Readers, thank you for being a part of our Brown/ Trinity community. Thank you to all of our beloved alumni who have reached out, to the families of our students who are sending love and support across many many miles, and to our colleagues at Trinity Rep, in the industry, and beyond for reaching out to connect, to assist, to offer words of encouragement and support.
Be well, and take good care of yourselves and each other.
– Angela Brazil
Director of the Brown/Trinity MFA Program
