The Gainesville Theater Alliance is preparing for its full season of shows with a new artistic director. Zechariah Pierce, who also serves as the associate director of the University of North Georgia’s newly-formed School of Communication, Film and Theater, said emphasizing the in-person performances is especially important following two years of COVID-related disruptions.
“It really does feel like we're just sort of coming out of the ashes a little bit,” Pierce said. “The whole world has forgotten about the importance of being in the space together. And that's our business, that's our art form – the shared breath between audience and stage. The first and foremost priority for me is to inspire people to come back.”
The stage is not the only place where Pierce wants to re-incorporate the physical aspect of performances.
“There's some marketing changes that we're hoping to do,” Pierce said. “We've all been online for so long and that used to be the sort of catchphrase [to] get people involved on social media and emails. And while that all is important there's a need to kind of get back to the physical. I mean, we're so inundated with stuff online right now, that it's almost like, can I have anything else but a digital representation of something? So kind of going back to this sort of space of, ‘Hey, there's, there's a good old fashioned poster on a sign that I saw the other day, and that sticks out to me because I'm inundated on my phone with everything else.’”
The Gainesville Theater Alliance is a 40-year-old collaboration between Brenau University and the University of North Georgia, which was known as Gainesville Community College at the time. During that period, Brenau University was still an all-women’s school and needed a more diversified pool of actors and talent. Meanwhile, the then-smaller community college needed more resources.
“There was also a lot of collaboration with the greater North Georgia community,” Pierce said. “As the universities and student bodies have grown, there has been less of a need for that, since the students are our priority when it comes to opportunities, production assignments and etc. But that's sort of how it started, and it's grown as both universities have grown as well.”
Pierce plans to give both his UNG and GTA students a different kind of acting experience as well. His parents were performing artists in mime movement and European clown theater, and he traveled with them to carnivals. Although he earned his MFA in Theater pedagogy from Virginia Commonwealth University, Pierce said clown work is incorporated into his teaching because it can create a story from the physical body as opposed to a script.
“There's definitely, I think, a cultural hump to get over from a student,” Pierce said. "Because the work inherently requires people to be okay with and rather to embrace failure. It's in that sort of space of failing that the creative process thrives in solving that problem. With clown, it's solving it in sort of ridiculous ways. But they're still following a line of logic or rather clown logic in the sense of creatively solving these problems from the perspective of this playful space of failure. Failure is such a huge, scary word for so many students coming into college, just in the way that our culture sort of ingrained.”
The elements of clown work can be linked to satire, making it a much deeper type of expression than many people may think. Its incorporation can be seen in GTA’s upcoming November production, Urinetown: The Musical.
“The show itself actually takes styles of musicals from across different ages of American musical story types and archetypes and weaves it into this sort of dark comedy about corporatism and, and government oversight,” Pierce said. So there's actually a lot of sort of clown elements to the story itself in taking something that is a massive failure. There's just a lot of that actual clown work of taking something that can be really dark and sort of making light of it and finding the light in that sort of monumental failure of society. So there actually might be some more contemporary ties to our world than we'd like to admit.”
Tickets for Urinetown: The Musical will be available for purchase starting Oct. 10 on GTA’s website. Additionally, GTA has its New Works Festival at the University of North Georgia-Gainesville’s Ed Cabell Theatre on Oct. 20-23, which will allow GTA students and alumni to share their own plays.
“Even as a clown in my own training that doesn't come from that tradition, [playwriting] is such a large tradition for the American stage that we really need to continue to foster those story writers, those playwrights to to cut their teeth at this level and be celebrated in this early stage of their of their formation. So we're really excited about that.”
