1.9 A Conversation with Briandaniel Oglesby
This week Jimmy talks with progressive alt-ed teacher from Texas, Briandaniel Oglesby. Listen in to hear about how this playwright and teacher uses devised theatre to create cutting edge and relevant work with his middle and high school students at Skybridge Academy.
Briandaniel’s Recommended Resources:
Commission Playwrights and Dramaturgs
JIMMY CHRISMON:
You are listening to episode nine of THED Talks with Jimmy Chrismon. THED Talks is a podcast for theatre teachers and theatre education students. Hi, I'm Doctor Jimmy Chrismon theatre education professor at Illinois State University. Each week I want to bring you stories and interviews from experienced K12 theatre teachers, current theatre education majors and professors of theatre education that will warm your heart, renew your faith in teaching and provide resources to better your practice in your theatre classroom. Thank you so much for listening. I'm excited to bring you this week's episode where I talked with Briandaniel Oglesby who teaches in a very unique situation that um, I think some of us are going to be very envious of. Uh, so hopefully you can gather some really useful things about devising theatre from what we're going to talk about today. You can always reach out and contact me via email at thedtalkspodcast@gmail.com. I always welcome feedback. I welcome your requests for things to talk about on the show, as well as if you would like to be a guest. I'm looking for guests for season two that will begin in August. So please reach out to me. Let me know if you're interested. I've already got a great lineup started and I'd love to add you to the list. You can find our show archives as well as transcripts from every episode as well as each teacher's resources that they recommend from the episode on www.thedtalks.com. I hope you'll enjoy the interview with Briandaniel. Well, I'm excited to welcome to the show this week. Briandaniel Oglesby. Um, Brian Daniel, uh, is the director of theatre arts at SkyBridge Academy in Dripping Springs, Texas. Um, so I have a lot of want to talk to you about, so why don't we just jump right in and, uh, tell me a little bit about where you teach and kind of the, the situation you're in right now with the school that you're at.
BRIAN OGLESBY:
Right on. So Skybridge Academy is progressive alt Ed. It's a, a private school in Dripping Springs. It's a suburb of Austin. I live in Austin proper about 25 miles away from the school. Our school is, it's a really, really small school it's junior high and high school and we have about 65 kids. We can grow to about 75, maybe 80 kids, but it's, it's really really, small, which means that we have a lot of one on one with the students. We don't have grades, we have narrative evaluations and we're in, our evaluations are based off of our criteria based off of our core values, which includes content mastery, what, what do you actually know, but also includes like perseverance and effort and so on. And that is, and that kind of program allows, uh, or that kind of, um, school allows for my kind of program to really thrive. The, um, the students vote on the classes except for the core curriculum and basically the classes are shaped to the people in the room. The, uh, what happened very early on was I had, I had this class I, I was hired, I was there part time. I had this production class of six kids, one of the classes I made that first semester was production and had six kids in it. And so I was looking around for like how do you find a show for six kids? And I had just graduated from an MFA program in Playwriting. This was like a sort of part time gig, um, this was the day job while I did my big kid writing. So I just started and uh, we were looking at a handful of scenes, um, because we're both the junior high and high school, like you have to look for something that's going to include both ranges, especially back that was, we had about 40, 45 kids back then, but one of the kids had like an idea for an image and I was like, I kind of want to write a play and I will write a scene based off of that image and then we'll see if the kids like it and the kids did. And then like I wrote the play with and for them using devising activities and that kind of created the program where I write the play with and for the high schoolers in the fall. And then I write the play with and for the junior high in the spring. And that just, it just sort of spiraled outward from there.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
So. So did they seek you out, uh, to come build that program?
BRIAN OGLESBY:
I was hired on vibes. Um, like, uh, what happened was, is I had a friend who was their, uh, their English teacher at the time and she knew that they were looking for a theatre teacher and she knew my, uh, my pedagogy, my approach. I was going to do a reading at the school that didn't pan out and just kind of meeting my boss. Uh, that went really, really well. And then later on I was graduating and didn't know what the next year would have for me and I, and they reached out and we had lunch. And like, there wasn't a moment in that lunch where there was a, you're hired. It was just kind of like, so we're just meeting each other and by the end of it we were talking about like what classes I would propose to the students, which is like a really good way of getting a job, I mean there's more formal process now that just happened to be a particular moment in our history when that was how we were hired or how I was hired. But my pedagogy really lined up with the school, like I'm very much learner center and I want to go and make things with the people, the room. I uh, I want the things to sort of reflect the people in the room and it's, and as a playwright, like it's what I can actually do. There are many things that I can't really teach without actually making it. Like I, I need to know how the mechanics of the, of the, of the things of the plays actually work. And the best way of doing that is actually writing it that way. I know how the characters work and so that allows me to actually teach the acting and teach all the other athletes elements of it.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
I am not a playwright. I have attempted to do that and it was very unsuccessful. I am not proud of my work at all. Um, so I am always just completely, I love hearing how playwrights work and I love, I love that good teachers who can do playwriting with their students. Well and there are, I'm sure that other teachers out there that are listening to this episode are going to be like, this man just lives in an absolute dream world that none of us do. But I know you do some really cool work with your kids. I want to dig into that a little bit if we can talk about that devising process. Um, cause I know that's a hot thing, uh, that I'm teaching at the university level. I mean I know that's a big thing in like IB theatre and all the other things that teachers want to do, but we don't know how to do it. So give me a little bit about your process and how you work with your students with that.
BRIAN OGLESBY:
So I write a play in a semester and like if you're doing a, um, and I've spent a lot, a lot of time learning how to write plays and write other things. I have spent, I went to college for 10 years for these, these things and I think there are things that I would suggest doing in miniature versus like crazy thing that I, that we do. One of the things I, I start each semester thinking about is like what is sparking for me or what is really interesting to me. I usually have an idea of some of the kids in the, in, in the who will be in the room, but not all of them. Creating plays from, from whole cloth starting from complete and complete scratch is really, really hard. And so last, this last year I wanted to focus on adaptation, which gives you a sort of a, something to sort of pin the things that you're doing to. Each process is will, will be a little bit different, but, um, I'm, I'm still speaking in abstractions. Let me get a little bit more concrete. This last semester, the things that we started with, we knew that our character would be going on a hero's journey. And the reason I, we knew that is because I had these conversations with their English teacher about like what they could be learning and, and the English teacher wanted to focus on the hero's journey and that's kind of where we sort of collided. And we knew that there was this character who had been in the two previous junior high plays, who seems to start the, the first of the plays it was called the Untitled Pirate Play by saying like, oh, I want to go on this great adventure. I want to defeat pirates and then spends most of the play hiding. Um, and I was really excited by this, like this character that was like, that um, uh, takes this heroic tropes and then doesn't actually have an impact on the plot but manages to survive this play. And then he also in the second play, he sort of gives us entry at the beginning of the second play, which is called And Then She Picks Up the Sword and then, um, uh, when the other characters and he disappear into the forest, um, for sort of Shakespeare, comedy inspired series of events. He very quickly loses his memory and like has his heart removed with like right before the climax and causes the climax in that way, but is dead for it and then come back to life. And so I was like, I really want to focus on him. Like he's the one who's connected these two, like the rule of threes, you need to have threes and this pattern. So we started with Carl, we had done some work where I was like, well, we have a, where I was looking at the different worlds that he had encountered. He had, he'd encountered this sort of fairy land at knights and princesses and Queens world. It encountered this world of pirates and Sorta, uh, and cracken, we played around with a bunch of different locations and the things that started to spark were under the sea and uh, going to space. And so I had my tech students come up with inspirational images, just basically like just come up with things that really spoke to them. Um, and so, and then what we did is we did, um, I had a couple of weeks of doing, of doing improv games to kind of get them used to building story building, um, based off of images and based off of themes. And then gave them a handful of these handful of images and we said go. And they did a basically sort of a series of scenes from half kind of a thing where they would lie, where they would see an image and they would like create something. And the things that were really sparking, we would then sort of build off of. And that essentially I attached a number of very traditional theatre games and use them to build story or apply. The kids different semesters will have different skills. Um, sometimes the kids are more, are better at creating character voices and so we do things where they were interviewing them in different character modes or doing good, bad worst. Uh, they sort of a theatre game where the, where you, where you have someone interviewing three characters and one has like a who is like a virtuous character or the other one's a bad character. And the other one that is like, we ended up going to kind of a doofy character and they'll create characters built based off of that. And then I'll have to sort of fashion the sort of the plot. And sometimes the kids are really driven towards the plot. And what we'll do is we'll do this sort of like long form improv activity where I'll give them a starting point and then point them in different directions as they're sort of building story and then have to try to figure out, okay, so these are the different characters that had started to emerge, this sort of lost child or this overbearing mother. There was some interesting things here. What can they sound like? And then what I do is I start writing the play and I go more into a playwright mode and I'll bring different scenes to class and different versions of that and then we'll read it. And then whatever is sparking the most out of those different scenes I'll just uh, lean into those and sort of build off of those. Again, it's really about like taking theatre games and applying it to building a story or kick building characters I would say. And then about six weeks and there is a play. There has to.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
So it's a, it's a, um, it's a combination of like the devising and I use quotes "process" because there are 8 million different ways to create a new work. Um, so it's kind of a combination of what is out there of this is how you devise and in traditional play writing as well, where you're bringing in, you're bringing in new work for them based on what they've done.
BRIAN OGLESBY:
So I've written a number of, I've written two of these deleted scenes for fairy tales with my junior high kids and that's a probably a more of a primer on how, on how to like directly apply devising and Improv to making a script because it's such a recognizable container that everyone in the room kind of already can understand. And so for that one is, is even better, is just an even better example. So you just like, you get a handful of people familiarizing themselves with the different, different stories you can do sort of pitches where they throw out different ideas and then they just do improv based around it. And then you just try to gather the things that are like sparking and the things that are really that really exciting and the things that are really interesting. If you have some kids with good improv skills, that's a great place to see. That is where they start. That is where things start to um, to really rise. You can, and then you sort of look at can look at what, what the pieces want to be, what they are kind of like circling around and try to build off of that. Those, that, that kernel that they're giving you.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
What do you, what do you, with your experience in doing this, what do you see as what is valuable or the benefits of doing this type of work with your kids?
BRIAN OGLESBY:
The kids get very, very, very invested. Just start that is a starting point. Like that. They feel like they have ownership in that and sometimes that that can, that can lead to problems. As you can imagine. Like a, you know, like, oh, there were some creative choices that happened into play last night. I was not expecting, oh, that kid pretended to be drunk at that time and I'm going to have to talk to. But the fact that they, that they have that sense of ownership means that they're, um, in my, in our very small school, I have these kids who really love making theatre. They make more creative choices. And again, I was, I'm a playwright and my academic background is in writing. I have some practical experience in producing some practical experience in building sets and all the other things around it. But I don't have like a deep well of training, um, to draw upon for like teaching acting. And so having kids who have a lot of ownership of these, of, of the play, um, means that they are more willing to take risks with their, as, as actors, which is really awesome. They learn about the, they experience the creative, um, both, uh, by like being a part of it. And also by witnessing me and they, you know, they see me in my, my crappy first draft. They see me as, I'm like tearing out my hair. They, they talk with me when I'm like trying to figure out something in a in and so and so is when they're, when they're doing their own creative or even just writing composition, writing essays, they can sort of draw upon that and be like, oh, this is what Brian goes through. He did it right in front of us. Like, you know that I do multiple drafts, you know, that there are like dozens and like that you have to generate a ton and ton and ton of crap before you can get to like that good thing. So just start doing it. And so, um, so that's a huge benefit. Um, the plays reflect more of their voices as well and their experiences and things that they're interested in. So we have a large number of LGBT, uh, kids in our, in our student population. And so we have a number of plays that are, that are, that are gay, um, that have gay characters in it and sometimes and while and like the first one we did that was like, it was a LGBT version of Romeo and Juliet with a 12 year olds or junior high kids. Um, and that were where it was really hinges on that later on. The latest plays that we have. It's not, it's, um, occasionally it's a plot point, but oftentimes it's just part of the landscape of the, of the, of the place that, you know, that we have, um, trans or nonbinary or, um, or gay characters. Like it's just has to be part of it because those happen to, that like, that's those are the people we got in the room. You know, it also means like, I'm not jockeying around looking for a play that fits the gender makeup of that. I assume that the kids have, I, I'm often on Facebook and these posts will be about, we need, we need, I need a play for five talented girls, three girls, additional girls, and two boys who, uh, and I'm like, I, Okay. There's always a part for any, for, for the kids. There's always a part for the kids in my plays. You know, there's some things that I sort of shape in that way too. Like I won't have a spear carrier number two unless I have a kid who is so petrified but only and wants a tiny, tiny, tiny part and like and might freak out and have an anxiety attack and disappear into a closet like, like the in which case like there will be a spear carrier number two, but everyone has something interesting to do onstage. They might not have the big part. Um, but they have something interesting to do onstage and so, and I make it and I'm able to tailor it to the people in the room. And again, like in a small school, you really have to be able to include everyone who wants to be included. And I think that's the cool thing. And like, and I hope that larger school like you can carry that philosophy of like wanting to include everyone who wants to give a piece of their lives to this part.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
Well then, like, like you just said, it goes back to that even even the spear carrier number two has invested what he wants into that piece and you, you've taken his contributions and made it a part of, of the final piece. So yeah, they feel that it's, it's theirs, they were a part of it. Yeah. You landed in this position in a very nontraditional way and you're in a very nontraditional school. Tell me maybe from the teacher perspective what you wish you had known going into a classroom.
BRIAN OGLESBY:
I had a handful of technical skills going into it before I was at Skybridge. Um, during the summers I'd make theatre with a theatre company in California called Barnyard Theatre. Um, and um, yeah, my hometown and it was like a, and it was like, it was in a barn and there was dirt floors and like we had to load in everything, every audience chair, every baton, every light, everything. So I had some, some familiarity with the producing side of things. Like how do you, how do you put a screw into a piece of wood? And there are a lot of these sort of, I really wish I had known more. Like I wish I had known more. I wish I had known how to teach it. I wish I, I realize that, um, in the last week I had this huge epiphany of that when I teach technical theatre, I need to talk, we talk about safety very much early on and we talk about, we don't talk about envisioning how things can go wrong and how do you communicate how something should be used. Realizing that that is essential to teaching technical theatre. I wish I had known that. Right. Um, I wish I had known that. Like, just, it's not just reading the play and, or creating the play and doing research and on images and then doing research on techniques to build the things you want to build or do the things you want to do. It's also putting yourself in the position of someone who is operating at an actor who has to pick it up and find it on a prop table and imagining what they're going to do when they see it. You know? And so I wish I'd known those kinds of things. There's some things that I, some psychological things with teenagers that I've had to sort of like stumble into. I can't think of any like concrete examples, but I just like kind of know that like I've, I've been learning a lot. Um,
JIMMY CHRISMON:
well the, the, the great thing about what you just said is there's no concrete thing to know about that, right? Because the teenagers are constantly changing,
BRIAN OGLESBY:
There were a lot of things that I didn't know going in, but interviewed friends about. Like how do, like how do, how does an actor work through stage fright and like rituals that we put in place. I'm like, okay, so that's a function of warm ups, not just, not just learning how to project. It's also about creating a ritual so that people have don't have, have stage fright when they go into it. Ah, I did not know that going into the room, I'm going to do, I spend my time reading plays and writing plays and seeing other people work with actors. I wish I'd known Viewpoints, I learned some things about viewpoints. And I wish I had like taken more Viewpoints, uh, stage combat in every play. I have some, I have a fight because I learned from, from my students that they really learn how to trust each other when they have some stage combat. And I know a handful of things that I keep reusing and reusing and I really wish I had more training in that because it, it really does those moments do really, really, really build trust in the room. And I think, and that's, and I think that's one of the major, major things that someone could get out of theatre is the ability to like learn how to work with each other and how to trust each other.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
So you have to have that foundation to do the work that you're doing with your kids too. Yeah. And you're not alone with the, the, the technical theatre stuff. Because most, most all the teachers that are coming out are good acting, directing teachers and they think they can do playwriting well and their theatre history, they can do that. But when we get to your building sets and you know, designing lights and costumes, I mean, goodness gracious. I, I was kicked out of the costuming shop during my Undergrad so I couldn't even thread a sewing machine. So I had to learn
BRIAN OGLESBY:
Costuming is a big black hole for me. Like I am just like, I'm going to trust other people to do it and if I need to go to a thrift shop, I will buy, I will go to a thrift shop and buy.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
Yeah. So you are not alone in that. Tell me about, um, one of your favorite one or two of your favorite stories from, from your teaching experience so far
BRIAN OGLESBY:
At Skybridge we have a sort of a capstone which is a sort of a senior thesis type thing, project. And we had this really very talented kid who's a very clearly wants to be an artist, like, like, he's uh, he's, he's very, he just makes things beautiful everywhere he goes. Like he'll just be like, he'll walk into a classroom and reposition all the books. So they look like a rainbow and you're like, okay, cool. They need to be an alphabet order. But like I love that it's beautiful. His capstone was not, was something that would have been ambitious for anyone else. It was a flower boxes of some sort, initially, and we, and the art teacher, and I like talking to her, like I think Sam needs something a little bit more ambitious. He needs a larger canvas on which to do his work. And I was like, well, I can just give him my theatre. He has, he has a 24 foot by 24 foot theatre. Like it's a very tiny space, but he can do whatever he wants as long as it follows. It has, it follows in this criteria. Like it's, like we can fit 45 chairs in there and, um, we have play space and there's an entrance and exit. And um, and so he reluctantly took it on initially you thought like he had to. Um, and it ended up being a great thing because he did this beautiful design very early on and so, and then spent the entire semester building it with this like, platoon of junior high technical theatre kids. So I'm just like, there was, they were, they would do it the entire class. He just kind of led them in building this beautiful set. And then they would often do it through, through, through, um, uh, through rec and lunch. And, uh, he wanted it to be fully immersive and it was the, and so, and it's the set that it was like rocks and flowers and, and it really reminded, and that's the one that really reminded me of like a Midsummer Night's Dream specifically and also just sort of the sort of pastoral comedies of Shakespeare. And so I ended up doing, ended with the process with that started with like looking at the image, well first it started all with me teaching the kids all like, like, or like let's create, you know, Tableau's based off of locations and the around Skybridge around the campus and then build the stories off of those tableaus. And then building and so on and so forth. And so then when we brought these skills that we created in story to the design images, and they came up with these really cool ideas and the things that we're starting to pop was a, was there a couple in there about these characters who are fleeing a wedding. They didn't want to get married. And I was like, I'm really, that's really starting to spark for me. I'm really liking these ones. And it does remind me Midsummer and also the kid, Sam, our designer, which was telling me that images would come to him in his dreams, it would be like, here's an image. So I drew this image that came to me in my dream and I'd be like, okay, cool. And so, and what I ended up doing was we ended up having this, the play. I was like, I really want this play to be fully, deeply immersive for you to go. And Sam wanted that too, for you to go into the theatre and feel like you're entering into this other land. This other magical land. And how do I do that? While also having the story, the parts of the story of where people are leaving weddings. Well I'm going to have the wedding. The first scene is going to be outside of the theatre. We have a nice sort of lunch room that looks like a living room and I'm going, we're going to decorate it as a wedding. And I was, and I had, this is awesome, like she was in junior high then, a person in my technical theatre class who loves doing props and it was like just like turn it into a wedding venue. And it was like, oh that's, that's like here's some that like, like foam wedding cakes that look realistic that she found online. Like, or like just the how to build them, she found online. So she built these things and it was beautiful. And then the princess doesn't want to get married to the prince and the prince really doesn't want to get married to the princess and they both run away from their wedding. And then, you know, there's fainting and then everyone goes into the forest and like Dorky forest, things happen. And so like for me that was just like a wonderful experience of like starting from a kid's design and trying to figure out how to inhabit that space. How and how can we create story in that space and how can we go instead of going from like a, from a play to a design, going from a design to replay and to take these ideas that the kids were sort of circling around and turn that into a story and to like not have like a, like one of those journey plays where you're going like that you're going from place to place to place, but like having sort of the kernel of that of like starting in one place, thinking that you're going to have a play out here and then finding out that it's actually in this other place and like it was, it was, that was, that was one story that I just really, really love.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
What do you see as the greatest need in your students right now and how can we as theatre teachers help them with that?
BRIAN OGLESBY:
I think the sense of being heard and being, yeah, being a, being listened to and being heard. Yes, I am the director when I'm directing the plays and I'm the playwright. When I'm writing the plays and there's a level of, there's, it's, it's still a vertical process. It's not a purely horizontal processes, it's not a democracy. But I think that's the thing that I can bring into that room is like I do listen to the kids when they have an idea, when they have a concern. For example, I had one of my experiments in this last play that I've been working on is there are a number of characters die throughout the play and, and every time they die. Um, but it takes place in space. And so there's an alien species that has a, has the belief that when you die, you relive the moment where you met the love of your life and they stand up and each character says what the moment where they met the love of their life. And then there's one character who dies. The last character who dies in the play is selected completely randomly there are five different characters it could be from. And they improvise a monologue and they can, the kid can improvise like where they met a love and it doesn't have to be romantic. It could be familial or friendship and so they can, they can improvise their, they can, they can improvise it from the character's point of view or from their own point of view. One kid always chooses her best friend and like talks about that and the other kids make up stuff and then they would leave and my idea was I wanted them to leave and then not come in for the, for the, for the bows at the very end because I think I want the audience to carry the story with them just a little bit longer. And the kids were great with the, they love the like improvising and coming up with their own, that moment for that for them. But it made them uncomfortable to like not be part of the bows at the very end. And they came up and they talked to me about that and we talked about how that some audience members would feel like, would feel worse because their kid was not coming out and some of the like and like other audience members wouldn't even like really figure it out. And like that's kind of a coded thing. And so I changed it. I was like, okay, like I think like this experiment is one that is not going to like is, is not as valuable to me. This part of this experiment is not as valuable to me as these other parts. And you have, and we, and we talked about the reasons for it and the reasons against it and they were able to sort of, articulate like that when you have a play and then you have all the characters, including the ones who left, come back on stage, that it kind of negates that, that like that that loss and there is a genuine loss. But they were able to articulate that, but they're also able to see the other and articulate their other feelings about it and like, and we're able to talk about like how the different different people would have all this. I felt, I felt really good that they came up to me and they kicked back at my choice because I knew that they were being heard. And I think if you feel like you're being, I think if you feel like you're being heard, you feel like your voice matters. I think that's important. I think that like it means that they'll feel more empowered to create their own work in the future. And that's really what we need. We need people who are creating and not just consuming. It's a great skill to have. And instead of having people who are just sitting on the sidelines being grumpy, that people are not making things for them, they make their own things. Yeah. I think feeling like you're not being heard and you're not and you don't count is really tough. I mean that, and that goes to a lot of different things. That goes to what it means to be LGBT or someone in an underrepresented community.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
I think it's a testament to the, the environment that you've created with your students in the, that you've obviously established some kind of sense of ensemble or sense of trust with them that they felt they could come to you and say that. Yeah and that you, they knew they would be heard by you. So I, I think that's just a testament of the work that you're doing with your kids. What is a resource you're currently using or have used that we need to know about?
BRIAN OGLESBY:
I would say the New Play Exchange. I think that I am always seeing people on Facebook ask about where they find plays and asking about plays and then people just recommend the same handful of plays. Oftentimes Disney Jr and I'm like, oh my goodness you guys, there are literally thousands of plays on the New Play Exchange and you can find them or you can find a playwright and playwrights want to like connect with people. They want their stuff to be produced. So I would say the New Play Exchange is like a very concrete is like a very concrete place where you can find a of plays, some of them on produced, some of them produced that are, and you can search for whatever criteria you're looking for. I would also say another resource. I would just say like, let's be honest, playwrights, playwrights are great resource. Um, I would say if you don't feel comfortable, right? Creating with your own, creating your own plays with your kids, talk to a playwright and commission a playwright if you have the money, like if you can find the money and commission a playwright. Playwrights are a lot cheaper than you realize because we want to work to be produced and like, oh here's a, here's a guaranteed production right here. Like I will whatever. What do you need? And then you also have a play that you can sell to other people. Like it's like it's, it's a great thing. I would say like that's another resource that I would highly recommend people actually consider. I would also plug dramaturgs as well. I think oftentimes there's a lot of bad dramaturgy that happens in the high school and junior high theatre world and there are people whose, who are hungry as well and would cherish the chance to have their work impact human beings out there. High School theatre is probably the most produced theatre in the country and you have a much greater impact in a much deeper impact on if you're working, if you're connecting with the high schoolers. So I think dramaturgs and playwrights could be wonderful assets to be incorporated into theatre education world.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
What are your parting words of wisdom for new teachers?
BRIAN OGLESBY:
Look for the stories that are being overlooked. Look for the people who are being overlooked. That's both. When you're looking to craft a season, and it's also what I hope you look for when you are casting or yeah, when you're, if you're in a, you're in a big high school, the kid who plays a nurse can play Juliet, you know, like the kid who plays a nurse can be the lead. And so I think look for the things that are overlooked.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
I love that. I love that so much. Well, where can we find some information about you and your plays? If we want to research a little bit more about you?
BRIAN OGLESBY:
Uh, probably my website's the best or that, uh, I will warn, there's both the stuff for teenagers and the stuff for adults on there. I, I came into this writing plays with curse words in the title. So it's briandanieloglesby.com Brian spelled with an I. Oglesby is spelled o g. L. E. S. B. Y. Briandaniel is one word. If you, if you're a new play exchange, Briandaniel Oglesby on New Play Exchange if you have an account for them. If you find me on Facebook I will totally be happy to chat unless we're in like graduation time or I'm super busy or something. But uh, my websites I try to, I try to keep it updated. I tried to put up the Po, the play is as soon as they feel like their shovel ready. Writing two plays a year for, for my kids. And then additional plays means I, I get a lot, I write a lot of plays, but it is like my day job as well. So, oh, I, there's a lot of stuff
JIMMY CHRISMON:
I've been to your website and I can attest there was a lot on there and there's a lot of good stuff on there. So, um, I hope, um, your website, we'll see a little bit more increase in traffic and uh, maybe people, some reaching out to you to, to produce some of your work. Well, thank you so much for joining me and I look forward to seeing what else you and your students do.
BRIAN OGLESBY:
Oh, it's a pleasure and thank you for having a thought space for people who make work with young people.
JIMMY CHRISMON:
I love it and I love the people who do that. So thank you for, for reaching out to me. Thank you Brian. Daniel for reaching out to me and, and wanting to share the really neat innovative things you're doing with your students at Skybridge Academy. Again, you can find his works of playwriting that he's done as well as various essays that he's written about devising theatre. And the and the playwriting that he's done on his website briandanieloglesby.com visit our website at www.thedtalks.com where you can find all the show notes and archives as well as the resource list from each teacher who's been on the show. Please go on to any of your favorite podcast providers. You can find us on Apple Podcasts on iTunes, Google Podcasts on Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, Anypod, Tunein and of course Youtube as well. Please reach out to me via email at thedtalkspodcast@gmail.com you can find us on Twitter @theatreedtalks, can find us on Tumblr at thedtalks.tumblr.com we're on Facebook at THED Talks, Instagram @thedtalkspodcast, and again, our website is www.thedtalks.com. Please go on any of your podcasts providers subscribe to the show. Rate us, give us those stars, review as tell us what you're liking and share the podcast with those teachers out there that you think could benefit from what we're doing. Thank you Joel Hamlin and Joshua Shusterman for the use of your song Magnetize. I hope you have a wonderful week. And I hope your end of the year is wrapping up really, really well. And I know you're already making plans and looking forward to a relaxing and wonderful summer when you can take time for you. Thanks for joining us this week. We'll talk to you next week.
