All Hands on Deck

Sit-In gathers artists from all corners for the ultimate stage to screen collaboration

STORY BY Sally Henry Fuller

IMAGES PROVIDED BY Palette Group

Sometimes when options become limited and it looks like the desired result is impossible to achieve, that’s when innovation happens. For the Alliance, that’s exactly how today’s version of Sit-In came to be.

“It’s been a wild journey,” says Christopher Moses, the Alliance’s Dan Reardon Director of Education. “About five years ago, the High Museum and the Alliance were talking about this collaboration around a children’s picture book exhibit that would chronicle the Civil Rights Movement both historically, what happened in Atlanta, and where we are in the world today. And we’ve been doing these collaborations [with the High Museum of Art] around children’s picture book art for a number of years. This was kind of like a dream project of all of ours.”

Fittingly for a dream project, the High Museum entitled their exhibition portion, which was on display through November, Picture the Dream.

While the Alliance had adjusted their Sit-In plan from a June 2020 run to a streamed staging that fall, safety concerns about getting a cast together to rehearse meant they had to scrap even their backup plan. Simultaneously, the subject matter seemed more timely than they had anticipated.

“We had two choices, one of which was to shelve the project and wait,” shares Moses. “But while this was happening, our entire country started really having a reckoning around social justice and racial equity. And we thought that we had a responsibility to tell this story now. It’s been in the works, and we thought this could really be a fantastic way for students, young people, and families to have real dialogue about what’s going on.”

As creative gears started turning, the team came up with the idea to turn a High MuseumAlliance Theatre collaboration into an allhands-on-deck artistic collaboration with the Palette Group, a production company based in New York City that specializes in film, design, and marketing.

“It just got crazier and more fun because none of us had ever done this before. So we were inviting new types of collaborators on board, working with filmmakers, illustrators, animators, and theatre people,” he says, adding that they also had some “dynamite original music” written for the piece. “It’s just become a really new way of storytelling that’s so exciting

for all of us.”

It might sound like this means the Alliance has opened up an animation studio, but Moses says this venture is not exactly a traditional animated movie.

“It’s not like veering totally into film,” he explains. “There are people who’ve done and can do that much better and have decades of experience and far more resources. But we asked ourselves, what can we take from what we know about good storytelling in the theatrical world? What happens when we collide that with people who work in film and animation?”

“[Playwright] Pearl Cleage didn’t write a screenplay; she wrote a play and we wanted to honor that. So it really does have this feeling of theatrical animation,” Moses says, adding that like a play, this piece places a heavy emphasis on the written word. “And it’s new to [the filmmakers] too. They’re learning a new vocabulary. They’re working with artists like Pearl Cleage and [director] Mark Valdez, who have spent their entire careers in the theatre thinking about character and story from a different way than they normally would. So it’s really this interesting new collaboration.”

Rounding out the creative team throughout workshops last year were some small but essential team members: third grade students.

“[Children] are going to let you know immediately how they’re feeling, which is why we brought in classrooms of third graders early on in the process to get their feedback and really listen to how they’re interacting with the

story,” the education director shares. “That has become part and parcel for developing new work. We want that target audience in the room. [Author] Andrea Pinkney is an expert facilitator with young people, so she and Pearl led a conversation afterwards that really led the way for what the next revision was going to be because we found out where they had questions, where they were curious, and what they were thinking about in their own contemporary world. That was enormously helpful.”

With the approval of the target demographic, the Alliance team is hopeful about the potential reach of this piece.

“While it’s definitely an Atlanta story and is rooted in our city, it has national appeal. So there’s a chance to get this out to communities that never would have traveled to the Alliance Theatre. It ties so directly into the curriculum for fourth and fifth graders that we think this could have lasting resonance year after year, which is something we never would have thought of. I think it’s forcing us to rethink what’s possible.”

So can we expect to see more animated shorts from the Alliance? Moses says it is a possibility.

“I certainly would not count out trying to do something else in this vein, even when we can get back to producing like we want to. What this really affords us is an opportunity to rethink access to our work. Normally we are hemmed in by a four week run and a limited number of seats. But we can run this for as long as we want to. There’s no limit on how many people can see it.”