After more than a year and a half of the COVID-19 pandemic, the teams behind Spectrum Theatre Company’s Firelight Festival of Devised Work projects knew the Northwestern community needed two things: joy and healing. 

Firelight Festival is comprised of two devised shows, “Project Heal” and “Project Joy,” which means directors and casts wrote them collaboratively. “Project Heal” goes up Friday and Saturday at 5 p.m. in Norris University Center, and “Project Joy” will go up Saturday at 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. in Shanley Pavilion. 

“Project Heal,” directed by Communication junior Joyce Pu, explores themes of loss and grieving during the pandemic. As an international student from China, Pu experienced the pandemic in two countries and was intentional about including international student collaborators in the show.

Through research, interviews and art-making, Pu and the cast created an interactive, movement-based play. Pu conducted research over the summer on loss during COVID-19, and she brought it to the cast as a jumping-off point. 

“Structure-wise, I would tell the cast I was coming in with a skeleton of this house, and we’re going to build this house together,” Pu said. 

The show does not follow a concrete plot, instead focusing on individual stories tied together by the experience of grieving. 

“Project Joy,” directed by Weinberg sophomore Victoria Grisanti, took a somewhat different approach to devising. 

Similar to Pu, Grisanti researched over the summer to prepare for rehearsal. She said she read scientific articles on joy as well as “The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World” by the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu and Douglas Carlton Abrams. Grisanti also watched lots of joy-related TikToks. 

“We were looking at joy as a very broad, encapsulating feeling that doesn’t have to just mean ‘happy’ and can hold a lot more than that,” Grisanti said.

When the cast came together in the fall, it wrote a narrative-driven play, drawing on its own experiences. 

The story follows a girl named Lily as she packs up her childhood bedroom and reflects on moments of joy brought up by different items of clothing she tries on. The cast members reenact each moment, in all of its complexities.

“We would start with an idea for what a memory might look like, like coming home for Christmas, and then we play with it,” said Communication sophomore Maggie McKenna, one of the “Project Joy” cast members. “Then we took that and what we learned from that and we wrote a script, each of us contributing different sections.”

Spectrum Theatre Company has produced a devising series for several years. Pu, who is also the company’s literary manager, said the board prioritizes devising because it sees collaboration as an important part of theatre-making. 

While the two projects this year took on different directions and tones, both teams focused their energies on creating shows around what they thought audiences needed this fall.

“It’s important to have a communal response to this communal trauma that we’ve all gone through,” Pu said. “I really don’t think there’s another better way to do it other than devising: we get up and get a group of student artists to make art together in response to something.”

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