Collaborative Theater: Devising 101

Sacha Vega and Alyse James are leading a participatory symposium on Devised Theater. Devising is a process of sharing ideas, skills and resources and it can serve as a blueprint for how we can work together collaboratively to scheme and dream up new societal structures.

The workshop will be in two parts. First will give a background on the history of Devised Theater, our relationships to it and how we used Devised Theater to make our piece W(hite)omen which is premiering at Collective Future's Festival. In the second portion of the workshop we will give creative prompts that allow attendees to get up on their feet and begin to play with devising tools themselves.

Sacha Vega is an artist who collages movement, poetics, and humor to examine the ideologies that train bodies to move. She has presented work at New York Live Arts, Movement Research at Judson Memorial Church, Westbeth Gallery, Leslie-Lohman Museum, FringeArts, PhilaMoCA, Baxter St x CCNY, and Pelham Art Center. In 2025, she directed two evening-length works at 3AM Theatre: 1-Way Mirror, choreographed by [REDACTED], and PINCH, a trio dance-theatre work exploring safety, control, and possibility.

Vega is a 2025–2026 New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks artist and a 2026 Da Vinci Arts Alliance Collective Futures Fellow. She has participated in residencies and programs including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, New Dance Alliance’s Satellite Program, LEIMAY Incubator, Wassaic Project. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts, where she teaches media and performance courses.

Alyse James is a writer and classically trained clown who creates out of an insistent sense of curiosity and existential pondering, inspired by a deep desire to merge otherworldly cosmic clown etherealities with our everyday human failures. Their collaborative theater making and community engagement informs their socially conscious art practice. As a performer they have worked with FIFA World Cup 2026 Balich Wonder Studios, Pig Iron Theater Company, Upright Citizens Brigade and Fringe Arts. From 2024 to 2026 they were on a touring regional theater contract with Theater Unspeakable.

Their work spans clown, devised theater, original songs, plays, and poetry, often incorporating elements of the surreal and absurd. Through vivid imagery, discomfort, and vulnerability, Alyse invites audiences into layered worlds that challenge, provoke, ask rather than answer. They have an MFA in devised performance practice from Pig Iron Theater Company and are currently the collective futures fellow with Davinci Arts Alliance and the BIPOC artist in residence at Mascher Space. As of fall 2026 they are a first year student at Hollins University’s MFA in Creative Writing program with a poetry emphasis.

The Parallel Play Symposium, presented as part of the six-week Collective Futures festival, is a two-day gathering of artists, scholars, organizers, and cultural workers exploring the practices, histories, and conditions that sustain collective cultural production. Through free panels, workshops, and performative presentations, participants will examine the cultural significance of collective art-making and artist-run spaces while sharing strategies for building and maintaining collaborative cultural infrastructures.

Organized around thematic tracks—including How To: Collective Tools & Tactics, Relational Infrastructures, “Have You Seen the ___?”: Memory and Collective Spaces, and Playground: Place, Ecology & Entanglement—the symposium will feature workshops, panels, performances, and conversations presented by ATUOMAT Collective, Luster Gallery + Studio, Obvious Agency, Vox Populi, Termite TV Collective, All Mutable, FORTUNE, FJORD, Big Ramp, Da Vinci Art Alliance, cinéSPEAK, Practice Gallery, and many other collaborators.

Registration is required for each session.