![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/files\/2018\/05\/IMGP9489-300x199.jpg\")
<\/a>That inspiration carried her through her undergraduate years, all the way to her honors thesis. At the end of her junior year, the theater director announced that students would have the opportunity to write and act in a devised play, and Parham wanted to participate. \u201cI thought \u2014 I\u2019m not going to have time because of the thesis, but I talked to the director and realized I could write a thesis about doing this<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\nDevised theater begins with an inspiration \u2014 an event, a text, a piece of art \u2014 and creators develop a story and show around that inspiration. The theater students at Oregon State, under the mentorship of Professor Elizabeth Helman, began with Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s Letters to a Young Poet<\/i>. \u201cIt\u2019s perfect for college students in the arts. It\u2019s all about finding yourself as an artist,\u201d Parham says.<\/p>\n
Equipped with inspiration and a name, The Upward-Beating Heart<\/i> (which comes from a sentence in one of Rilke\u2019s letters), Helman held auditions in fall term in which interested students had to create a short performance piece of two to three minutes based on a quote from Rilke and participate in a group exercise. Helman selected 11 students to be involved in the play, and Parham was one of them. Over winter break, the students studied Rilke\u2019s work, and in the first few weeks of winter term, they analyzed the work letter by letter, discussed themes and meanings across different translations and wrote personal reflections on their explorations.<\/p>\n
Students pitched different ideas for the subject of the show, a context in which to ground the ideas from Rilke\u2019s letters. They found something that resonated in the Spanish Civil War. The oppression of intellectuals and artists during this time spoke to both Rilke\u2019s encouragement of the young poet to develop true artistic expression and the political and cultural climate of the present day. \u201cLooking back,\u201d Parham says, \u201cthe auditions were two days before the election; we found out the result around the same time as our results, and we began writing around the time of the inauguration. It was perfect. There was nothing else we could have done.\u201d<\/p>\n
Parham\u2019s thesis addresses the process of writing a devised show, particularly the way that personal, political and current events affect the creation of a devised play. She researched past students\u2019 creative thesis projects to survey ideas for structuring her own.<\/p>\n Parham says the writing process of the thesis has been a challenge, particularly in the midst of another engineering internship and classes. She would come home with two more hours of schoolwork and didn\u2019t necessarily want to write. \u201cBut it was easier because it was something I was passionate about. I could spend hours talking about the play,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n The most memorable moment in this project, Parham says, was \u201cwhen we performed and got standing ovations \u2013 seeing that people really like the play, the fact that we could create something that had a positive response.\u201d She also remembers vividly the exciting process of creating the characters with other cast members. After one particular development in the story of the character who would become her role, Ana, she thought, \u201c\u2018I definitely want to play her \u2014 I am<\/i> her!\u2019 Getting to perform as someone you helped create was amazing.\u201d<\/p>\n Overall, pursuing both of her passions enriched her college experience in unique ways, and she plans to continue cultivating both. \u201cI want to try to keep doing theater for the rest of my life. I don\u2019t know if I could\u2019ve gotten through engineering without theater, or theater without engineering.\u201d Annie Parham, who graduated this winter from the Honors College with a degree in civil engineering, will transition this spring into a full-time position as a structural engineer with CH2M Hill in Portland. But she\u2019ll bring another passion with her: theater. During her years at Oregon State, she\u2019s performed in shows almost every term. \u201cI\u2019ve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8345,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1205,1306,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stories","category-student","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8345"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3006"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8890,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3006\/revisions\/8890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/files\/2018\/05\/fullsizeoutput_8ac0-199x300.jpeg\")
<\/a>The group studied the history, issues and conflicts of the Spanish Civil War period, ultimately creating six stories with eleven characters and incorporating student-composed music. \u201cThe whole process of working with eleven different people from different backgrounds and the very intense ethical and political discussions we had came out in the writing. It\u2019s about artists being oppressed by a government that doesn\u2019t want their voices heard, so it was specific for us but also globally relevant.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/files\/2018\/05\/IMGP0839-300x199.jpg\")
<\/a>And her theater-centered thesis inspired her to possibly pursue graduate school as she continues her engineering work with CH2M Hill. \u201cI wasn\u2019t planning on going to grad school, but now, I think maybe I could do it. I had a glimpse into writing a thesis, and next time, I could see myself writing a technical thesis. The honors undergraduate thesis is such a great opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"