My City February 2023

She and Flint Rep Artistic Director Michael Lluberes got together and created the Flint Mural Plays. “We came up with a way to tell stories during lockdown,” she recalls. “It was a by-and-for community endeav or on an epic scale. We partnered with neighborhoods, organizations, playwrights and actors to get it done.” Currently, Haley is working on pro ducing another site-based perfor mance project at a library in Flint. In her own innovative style, on February 17, Haley will direct her stu dents in the opening performance of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime” at UM-Flint Theatre. With the help of projection designer Alison Dobbins, it will feature a re imagined setting in an effort to merge the 3D world with the digital world. “I am fascinated with immersive dis plays such as the recent Van Gogh ex hibit,” she says. “We will be fusing the “For me, it was never about money or being famous. It was about telling stories together with people and for people.”

PHOTOS BY SCOT ORSER

winning Michigan Wilde awards for her performances in “The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds”, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, and as Jaques in “As You Like It”. It is as an actor that she feels most comfortable; but it is as an educator and theatre-mak er that she feels the biggest sense of purpose. “Theatre-making is a relatively new term. A theatre-maker is one who finds a story with other people in unconventional ways. It is different from a playwright,” she explains. “An actor’s task is to ignite a character in a story.The director ignites the story for the audience, and the theatre-maker finds the story through a process of collaboration.” In 2007, Haley devised a series of small vignettes with her students using the grand fountain in Down town Flint as a setting and the project serves as a perfect example of theatre-making. Together, they uncovered and devised the stories

in the location and presented them to the public. “Theatre without an audience is just rehearsal – it needs the witness and the performers feed off the energy,” she adds. After that, Haley continued to push the possibilities for theatre in Flint. Along with her students, she devised the nationally-recognized “Glen wood: Restoration of the Spirit” performance project taking place at Glenwood Cemetery and, in 2014, the “9x Nourished” performance project at the Flint Farmers’ Market with FYT. “It was about coming together in an unconditional setting, finding and telling a story,” Haley states. “It’s about being in the 3D world and connecting to others.” When the pandemic hit in 2020, Haley contemplated the future of her medium. “What does theatre need to do in the digital world to distin guish itself ?” she asked. “Innovation and new ways of telling stories have always been important to me.”

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