GREENSBORO, N.C. — This year marks the third season of the Common Thread Theatre Collective, a collaboration between Davidson College and N.C. A&T to help bring together two walks of life and provide a unique experience for students.
Walker Hansen, a rising senior at Davidson, has been working with the arts since high school, on and off stage, as an intern for the sound design and lighting board operator for theater group.
“There's a lot of artistic work that goes into the technical side of theater that I think is really impressive and really important. Everything is so interconnected, and it works to make the audience feel some sort of emotion,” Hansen said.
The interns in the collective put on a production of "Fat Ham," a spin on Shakespeare’s "Hamlet," by North Carolina native James Ijames.
“It's been a great learning experience, especially working with professional actors and professional directors and tech crew,” Hansen said.
Students, professionals and professors from multiple schools in the state help put on the show, creating a once-in-a-lifetime experience and allowing the students to learn about new cultures and research opportunities and create a common goal.
“It allows you to open up more with people around you and really build community in really profound ways,” Hansen said.
"Fat Ham" discusses themes such as generational differences, masculinity and sexuality, letting those on and off stage see a version of themselves they might not normally be able to see.
“Seeing like especially Black people on stage isn't as common as I feel it should be. And I think it really invokes hope, and like I'm almost like a new goal for them to say like, hey, I can perform, too,” said Kaia Brown, a rising N.C. A&T senior in the theater group.
Brown plays Opal in the production and says she hopes seeing the show will let others follow their dreams similar to how she did after watching an all-Black cast of "Beauty and the Beast."
She says the experience allows her to interact with people she never would have been able to work with, and she directed and costumed others who don’t look like her.
“They didn't really have what I was looking for in my size, [when looking for costumes at Davidson] but I was able to find pretty much anything for the Davidson students because their clothes, I think their stuff is just a little bit smaller and a little bit less forgiving for a curvier figure. With the makeup maps, I had never done a makeup map using lighter skin, lighter than my own,” Brown said.
The eight interns also created their own children’s coloring book and play titled "Once Upon a Trial," a twist on "The Three Little Pigs."
"Once Upon a Trial" will taken place in the Paul Robeson Theatre at N.C. A&T on Saturday at 2 p.m.