The Artist’s Round is a new art program where one artist is chosen by Mr. Duarte, Ms. Bradley, and Ms. Allen every month to create a piece of artwork in any style that they feel resonates with themselves and can impact the community. At the end of the school year, all the artists will come up during a Chapel and share their works. Last month’s artist Wes Lindstrom-Chalpin made a beautiful song inspired by Henry Buckley-Jones’ mural on humanity’s relationship with nature. This month, TJ Cannistraro will be making and performing a monologue based on the same mural.
When thinking about someone to create a monologue inspired by a song, TJ was the first choice that came to mind. Ms. Allen emailed him right away about this opportunity, and TJ accepted immediately, saying that he was excited to be able to stretch his creative wings with this endeavor. Since joining the school, he has done multiple plays every season and is an instrumental part of the Belmont Hill theater program. He hasn’t written many monologues himself before, so this would be the perfect opportunity for him to do it.
When asked about how Henry’s mural inspired his monologue, he said he wanted to “capture the feeling of the original artwork but maybe with my own spin on it.” He thinks that the best part of a project like this is seeing the impact each artist has on their piece and the unique ways they interact with each other. Since the monologue is still in its early stages, he wasn’t able to get too far into the content, saying that he is just going to take what comes directly to his mind when he looks at the mural and put it onto paper, since “a monologue is more poetic than prose.”
TJ is planning to write the monologue from the perspective of the fire, fighting to try and grow against the person with the hose, whom TJ plans on characterizing as the villain. He says that his idea of using the point of view of the fire is to “convey that sometimes what you see at first glance isn’t always the true story.” Looking at the mural, it’s up to the viewer to decide if it’s the fire that’s destroying, or if the hose is putting out a “spark of life”. Since he thought a lot of people would pick the person with the hose as the hero of the mural, he wanted to shed some light on the other side of the story.
So far, TJ’s favorite part in creating the monologue has been the brainstorming process. He says that it has been “very interesting and challenging, as different ideas come to life.” He has to sort through the different emotions and ideas he feels when looking at the mural and channel them with a singular purpose into the monologue. Another challenging part of the monologue will be writing as fire. It is very hard to write a monologue with the speaker not being a human, as you should be able to relate to the speaker in some way.
He has only just started to write his rough draft, but there are already many strong emotions. The struggle between the fire and the hose is already very evident in the short part that he has written, so the final version is sure to be a rollercoaster of emotions that tell the other side of the story of fire and water.
