We recently connected with Joanna Syiek and have shared our conversation below.

Joanna, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Do you think your parents have had a meaningful impact on you and your journey?

My parents really supported my creativity and curiosity from an early age. I think they realized that songs, music, dancing, and theatre lit me all the way up and they really leaned into finding and creating experiences to help nurture that joy. (I also think I dropped a few breadcrumbs that creative pursuits > sports in my early years. See: most of my soccer games around age 4 included me foraging flowers and creating daisy chain crowns on the sidelines vs. caring too much about where the ball was).

One of the greatest gifts they gave my brother (a fabulous musical theatre actor/writer) and me was building us a stage in our East Coast basement when we were young. This opened up a whole world of putting on shows for friends and family, looping those friends/families into productions, and sparked my interest in directing shows (thanks a million to my brother who would put on entire renditions of full productions on a casual Tuesday with me). They fully “yes and”‘d the spark, and in so doing, helped to stoke a wonderful, glowing fire of creativity that all of us in our family felt safe and comfortable to explore and enjoy. I’m grateful for them and their support every day.

Joanna, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a new works and musical theatre director based LA who founded a theatre company (Color and Light Theatre Ensemble) dedicated to exploring new voices and iconoclastic theatre. I have a decade of experience cultivating an artistic community, partnering with various LA venues, creating teams, and mounting productions that lead to sold-out theatrical runs and extensions. I specialize in new works, musical theatre, and reimagined stories.

I founded a theatre initiative committed to performing contemporary works that allow us to better examine the world in which we live. I love bringing a wild idea from page to stage, and have a soft spot for pieces that mesh historical retellings with a rock score. You can learn more here: https://www.colorandlighttheatre.com/joanna-syiek

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Support each other and support the arts. This means seeing fellow theatremakers’ shows, showing up for musicians’ concerts, taking in art in galleries and on the streets, and finding ways to nurture your own creativity too. I’m a firm believer that everyone is creative, at least in some way, and that our society would thrive if it made things easier for artists and creatives to exist and share their work.

There are so many figures on why supporting the arts is vital to us and I’ll just drop a few of these here:

– The arts allow for positive ripple effects. University of Pennsylvania researchers have demonstrated that a high concentration of the arts in a city leads to higher civic engagement, more social cohesion, higher child welfare, and lower crime and poverty rates.

– The arts improve your health. Almost one-half of the nation’s health care institutions provide arts programming for patients, families, and even staff because it is proven that these programs because of their healing benefits to patients — shorter hospital stays, better pain management, and less medication.

– The arts make you smarter. Students with an education rich in the arts have higher GPAs and standardized test scores, and lower drop out rates — benefits reaped by students regardless of socio-economic status. Students with 4 years of arts or music in high school average 100 points higher on the verbal and math portions of their SATs than students with just one-half year of arts or music.

In order for us to create an even more thriving ecosystem, we need to ensure our local and U.S. government programs continue to support the arts and remove barriers to entry (economic, societal or otherwise). The Arts and Cultural Production Satellite Account from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) reported that arts and culture economic activity in 2021 represented $1.02 trillion, up 13.7 percent year on year.

The arts help us to build bridges between divisive ideas, and create a solid meeting place to exchange ideas and change minds. Creative pursuits can sometimes be considered a nice-to-have, but they are actually vital to our survival in difficult times and bring us together across ethnicities, religions, age groups and more.

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

A few books and videos which I will heartily recommend:

The Empty Space (by Peter Brook)
Kazan on Directing (by Elia Kazan)
Gilbert’s Ted talk on listening to your creativity (https://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_your_elusive_creative_genius?)

Also, Fractured Atlas is a wonderful resource for getting started with your creative pursuits. And I absolutely love their vision = “to create a world where all artists have the tools they need to make their creative dreams a reality.”
(https://www.fracturedatlas.org/)

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.colorandlighttheatre.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/colorandlighttheatre/

Image Credits
Image Credits: Martha Thatcher, Shea Donovan, Peyton Crim, David Bazemore