By Esther Ho
In January, UC Santa Barbara students wearing long-haired wigs staged a protest, yelling on campus while waving spray painted posters. The students were bringing a contemporary spin to the now-classic hippie-era musical HAIR.
Written and set in 1968, HAIR conveys the reality of life in the late 60s when the population was grappling with a compulsory draft for the war in Vietnam. When it opened, the play was controversial, depicting the drug use, free-love, and a love-hate relationship with the country. Now, 50 years later, the musical is more timely than ever.
Mikayla Knight, a UCSB third year Feminist studies major with a minor in both Theater and Professional Writing, is the current president of Shrunken Heads, a student run musical theater society.
Behind the scenes of the production was Mikayla Knight, a third year Feminist Studies major who is doing a minor in both Theater and Professional Writing, with an emphasis on LGBTQ rights and issues. Knight has helped direct multiple musicals, including HAIR.
She has also performed a piece on sexual assault during the annual production of The Vagina Monologues and Herstories, a performance that deals with various aspects of the feminine experience. Knight is the current President of Shrunken Heads, an entirely student run musical theater society, that seeks to utilize theater and art not only as a mode of expression, but also as a platform for human rights activism, and to spread awareness about pressing social and political issues. She recently spoke about her work.
Q. How did you start out in theater and how has it shaped you?
A. I was eight years old when I first started out. I originally began with dance and community theater, then applied for a musical theater conservatory school, which is a sort of charter school. From there I worked alongside Broadway artists and did concerts and shows. Theater has shaped and influenced my life in a lot of ways because a lot of the decisions I’ve made has revolved around how I’m going to continue to make theater a part of who I am.
Q. Where do you think the intersection of art and theater is, and how does it play a role in generating social change?
A. Art is a mode of expression that is unique in that you can combine different aspects of things that you care about and assemble them to create something beautiful, or to hold a mirror to society. There’s a quote that I once saw and am now obsessed with, “Art should comfort the disturbed, and disturb the comfortable” and this really resonates with me. With theater, there’s a level of human interaction that you don’t get from, I think, almost any other form of art. You’re all there, breathing the same air, experiencing the same story, whether or not you are the director, a performer, or an audience member. There’s something so beautiful about assembling a group of people for a couple of hours and feeling this wide range of emotions. I think that’s really powerful.
Q. What does being a theater minor mean to you and why is it important?
A. I mainly focus on theater and community which I treat as theater as activism, or applied theater. It can be defined as theater in nontraditional spaces or ways. For me, it’s so important because it takes that beautiful intensity that theater provides in connecting with one another and gives voice to a marginalized community. We can create platforms for any marginalized community that usually doesn’t have a voice, hear and share their stories and essentially place them into the master narrative.
Q. I know that the LGBTQ community is something that you are heavily involved in. Can we chat a little about the question of gender and its reinvention in the 21st century and how that has influenced how you direct?
A. Well, for example, with the musical HAIR that we put on earlier this year, we brought in contemporary politics and incorporated that into the show. It takes place in 1968 where we see topics that were taboo then, as they still are now unfortunately, such as a movement for free love and civil rights. In the final moments of the show we chose to represent how those issues parallel. For example, we had the actors hold up posters advocating things like free love, and on the flip side of it, we had ‘trans-rights’ or ‘human-rights’. Showing that these issues still exist today shows that we can continue to keep evolving but there’s always going to be another thing to fight for. As someone who identifies as a feminist and part of the queer community, it’s important to keep revealing that to society.
The actors of UCSB’s musical production HAIR, put on earlier this year, posing with signs advocating for free love and trans rights to promote what the musical stands for.
Putting myself in my artwork tends to be my own way of generating change. This year in Vagina Monologues, I wrote and performed my own piece about my experience as a survivor of sexual assault which is something I never thought I would be able to do or ever be able to talk about. Then, at intermission, a woman in her 60’s came up to me, crying, and told me that I told her story. This was a moment where I was like, ‘Oh God, this is what I have to do.’ Even if it’s painful or revealing, it’s important that someone is out there telling these stories and I don’t see why that shouldn’t be me.
Esther Ho is a Junior at UCSB majoring in Communication.