This past fall, Theatre Dance Professor Shawn Womack worked with CC students and residents from two participating care facilities – MacKenzie Place and Life Care Colorado Springs, on the “Of a Time” project, to attempt to counter the restrictions on social interaction and alleviate isolation that has come about by the COVID-19 pandemic. Her project has had both extra-curricular and co-curricular components. Professor Womack noted that “This project was a direct result of the pandemic. How to build connection across different communities? Zoom was our means, of course. It felt all the more urgent when care facilities went to lockdown and students have become more isolated from one another.”

It is with this in mind, and amid a great amount of uncertainty, quarantines, shuttered campuses, and limited options to engage with others, a group of students attended one of two workshops titled “Of A Time: A workshop in Sharing Stories across Communities and Generations” in mid-September. The workshops, organized in collaboration with the CCE and BreakOut leaders, were designed to prepare and guide Professor Womack’s student how to meet with local elders over Zoom to create meaningful connections, grapple together on how to bond with others, and to share their experiences during isolation.

In her adjunct course, GS 222: “Of A Time: Sharing Stories and Creative Expression during COVID-19”, students took their Zoom meetings a step further and used them as inspiration for a creative project. Over the course of 3 blocks, students were instructed to meet with elders and then manifest their encounter using an artistic medium such as music, dance, writing, theatre, drawing, sculpture, photography, film, or digital media.

When asked about her inspiration and goals for the project, Professor Womack said “as both a CC professor and as someone who cares for a family member in a care facility, I was struck by how the pandemic was isolating yet that different generations experienced the sense of isolation differently. I witnessed both the first-year students being immediately quarantined for two weeks at the beginning of the semester after elders in my sister’s care facility had been quarantined for over five months. It occurred to me that it would be beneficial to both students and the elders to engage in conversation, to connect and share their stories across generational and institutional divides…I hoped that these conversations would, for a moment, alleviate the sense of isolation for all.”

The students who did artistic works met again after the Thanksgiving break to work out how to share their creative work back with those who had, in Womack’s words, “generously shared of themselves and their stories.”

Video or notes from the interviews are planned to be archived in CC’s Special Collections. Many thanks to Professor Womack for sharing about this much-needed work!