As the pandemic continues, artists are finding new and creative ways to express their own views as traditional American societal values seem to be undermined and reshaped. Speaking from her own experience, Harvard artist Devonne Pitts ‘21 talks about her experience during the pandemic as a director and a writer. Currently a senior in the college studying Theater, Dance, and Media as well as History and Literature, specifically looking at how gender and sexuality intersect with critical race theory, her academic schedule in concurrence with her extracurricular background attests to her ability as an artist, displayed in her works that we have attached below. Outside of school, Pitts is very involved in arenas where she can express and learn more about the processes of directing and writing. Initially getting her love for art from her mother’s creative personality, the duo discovered a shared music and movies together which empowered her to begin this self exploration of expressing herself through different artistic mediums. As she and her mother watched movies together, her love for film organically led into a love of theater with movies such as West Side Story and The Wizard of Oz. In time, she embraced roles as an actor, director, and screenwriter which she now uses to progenerate her unstinting artwork. Below was our conversation where I learned about her creative process, growth in her work, and its influence on herself. Finally, she gave some background information on two of her pieces. I hope you enjoy learning about Devonne as much as I did.
How did you get into art and how was your creative process formed? What is that process?
I grew up in an artistic household in the way that my mom is very artistic and does a lot of things with her hand. She is also a seamstress so she was always sewing things and creating. So, I always grew up in a creative environment. I would say music and movies are the two main art forms that my mom and I shared for a really long time until we started to get into new art forms. That’s where I think my love of theater grew from because I remember some movies we would always watch would be musicals. Then in high school, there was a requirement to take one artistic class, so [from] there, I went into acting, which started to make me think about Shakespeare and it kind of bloomed from there. A modern equivalent of my situation would be Troy Bolton from High School Musical. In high school I actually played sports all of my life and then took one acting class and was sucked into it and loved it.
Did you find an intersection between sports and acting?
It was actually a very smooth transition because I did sports all my life and the one time I decided I wanted to do theater extracurricularly, I applied to assistant direct a show that our teacher was directing. It was a show called Ragtime, and it was a huge musical that went out in the winter. This made me skip softball preseason. I thought about playing softball at Harvard but after joining theater here I realized it’s pretty much a sport on its own once you get into the thick of it. I think the ending of high school ushered me out of the sports phase and into the theater phase, and when I got to college, I realized there was so much I did not know about the craft. I knew that I wanted to direct because I knew I could assert my own artistic thought. I knew that, as a freshman on campus, you also have to become accustomed to the scene that you will be doing work in. So, I kind of put myself on this mission to learn all that I could about theater and theater at Harvard. So, I did that for about two years and didn’t direct my first show until my sophomore spring called For Color Girls that is a staple for black women who do theater. I did all kinds of theater after that. I acted in things, light designed for a show, tech directed, and built the sets for a few productions. I was on the board of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club just to learn everything I potentially could about theater. I was able to intern on a show and really got to sit in contact with a professional director and learn how they were doing things. It was just about getting familiar with the class. At the same time, I was also taking writing classes at Harvard which included playwriting classes and another creative writing course. At the same time, I was also focusing on academic writing skills but then extracurricularly asking myself how I could become a better minded theater practitioner in order to become a better director.
You said you were inspired through this love of music and movies with your mom at a young age but you were more recently inspired by theater to take ownership of your own productions. When would you say you feel that you transitioned into someone who would consider themself as an artist?
I think there are two separate tracks for the two parts of myself being an artist. I do see myself as a director and writer. The acting part is there and I do it for fun, but I don’t think of myself as a director, writer, and actor.
As a writer, I think that realization came much sooner. I have been writing since I was seven years old. In all reality, I used to write song lyrics all the time and short stories when I was bored in class. I realized I wanted to do something with writing in my life really early on. Directing, however, I didn’t know it was a thing until high school. I think after coming to college and really working in that environment did I realize that it was something I really wanted to do. I probably didn’t think of myself as a director until I had a directing credit under my belt sophomore spring.
So, while producing this show before you felt like an artist, what was that “grey area,” like when you had to play the role of a director but you didn’t necessarily feel like you were one?
It was very hard. Kind of an origin story, one thing I credit as being very helpful in making that decision and making moves towards getting out of that grey area was Dead Poet’s Society for the first time. There’s this resounding calling to seize the day; Robin William’s character teaches his students to appreciate art and its place in the world. So I am sitting here, as a student thinking about what I want to do. I watched that movie and, in conjunction with some other things in my life, it led me to realize that art is something that speaks to me and is something I get a lot of pleasure out of in life. So, I started thinking about what I have done so far and what I liked about it. Then, taking my previous experiences from writing, community theater, and my high school, I extracted the pieces that I liked the most and did them all. So the first thing I did was audition for a show to help me get in like I did in high school and, through classes, I learned theory and how to go from scenes to a full show.
How has embracing yourself as an artist influenced your own work?
I definitely feel like it has changed my work. I take myself more seriously now that I have confronted my initial insecurities. On the other hand, I don’t try to take myself too seriously. I don’t try to discredit anything I write as childish. I decided that, now that I am a writer, anything I direct, anything I write, lives within the vein or the journey that I see myself as an established director or writer. It is all part of that journey so that it is something of value and something I shouldn’t discredit—taking that sense of consciousness toward the work I’m doing. I can’t pinpoint a precise thing that it has changed in my work. but I think it allows me to grow as an artist.
Would you mind going through your work?
Yeah, I’d love to talk about Untitled. Both represent two various ways I think about the way I create art.
Untitled I wrote in a tizzy. One day—actually the day after the Minneapolis unrest and the night before police stations were burned down, so obviously lots of social unrest. So, the next morning I was in the social media world, watching the news. This resounding question of every scenario people were playing out in their heads and voicing on most platforms unsettled me because no one is talking about how further unrest would result in the cost of human life. That was my biggest question. And obviously my own personal dually inculpable views of first living in the United States and having to grapple with these issues being a black woman as well. So I wrote that poem because one, I never engage publically through my art with something that was on my mind by the way of civil unrest. So, that’s where that one came from. In terms of inspiration, I keep coming back to this question of our collective confrontation with our mortality and how that is a key part of any question we have about how race or sexism operates in this country. No one wants to address the key parts of our problem, so that has been on my mind lately.
First Burn is more lighthearted. That was something as an artist I decided—that I wanted to create something very visually appetizing. During quarantine, it was a challenge. I definitely have to credit Ryan Chester ’20 who edited the entire video. I was consulting him through multiple drafts, but he was huge on the tech side, so I would definitely like to give a big kudos to him. In terms of the visual aspect of it, everyone filmed it on their own phones. Ryan helped coordinate how everyone filmed and used his camera terminology to work through that component. As a director, it was important how it looked. It was a component I wanted to be at the forefront of it. It also gave me an opportunity to experiment with visuals in an environment where you normally can’t do as much as we would like, but we still wanted to make something that you would traditionally see, including framings and other music video aesthetics. So, there is a visual continuity. We also had to work with what people had from lighting possibilities to costumes and backgrounds. It becomes a puzzle piecing things together and seeing how we could piece everything together. In those constraints, we probably had to be more creative in how we put that together.
Untitled
When you are born amongst the catacombs no vision of death is peaceful
no vision of death is isolated
I have often wondered
what I would do
what I should do
if I ever found
death at my doorstep
shrouded in the pale myth of safety
I hope that I will not stay quiet
I hope that I will not die doing nothing out of fear of dying from doing something Because even in silence
those violent visions come to fruition
They have not yet come for my throat
But they have still managed to stifle my words Even as I write this now
I am still silent
There are some pains
Too bloody to articulate
Too wretched to fathom
Until they are lived
Featured image from First Burn music video.