Jen Moore is an actor and musician who has been involved with Freehold since Engaged Theatre’s 2020 production of Auntie Val. We sat down with Jen to talk about the music she makes, the creative challenges of engaging with other cultures’ music and art, and the deeply personal nature of her involvement in hidden/current, a play written by and featuring an international cohort of artists that investigates gender-based violence across cultures.

 

Before we start, can you talk just a little bit about your acting journey?

I still don’t know exactly if I’m an actor, but Robin [Freehold Artistic Partner Robin Lynn Smith] approached me in 2020 about scoring a play, “Auntie Val,” with Freehold. I said yes. I’d never scored a play. I hadn’t acted since elementary school. A couple years later, I did another production with Freehold—”The Pericles Project”—and that’s when I started acting with Freehold. I don’t have training in acting, but I love a challenge, especially an artistic one. 

I also work with another theater called Ase theater. It’s theatre in the African continuum. It’s approached a little bit differently than [Western] theater. In this form, the artist is asked to bring their full selves to the production, and a lot of the work is done collaboratively. 

What’s struck me the most about all of these experiences is that theater is so involved and so detailed, and there’s so many different moving parts. And it’s a medium of human growth. Theatre is a place where you can transform yourself through the process of being a part of it. So that’s been my journey so far. It’s a short one, but it’s been a deep one.

 

Would you mind talking a little bit about the correlation between music and theater, and how those two mediums interact with each other?

Absolutely! I kind of have different limbs in terms of music. I score for theater. I produce music, I engineer and I play instruments. I never know what to call it [genre-wise]. It’s really eclectic. It’s a mix of a lot of stuff. I play acoustically, I play electric, I also DJ. I think my musical approach has just been, first and foremost, to not let anything stand in the way of making the music. The resources you use—what you have access to—you create sounds with, create instruments. I have an appreciation for hip hop and that technology of music was very much born out of necessity. So distinctions I used to make in my mind about, “Okay, you play instruments, and then there’s DJing, and then there’s other stuff,” and they’re separate things. I just don’t see it that way anymore. I think [with] the tools you have, we can make music with anything. 

I think [my music] lends itself to theatre. It lends itself to film. I think of music as storytelling, and there are arcs, and so it’s not necessarily following musical formulas, but more of a poetic transmission of a story. 

I’m also finding ways that working with music in theatre is very different from working on your own music. It’s way more collaborative in such an awesome way.

At times it can be more stressful because there is an objective, a sound, an emotion being evoked. And I appreciate the challenge of that. Figuring out how to mesh how you move and how you sound with the objective of a given production is a really big challenge, but a welcome one. I’m learning continually through this process, working with other musicians and seeing how they work, and their mastery of what they’re doing. 

This is quite an ambitious project that spans continents and cultures. How do you think about creating music for something that’s so big, that encompasses so much?

So, with going to South Africa last year, it was actually my second time there. I went there many years ago, when I was 21 and in college. It’s been almost 20 years now since that first trip. And speaking to the transformative power of theatre, being able to return last year, 17,18, years later, to be working on this project—shining light on the global issue of gender based violence—I couldn’t have pictured it on my first trip there. 

And I had been wanting to go back all of these years. So what I felt was that I had been called back ancestrally through this work to make right on the land, to do meaningful work on the land and meaningful work with the people. Not to get too in the clouds about it, but I believe that it sets things right inside of ourselves, inside of our families and our lineages, when we’re able to do certain kinds of work. So in that way, going to South Africa did feel like a return, but also in this incredible new way. 

The musical approach, for me, was really overwhelming, to be honest. I was nervous about my skill level. I was nervous about engaging with other cultures’ music and art, and not wanting to be appropriative or extractive. And I really voiced all of that. I didn’t hold it in. I just said, “This is where I’m at with stuff.” And we worked with what we had. 

I think what we were able to do with the artists from here and from South Africa was to create a kind of communal container for us to be in. Relationships [were] built. Certain levels of artistic trust were built, and there’s a deeper understanding of how we are exchanging culturally, inside and outside of the production. So I think in a way, you have this final thing at the end that people come and they see, and they like it or they don’t like it. But the process of transformation is happening from the second that the seed of an idea is in the playwright’s mind. There is something that is morphing and changing. 

In that way, this process of storytelling is reflecting a part of the desired outcome, which is this ability to ask ourselves questions about ways of being that we’ve agreed to that maybe aren’t in our highest good. And to bring a voice to something that is so pervasive and so loud in people’s lives, but often has no voice in terms of everyday conversation. 

Speaking with people here or in South Africa, folks that I’ve just met who are asking what I’m doing, I let them know about the project. There isn’t a person I’ve met who hasn’t said, “Oh, that needs to happen.” Or “I’m so glad, because where I’m from, nobody talks about this, but it’s happening all the time.” I think there’s a hunger for light to be shed.

Is there something specific that you are hoping people come away from the play with? Will people come away with different things depending on where they are in their life? How do you think about that? 

In the year leading up to our first trip there, Robin and I had a lot of talks around this very idea of: what is the goal? And how do we present this in a way that doesn’t wrap it up in a bow; that challenges, but also moves with respect for the places and the cultures we’re moving through. I think [the goal is] creating space for questions to be asked within yourself, amongst one another, questioning a way of moving within one’s own life or within the world that we’ve been reared in. There might not even be language for it. How do you begin to question something you don’t have language for? 

I think a really big part of it is, for anyone who sits down to view this production, are there points that they can see themselves reflected? We’re dealing with archetypes in a way, the idea of victims and aggressor, and attempting to complicate the narrative a bit. So how do we tell the truth about the gravity of situations like this, and also say everyone involved has a depth to them, and that in situations with violence, even the aggressor is a victim of it. What is it then, in storytelling, to present this, to not beat people over the head with it, but to create opportunities for pondering, for question?

Something that was big for me was wanting people to be able to access the story, regardless of what they do after. In the most perfect world, someone may see this and be able to transform their life through it. But we know from the data, that that often doesn’t happen. And the reality of people freeing themselves from situations of communal or familial violence is there’s a lot of danger involved; death can be involved. 

Let’s say there is a woman who is experiencing this violence, and she comes [to the play] and has no intention of leaving a family situation or a partner where this is happening. What point does she connect to? How do we not condemn the people who are not able to transform the situation in certain ways? We spoke about [the idea that] even if the mind can shift around a sense of self, and understanding of right and wrong ways of being in relationship with one another, that is a form of transformation. Just to know that you do not deserve [violence] is a form of transformation. 

That’s just one example, but we’re really trying to open the space up for people to feel reflected in the story and for humanity [of the characters] to come forth. Because we feel like that’s a part of what we’re dealing with: human beings’ inability to see the humanity of other human beings. And so if that point is the foundation, how do we approach this differently from all sides, including what it means to have justice or rehabilitation? How does that shift if we understand the humanity of the people involved?

Is there anything over the course of this two year process that really surprised you? Was there anything you learned you didn’t expect to learn?

Yeah, absolutely. A really big part of my approach to my artistry in general, and to my daily life is deep listening and ancestral guidance. There’s what we do on the surface, and then there’s layers going on under that—whether we understand them or not. To be candid, I come from a family with a history of gender based violence. One thing that blew my mind about being a part of this was: I thought that I had plateaued a bit in terms of my healing. I had done a lot of work, gotten myself to good places. I didn’t really see the possibility that [the healing] could go even deeper, [or] that it could look like this. It could look like me being engaged in my art, being engaged in theatre as the process of healing for an aspect of my life that [I] kind of hold separately. Like, “That’s my past, that’s the family stuff; I do this now.” 

And so preparing for the trip, returning to South Africa, [I understood] how I had been granted this kind of ancestral permission again to make right on the land, to understand what I was able to give and receive that maybe I hadn’t been able to do 20 years ago, because I didn’t have the understanding yet. I had been granted this opportunity if I would just say “yes” to it. 

So I think that was the biggest thing for me, personally, was feeling a real-time understanding. It clicked before we went, that “Oh, you’re being granted such a big opportunity on so many levels to do this kind of work. And the healing through these old familial traumas and histories of violence is coming through your art. It’s coming through using your voice to advocate for yourself and for other people. It’s coming through shedding a light on something that you’ve actually dealt with. This isn’t otherly to you, this is something from your own life.” 

My appreciation for the project just runs really deep, because I recognize the transformative power of theatre. Anytime I work with theatre, I know there’s always something else that’s happening. There’s some point of my life that is opening itself up to be transformed. And so that’s been the biggest lesson. 

With this project, I feel like we’re all being granted this permission, because it’s like the Earth itself and the cosmos are saying: “This is the right time to do this. And whatever the stories that need to be told through you, because you are all willing to tell them, we’ll grant you the passageway. We’ll figure out how to fund the trips. We’ll figure out how to do it as long as you keep going and recognize that even as the hurdles come, you’re still on the right path.”