A Conversation with Asheville Creative Advocates
Meet some of the artists and organizations that have shaped Asheville Creative Arts for the past 10 years.
Spotlight: Nehprii Amenii, Contributing Artist
“I believe that art should be accessible to all. I also believe that we can’t ask for young people to participate in building a new world if they haven’t even been asked to imagine, period.”
– nehprii amenii
Asheville Creative Arts was founded to address the lack of high-quality, inclusive professional children’s theatre in Western North Carolina. While ACA continues to create and produce innovative theatrical experiences for youth and their families, we have since expanded the scope of our work to support artists and community-based organizations. Our approach to art making and to technical assistance is consistent: with encouragement, resources and spaces that nurture trust, creativity and accountability, audiences, artists, activists and community leaders are able to reach their full potential.
Writer and director Nehprii Amenii has been involved with ACA since 2016. She sat down with Carolina Corona, and together they enjoyed going down memory lane and revisiting some of Nehprii’s collaborations with the organization.
CC: How did you find out about ACA, or what was your first experience with the organization?
NA: I found out about ACA through Abby. She was working with another company, Pan Asian Repertory here [in New York], and I was doing a performance. We were introduced as both of us being in the puppet world and so I was like, “Reach out to me if you ever need anything,” so she did. She is great at networking and being a community liaison. That’s how we formed a relationship, and then she asked me if I would come down and direct a show, so I came down and directed Click, Clack, Moo. I think that was in 2016.
CC: Why do you care about the organization’s mission?
NA: The organization is just so simple and honest and sincere. It’s hard for me to think about the mission as it’s written on paper, because I have less interaction and experience with the mission as it’s articulated and more experience with the mission as it is lived. You know, as it gets enacted by Abby and the people that she brings around. I care very much that she is making theater in a way that is so human. It really is about how we use the arts to make it accessible to the community, both in the way that we are removing ticket sales and making it available to local patrons, but at the same time making it available to the community in a way that is not persnickety. Commercial theater, people have to have all this experience, but in ACA the doors are open so you can come in as you are with whatever level of training you have. Somehow, Abby and her magic makers always have the capacity to fold people in and to bring them along, and that is the mission I know.
CC: What motivates you to advocate for the organization?
NA: I just, I love it. It is part of community building. Abby has been a huge supporter of my work, and as I grow she has been there along the way. When you build community like that–in a way [where] doors are open and she leads in such a generous way–then it builds in more care, of wanting to take care of the organization too. So, I think ACA has a lot of loving hands in that way.
CC: What are your values and beliefs related to the organization’s work?
I believe that art should be accessible to all. I also believe that we can’t ask for young people to participate in building a new world if they haven’t even been asked to imagine, period. It is cultivating imagination, and saying art is more than what people think. “Oh it’s cute, it’s the arts…” but it’s really mental and spiritual training for how we use our faculties to create change. And so that to me is what is happening at ACA.
CC: What are your expectations for the organization’s impact?
NA: I expect that ACA will continue to produce work and make art accessible to children and young people and to families, both on the stage and the classrooms and the broader community. I am also seeing–because of this rapid domino effect between the hurricane and the shifts that are happening in the administration–I am watching Abby’s arms instantly octopus to respond to what the need is. She’s figuring out what the community’s needs are right now, and so I expect that in addition to providing the arts, ACA will continue to root itself as a local organization that the community can trust. Once it has its own visible home as well, those roots are going to deepen even more.
“ACA has been intrinsic to my growth as an artist.”
– nehprii amenii
Abby is the hardest working woman, nonstop! Her work is also sincere. I look at the organizations that came out after George Floyd was murdered, saying “Oh we love you, we want to support, how do we build, how do we support BIPOC artists…” You can’t even say Black artists, you have to make up a new word. These organizations [rose] up and they put in all this money–stamps and bumper stickers–and they did that and then they [went] back to normal programming. But the work Abby had been doing, of just being inclusive of all and empowering of all, before these things, it’s hard-working and also honest. That’s just her heart.
CC: How has your life changed for the better with your organization’s help?
NA: That is a really hard one to answer, not because I can’t find it, but because it’s almost so interwoven into my growth. I am trying to think of my very first moment of being able to have ACA’s support to scale and incubate me as an artist. I had my first self-written, self-produced show in 2018, so this is a whole another layer that falls into that community outreach. I was able to learn from Abby the business, the language of writing, the titles. It’s so in me now that I can’t even remember everything that I received from it. And then, her asking me to come down and direct Click, Clack, Moo–it was the opportunity to do what we do and practice the skills that we have and stuff that we don’t even know we have yet. They don’t come until you are called upon.
Even though I had started directing, it gave me more practice in a freer way because ACA is community-based, so it doesn’t operate with the same rules of the more commercial theaters. There is more ease. I was like, “I would love to have kids who are actually there with their school instruments and they are the barnyard animals.” Abby is like, “Yeah, ok, we can figure that out.” It’s the fluidity and the openness of the organization. ACA has been intrinsic to my growth as an artist.
There was an organization when I lived in Minneapolis, in the Cultural Wellness Center. In the building itself, there was a room that they called the Invisible College, because it belonged to all the various community and elder and cultural groups, and that room was left blank. It always transferred and shifted to whatever it needed to be to accommodate the learning that would take place there. I don’t believe ACA has a name for all of the programming that it does like artist development, it’s just like its own invisible college. It transforms and helps incubate whoever, however, whenever it is needed.
In the kaleidoscope of memories I have of ACA, what is popping into my mind is Abby doing the pick up, she’s doing the drop off, she’s loading this… her hands are so in the logistics at the same time out of what is necessary. To watch her go pick up the actors, bring them to rehearsal, drop them off while she does more of the administrative side and then comes back to pick something up… I don’t think a lot of people realize how much logistical support is needed to run an arts institution. It’s so admirable how she makes it happen. I hope more community members can be folded more into this logistical side of things too–people doing things that might not look like creativity, but they’re still doing work to help towards the mission by helping drive the van or packing boxes.
I am glad I got the chance to talk about the work of someone I love and the work that I love.