ELYSE GRIECO
Life & Arts Editor
Have you ever had a story to share but felt like you didn’t know how to?
Life Stories is a new club on campus that provides students with a platform to express their individuality through art.
“Basically, we’re a club that encourages students to tap into themselves, become vulnerable and use different artforms to share anything that’s important to them,’ said freshman theater arts and music industry double major and club president Madjelyn De Jesús. “Whether it’s a personal experience or social justice issue, anything that they feel strongly about we want them to express.”
The club is fairly new, only becoming officially acknowledged by Fredonia’s Student Association a few days before this semester’s Activities Night.
The idea for the club sprang from a conversation between De Jesús and a couple of friends.
“At the beginning of last semester, we were just talking about how the theatre department doesn’t really have a platform for all students outside of the musical theatre major,” she said.
De Jesús wanted to create an encouraging and inclusive club that students could join, regardless of their major.
She also hopes that Life Stories will help take some of the pressure off of the traditional auditioning process that many art and theatre programs often use.
“Show business and ‘the industry’ are very competitive. Even here, the productions that are put on have an audition process and not everybody gets casted. We kind of wanted to make a space for people to just showcase their art,” she said.
The club invisions individuals creating their projects and then opening them up for collaborations.
For example, a student may make an electronic beat and another student may write a poem about a certain issue.
These students could then put their individual works together and create an even bigger outcome: a song.
De Jesús and freshman theatre art major and club public relations chair Yuwan Ilano are both already working on their own original work.
De Jesús is currently working on poetry while Ilano plans on having some of his own original work featured in next month’s fashion show.
“We just wanted to give people the opportunity to express themselves and have the platform that’s necessary to talk about issues that they are passionate about,” said Ilano.
Life Stories’ first meeting will be held this Thursday, Feb. 21 from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. in McEwen Hall.
For more information on the club, follow Lifestories.fred on Instagram.