By Adriana Navarro, Particular to the AFRO
Hana Sharif builds worlds for a dwelling. With the attention of a museum curator, she fastidiously selects the tales that may play out inside them and the truths they may show.
She practiced crafting narratives for 5 years on the Repertory Theater of St. Louis (The Rep) because the inventive director. Sharif, 45, will proceed to hone her craft below the identical title at Area Stage in Washington, D.C.
It’s a stage that Sharif’s 19-year-old self had stated she would run someday after studying of its repute and of the legendary work of its first inventive director, Zelda Fichandler.
“Once I regarded on the panorama of who was doing actually fascinating and fascinating work on the time, once I regarded on the panorama of what cities I believed I may have an actual influence in and which establishments have been actually hallmarks for the standard of labor that I wished to do, there have been solely a handful of theaters that basically checked all of these bins for me,” Sharif stated.
Sharif is succeeded by Molly Smith, who served within the position of inventive director of Area Stage for greater than 20 years.
“For the final 25 years, I’ve held magic in my arms,” Smith shared in a press launch from Area Stage. “From the primary second 25 years in the past, once I got here to Area, I used to be blessed with a top-notch manufacturing workers and dynamic administration. We are able to create something, and we have now…we’ve modified America alongside the way in which. Now, it’s time to move that magic on to the subsequent era—to Hana. I do know her magic will probably be mesmerizing and I, for one, will probably be cheering from the viewers.”
When Sharif joined the Rep in St. Louis, she turned not solely the corporate’s first Black lady to steer the theater, however the first Black lady within the nation to steer a significant regional theater.
She’s going to now even be Area Stage’s first Black lady to function inventive director, breaking yet one more glass ceiling. Deconstructing racial limitations is nothing new for the theater as Area Stage was additionally the District’s first absolutely built-in theater after its founding in 1950.
By years of expertise in management and quite a few awards below her belt, Sharif has ascended to the position she had set her sights on when first beginning out within the theater business. And whereas she had climbed the ladder to the highest, Sharif emphasised she was not the one one who had cleared her path.
“It’s actually bittersweet, proper? It’s fantastic to interrupt by way of a glass ceiling, however I acknowledge that there have been a thousand ladies who got here earlier than me who ought to have come by way of that ceiling, however couldn’t,” Sharif stated. “That’s the one cause I made it by way of the ceilings is as a result of their our bodies slamming towards the ceiling triggered sufficient fractures for me to have the ability to come by way of.”
The position of inventive director is akin to the position of a CEO at a big firm, in keeping with Sharif. There’s every part that comes with working a enterprise, together with advertising and fundraising.
It additionally means she’s the lead artist for the institute, enjoying a job in directing and creating the framework during which a playwright’s story will probably be instructed on stage.
“In the identical method {that a} museum curator would curate the exhibit within the artwork that you just’re seeing, a part of my job is to pick the reveals, to place collectively the artistic groups, the administrators, the designers, to substantiate the actors,” Sharif defined. “I work with the administrators to rent the actors, however we construct the worlds that you just get to see.”
Now, she seems to be to construct on the legacy of those that got here earlier than her.
Sharif has labored as an inventive director, a director, a producer and a playwright over the course of her profession. And whereas her position within the theater has modified over time, her mission of holding area for artists has stayed the identical.
“My job is to carry this area open, to create pipelines, in order that once I step away it doesn’t shut again,” Sharif stated. “There are 10 of us in a line, that the pipeline is wider, that the area is wider and richer, and never due to any explicit intersectionality, however as a result of once we are literally capable of have a spread of experiences of life, expertise of tales instructed, of ability set. We’re stronger, we’re higher, we’re extra human, we’re extra advanced.”
Sharif obtained her begin within the theater business at Spelman School in Atlanta. After graduating, she and her pals based their very own theater firm, Nassir Productions. By her firm, she was capable of make performs that spoke to her and her existence, she proclaimed.
She started to construct worlds. And in these worlds, she ensured that the life experiences of people that media sometimes doesn’t give attention to have a spot to breathe.
“The media has quite a lot of management over the photographs we see, and what we start to know and normalize,” Sharif stated. However the tales, the nuances of her life and the issues that existed within the intersectionality of her being weren’t mirrored with the complexity that she wished to see,” she stated.
Nassir Productions ran from 1997 to 2004, throughout which Sharif sharpened the abilities she would want for the subsequent stage of her profession from doing graduate work on the College of Houston to writing performs to elevating cash for the reveals.
It’s data she used all through her profession, garnering a number of notable awards. Amongst them are the US Institute for Theater Know-how’s 2023 Distinguished Achievement Award for Administration and Spelman School’s 2022 Nationwide Neighborhood Service Award. She additionally was the recipient of the Theater Communications Group’s New Generations Fellowship and the Aetna New Voices Fellowship.
Waiting for Sharif’s place at Area Stage, the corporate’s govt producer, Edgar Dobie, shared that he seems to be ahead to the brand new inventive relationships she’s going to convey and the “large tent view she brings” to the enterprise.
Teresa Sapien, the affiliate inventive director of Area Stage, will work alongside Sharif as she steps into her new position.
“My first impression of Hana was that she at all times desires to dig deeper into an issue and is excellent at asking questions that assist get to [the] bones of the scenario,” Sapien stated in an electronic mail. “She calls folks to the desk, listens intently, and isn’t simply duped as a result of, once more, she isn’t distracted by surfaces and as a substitute labors to get on the substance of issues. She is an inventive producer who insists upon collaboration and seeks out companions in brainstorming and implementation.”Theater, for Sharif, is a strong and wholesome instrument for understanding how life evolves.
“You spend all of this time to construct a world. You spend time to inform the story, to search out the reality, to search out the connections. Hours and hours and hours, and coronary heart and tears, and all this power goes into constructing a factor,” Sharif stated.
“A few of these worlds persist for months, however for essentially the most half, they’re ephemeral. They finish when the curtain falls. And you then launch it to let it grow to be what it’s imagined to be. It performs for a month or two relying in your theater, after which it closes. And that second of time is so ephemeral, you possibly can’t ever recapture that second.”
