{"id":77892,"date":"2021-03-25T08:23:44","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T12:23:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/?p=77892"},"modified":"2022-10-28T08:56:20","modified_gmt":"2022-10-28T12:56:20","slug":"inside-the-jar-with-ireon-roach","status":"publish","type":"bu-article","link":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/news\/articles\/2021\/inside-the-jar-with-ireon-roach\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside the Jar with Ireon Roach"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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March 25, 2021<\/div>\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\t
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\"Ireon<\/em><\/p>\n

This article was first published in <\/em>BU Today on March 25, 2021 by Joel Brown. Photo by Jackie Ricciardi<\/em><\/p>\n

When you jump into <\/span>The Jar<\/a>, it means you\u2019re down for art, positivity, and community. The nonprofit is a different kind of arts organization, founded to both broaden the audience for theater and foster community among audience members and artists. One of the leaders making that happen is theater<\/a> major Ireon Roach (CFA\u201921), its curator-in-residence and soon-to-be codirector.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeet Ire and you\u2019re just blown away,\u201d says The Jar\u2019s interim board chair Samantha Tan, an executive coach and fellow of the Simmons University Institute for Inclusive Leadership.<\/p>\n

In fall 2019, The Jar held an event featuring the play <\/span>Alma<\/em> <\/span>by Benjamin Benne, a two-hander about a Mexican immigrant mother and her US-born daughter, just after the 2016 election. The cast consisted of New York actor Ceci Fernandez and Roach, then a BU junior from Chicago, where she was a member of The Yard theater company and a veteran of that city\u2019s slam poetry scene. Guy Ben-Aharon, The Jar\u2019s founding director, had previously seen Roach perform with Boston\u2019s SpeakEasy Stage in <\/span>School Girls<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think she was surprised to see how diverse The Jar\u2019s audience was,\u201d Ben-Aharon says, \u201cand she stuck around for the dialogue because she couldn\u2019t not. It was so electric in the room she was in, to see what the community made of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a second event a few weeks later, Roach was hooked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was blown away by the depth of the conversation afterward,\u201d Roach says. \u201cThey all jumped right into that conversation from such a deeply vulnerable place, a place conversations normally take weeks to get to.\u201d<\/p>\n

As The Jar moved entirely online during the pandemic, she became a mainstay, starting its <\/span>World in Progress<\/em> <\/span>series, where theater-makers, musicians, writers, and other artists share their works in progress with online audience members and dialogue afterward. The emphasis is not, <\/span>how perfect is my art?<\/em> <\/span>says Tan. It\u2019s, <\/span>how does my art move you?<\/em><\/p>\n

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The Jar\u2019s board, here in a recent Zoom meeting, stands out among local nonprofit arts organizations for its diversity of age, race, and income. Photo courtesy of The Jar<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s the bread and butter of The Jar,\u201d Roach says. \u201cGuy and I are both theater people, but we are not about putting on a play every week. We are putting together a space that uses art to center a community and allow people to see others in themselves a little more clearly and authentically.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are rooted in radical vulnerability,\u201d she adds, to set aside differences and \u201cjust be a person with another person. The more I say that and the more I practice it, it\u2019s becoming a little less radical and a little more normal\u2014I can\u2019t wait until that isn\u2019t a radical idea. And that\u2019s what The Jar is working on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roach, whose mother is from Jamaica, goes by Ire, pronounced \u201cI-ree,\u201d as in \u201cirie,\u201d the Jamaican word for good, happy, pleasant. As a writer and host, she is not afraid to tackle tough topics like race and her father\u2019s incarceration. But on a recent Thursday, her smile was bright and her vibe positive as she welcomed about two dozen Bostonians to Zoom to hear and discuss a new work by a Roxbury singer-songwriter.<\/p>\n

Your typical Boston theater evening does not begin as she began this one: \u201cA moment of silence, a moment of joy, to bring your mind\u2019s eye to something good within you.\u201d<\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

\u201cAll systems we live within force us to build walls between us and a person that\u2019s different,\u201d Roach says. \u201cThis organization is about\u2014maybe if just for an hour on Zoom\u2014you getting to poke out one of those bricks in the wall and peek through and see the person on the other side, and maybe see yourself a little more fully, because you have more room to be.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

CFA theatre student Ireon Roach helps to foster community-building through the arts<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6310,"featured_media":77895,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"bu_prepress_billboard":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term":"","_bu_prepress_primary_term_manual":""},"tags":[],"bu-publication":[192],"magazine-article-category":[],"magazine-topic":[],"news-article-category":[329],"news-topic":[],"bu_edition":[],"media_type":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/77892"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/bu-article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6310"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77892"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/77892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94868,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-article\/77892\/revisions\/94868"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77892"},{"taxonomy":"bu-publication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu-publication?post=77892"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-article-category?post=77892"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/magazine-topic?post=77892"},{"taxonomy":"news-article-category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-article-category?post=77892"},{"taxonomy":"news-topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-topic?post=77892"},{"taxonomy":"bu_edition","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/bu_edition?post=77892"},{"taxonomy":"media_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/id-andrea.cms-devl.bu.edu\/cfa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media_type?post=77892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}