For This Young LA Actor, the Work Includes Giving Someone Else the Stage

The photographs show the lives of the people telling the stories. At Defining Moments: An Evening of Storytelling with Elders from Our Community, seniors share a moment that shaped their lives while images from childhood and other significant experiences appear on a screen.

That is the performance format described by Defining Moments, an intergenerational storytelling initiative founded and led by 17-year-old Los Angeles actor and high school student Maximillian Danner. Family members, friends, students and other community residents are invited to listen. The seniors can answer audience questions afterward.

For an actor, this is a different use of the craft: helping someone else find a way to tell a story that is already theirs.

Before the performance comes the practice

The public evening takes place twice a year, according to the program’s supplied materials. Its preparation involves interviews, help shaping narratives and rehearsal. Teen and college volunteers co-facilitate the sessions alongside Danner.

The work begins at a smaller scale than a stage performance. One exercise asks participants to name five things in a category as quickly as possible. Another, called the Connection Game, asks them to connect a word with an experience from their lives and turn that connection into a story. Memory, improvisation and vocal exercises also form part of the sessions.

“We usually start a fun exercise where we pick a category and the seniors have to name five things in that category as quickly as possible,” Danner explains in the supplied written materials.

These activities put familiar elements of performance—voice, spontaneity, structure and rehearsal—to work around personal memory. The material is a participant’s own experience, and the preparation gives that experience a form it can take before an audience.

That distinction matters to how this project can be understood as an arts practice. The creative task includes helping a person choose a moment, shape its telling and prepare to share it. A photograph can accompany the account; an audience question can continue the conversation.

The stage is only part of the exchange

Danner’s own interest began with visits to his grandmother and her accounts of growing up during World War II. In the materials, he connects her death almost four years earlier with his wish to keep her legacy alive through conversations with other older adults.

He also describes a more immediate reason to participate: hearing about a world that predates his own experience. For him, the Connection Game offers “snippets into what life was like in a time before I was born.”

That gives the young facilitators a role beyond preparing a performance. They are also its listeners. Seniors bring the experiences; students help provide the structure through which those experiences can be shared.

In Los Angeles, Danner’s project offers a concrete example of how acting skills can serve a community outside a film set. The finished work takes the form of an older person speaking about a life they have lived, with other generations there to hear it.

Source note: This feature draws on written program materials and statements supplied by Maximillian Danner’s team. Quotations come from those materials.