solo play with music

SKIN

SKIN explores the creativity and courage it takes to heal.

In this frank & funny queer love story with music, two things threaten a grad student’s dissertation on Virginia Woolf: her hot new girlfriend and her own dark past. She races to write herself into a happier future, as her creative life and sex life both get inventive. She strives to be bolder than ever before. But once you guard against life, can you open up again?

SKIN is written and performed by artist and activist Hope Singsen, the Founding Artistic Director and Host of the #HealMeToo Podcast & Festival.

You can hear Hope explore common questions about healing that are raised by SKIN on #HealMeToo Podcast S1 E7 with Sex Educator & Relationship Advisor Elise Schuster, and Art Therapist Valeria Koutmina. Then listen to a Podcast Extra to hear Hope’s talk on the neuro-psychology of trauma and ways the live arts can help.

SKIN is directed by Jessi D. Hill. Music by Hope Singsen, Bob Parins and Dillon Kondor. Meet the SKIN team.

articles & essays

Blog

Where Research Meets Practice

Particpatory Workshops

Interactive conversations following workshop presentations of the play set the stage for exercises, information, and tools that help people foster resilience, understand neuroplasticity, and engage in creative practice to support healing.

Relationships, Resiliency & Repairing the Culture

This interactive 3-hour workshop engages participants in imaginative conversations about events in SKIN to communicate core principles of: healthy relationships and consent; the neuropsychology of trauma and techniques for healing; and bystander intervention techniques that can empower people to reduce and prevent potential harm. All within a clearly communicated set of agreements for community safety, and explored through trauma-informed exercises that introduce skills that survivors and allies can start applying on the spot. Learn more

Neuroplasticity & The Arts

This 3-hour workshop offers a foundational understanding of the ways any trauma is believed to impact the brain, body, and self, then uses participants’ shared experiences viewing SKIN as a jumping off point to introduce theories of the ways that art-making and -viewing may be used to aid healing. Concrete examples are found in the therapeutic pedagogy at work in SKIN, as well as in participants’ other positive, powerful artistic experiences. Trauma-informed participatory exercises engage the imagination and the senses to intrigue, inform, and inspire students to activate their own creativity as a mode of healing. Learn more

Writing & Sharing Your Story

This 3-hour session will use SKIN as a model to share skills and techniques for writing autobiographically or fictively from life. We’ll explore ways writing our stories can give us tools for personal and cultural healing which continue in navigating the growth opportunities that come while sharing what you’ve written—whether that’s reading it for a friend or a class, posting it, or performing it for an audience. Participants will leave feeling empowered to use the arts more consciously and conscientiously as a channel for personal and cultural healing. Learn more

co-curricular events

Impacts & Assessments

Singsen conducts audience surveys, talkbacks and one-on-one interviews following workshop presentations of SKIN to measure its impacts and explore the sensory, emotional and cognitive effects of embodied creativity. At the Alliance for Arts in Research Universities national conference in November 2018, she offered a workshop presentation of SKIN and presented a talk on her research as part of a discussion panel addressing neuroaesthetics and the use of the arts in public health. You can listen to this talk on the #HealMeToo Podcast.

Post-workshop assessments have demonstrated that artists, students, scholars, scientists, and, especially, survivors and their supporters respond to SKIN and its co-curricular events in powerful ways. 

• One grad student described SKIN as a turning point in her journey of recovery.

• A dance student raced home to choreograph her own story of healing.

• Another immediately wrote and posted a love poem, quoting the play.

• A drama major/math minor interviewed Singsen on pairing science with art.

• A student investigating bullying started to discern the links between vulnerability and shame.

• Students and faculty alike reported that SKIN gave voice to their struggles and breakthroughs in academic writing.

 "Anyone writing a thesis should see this play."
--Vassar College Administrator

Workshop Testimonials

Dutchess community College student

“I’ve never met anyone who ...with such kindness and gentleness...told their story so raw. It was incredibly beautiful and I don’t think I’ll ever feel alone in this again. Thank you for being brave. You made me brave.”