Chari Arespacochaga

About Chari

Chari Arespacochaga is an acclaimed theatre director and educator at the College of Fine Arts at Florida State University (FSU) where she is the Director of the MFA Directing Program. Her theatrical direction credits include Rent, Kinky Boots (Short North Stage), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (University of California), Amadeus and Stupid Kids (Phoenix Theatre, Victoria), 9 Minutes (for PopUP Theatrics NYC), Rock of Ages, The Full Monty, Disney’s Tarzan, Spring Awakening, Legally Blonde, Altar Boyz and Into the Woods, among others. At FSU, she initiated and designed Performing Climate Change, a course that provides students from different colleges and departments critical and creative ways of approaching the climate crisis, and recently directed an acclaimed production of Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812.

Chari’s scholarship, artistic work and teaching is centred on theatre as necessary cultural work for social transformation and providing her audience and students new ways of engaging with theatre through the lens and lived experiences of an immigrant BIPOC artist-scholar. She is in the process of adapting a series of stories about a culturally diverse group of princesses/superheroines called the Guardian Princesses into musicals for young audiences as part of her commitment to developing new works. Other developmental collaborations include a new musical called Missing and a feminist retelling of Macbeth entitled Em.

Making community

“My experiences at UVic solidified for me how making theatre coincides with making community. It made me realize in concrete, palpable ways how we cultivate our life gets reflected in the work that I do as a theatre director and affects how I set up workplaces for people in making theatre. It also made me think about new ways we need to be creating stories and who else should we be inviting to the table to tell those stories.”

Stress on the set

“When I young, I was only allowed to watch Sesame Street, Electric Company, movie musicals and the Saturday morning cartoons. I remember clearly those vignettes in Electric Company where Rita Moreno was running a film set and everything would be falling apart. She was shooting something about a pirate on a ship and the mast would fall on them. And I thought that was great. Maybe, even then, I could recognize that's probably stress I can deal with and thrive on.”

Unlearning process

“I’ve had to unlearn that there's only one way of doing the thing. That there's only one way to rehearse. That there's only one way to tell a story. I try to unlearn whatever I thought were those absolutes all the time. Some are easier to unlearn than others.”

It's not about you

“You're teaching in a classroom, and you can prep and prep and you should have a plan, but it's not about you. It needs to become about the students. I am running a rehearsal, but it's not about me, it's about the show. It's about making the actors feel their best possible selves. It's about making my creative collaborators, whether they're designers or stage managers, feel like they have ownership of the show and the story that we're telling.”

Power of story

“I was always emotionally available to believing a story and letting it move me. I remember crying the first time I watched Dumbo as a toddler. There was always a connection to how stories can move you and make you think about things… Story is a good way to change people's minds. Even if you don't change their mind in a moment, there's enough power in the seed that it might plant so if even three or four people can ask a new question of themselves about how we deal with the world or how we live, I think that's worth the telling of the story.”