VIDEO: Watch 'Name On The Wall' From The 2021 Palefsky Collision Project

Directed by Patrick McColery in collaboration with Pearl Cleage, Playwright, the 20th Anniversary Palefsky Collision Project explored Marvin Gaye's legendary album, What's Going On. Public performances of the ensemble's original piece, WHAT MAKES YOU THINK I'M ALONE? A MEDITATION ON MARVIN 2021, occurred on Friday, July 30, 2021 and Saturday, July 31, 2021 on the Alliance Theatre's Coca-Cola Stage.

For three weeks each summer, the Alliance Theatre assembles a diverse group of 20 teenagers from metro Atlanta to explore and unpack a classic text under the guidance of a professional playwright and director. Through improvisational exercises, oral history, choreography, the individual performing talents they possess, and their writing, the teenagers create a new piece inspired by the classic text but perceived through their own utterly unique and contemporary prism. The Palefsky Collision Project affords teens a unique theatrical experience and gives them ownership of a performance at the Alliance. It also gives students validity - confidence in their talents, strength for the future, and power in their decisions.

Through this dynamic project, metro Atlanta teens create theater for and about themselves by "colliding" with a dramatic text, reinforcing the idea that theater can address their particular ideas and feelings.