08 IRVINE TALKS

TEAM: Aarya Padhye, Charlotte Cao, Owen Stapp, Mila Nenadic, Ayushi Das, Bardia Safari

ROLE: Vice President (2021-2022), Events Chair (2020-2021)

At Irvine Talks, a one-night celebration of humanity through speech, song, and art, high school students from around the district take the stage to share their stories of love, loss, mental health, divorce, immigration, and the like. The audience finds parts of their own stories onstage as they listen to students share such intimate pieces of themselves, surrounded by the stories of people they already know and people they have yet to meet.

Irvine Talks has, without a doubt, been the biggest influence in shaping me to be the person that I am today. It’s what inspired my love and passion for storytelling after opening my eyes to the capacities it has to break down the divides that we so often put up as human beings- the capacities it has to help us find love, connection, healing, and strength out of such pain, loss, and hardship. Through working with Irvine Talks, I saw a community of people who notoriously had a history of dismissing mental health, undermining artistic expression, and putting outrageous amounts of pressure on the youth come together to celebrate all of the things that make us human, not just at the event, but for the months of rehearsals, workshops, video shoots, volunteering events, and band practices that came before it.

As Vice President of Irvine Talks, I worked with the president to select and lead a group of seven board members tasked with planning and executing the event. Together, we auditioned over sixty individuals each year to select a final twenty to share their stories onstage, working with them over the course of four months to revise their scripts and improve their stage presence.

Individually, I was in charge of planning the opening event. Every year, I worked with artists to collect and display art created by students from all over the district, organized workhouses for the construction of the stage, murals, photostages, and activity booths, cold called countless food trucks and local bands, and recruited and lead a team of over forty volunteers necessary for the execution of an event of such large scale.

Being founded only five years ago, Irvine Talks is still finding its footing, but I have seen the event grow immensely, now an established part of the community with an official sponsorship from the Irvine Public Schools Foundation. I spread the message of Irvine Talks to Northwood High as the first board member in history from my school, contributing to a 550% increase in auditions from Northwood during my time on board.

After four years of involvement with the event, I shared my own story for the first time onstage in April of 2022. Irvine Talks has provided me, and countless others, with a platform to share, listen to, and connect over heavily stigmatized topics and experiences, and its penetrating message of the importance of vulnerability and community is one I will take with me for the rest of my life. Irvine Talks marked the start of my journey exploring the ways in which we can leverage storytelling and vulnerability to bridge connections and build empathy as well as my journey exploring art and multimedia as a medium through which to drive change in a community. And I know it is just the beginning to what I plan to accomplish.

Mural Design

When designing the mural that would become the backdrop for all performances on the day of the event, I was challenged with coming up with a design that aligned with both the branding and theme of the chapter while also not being too distracting or busy behind all of our performers, both for our audience and for any pictures. I thought that a pattern of speaking heads with the overlapping sections being highlighted with colors from Ch. V’s theme was a great way to emphasize the power in realizing our shared experiences and the moments of our stories that overlap with each others’, which is one of the founding principles of the event itself. I loved every second of getting to bring my ideas to life with my team and I love how both this mural and the one pictured below as a photostage/photo opportunity at our event turned out!