Spark

Catherine Hanna Schrock ’01 stands before a room of students with a small cast of professional actors by her side.

“Hello!”
“Hey!”
“We’ve put our toys away because it’s time to tell you a story. For now, sit back, relax, enjoy, but don’t get too comfortable. Because when I say when, we’ll ask you to play again.”

She uses the chant to cue her audience: today, they’re more than an audience— they’re about to become participants, too.

Schrock is the co-founder of Imagine, an applied theater company she started in 2021 with her husband, Peter. Her work helps groups and organizations of all ages create new ways of being together, through theater. She runs Imagine’s community programs, develops content—including scripts, lesson plans, and workshop experiences—and packages that content for others to be able to teach it, too.

Schrock’s work sits close to her heart. Her family immigrated to the United States from Egypt, and she moved around a lot as a kid. Growing up, she experienced feeling like she was on the margins of community spaces. Then a counselor at a new school suggested she take an acting elective, and the rest is history. “I fell in love with the craft and felt the impact of how it was transforming me as a person,” she says.

At Calvin, she joined the theater company while majoring in sociology and minoring in social work and international relations. And it was at Calvin where she began thinking of ways to intersect her two passions—theater and social justice.

Post-Calvin, Schrock taught and worked in community development in locations such as Chicago, Honduras, East Africa, and the Middle East. Earning a master’s degree in applied theater from New York University finally brought her two interests into harmony. There she studied theater forms “designed to be responsive to the world and to society and to offer a transformational quality in some way.”

Today, Schrock specializes in Forum Theatre, a form that invites audiences to participate in solving a difficult conflict through role play. Since 2018, she has been taking “Safa’s Story,” a short play about bullying prevention, into San Diego schools. Safa’s character is based on a former student of Schrock’s and shows a real-life conflict that ends tragically.

After the initial performance, Schrock invites students to rewrite the story in order to change its outcome, asking kids to identify the first moment they see something go wrong. The play starts again, but this time students stop the action, share ideas, and replace actors on stage, something that allows them to practice advocating for themselves or others in what Schrock calls “safe, brave spaces.”

“We see miracles happen. Truly. Kids’ beautiful warrior spirits are activated when they say, ‘We are not okay with how Safa is being treated,’” Schrock says.

Also notable is Imagine’s ongoing partnership with the city of San Diego. The organization serves as an engagement partner helping the city’s leaders create new ways of being together, whether breaking down standard practices of holding meetings, becoming more welcoming, or practicing non-violent ways of communication. “A lot of city conversations can feel hard for people,” Schrock says. “We try to create ways of being together that are disarming, inviting.”

Schrock believes the role of the artist is to do more than entertain. “Artists have the tools to both energize the community and criticize, bringing to light the question of what are we missing? Who are we missing? And how can we evaluate our shortcomings and do better?”

At the end of “Safa’s Story,” Schrock extends an open-ended invitation. “Would you believe that every day, you have a choice? You can use your voice, just like you did today, to say, ‘Things don’t have to end up this way.’”

Today, she’s planted a seed in her young audience—the knowledge that small, brave acts of advocacy make a meaningful difference in their world.