Today we’d like to introduce you to Chelsea Lynn Urban.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Chelsea Lynn. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
I come from a big family. Our roots being near Ellinger, Tx- A small Czech community located on Highway 71. My Father, Larry, was the youngest of eight, my mother, Rose, the youngest of nine. I was brought up with southern hospitality and every holiday having about two to three family gatherings for each side. With two older sisters and one little brother I never lacked an audience.
From a very young age, I wanted to not only be on stage but to build the stage. I wanted to create; which I like to believe I got from my Dad who, though was an electrician by trade, was a master carpenter and welder as well. He was a creator and always had a project to work on. In my early years, he added onto our childhood home and then set his sights on an ambitious goal: to build us a new home. He purchased a secluded stretch along the banks of the Colorado River from a family friend and began clearing the land. In order to have an open view of the Riverbend below, my Father cleared the seemingly impenetrable brush and brambles. We also watched him demolished the flooded one-story house that had been in ruins since the 1960s.
His brothers helped him lay the concrete slab, set the stilts, and then my Father made his way on to welding the frame. My siblings and I hauled raw-cut cedar boards (that he had milled himself) onto the deck lofted 10ft in the air (a necessary precaution my Dad made due to the Colorado River flowing just below). Many days were spent sanding the tongue and groove floor. It was his labor of love located on WaterFront Lane. It held and continues to host a majority of our family gatherings to this day.
My siblings and I all attended Columbus I.S.D. (the same school my Dad went to). Being in a small town with two older sisters, there’s not much they hadn’t touched before my turn came. (It was a running joke between our teachers to check us out the same textbooks.) They excelled at cross country, track, band, dance, and flags, which I did as well. I even made the captain of the dance team my senior year, but theatre was something that my older sisters never had an interest in. Like most small towns, there wasn’t much interest in funding our theater department. It wasn’t until my 6th-grade year that Columbus finally decided to allow their students to compete in the U.I.L. One-Act-Play competition (many thanks to Mrs. Lorrie Novosad-Walla who volunteered to be the sponsor). I was in every school performance from then on. Our new high school Director Ms. Judith Schneider-Wehmeyer even opened up the high school auditions to the Jr. High my 8th-grade year, and I was double-cast with a senior. In my sophomore year in high school, our production of “The Diviners” was the first time in over 50 years since Columbus had advanced to regionals in our district. Funny enough, I never took a theatre class until I attended Texas State in San Marcos where I majored in Theatre, hoping one day to become a theatre teacher, but many of my hopes and dreams drastically changed as soon as I moved away from my roots in Ellinger.
In 2013, the spring semester of my freshman year at Texas State, and a week after I turned 19, my entire world came crashing down. I was on spring break when I received a phone call from my eldest sister that brought me to my knees in the busy streets of South Padre. She told me that our father was missing. She said that a family friend and he had been checking fishing lines when a hidden limb pitched their boat and caused our Father to go overboard. She told me Emergency boats had been dispatched and were scanning the river. They would search for three days before his body surfaced. The uncertainty of those three days, the belief that they would find him, and then having all of our hopes dashed… to say that we were devastated would be an insult to the capacity of what we felt.
I had no way to move my grief. It all happened so sudden. We had just talked the day before. We didn’t even say goodbye. He said, “I love you- I’ll see you later.” That later never came. I was in disbelief. I felt that at any moment he would walk through our front door and ask me if I wanted to take a drive down to the river. I felt like my life was passing by on auto-pilot. I had lost my greatest teacher, and I still had so many lessons left to learn. For months, I slept the majority of my days away still believing that this was all a bad dream I would wake up from. I felt numb and disconnected. I almost failed out of college. I felt like I was just playing a character every time I walked outside. I didn’t know what to do, except that I had to carry on his legacy and continue to create as he would. My Father had built us a sanctuary on WaterFront Lane and I felt I could transform that legacy into a space where creativity could thrive in.
I will forever be grateful that my Father was able to see my Texas State debut before his passing at the Directing II showcase. (DII is a class at Texas State where seniors direct a piece of their choice). He saw a heavily adapted version of “Under Milk Wood”- a radio play- by Dylan Thomas directed by Tinus Seaux. It was a type of experimental theatre I had never performed in and something my family had never seen. Nevertheless, my Dad was proud of me, but after his sudden passing, it took me quite some time before I felt capable of auditioning again.
Theatre took on a different form for me after his accident. I changed my major from teaching theatre to Production & Performance. I found in the brief moments of live performance the weight of my grief momentarily lifted. Whether I was witnessing a new play being read for the first time, or being witnessed during a class monologue- I found solace in the arms of live performance.
Two years passed until I decided to audition for the DII showcase again, but I wasn’t going to recite another person’s words. I wrote and performed my own monologue, which I definitely was not allowed to do, but I didn’t ask for permission, and it caught the attention of my now creative partner: Molly McCarty, who selected me to be a part of her DII ensemble.
Molly’s DII opened a new chapter in my life. We worked with the aesthetics of Butoh and Rasa. Butoh is an interpretive Japanese art dance form, and Rasa is a Sanskrit method of interpreting emotions. Our purpose was to move emotion with motion. I finally had a medium that could not only lift my grief, but begin the process of moving with, embracing, and accepting it.
One rehearsal, in particular, changed our lives. We were giving and receiving feedback when the heavy subject of what we were going to do after our DII performance came up. Molly told us of her dream to have her own theatre company one day. She wanted to call it Medea’s Children. I told them about this crazy idea that had been sitting in my head to host an immersive festival with an intimate audience that would provide feedback for new experimental works such as ours. I told them I had the perfect place to host it. In that one rehearsal session, Medea’s Children and WaterFront were born.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I still struggle with my grief every day, and always will, but I struggle more with the disappointment my Dad would have if I were to give up- which many times, I was very close to. I will never win the battle with my grief, but I won’t stop fighting it either. I am here because I am my Father’s legacy and I will continue to take on each day for him and my family.
I created WaterFront as a place where original content would not be censored and for it to have a chance to be supported with an intimate audience. The struggle of producing a variety of festival is something I would not be able to do without the support of my friends and family. I’ve pledged to hold WaterFront at least once a year for every year I have here. I consider WaterFront my life’s work and more so, the closest moments I have with my creator.
As for the struggle to keep WaterFront’s budget going- well, that’s something every year we get better at too. We rely heavily on sponsors to help feed our production and performers and to keep our equipment expenses low. Since their creation in 2015, WaterFront and Medea’s Children have left our experiences open to admission by donation. In the case of Medea’s Children, it’s difficult to put a price tag on moving emotions for the cathartic benefit of our audience, and for WaterFront, if the people want to keep it going, then they’ll donate what the experience is worth to them.
The advice I would give to any young woman is to stop doubting if you can do it and just do it. Find what drives you to get out of bed every morning and do that. What you contribute to this world is valuable, and what you want to create with your life is possible. Get out of your head and start planning. Write down your goals, and then take the steps to put them into motion. Stop putting your worth and your value in the hands of other people who don’t deserve it. You have the power to change and rearrange how your life is going as soon as you decide for it to be done, and no one can take that away from you, except, of course, yourself. As my Father, and I’m sure many others have said, “No one is going to do it for you”.
What should we know about WaterFront? What do you do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Well to streamline it a bit better: WaterFront is annual cultivation of creation done all by donation. It is a volunteer-run and leave-no-trace event. It is a space held exclusively for original work by housing an intimate audience to allow connection, and feedback, for all creative mediums. Creators are immersed in the body of WaterFront for a finite amount of time along with their invited patrons which generate the communal and experimental happening. We encourage all original content, from live music to spoken word; we love to showcase new visual and performance arts. We hold it over a weekend, and with Ellinger’s prime central location in Texas, we have creators come from Houston, Austin, San Marcos, College Station, and all the little towns in-between. Did I mention it’s also a campout?
When I’m not producing WaterFront or moving with Medea’s Children, I work professionally in the Austin Film Industry, usually in costumes or the art department. I’m also a figure model and have stunt doubled for a major network television show. Working behind the scenes I understand how much preparation goes into just one take. How you are able to re-set and go again if it wasn’t “perfect”, but you aren’t able to do that with live performance. Which I find extremely profound. It is the most human and humbling experience to witness a live performance, and the connection you feel like the performer to your audience is indescribable. All the preparation hangs on the precipice of one moment, and you are either there to experience it or you’re not. Sure, we can record moments on our phone and look back at them and share them, but it’s just not the same as having been there and the feeling you get when it is happening.
For good reason, society often focuses more on the problems rather than the opportunities that exist, because the problems need to be solved. However, we’d probably also benefit from looking for and recognizing the opportunities that women are better positioned to capitalize on. Have you discovered such opportunities?
I feel a Woman who knows herself, knows no limits and is a force to be reckoned with. I feel we are destined to lead, and I don’t just mean for a leading role. If something needs to be done, then a woman is already setting the course and gathering the people for it to be so, and no, she does not need your permission. I feel it is a very exciting time for women in film and stage. We aren’t just the pretty face in front of the camera anymore. We are directing where that camera shoots and how our story is being told. A woman is an entire reason anyone of us is here right now.
My mother is the only woman who could have survived the trials and tribulations that this life has thrown at our family. She not only held down herself during my father’s passing, but she held down our family. Her strength, her love, and her support are the only reasons I am here today. She has set the course for my siblings and I to do the good will that she and our father have placed in our hearts. The love that they shared, the support he gave her, is the standard that I hold.
The opportunities for women are growing, and I feel it’s because women are realizing their truth. We are no longer allowing the old ways to prevent us from getting to where we know we need to go. We are loving ourselves. We aren’t wasting time on the opinions of what a boy thinks, though we do appreciate the support a true partner can lend and who isn’t afraid of someone they can’t control. Women have changed the world, and we aren’t done yet.
Contact Info:
- Phone: 979-484-9797
- Email: whereiswaterfront@gmail.com
- Instagram: @WaterFrontTX
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WaterFrontTX/
Image Credit:
Molly McCarty, Stevie Marie Hamilton, Ashley Andruss, Lou Zylka, Chelsea Lynn Urban
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