This project, as the culmination of my two years on the Advanced Theatre Practice course, has helped me refine my artistic and academic goals and pursuits and has expanded my practical knowledge both as a director and as a writer. I have learned more about the industry, the landscape of theatre, and the place of adaptations in it, and I have made valuable connections with other practitioners in the field. I now also have a better understanding the process of adaptation and the nuances between a director's interpretation and a writer’s new version of a play. In addition, I feel more confident in approaching my work from a multidisciplinary point of view, collaborating with other artists in a thorough and comprehensive way, and revisiting the classical canon with a novel intention.

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Through the process of adaptation itself I have developed as a director regardless of the circumstances we found ourselves in and the new direction that the project took. With the more dramaturgical focus we took, the process has taught me more about the preliminary work of world building and character building. Balancing the roles of director and writer throughout the project has allowed me to get a better understanding of Ophelia as a character as well as her wishes and desires and her place in the original place. This close consideration of a character’s perspective has equipped me with an improved eye for detail when it comes to directing classical works.

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The development of ECHO was ultimately an application of the concepts and ideas I have been engaging with for the past year, which has helped me articulate a practice/method that I have termed “queer-forward adaptation”, emphasizing feminist and queer concepts of temporality, orientation, and the live body. What evolved into a practice-as-research model has allowed me to develop the play in a way informed by my research and theoretical findings. Going forward I intend to expand on my current practice and research in both an artistic and an academic context. I hope to conduct further research and engage with critical concepts in the field of adaptation, which I will continue to apply in my practice.

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My research into adaptation as a whole has inspired me artistically to think about how we can revisit the past with a difference and how adaptations of classical works can be a vehicle for this. As artists, we cannot change or erase the past, but we can draw on it as a source to emphasize a different, better future that challenges the status quo.