For the past 22 years, Upper School performing arts teacher and Belfry director K. Richardson has directed the majority of GA’s theatrical performances and taught students the fundamentals of acting.
As she heads into retirement, she will be celebrated and honored by many, especially her student-actors who feel like they have grown under her teaching and guidance.
“She gave me the opportunity to play Little Sally in Urinetown,” Belfry performer Lauren Sass ‘26 said. “With that role, she really showed me how to be an amazing actress and how to carry yourself on stage, and how to really put yourself in the character’s shoes.”
The final show of Ms. Richardson’s career was Ride the Cyclone in March, which really resonated with her students.
“I think Ride the Cyclone will have a very long-lasting impact on me in many ways because it was both of our last shows and we really adapted it to be our own,” Belfry performer Maddie Quinter ‘24 said. “It really felt like we had ownership over it and it felt more personal.”
In Ms. Richardson’s classes, she teaches the Meisner method of acting, which is typically taught in college. Many of her students find that the skills she teaches help them to live up to their roles.
“My precision has definitely increased and it has allowed me to really understand on a very deep level what I’m trying to convey,” Quinter said. “It helps me tap into whatever I’m supposed to be conveying, whether it’s complete sadness, being wrecked, joy, or excitement.”
Some students apply what she teaches beyond the stage, affecting their daily lives and interactions with others.
“I learned how to get better at empathizing with characters,” McKenna Miller ‘25 said. “In turn, that helps me in real life with other people and being aware of our emotions and embracing them on stage, truthfully.”
Ms. Richardson’s creative perspective helped students expand their beliefs of what’s possible, bringing forth ideas that have benefited Belfry’s performances.
“She brings things up and sees things in the text that we perform,” Miller said. “There are important details that sometimes we don’t always see but they make the performance so much better, so much more authentic.”
“She has so many out-of-the-box ideas that are original and so unique to the point that I don’t think I could ever imagine these things happening,” Quinter said. “But she is so determined to make that creative idea a reality.”
Many of her students recognize that she fosters a tight-knit community where everyone feels included and supported.
“She offers space for people to be authentically themselves without judgment,” Miller said. “K really cares a lot for each and every one of us individually and on a personal level.”
“It’s very contagious in the room whenever you work with her, that comfortability and being vulnerable and also humorous at the same time, which is a hard skill to master but she does it with such ease that,” Quinter said. “It makes every experience that much better.”
As Ms. Richardson bids farewell to GA, so does her son Liam Richardson-Harris ‘24, who has known Belfry prior to getting involved during his Upper School years.
“She gave me guidance when I was like, too young to be in her classes,” Richardson-Harris said. “It made me good enough that I could enjoy it enough to want to keep doing it when I had the chance to do it with her.”
Because Richardson-Harris has watched Belfry grow, he has a better understanding of how the Belfry program developed under K.’s direction.
“There’s stories that she’s told me about her first couple of years [at GA], and kids were not learning their lines until tech week. From the beginning, part of it was like, ‘no: we’re going to make really good shows,’” Richardson-Harris said. “And that, I think, is at the core of Belfry today.”
With Ms. Richardson’s creative input leaving the GA campus, Richardson-Harris believes that it will simply be different with the new director and the students will still hold onto Ms. Richardson’s teaching and direction.
“The way that she chooses shows and with such intricacy and the specificity of thinking about like, ‘who’s in the cast? What are their skills like?’ That might be different,” Richardson-Harris said. “I think it’s gonna be really good, in part because some of that DNA is going to stick in the kids that were here before. But it’s gonna be very different.”
As for Ms. Richardson herself, she has accepted her departure from Belfry and how her students will continue onwards in a new direction.
“I think it’s really important for me to let it go,” Ms. Richardson said. “Belfry is going to change with the new director and I don’t own that. The students and the new director will forge whatever that is together.”
She emphasizes her close collaboration with her students and how all of Belfry contributes to the success of a performance.
“We’ve all done it together, right? It’s not something I do to them. It’s work that we all do together. And that’s the point that I get to let go and stop working,” Ms. Richardson said. “They’re still working and I get to enjoy all the fruits of our labor and I get to enjoy everybody else enjoying that.”
At the end of her long career, she finds more value from her experiences rather than her awards or achievements.
“I can be proud of the awards and stuff like that, but I actually feel like those are so arbitrary, and that we live in a world like that,” Ms. Richardson said. “You don’t do art for prizes. You do art because you have something to say.”
Lastly, she encourages GA students to approach the world as their true selves.
“There is nothing more powerful than being your authentic self and you don’t have to put on anything to go into the world,” Ms. Richardson said. “What you just actually need to do is be who you are and encounter the world that way.”
As GA’s Belfry and acting department goes through a significant transition in leadership, it just means that there will be new and different experiences for its members. The new director, Mr. Gibbons, will take his creative expertise to the stage and continue to direct GA’s skilled and talented performers.