After fruitful workshops and discovering the resonance of a woman’s experience, they met with Houston’s former poet laureate, Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton. It was through these meetings and additional workshop time that Mouton helped each cast member craft their story into a monologue. Madeline Styskal then took each monologue and composed the accompanying music. For the singers involved that meant music being written to accompany their original song text and for the instrumentalists, that meant an instrumental piece was developed and adapted from their monologue.

Once all artist’s monologues and music were established, graphic design artist and Moores School of music alum, Janine Dworin, created visuals that represented each of their stories. As each artist performed, their unique graphics were projected behind them. “This was the first time I’ve created a piece for a stage production before, so I was excited and challenged by the opportunity. I’ve always used art as a therapeutic way to work through how I’m feeling, and I was hopeful that my creations would help the women performing experience their stories in a new way,” said Dworin. 

“This is not something that classical singers do a lot. Usually, we’re singing a text written by someone else, and that someone else is typically a man. Although there are texts by women in the classical music canon, it’s male-dominated. So, the ability to share the stage with a cast of women who are performing their own text developed from their own experiences rather than singing what a man thinks a woman’s experience is, was therapeutic. Since its conception and debut in 2021, some women in the cast made some decisions and changes in their life after the show because it was a becoming process. In fact, we have to change some of the monologues for the New York performance because their stories have changed so much,” explained Kenley-Miller. 

Founder and Artistic Director of The Why Collective, Sydney Anderson, has gathered a diverse group of thinkers across many artistic disciplines to tell stories together without a hierarchy of roles. “The dancer can speak just as loudly as the actor, and the painter can find expression in movement just like the violinist. My experience as a multi-hyphenate artist seemed to be celebrated during my college years, but I discovered very quickly that wasn't the case in most professional settings. When I put on the hat of "singer" in a professional setting, I was rarely allowed to have ideas about anything other than my vocal line. I felt like I had to hide my other artistic skills to be taken seriously as a performer. I got tired of asking the leadership in arts organizations, ‘Why are we doing it this way?’ and hearing some version of ‘That’s just the way we’ve always done it.’ I realized with a growing passion that that answer was not sufficient for me. I believe that if we stop asking why, we stagnate and eventually become irrelevant.  To me, the only thing that moves something into the category of “art” is intention,” Anderson said. 

When Anderson first saw Kenley-Miller's concept for The Women Have Something to Say, she was blown away at how aligned the project was with her dream for projects that The Why Collective would one day support. “I was so inspired by the authenticity with which the women were being encouraged to share their voices, and it struck me as such a powerful tool to write one's own stories into monologues; by placing ourselves in the role of a character it somehow makes it feel safer to tell our most vulnerable truths to an audience. In true The Why Collective fashion, I immediately thought about how my interdisciplinary model could widen the access points to this workshop-style creation process. So, this iteration will include dance, visual art, and theatre-in-the-round staging to bring the audience into these all-too-relatable stories, hopefully seeing themselves in the performers,” said Anderson.