Kalos K. Chu ’22-’23 on Creative Development and Building a Musical from the Ground Up

Kalos K. Chu ’22-’23, a former Crimson Arts Chair, found his artistic spark at a young age: First as a musician, picking up the violin from an exploratory music program, and later delving into the world of conducting. “I really enjoyed conducting as a method of musical collaboration, it was the perfect way to channel and be the hub of all of this music,” said Chu, reflecting on the events that led to the manifold music director positions that he has since held at Harvard. His seasoned record includes shows as recent as ¡TEATRO!’s fall 2022 “In the Heights” production and stretches all the way back to the 2019 First-Year Musical, “Cruising Altitude,” which he music-directed, and which catapulted his entry into arts communities at Harvard and forged connections that would sustain his next four years of artmaking.

In fact, the 2019 First-Year Musical served as both an inspiration to Chu and as his introduction to the music world at Harvard. Seeing students his age grapple with the abstract concept of creating an original musical — and realizing that these students were able to create something genuinely good — piqued his interest, leading him down a path filled with much more theater than his high school self could have ever imagined.

Today, however, he sees writing as his primary art form. Carrying with him a love of writing and a deliberateness inspired by a high school English teacher, Chu fostered his artistic identity with creative writing classes starting in his first year at Harvard and beyond. Writing the 2022 Hasty Pudding show allowed him to begin to see his creative ideas come to fruition, a process that he would become experienced in over the coming years.

A turning point in his artistic career came during the Covid-19 pandemic. Before that, he envisioned himself writing long-form creative nonfiction for The New Yorker, but the turmoil in his personal and interpersonal life during the Covid-19 pandemic — along with the flexibility and down time offered by quarantine — gave him the freedom to pursue previously vague notions of working in screenwriting and entertainment. He pursued internships in creative development, working to develop ideas for movies and TV shows at DreamWorks, Lucasfilm, and Nickelodeon, which allowed him to improve his understanding of story and nurture that “soft skill,” as he calls it, which would prove valuable in his own creative process.

“I think over time, I sort of grew to understand what that means in terms of what a story is and how to break it down into its parts and isolate the parts that are working and are not working,” Chu said.

Currently, Chu is working on an original project, “OUT,” set to debut in the spring of 2023. The initial idea — the “kernel” of the story — came from the summer after his first year at Harvard during a study abroad in Beijing, where his professor told his class about a popular dating app in China where you can hire people to pretend to be your significant other to take home to your family during the holidays. This idea — which ultimately evolved into a queer story of protagonists struggling to come out to their parents — fascinated him, and started taking shape in his junior year of college. From there, it became an iterative process of fleshing out characters, storylines, and watching the concept grow into an ensemble cast, keeping what worked and scrapping what did not.

Writing is Chu’s favorite way to interact with the world. “I wrote ‘OUT’ because I felt like it was a story that I needed to tell, that I needed to get off my chest and that was baking inside of me for three years, and I think, really, the people who make good art are the people who do it because it's the only thing that they know how to do and the only way that they know how to communicate with the world,” Chu said. But as he said, that’s not the only pull: Creative development is also a fun, collaborative, and interactive experience, especially in animation, where his sights are set post-graduation. Wherever the road takes him, creative work and creative development are certainly in his future.

For others looking to write and put on an original show, Chu’s advice is simple: “just do it.”

“One of the things about Harvard is that I think a lot of times when you do something here you feel like you have to be the best at it or it’s not worth doing, and I think that is the worst idea ever if you are thinking about pursuing art, because there is no sort of standardized metric for what is good art,” he said. He recommends opening the document and just starting to type, because the perfect opportunity will never come. As he says, all the reason to write is that you have a story that needs to be told. “The journey of becoming an artist is silencing those demons within yourself that tell you you can’t do it,” he said.

Chu is adamant that the hardest part of doing arts at Harvard is not getting involved, but staying there. It’s easy to forsake personal interests in favor of what you pragmatically think you should be doing, despite the safety net and employability of a Harvard degree. But the best thing to do as an artist is to fight that urge, persevere in your interests, and to keep making art.