Process

Lane Michael Stanley offers a toolkit of questions to consider for those who seek to have a community-embedded artistic practice, based on his own experience in recovery housing and his time developing plays with unhoused people.

Robert Duffley, dramaturg for the We Hear You—A Climate Archive series, details the process of creating 77 Messages to the Future, an offering that amplifies and preserves youth perspectives on the climate emergency from around the world. He shares how this work counters dominant media narratives that exclude the voices of youth and illustrate the climate crisis as something yet to come.

Nasima Bee discusses the creation of take back my body, which was informed by a series of workshops in which groups of Muslim women connect and share experiences on the topics of belonging, identity, and home.

In the spirit of decentering directors as the sole owners of a production’s concept, Daphnie Sicre proposes a two-day pre-production gathering, or dalliance, for the creative team. The format of this dalliance is inspired by her group’s work at the Latinx Theatre Commons Designer and Director Colaboratorio.

Rob Silverman Ascher chronicles the collaboration between Aaron Pang, a non-fiction storyteller with no formal theatrical training, and Johanna Kasimow, a director with a background in devising and physical theatre, on Herein Lies the Truth: Pang’s story that centers around sex and disability and confronts able-bodied expectations of what a disabled performer ought to share.

Barbara Fuchs shares findings from “For a Resilient US Theater, Post-Pandemic,” a Pandemic Preparedness Performing Arts research project which looked at how the nonprofit theatre sector responded to the COVID pandemic. The report asked what worked, where, and why, in order to recommend new measures to pave long-term stability in theatre. 

Amelia Parenteau explores the creation of The < 3 G E N Project: a documentary theatre project in which the creators, Beatriz Cabur and Giulia Cavallini, are using digital theatre to bridge the digital divide between generations of women, and invite these women into conversation on how to better connect. 

Ayesha Jordan writes about the intersection of performance and permaculture, and how slowing down and respecting the cycles of the earth are influencing her multi-species project in process. 

Deke Weaver discusses his life-long project, The Unreliable Bestiary: an ark of full-length performances about animals, our relationships with them, and the worlds they inhabit. Through this ambitious project, Deke and his team draw out the connections between disparate local and global dots and illustrate how the personal is political.

Yaşam Özlem Gülseven interviews Davit Khorbaladze about his play UNLOVE: an experimental work based on his personal documentary material about the loss of love during a time of global crisis and the identity crisis that followed. The two explore how UNLOVE and the rest of the “UN-” trilogy highlights the shocking resemblance between intimate experiences and global events.

Educator Rainier Pearl-Styles recounts their experience of devising a show in response to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, using tenets of Paolo Freire’s theory of liberatory education. Through recasting, restorying, and restructuring, the participants were able to use Shakespeare as a tool for understanding power and identity.