This Is How We Do It Festival at The Foundry Theatre

The Foundry Theatre presents talks at the This Is How We Do It Festival livestreamed on the global, commons-based peer-produced HowlRound TV network at howlround.tv Saturday 20 April and Sunday 22 April 2012.

As some of you may know, The Foundry Theatre frequently hosts different sorts of public events (separate from our productions) where artists might find meaningful exchange with people outside of our own community and practice—both as a way to assert our presence and significance in building the world and hopefully to widen our access as a community to some of the amazing things going on outside of our rehearsal rooms, and studios. I write now to invite you to be part of the next one—live and in person in NYC, or via Livestream from wherever you are in the world (and hooray for HowlRound TV!).

This event is a “festival of dialogues about another world under construction” called This is How We Do It (thank you Montel Jordan). We’ve invited some insanely creative people to come to NYC from all over the world—Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Spain, and across the United States—who are creating and living and working in innovative new systems that change the way the world works. April 20-22, they will each present a show and tell about what they’re doing, how they do it, and how it’s going. And we’ve invited artists like Erik Ehn, Marcus Gardley and Morgan Jenness (among others), people from the Occupy Movement, and social justice practitioners to respond with questions. Then we’ve left lots of space for conversation to follow.

Why are we doing this? Because though these practices are proliferating widely across the globe, there's barely a language for what they are or how they're connected. They're primarily framed as a kind of "visionary activism," distinct from or even instead of protest politics (academics refer to them as "prefigurative" practices). I think "activism" is only one of its frames; on a deeper level it's simply people who are creating and experimenting with new forms of transformation, not unlike our work in the theatre.

I think there’s an interesting language waiting to be developed between those of us who create art and those who are creating these new structures. We both work and live in the ambiguity of creation, of not knowing and proceeding anyway (often against or in spite of prevailing norms). I think the speakers we invited are coming because a theatre company invited them, because of the opportunity to speak about their work with others creatively engaged with making things.

This is surely the case with Grace Lee Boggs—the legendary philosopher and activist, who will open the festival on Friday night. At the age of ninety-seven and going strong, Grace been a part of every major U.S. social movement over the past seventy-five years. And for those seventy-five years, she has insisted that art and the artists who make are vital to the process of changing the world. If nothing else, don’t miss Grace on Friday night!

I hope you can make it—thousands of you—to some or all of this remarkable conversation. And I’m mad looking forward to the conversations we will have afterwards—and the ones after those.

Saturday & Sunday Schedule

ANOTHER POLITICS

Int'l Presenters:
Mzwakhe Mdlalose, President of the South African Shackdwellers’ Movement (Abahlali baseMjondolo)
Rafael Litvin Villas Bôas, a coordinator of Brazil’s Landless Workers' Movement (Movimento Sem Terra)

Local Respondents:
Erik Ehn, Playwright
Raquel Lavina, Program Director at Social Justice Leadership
Maria Mercado, member of Movement for Justice in El Barrio
Michael Premo, Co-creator of Housing is a Human Right and member of Organizing for Occupation

ANOTHER MEDIA

Int'l Presenters:
Claudia Acuña, Founding Member of La Vaca communications cooperative in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Diana Nucera, Program Director at Allied Media Projects in Detroit

Local Respondents:
Marisa Jahn, Executive & Creative Director at People’s Production House
Morgan Jenness, Cultural Occupier, Abrams Artists Agency
Alyssa Katz, Editor of The New York World

ANOTHER SAFETY

Int'l Presenters:
Joyce and Nelson Johnson presenting on the Greensboro Truth & Community Reconciliation Process
Mimi Kim, Founder of Creative Interventions in Oakland

Local Respondents:
Marcus Gardley, Poet-Playwright
Jill Williams, Truth Commission Consultant and Occupy Faith Organizer
YaliniDream*, Collective Member of Safe OUTside the System

ANOTHER ECONOMY

Int'l Presenters:
Michael Peck, US representative for the Mondragón federation of workers' cooperatives in the Basque Country
Daniel Tygel, former Executive Secretary of the Brazilian Forum for the Solidarity Economy

Local Respondents:
Carmen Piñeiro, Sustainable Communities Organizer at Community Voices Heard
Carne Ross, Executive Director of Independent Diplomat and member of the Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Working Group
Juan Carlos Ruiz, Communications Coordinator at Green Worker Cooperatives

Here are the details: the livestream will be broadcast on TheFoundryTheatre.org and howlround.tv. Remember to use #howlround on Twitter to follow the conversations Friday (7pm EDT) and Saturday and Sunday (12pm & 3pm EDT). To follow the written conversation, check out the series blog.

For the full schedule of "This Is How We Do It" click here.

About HowlRound TV

HowlRound TV is a global, commons-based, peer-produced, open-access livestreaming and video archive project stewarded by the nonprofit HowlRound. HowlRound TV is a free and shared resource for live conversations and performances relevant to the world’s performing-arts and cultural fields. Its mission is to break geographic isolation, promote resource sharing, and develop our knowledge commons collectively. Anyone can participate in a community of peer organizations revolutionizing the flow of information, knowledge, and access in our field by becoming a producer and co-producing with us. Learn more by going to our participate page. For any other queries, email [email protected] or call Vijay Mathew at +1 917.686.3185 Signal. View the video archive of past events.