Recent Essays

Dr. Joan Lancourt reflects on collaborating with Boston-based theatre board chairs to discuss eye-opening ideas and shared frustrations.

What we really needed—and received—was a place to develop an unfinished work in a professional touring locale with Chicago audiences, and to prototype a student chorus that would be trained to perform in the work. Simultaneously Columbia College had the Double Edge ensemble embedded in its department for nearly a month. Acting students had daily access to training. Directors, playwrights, and actors could observe rehearsal and process regularly.

Bertie Ferdman interviews Anne Hamburger about Basetrack Live, a multimedia theatre production inspired by Basetrack: One-Eight, a web project created in 2010 by photojournalists embedded with US Marines fighting in southern Afghanistan.

This week's Twitter conversation using #newplay will be in Spanish and topic is: "Diferencias culturales y de idioma en teatro" This conversation will be moderated by Inés Gubba-Tejeira @Ineika—who like all of our moderators, authors, and content producers—self-selected to peer-produce on this commons-based platform! This hour-long Howl will take place on Thursday, October 30 on hashtag #newplay at 11am PDT (Vancouver) / 1pm CDT (Austin) / 2pm EDT (Toronto) / 18:00 GMT / 7pm CET (Madrid).

There is a very gentle story at heart about a boy who wants his mother. We all feel that separation; we all want to return to that place in our lives where our mother’s voice, scent, and presence can solve everything. That makes it pretty universal.

Touch has an important place in open-frame work. It is our most powerful resource—but we must craft it with the care we craft each other element. In fact, with more care, because we are stepping into a world where audience members need to grant true permission for it to be impactful. Touch is a sense we may turn off to function in our day-to-day lives. Are you aware of the smooth texture of your keyboard or the hard wood of your seat? Are you processing the feel of your jeans against your skin?

I don’t want to write an article about how we don’t see enough of a certain kind of people on stage. We are all working within an unfortunate system that, for the most part, elevates the work that mirrors itself. Instead of talking about production, I want to write about the art that we are making, because we are artists making art, whether it’s produced or not.

The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), with support from ArtPlace America, is hosting a convening that examines how performance-based organizations, and the artists they engage, transform places through their artistic practices: "Beyond the Building: Performing Arts and Transforming Place". This multiplatform convening will be live webcasted and will have Twitter discussions on hashtag #performplace on Monday, November 3, 2014, from 6am PST to 2pm PST / 7am MST to 3pm MST / 8am CST to 4pm CST / 9am EST to 5pm EST.

Director Will Davis shares his experience navigating theatre spaces as a queer person.