Community-Engaged Theatre

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.

Kristin Idaszak shares about Dolores Díaz’s new play Black Sunday that connects the environmental racism during the 1935 Dust Bowl to contemporary migration crises in Chicago.

Ifrah Mansour creates performance art that explores joy and healing while connecting communities. In this essay, she illuminates the connections between her work and her experiences as a Somali American, a refugee, and a Muslim woman.

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.

Eseovwe Emakunu and Anita Anoma of Shanty Theatre recently launched a campaign that brought together primary school performers and university audiences for a dance drama performance about climate change. They discuss the creative process and impact of this performance project, which catalyzed action and learning about the impact of climate change and deforestation in Nigeria.

Tannis Kowalchuk, artistic director of Farm Arts Collective, shares about the project Dream on the Farm—a ten year project of climate change plays performed on Willow Wisp Organic Farm that grapples with the questions: How do we imagine our future? What are our dreams?

Latinx theatremakers Jorge Piña and Christin Eve Cato sit down for a conversation about their paths through the theatre field and their advice for future generations looking to sustain this work while caring for themselves and each other.

Jan Cohen-Cruz delves into the process of bringing The Most Beautiful Home… Maybe, a multi-city project that aims to use art to influence how people think about housing, to Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. Through this process, Jan saw how theatre can bring together housing advocates from different walks of life to find their commonalities and collectively imagine a world with equitable housing for all.

Alberto Justiniano and Milta Ortiz, artistic leaders at Teatro del Pueblo and Borderlands Theater, respectively, have to balance organizational leadership and prioritizing their art. They discuss this work and the ways they engage their Latine communities while providing them with avenues to reflect on social justice issues. 

When Ty Defoe and Larissa FastHorse’s For the People premiered at the Guthrie Theater this fall, it became the theatre’s first mainstage production by Indigenous authors. Robert Hubbard reviews the play, lauding its comedy, spectacle, and commitment to the Native community of the Twin Cities.

Applied theatre scholars and practitioners Jennifer Schaupp and Dr. Felicia Owusu-Ansah discuss the empowering potential of Theatre of the Oppressed, and how Felicia has been able to utilize it in Ghana and other places around the world.

Spurred on by the National Theatre production of James Graham’s Dear England, verity healey discusses the notion that theatre in the United Kingdom might have a few things to learn from football.

Eseovwe Emakunu and Dennis U. Obire, co-founders of the Shanty Theatre, chronicle their work in the Adagbabiri Community in Bayelsa State, which is one of the most educationally deprived states in Nigeria. Using a theatre for development model, the group worked with local children to create a performance that demonstrated the importance of education in the social development of a community and nation.

Robert Hubbard reviews Larissa FastHorse’s Wicoun, a transformative story of a teen finding power through gender and cultural identity—with the support of some Lakota superheroes.

Genevieve Schroder-Arce discusses her experience attending—and co-creating—Teatro Vivo’s Las Pastorela 2022, which invited audience members to construct the piece and perform it for one another as a way of modeling collaboration among community members.