Community-Engaged Theatre

Since her arrival at a small liberal arts college in Kentucky, Jayme Kilburn has grown its theatre program into a valued local cultural institution. By positioning theatre as a social service, she writes, she has cultivated a community that wants to show up.

Drawing from their experiences creating the Arts for EveryBody campaign, Christina D. Eskridge and Michael Rohd explore the concept of co-design in artistic, civic, and community contexts. Their experience with the initiative models ways for artist-led practice to build trust and guide processes within community development efforts.

Pluralism is inherent in community partnerships, whether hyperlocal or national. As the One Nation/One Project team built public arts partnerships in eighteen sites across the country, they sought pluralistic strategies to respond to a question of growing importance: What future is possible at the intersection of our increasing diversity and diminishing cohesion? And how do we reach it?

Collaborating with individual community members in a theatremaking process can greatly enrich a project, but the process is not simple. Jacob Buttry offers reflections to help artists structure their community-based theatre projects in a democratic way while respecting the time, labor, and capacity of all involved.

How do you write a union play that doesn’t end in everyone yelling “Strike!”? Abby Schoering explores one answer to this question offered by Gwen Kingston’s Café Utopia, which engaged Notch Theatre’s community-responsive methods, verbatim interludes, and enough juicery puns to keep the laughs coming.

Citlali Pizarro draws on her own experience working with incarcerated poets, and learnings from the film Sing Sing about Sing Sing Correctional Facility’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, to explore how common narratives about creating theatre in prison fall short, and what theatremakers must understand instead.

The former community engagement director of the Guthrie Theater, Rebecca Noon, reflects on the early years of the theatre’s Native Advisory Council and the steady relationship building that led to powerful collaborations with Indigenous communities across the Twin Cities. 

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?