Cross-cultural Exchange and Cultural Mobility

But what interested me in that scene, besides the actual incredible fact that in a Romanian city somebody had decided to build, in 2011, a wall between “white people” and “gypsies,” was the current Romanian political discourse. And I was interested in whom I was addressing too. I realized that I was speaking, just like the current political discourse, to a middle-class of which I was a part.

This series presents perspectives on contemporary theater in Romania. It is curated by Iulia Popovici, who recently concluded a month long ArtsLink residency at HowlRound.

Sibiu International Theatre Festival creates a dialogue from the performances of different cultures. It brings up the questions of how artists perceive and what that means within our work.

The fall of communism in 1989 ledway to the democratisation of art. Ioana Tamas gives the breakdown of how arts management had to be developed to make this transition successful.

Writing about a national theater as far away from the United States as the Romanian one means, in the end, performing exoticism—playing the monkey for the zoo visitors that do expect a monkey. Because, in the end, it’s not about the theater—a specific economic and aesthetic system designed to produce and share artistic work—it’s about how a society, in this case Romanian society, is perceived at an international level.

Mitch Mattson offers an overview of the work accomplished by Voices of Now: India.

Holly L. Derr covers Radar L.A. 2013, an interdisciplinary and internationally focused theater festival in Los Angeles theater

Hannah Wolf introduces her position as an American in Romania, teaching and researching at the University of Theatre and Cinema in Bucharest.

Eleanor Regan finds during her study abroad experience that theatre that interrogates a subject actively and presents a real viewpoint gives the audience the most to chew on.

Is ensemble a group of people working together over a long duration? Is it a non-hierarchical organizational structure? A way of being and working together with a shared sense of priorities?

Daniel Sack continues his reflection on the 2013 Avignon Festival with a look at South African director Brett Bailey's installation-performance on colonial injusticies.

I think about paradoxical needs this experience embodies—for community and solitude; structures and flexibility; stability and change—and the need for all of it, simultaneously, in our lives, our practices, our field.

In the following Around the Teapot series, three writers reflect on “Adventuring Together: Ensembles, Collectives, Laboratories & Networks,” a weekend-long gathering of performance artists and scholars, from across the U.S. and Europe, held in Los Angeles. 

Chanakya Vyas teams up with the HartBeat Ensemble to explore the connections between India and America through oral interviews to find the obvious can be overlooked. 

Elaine Ávila explains why she does not define herself as Latina, but takes accepts that designation with the highest honors.

From 2008 to the present, playwright Adrienne Kennedy and Egyptian scholar Nadia Maher were in correspondence. This is an edited selection of emails they exchanged while Nadia was working on her Master’s thesis during the Egyptian Revolution.

Steven Ginsburg explores his expectations of globalization in India versus the realities of the quick economic growth spurt.  

Elaina Avila, inspired by the Occupy Movement, decided to write plays for the 99%. Here's what happened.

Daniel Sack writes through the one-night-only performance of Romeo Catellucci's Schwanengesang D744 at the 2013 Avignon Festival, and how it turned its gaze back on the spectator.

In the midst of the fringe festival, Kingston escapes to site-specific theatre coming face to face with the lines of audience participates and affects.

From her time being in a country the size of Michigan that brews narratives of local experiences, Regan wonders about the United States ability to cultivate plays that reflect local area’s stories.

Talya Kingston shares her experiences with Nirbhaya, Quietly, and The Events at Edinburgh Fringe in the second installment of this series focusing on the idea of witnessing.