Documentary Theatre

Julia Hune-Brown and Keira Loughran discuss crafting Then Is Now, a concept album/video playlist they created through conversations with Chinese Canadian women who grew up in Toronto’s Chinatown during the era of the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Lisa Rafferty sits down with Ukrainian documentary storyteller Alem Kent to discuss Kent’s Our Response Ability and upcoming work with ProEnglish Theatre. Through documentary and verbatim theatre practices, these productions detail experiences of Ukrainians living under siege and working as war persists around them.

Theatremaker Viktor Vilisov examines the important role theatre can play in supporting migrants and refugees.

Michael Dewhatley sits down with playwright and director KJ Sanchez to talk about her experiences making plays based on real events. They discuss process, responsibility, perspective, and how to create without an agenda.

Margarita Kompelmakher details the Alliance Theatre’s process of adapting Working into a community-engaged production that both modeled grassroots organizing and told the story of the work of organizers in the city.

Anastasia Patlay talks about creating documentary theatre with the Moscow-based company Teatr.doc.

Lee Sunday Evans, the artistic director of New York City’s Waterwell, discusses the power of transcripts in performance, the topics of immigration and deportation, and the urgent attention that needs to be paid to the United States border right now.

Summer Robinson interviews playwright Lynden Harris about her work creating theatre with men on death row across the United States.

Sean Anthony Chia examines the impact of a powerful story—one without spectacle—through the lens of Isaac Gomez’s the way she spoke.

Sam Williams dives into several of the productions at Finland’s Tampere Theatre Festival, which ran between August 5 and 11 and which was curated based on the theme of bravery.

Michaela Goldhaber, current artistic director of Wry Crips, talks to the founding and early members of the disabled women’s theatre group about their history.

verity healey looks at Teatr.doc’s latest show, Torture, and the vital need for “truth-telling” theatre.

Arman Heljic uses the play Roma Armee to discuss how European Roma are rejecting their colonial legacy and reclaiming their narrative.

Katarzyna Pabijanek reflects on Roma presence in Hungarian theatre, both throughout history and today.

Mihaela Drăgan looks at the way Roma are and have been portrayed in theatre in Romania and how Romani artists are working to reclaim their stories.

Mona Merhi reflects on four productions at France’s 2018 Avignon Festival that were created based on real-life events, people, or documentary material and questions whether staging documents is an ethical process.