Oregon

In 2014, Portland Experimental Theatre Ensemble embarked on a decade-long project translating and producing Anton Chekhov’s plays. Kate Purdum details how this project used fresh translations and imaginative theatrical landscapes to affirm the playwright’s relevance to contemporary audiences.

In the spirit of decentering directors as the sole owners of a production’s concept, Daphnie Sicre proposes a two-day pre-production gathering, or dalliance, for the creative team. The format of this dalliance is inspired by her group’s work at the Latinx Theatre Commons Designer and Director Colaboratorio.

Ten years after writing The Gun Show, playwright Ellen Lewis looks back at the play that tasks an actor with the delivery of a series of gun stories from Lewis’s life—typically with Ellen among the audience. Lewis sits down with Nate Cohen, who worked on the show for several runs that totaled more than one hundred performances, to reflect on the ways the play, its playwright, and the world have changed over ten years of productions.

Carl(os) Roa and Rula(s) A. Muñoz share a multi-vocal, non-linear account of their group’s work at the Latinx Theatre Commons (LTC) Designer and Director Colaboratorio. Through both text and images, they document their group’s explorations of non-hierarchical generative process, as well as the challenges they faced.

Dolissa Medina details her group’s expansive design process at the Latinx Theatre Commons Designer and Director Colaboratorio. Engaging with a variety of spaces and art forms opened the group’s creative floodgates, allowing them to reach new perspectives on their work and their ways of relating to one another.

Mateo Hernandez acknowledges collaboration and artmaking as two distinct processes that inform each other in the theatrical process, an observation rooted in their group’s experience of intentionally reexamining the collaborative process at the Latinx Theatre Commons Director and Designer Colaboratorio.

The Latinx Theatre Commons Designer and Director Colaboratorio gathered dozens of Latinx theatremakers to approach collaboration from a place of inquiry, play, and exploration. Carla Della Gatta writes about this event as an alternate story of what is happening—and what could be happening—in US theatre right now.

The Latinx Theatre Commons announces the cohort of six directors, twenty-four designers, and seven scholars/documentarians selected for the Designer and Director Colaboratorio in Portland, Oregon this summer.

Olga Sanchez Saltveit and Shayna Schlosberg continue their conversation for the Latinx Leaders at the Forefront series, focusing on mentorship, trade-offs they have made, and their shared experiences working in service of equity.

The LTC announces they are now accepting applications for Colaboratorio, a series of learning opportunities to encourage authentic creative expressions and collaboration between Latinx designers and directors.

Writing from her little family farm in Oregon, E.M. Lewis applies the lessons learned in the garden to her experience as a librettist and playwright.

Loren Noveck discusses the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate the entire corpus of Shakespeare into contemporary modern English.

Playwright and professor Theresa May talks about creating a show about the planet, Sky Woman, and the Youth Climate Movement, and how collaborating with students enhanced the development process.

Luis Alfaro and Herbert Sigüenza talk about their experience in the National Playwright Residency Program, learning about the inner workings of theatre companies, portraying Latinx people in a positive light, the importance of comedy, and more.

Part II of the conversation between Bill Rauch and Nataki Garrett—the outgoing and incoming artistic directors of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—touches on inspiring leadership choices, pacing yourself, and cultivating diverse audiences.

Part I of the conversation between Bill Rauch and Nataki Garrett—the outgoing and incoming artistic directors of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival—touches on personal values, gratitude, and how the joy lives in the struggle.

Bill Rauch, the inaugural artistic director of the Perelman Performing Arts Center, and Diane Ragsdale, assistant professor at the New School, sit down to discuss long overlaps between outgoing and incoming leaders; equity, diversity, and inclusion initiatives; the responsibility of an artistic leader is the time of #MeToo and #TimesUp; and more.