Iranian Girlfriend explores the complex relationship between fact and fiction—a dynamic that played out in its journey from autobiographical essay to autofictional play. Creator SB Tennent discusses the play’s origins, process, and ambitions with Georgia Evans.
How can voice work enable actors to access their widest range of expression? What happens when vocal training is not about “fixing,” but play and connection? Madeline Sayet sits down with voice practitioner Sayda Trujillo to explore these questions in a conversation about liberatory vocal practice.
Visionaries in the theatre field lead a community conversation exploring a range of theatrical practices for engaging communities in conflict resolution, healing, and fostering an environment of empathy and care.
Fifty Boxes of Earth at Theater Mu was a maximalist play that combined Western and South Asian theatrical styles, choreography, and puppetry. Lianna Matt McLernon and playwright Ankita Raturi talk about the show’s collective approach and how it was created to be reproduced for any specific community.
In Russia, “LGBT propaganda” has been banned, forcing artists who want to create work that engages with queerness to do so in secret. Viktor Vilisov shares about the process of their show Birds, an immersive adaptation of the Tarjei Vesaas novel, that they have performed in apartments throughout the country.
The team at Shanty Theatre dove deep into Igbo mask and masquerade traditions to stage the largest of them all: the Ijele Masquerade. Angelea Okolo and Eseovwe Emakunu detail the research and creative process they used to bring the masquerade to Benin City, Nigeria.
Through non-narrative rock numbers, Dan Fishback is Alive, Unwell, and Living in His Apartment targets contemporary societal betrayals, from COVID denialism to the genocide in Palestine. Taylor Leigh Lamb writes about the show’s genesis and its multi-pronged commitment to safety and access for audience and artists alike.
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.
Evan Silver aka Tiresias details their inspirations and intentions for cryptochrome, a sonic odyssey and ritual meditation that invites audiences to imagine themselves in the sensory worlds of other living things.
In the solo show KOAL, Jacinta Yelland explored both human and non-human experiences in response to catastrophic bushfires in Australia. She shares the insights and creative decisions that kept her piece deeply entwined with nature and culture.
The solo dance theatre piece LOAM adopts the balance, duration, and repetition of soil. Cara Hagan details the research questions and generative processes that she used to shape LOAM—and her own life.
COVID protections are essential for many artists to work safely. However, they are not the norm within the theatre industry. Performer Ezra Tozian offers a practical guide for theatre workers to negotiate COVID protections for productions.
Creative director and choreographer Brandon Powers takes host Tjaša Ferme on a deep exploration of the merging of extended reality (XR) with theatre. He explains how theatremakers’ knowledge as spatial creatures is exactly what the virtual reality (VR) world is looking for.
Dramaturg Yejia Sun discusses the process of When I Look at Myself, a multimedia performance workshop documenting Chinese women’s relationships with their bodies. She shares how the experience provided a container for healing and a space for empowerment via exploring feminist narratives in China.
Liza Bielby and paris cyan cian are in Detroit and New Orleans, respectively, building the worlds they want to be in. They discuss their work in performance collectives, connections to community, and the places and relationships that undergird their work.
kara lynch and Seema Sueko use their own artistry as a jumping off point for a conversation about methodologies for creation informed by consensus, alternative economies, community organizing, and more.
In this artistic encounter between Sharon Bridgforth and Sharon Day, creative response leads the two artists to parse connections between nature, family, performance, and language.
In this conversation with Kat Mustatea we chat about her project, BodyMouth, that is also a new instrument where a dancer’s movements prompt a speech synthesizer. For an extra twist, we ponder if we could use this instrument to reverse and decode the messages behind Tai Chi or the magical gestures of Carlos Castaneda.
The MicroCosmos project convenes artists who venture into the inner dimensions of artistic practice to be in dialogue and right relation with the outer context in which we live. In this introductory encounter, the project's co-curators surface the micro in their own practice.
In 2024, the Island Shakespeare Festival in Whidbey Island, Washington, set a goal of producing “zero-waste.” They partnered with local sustainability organizations to confront their waste issue and transform the front-of-house experience for theatregoers.
Dave Osmundsen counters the idea that working with Autistic artists presents a “challenge” by offering practical recommendations for casting, rehearsing, and performing with Autistic artists.
Ghost Forest grapples with the climate crisis playing out through sea level rise that impacts forests of the Eastern Bay in Maryland. Taylor Leigh Lamb discusses the way the play’s ecological approach extended into new play development process that supported the art, the artists, and the surrounding community.
Georgia Evans is the writer and director of Walls: Chloe’s Story, a Forum Theatre play about people with chronic vulvovaginal pain—something she doesn’t deal with. She discusses how to create a show about other’s intimate stories in a collaborative, trustworthy way.
You on the Moors Now was the first foray by Jaclyn Backhaus into committing the improvisations and musings of an ensemble to the page while developing her own style. She joins the cast of the show at the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee to talk about the genesis of the play and iterations over time.
Access dramaturgy is a practice of integrating access creatively and collaboratively in performance from the earliest moments of the creative process. Access dramaturg Alison Kopit, in collaboration with Ann Marie Dorr and Maggie Bridger, introduces the transformative practice of access dramaturgy as implemented in Radiate and Dark Disabled Stories.
