Today, we are happy to launch the Theatre in Community podcast series that has been funded by a grant from the Community Culture and Heritage Program of HumanitiesDC.
We'll interview theatremakers in DC who created community-embedded theatre in our city from the 1970s to about 2019. We'll explore how the collective, collaborative art of theatre is infectious, encouraging creativity not only among its practitioners but also among all who experience it. Clearly, there are hundreds of people we could talk with, but we're going to launch the project with a small sampling of interviews with amazing theatre artists from each of these five decades.
To help with these rich conversations about theatre, we’ll provide a glossary of terms and names with each podcast (see below), which will deepen your understanding of DC's rich, recent theatrical history.
So, what do we mean by community-embedded theatre? A great question. And for that, we're going to turn to our own theatre expert, Robert Michael Oliver. In addition to being our co-host and a veteran poet, playwright, writer, director, actor, theater and cultural critic, educator, gardener, cook, father, husband, and all-round creativist, Michael is also a scholar with an MFA in directing from Virginia Tech and a Ph.D. in Theatre and Performance Studies from the University of Maryland.
His 2005 dissertation, National Theater or Public Theater, the Theatrical Geography of Washington DC, circa 1970 to 1990, delves deeply into this subject.
For more information on Michael, click here and here.
Glossary
Peter Sellars and here.
We are eager to hear from our subscribers. If you like the conversation or have a comment or a question, use the comment feature or the heart button below. And thanks in advance for sharing this podcast with your friends and colleagues.
To those of you who are FREE subscribers, please consider becoming a PAID subscriber so that Creativists in Dialogue and its Theatre in Community Project can continue bringing you interesting and insightful conversations about creativity and theatre from DC and beyond.
Special shout out to Creativists in Dialogue’s Audio Engineer Elliot Lanes, our Social Media Manager Erinn Dumas of Dumas83, and our Transcription Editor Morgan Musselman.
For more information about Creativists in Dialogue or our other projects, please visit elizabethbruceDC.com or rmichaeloliver.com.
This project is supported both by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, HumanitiesDC, and by subscribers like you.
The Theatre in Community Project