Breaking the Ice: Spotlight on Safety
Although we’ve been enduring a pandemic for the last year or more, at this point, and theatre companies all over the country have shuttered, becoming spaces occupied only by ghost lights, theatre has not died.
Storytelling, and story visualizing through the material of human voices and bodies, has survived longer than any culture on Earth. And so, theatre will continue.
We—theatre artists—simply need to be purposeful about how we use this moment. This intermission. This dark day.
Dr. Kevin Kumashiro writes (in multiple places, my favorite of which is Troubling Education: Queer Activism and Anti-Oppressive Pedagogy) about learning through crisis and resistance, and writes that by disrupting previous knowledge with new perspectives, we may be making learners uncomfortable, but that this discomfort is a productive anti oppressive praxis.
So, in this moment of crisis and resistance in the theatre industry, let’s find some productive discomfort.
The folks at Colorado Theatre Guild, Phamaly Theatre Co., and IDEAS, as well as myself and the other two co-founders of the Rocky Mountain Artists Safety Alliance—Tammy Meneghini and Angela Astle—are doing just that. We have collaboratively dedicated ourselves to making this uncomfortable pause in the well-greased machine of our industry into a productive moment.
For this purpose, we have created, and are inviting our community to, a series of workshops.
Our recent “Breaking the Ice” workshop was an introduction to this conversation; a gathering of folks representing theatrical organizations and independent theatre artists, sharing our thoughts on what needs to happen based on our current moment, and in what ways we need to improve our practices to best prepare for an improved Rocky Mountain theatre industry upon re-opening.
As a result of that conversation, CTG, Phamaly, IDEAS, and the Rocky Mountain ASA have created three follow-up workshops which will be held this August.
Each workshop will focus on a somewhat uncomfortable (to many) conversation, in hopes of moving our entire community to a more productive place. Each workshop is rooted in the thorough research of RMASA, IDEAS, and CTG.
Hopefully, you’ll join us to make this pause, the uncomfortable contexts of politics, art making, and the pandemic, and the discomfort of learning and growing into something that can be useful for all of us.
