Hello and Welcome to the Louisville Intercultural Engaged Theatre Project Blog!

Hello, and welcome!

This is a blog for a course and project at The University of Louisville in which the students are learning about community based theatre through creating a play with and for a community of recent immigrants who have sought refuge and settled in Louisville, KY. We will be meeting with this group of people, with whom we connected through Catholic Charities, over the next several weeks, to hear their stories and to ask for their help creating a theatre production based on those stories.

Here is an article in Louisville’s Highlander newspaper, to which we looked for initial outside research about the community with which we’ll be working. We’re outsiders to this group, and are beginning with a blank slate in terms of knowledge and goals for the resulting play. I, personally, am very grateful for the willingness of these people to share their stories with us, to help us learn about their lives, and to help us make theatre that connects directly with people in our city.

The class began with students reading about and discussing the processes used by companies in the United States doing “community based” work, which people define in different ways.  In Beginner’s Guide to Community Based Arts, “community based art” is defined as “any form or work of art that emerges from a community and consciously seeks to increase the societal, economic and political power of that community” (xvi). Robert Leonard and Ann Kilkelly’s book, Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted in Eight U.S. Communities, includes chapters on several companies, each of whom has a different idea of how to define the field in which they work. Lately, I am particularly interested in a definition very much like the one put forth in Performing Communities by Cornerstone Theater Company, with whom I had the privilege of studying and making theatre in 2010: “their success is based on baking art that satisfies all partners involved” (73). While I am certainly open to the possibility that this work might increase the power of the community with which we are engaging, and I would love for that to happen, my interest is more in using the theatrical process as a means of communication and one-on-one connection with my new fellow Louisvillians who came here from around the world. In other words, if there's a problem this group would like to explore through this process, we'll be happy to talk about how this project can help with that. Beyond that, my hope is that we can build a new community through this collaboration, learn something about each other, and enjoy ourselves in the process. 

As we work through this process, another of our goals is to allow the outcome of the process...the play or performance...to take shape based on the conversations we are having. Ultimately, it should be a representation of all of the different voices and stories we hear, and of the way in which we went about collecting them. Especially with such a rich community of people who have very different cultures of origin, it seems important to find a way to allow the multiple ways of seeing the world we're bound to encounter equal weight in the story we tell.

This blog is intended to be another way to listen and have discussions. As we work on the project, students and I will be posting our thoughts here, and hope that everyone will feel free to comment. By the end of this semester, we will have created a draft of a play, and an important part of devising that play is the feedback we get from people in the world around us. We hope that you’ll keep up with the work we’re doing, will become a part of the community we’re building through commenting here, and will help us create an exciting new piece of theatre.