Theatre Arts Program
Friday, October 16 2020, 2-5pm
Jennifer Kidwell, the Obie-Award winning co-creator of Underground Railroad Game,makes bold, performer-driven work that is “concerned with discomfort and/or confusion around normative practices and systems.” In this workshop, she will lead us through important questions about how we fully align our creative and decision-making processes with the politics of the artworks we seek to create. She will draw from her extensive experience working in collaborative theatre in Philadelphia and around the country to help us consider how we navigate questions of authorship and collaboration in creative processes. If our aim is to create a critical, liberatory theatre, how do we do so in our rehearsal processes as well as in the way we interface with outside stakeholders and funders as we make creative decisions?
In this workshop, participants will start from the seemingly simple decision of what to title a show to consider the ways this choice traverses issues of authorship, artistic agency, vulnerability, collaboration, funding, marketing, and ethics. Participants will leave with some tools to create the kinds of creative processes that fully and deeply support the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of their artistic work. All members of the Penn community are welcome.
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The Theatre Arts Program, Platt Student Performing Arts House, Penn Performing Arts Initiative, and Sachs Program for Arts Innovation present:
Case Studies in Leadership, Social Justice, and the Performing Arts: Bringing Critical Reflection into Practice
The performing arts are, at their heart, social endeavors. If they are to be a social good they must be guided by an ethical disposition to protect and advance the well-being of others and a commitment to collective flourishing. How does such an ethical disposition intersect with the complex process of art-making and arts-management in the real world?
In this series of workshops, led by nationally-recognized artists and arts-leaders, students will consider moves they can make now—in their student groups, in their classrooms, and beyond—to more fully align their activities in the performing arts with an ethical commitment to social and racial justice.
SAVE THE DATE:
Friday, November 13, 2020, 2-5pm EST with Baltimore Center Stage’s Stephanie Ybarra.
Friday, February 26, 2021, 2-5pm with the Public Theater’s Shanta Thake and Asha Nelson-Williams