Stages of Change: Empowering Artists through Embodied Practice

About the Event

Through a series of embodied workshops, each artist will share their creative process, inviting you to actively experiment with their methods while developing practical tools for your own work.

This is a rare opportunity to expand your artistic practice, connect with fellow artists, and explore how theatre can engage the most urgent questions of our time.

Begins with a livestreamed panel at 12:30 on Friday, May 22nd and continues with sessions on Saturday and Sunday from 10am – 5pm. Space is very limited.

WORKSHOP DESCRIPTIONS

Site, Society, Community: An Introduction to a Toolkit for Site Performance is an introductory workshop on the fundamentals of socially engaged, site-responsive performance. Participants will explore how public spaces and civic structures shape community experience, and how these forces can be translated into theatrical/choreographic ideas, images, and performance scores. The workshop’s goal is to help participants gain access to a concise toolkit that supports the creation of storyboard sketches and conceptual proposals for developing site-specific art performances in dialogue with communities and their stakeholders.

Activating Public Space: Performance as Civic Action
The workshop approaches performance as a tool for encounter, visibility, and social engagement, asking how artistic gestures can reframe public space and generate moments of connection, agency, and collective experience. Explore how artists can temporarily transform public space through collective action, participation, and performative intervention. Participants will experiment with practical strategies for activating everyday environments through spatial interventions, movement, and shared presence.

Sociodrama: Rehearsing the World
Sociodrama is a group-based, improvisational method that uses role play to explore shared experiences, social roles, and systems. In this workshop, participants will co-create and enact scenes drawn from real-life social and organizational challenges, examining how power, identity, and relationships play out in everyday interactions. Through guided reflection and play, we will surface multiple perspectives, expand empathic understanding, and rehearse alternative responses that support more just and caring ways of being together.

Perfect City: Tools for Creative Civic Action
Our work uplifts residents’ knowledge about their own communities and the policies and design choices governing them. We draw on theater, popular education, and design thinking for social justice. We make avoidance maps as a way to begin a conversation about policy, how to craft testimonies for local government meetings, and how to see new ways to participate together to develop more vibrant communities.