Empire State College Fdn Inc

                      "Creating Community Conversations"

The Winter/Summer Institute’s applied theatre-making process provides a space for exploration, interaction, and collaboration with participants from vastly different cultures and backgrounds. We bring people together to question assumptions, engage in problem-solving dialogue, experiment with biases, improvise collective ideas and, most importantly, create fabulous theatre.

Since the November election, we’ve accelerated work on a WSI Field Guide, which will make it possible for groups anywhere to devise the kind of collaborative theatre we’ve been creating for the past decade in Lesotho, southern Africa and New York City.

On August 3, we’re taking our Field Guide on the road to the American heartland, Chattanooga, Tennessee for an intensive three-day residency, "Creating Community Conversations."

Co-sponsored by the Chattanooga State Community College Theatre Department and working with local community arts and advocacy groups, the residency brings our collaborative process to facilitate dialogue and create provocative, entertaining theatre to a region that, like our country as a whole, is deeply divided along political, religious, class, and racial lines.

Since 2006, WSI has been making theatre, both in Lesotho and New York, around HIV/AIDS, economic and gender disparities,  and other critical social issues. Our collaborative process creates a space where participants from vastly different backgrounds can come together to create fabulous, provocative theatre. We’ve seen the transformative effect our method has had on the many WSI participants from Lesotho, South Africa, the UK, New York, and beyond.

Now we want to bring that work home to our own heartland where, more than ever, we need new ways to talk with each other and to create possibilities for the future. We believe WSI’s collaborative theatre making process can do just that.

We need your support to make it happen. We hope you’ll make a tax-deductible gift to this inspiring new project and help take us to Tennessee!

Your tax-deductible donation to Razoo will be directed to the WSI’s fiscal sponsor, the Empire State College Foundation, and put to work immediately.