Project Summary

We will create storytelling evenings in different neighborhoods. Dialogues will provide opportunities to raise questions and note issues or concerns raised by the narratives. Performing and visual artists will develop and realize a series of works based on selected stories.

About me

My partner in this proposal and I are friends: I am a playwright, producer, director and performer, an Assistant Professor of Communication at Regis University where I teach public communication, dialogue, and communication theory. I co-founded a theatre festival for original work, now in its 16th year (the Ko Festival of Performance at Amherst), and did both Masters and Doctoral work in the areas of personal-narrative theatre, audience stories, and community-grounded performance. Daniel Horsey is a conflict and collaboration practitioner who mediates a wide variety of disputes. With a combined 45 years of theatre and communication experience, we are both intrigued by and committed to imaginative, artistic approaches to conflict and dialogue, and have seen community-based storytelling and theatre transform disputes, relationships and individuals. We both enjoy bringing people together, helping to make collaborative experiences that are personal, moving and memorable, and which produce energy, ideas and relationships. Doing the work we do (me in higher education and community-based theatre and other performing arts projects, and Daniel in the unusual and lovely, theatrical community storytelling events that he creates) we have come to believe we should make this project happen, and to feel confident that, while its simplicity is its greatest strength, it has potential to grow and develop year after year.