This Is How We Do It: Grace Lee Boggs, Nelson Johnson, Andrea Smith - Friday, April 20, 2012
Channel: HowlRound Theatre Commons
Date: 2014-08-21

As some of you may know, The Foundry Theatre frequently hosts different sorts of public events (separate from our productions) where artists might find meaningful exchange with people outside of our own community and practice—both as a way to assert our presence and significance in building the world and hopefully to widen our access as a community to some of the amazing things going on outside of our rehearsal rooms, and studios. I write now to invite you to be part of the next one—live and in person in NYC, or via Livestream from wherever you are in the world (and hooray for #NEWPLAY TV!).

This event is a “festival of dialogues about another world under construction” called This is How We Do It (thank you Montel Jordan). We’ve invited some insanely creative people to come to NYC from all over the world—Argentina, South Africa, Brazil, Spain, and across the United States—who are creating and living and working in innovative new systems that change the way the world works. April 20-22, they will each present a show and tell about what they’re doing, how they do it, and how it’s going. And we’ve invited artists like Erik Ehn, Marcus Gardley and Morgan Jenness (among others), people from the Occupy Movement, and social justice practitioners to respond with questions. Then we’ve left lots of space for conversation to follow.

Why are we doing this? Because though these practices are proliferating widely across the globe, there's barely a language for what they are or how they're connected. They're primarily framed as a kind of "visionary activism," distinct from or even instead of protest politics (academics refer to them as "prefigurative" practices). I think  "activism" is only one of its frames; on a deeper level it's simply people who are creating and experimenting with new forms of transformation, not unlike our work in the theater.

I think there’s an interesting language waiting to be developed between those of us who create art and those who are creating these new structures. We both work and live in the ambiguity of creation, of not knowing and proceeding anyway (often against or in spite of prevailing norms). I think the speakers we invited are coming because a theater company invited them, because of the opportunity to speak about their work with others creatively engaged with making things.

This is surely the case with Grace Lee Boggs—the legendary philosopher and activist, who will open the festival on Friday night. At the age of ninety-seven and going strong, Grace been a part of every major U.S. social movement over the past seventy-five years. And for those seventy-five years, she has insisted that art and the artists who make are vital to the process of changing the world. If nothing else, don’t miss Grace on Friday night!

I hope you can make it—thousands of you—to some or all of this remarkable conversation. And I’m mad looking forward to the conversations we will have afterwards—and the ones after those.

http://howlround.com/to-my-beloved-colleagues-who-make-things

Help us caption & translate this video!

http://amara.org/v/Sqct/