Julia Cavagna & Kate Bell

Theater to the People
"Dreams and Nightmares"
Artistic Discipline: Theater
Category: Brooklyn Arts Fund
Grant Year: 2021
Location: Park Slope
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Theater to the People is a collaboration between physical theater artist Julia Cavagna and playwright/director Kate Bell, focused on bringing bilingual (Spanish/English) and socially engaged theater-making experiences to adults with little to no prior drama experience. We seek to bring together many perspectives on what Brooklyn could be: new immigrants, people who identify as first-generation Americans, people who have lived here for generations, and people who might identify as “gentrifiers.” TTTP seeks to inspire community organizing and resilience by building creative, social, and political alliances among people from a wide variety of backgrounds through the act of collaboratively making theater. Theater to the People: "Dreams and Nightmares" will provide participants with skills and resources for creative expression, self-care, and community-building, with a special focus on amplifying the stories of all those potential members / residents experiencing structural oppression connected to their low income, race, ethnicity, immigration status, housing security, gender, gender identity, and/or sexuality.

Theater to the People: "Dreams and Nightmares" will provide between ten to twenty adult participants with twelve two-hour and a half bilingual (Spanish/English) weekly workshops, culminating in either a public performance at Brooklyn Arts Exchange in the late fall of 2021, an outdoor public performance in Prospect Park in the early fall of 2021, and/or a culminating video of virtual collaboration (available to the public in the fall of 2021), or some combination of the three. All workshops will be co-facilitated by theater artists Julia Cavagna and Kate Bell. Participants will develop performance skills through improvisation, physical theater/clowning techniques, Augusto Boal´s approach, creative writing, music, and ensemble devising -and all those options through electronic devises too-

This fourth Theater to the People workshop series will explore the theme of “dreams and nightmares.”