On April 4th, 1968, I was crossing the street on my way to class when I heard students yelling to each other, “Have you heard the news? Have you heard the news? Martin Luther King was assassinated.”
From collaboration with an Appalachian women’s shelter to working with Liberian refugee artists in Philadelphia, Roadside Theater and its collaborators use cultural expression to address domestic violence.
These disasters reveal how disconnected community knowledge and the expertise of the industrial and scientific communities have become from each other, and how estranged both of these sectors are from the political process.
According to a report from the federal Appalachian Regional Commission, my home in Central Appalachia has the highest death rates from all cancers among all demographic subgroups of any Appalachian region.
How can communities use art and culture to develop themselves? How do they define the issues they want to address? What steps need to be taken for this process to be inclusive and effective? How do the aesthetics of theater change in community-based contexts?