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Art in a Democracy

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Ensemble Works
Ensemble Works Book Cover 2005

Articles about Roadside Theater, Grassroots Theater,  National Conversations about the Arts, the Appalachian Region, Art and Community Organizing, and the Roadside Newsletter Archive.  Articles are in alphabetical order according to title.

Community Cultural Development
Teaching at Colleges and Universities
Culture Policy
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A Bridge Conversation on New Paradigms of Artful Change

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke, Craig McGarvey, and Peter Pennekamp
Community Arts Network, March, 2008 Dudley Cocke is artistic director of Roadside Theater, the Appalachian ensemble known for its original plays and national artistic collaborations with traditional m..
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A Call for Cultural Development

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke and Ruby Lerner
1989: The more things change, the more they stay the same..
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A Call for Experimentation

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
A Keynote Conversation - "A Call for Experimentation: Why Ensembles are Especially Ready to Lead the American Theater into a New Period of Discovery" Network of Ensemble Theaters Festival Amherst Coll..
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A Matrix Articulating the Principles of Grassroots Theater

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke From: From the Ground Up: Grassroots Theater in Historical and Contemporary Perspective Dudley Cocke, Harry Newman, and Janet Salmons-Rue,Editors..
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A Short Story of Multi-Culturalism

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
The author recounts what it’s like to be part of a white, rural, and working class theater company at a national multi-cultural festival at Dartmouth College..
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A Time of Questioning

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke, a reflection on philanthropy, 2007 To close the October 2007 Grantmakers in the Arts national conference, several conference participants, including Dudley Cocke, were asked to share ..
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A Week-Long Immersion

Essay or Article
By Jamie Haft
A Week-Long Immersion in the Activist Theory and Practice of Appalshop New York University Tisch School of the Arts undergraduate students immerse themselves in the creation of grassroots film, theate..
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Appalachia on the Move

Essay or Article
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By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke, 2010: Published in Longleaf Style magazine.
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Appalachia, Democracy, and Cultural Equity

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke From: Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity Marta Moreno Vega and Cheryll Y. Greene, Editors. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1993..
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Appalachian Advocate Preserves Local History

Essay or Article
By Colleen Birch Maile
By Colleen Birch Maile, Atlantic Southeast Magazine, November/December 2006; An article about Roadside Theater's Ron Short The heart of Appalachia transcends state lines, spilling from the coal countr..
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Art In A Democracy

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke Text from The Drama Review , Fall 2004, Social Theatre, Vol..
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Artists Call for Cultural Policy

Essay or Article
By Arlene Goldbard, Dudley Cocke, and Dee Davis
By Arlene Goldbard, Dudley Cocke, and Dee Davis A petition addressed to all presidential campaigns, May 2004 We the undersigned artists and arts organization representatives come from all parts of the..
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Appalachia's Roadside Theater

Essay or Article
By Donna Porterfield
Appalachia's Roadside Theater: Celebration of a Community's Culture By Donna Porterfield From : The Citizen Artist: An Anthology, High Performance Magazine 1978-1998 In 1975, Roadside Theater began at..
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“Bridging Social Capital”

Essay or Article
By Robert Putnam
By Robert Putnam Excerpted from: Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community , New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000..
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Change

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke Keynote Speech Kentucky Arts Council Statewide Arts Conference October 20, 2000 When I first saw the conference booklet’s glyphic margin mantra, "Change, change, change," what came rif..
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Class and the Performing Arts

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke An essay explaining how Roadside has been able to consistently attract an audience fully reflective of the nation ’ s economic, racial, and geographic diversity..
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Coming Through the Wire

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke American Theatre magazine, March 2000 With the year 2000 just arrived, who can resist the invitation to prognosticate?..
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Community Arts 2007 A Muscular Year

Essay or Article
By Linda Frye Burnham
by Linda Frye Burnham, Art in the Public Interest and Community Arts Network , January, 2008 The field of community-based arts showed its muscle this year..
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Community Arts 2008 The Year of the Great Leap

Essay or Article
By Linda Frye Burnham
by Linda Frye Burnham, Art in the Public Interest and Community Arts Network , December, 2008 In the U.S., those engaged in the field of community-based arts will remember 2008 as the year we all rais..
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Community Participation and Civic Dialogue

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
Remarks by Dudley Cocke Renewing Democratic Civil Society The Centennial Assembly of the Commonwealth Club San Francisco, CA February 27-28, 2003 Good morning..
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Connecting Californians

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke, Craig McGarvey,Linda Burnham, Erica Kohl, et al., Editors.
Connecting Californians, Finding the Art of Community Change: an inquiry into the role of story in strengthening communities Dudley Cocke, Craig McGarvey,Linda Burnham, Erica Kohl, et al., Editors..
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Connecting Traditions

Essay or Article
By Lynn Cline
By Lynn Cline Pasatiempo, a weekly arts supplement of The Santa Fe New Mexican, March 2002 "The majority of mountain people are unprincipled ruffians," a New York Times editorial stated in 1912..
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Contemporary Artists on Contemporary Arts

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke, NETWORK Conference International Network of Schools for the Advancement of Arts Education Miami Beach, Florida, October 13, 2006 Last week at her birthday party, my 12-year-old niece,..
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Conversations at the Intersection of Art and Activism

Essay or Article
By Linda Frye Burnham
By Linda Frye Burnham Community Arts Network Website Alternate ROOTS' 25th anniversary celebration, "FOCAS: Focus on Community Arts South" (April 17-21, 2002, Lexington Kentucky) was located at "The I..
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Cultural Organizing Session Opening Remarks

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke Grantmakers in the Arts Annual Conference Boston, November 13, 2006 The term cultural organizing means putting culture, including its concentrated expression of art at the center of a ..
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End Cultural Isolationism

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke American Theatre magazine, February 2002 It sounds like a joke, but when the east Kentucky theater company that I direct performed in Sweden in 1981, audiences came expecting to see Je..
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FIRE AND PROMISE: A Saga of Collaboration

Essay or Article
By Arnaldo López
By Arnaldo López American Theatre magazine, March 2000 "We have arrived at a critical moment in staging and musical direction," announces an emphatic Rosalba Rolón..
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Grassroots, Community-based Theater

Essay or Article
By Robert H. Leonard
Grassroots, Community-based Theater: A View of the Field and Its Context By Robert H..
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In Sync? For American ensembles

Essay or Article
By Ferdinand Lewis
In Sync? For American ensembles, questions come first - then creativity y Ferdinand Lewis American Theatre magazine, May/June 2000 Ensemble theatres in America live on long hours and luck..
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Independence, Not Isolation

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke From: "On Cultural Power," American Theatre magazine, May/June, 1997 One of 13 commentaries The broad culture issues encapsulated by August Wilson’s and Robert Brustein’s running debat..
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Invisible Threads and the Place We Call Home

Essay or Article
By Sally Voris
By Sally Voris A report on Roadside's multi-year, community-building residency in Patapsco, MD The place I call home is Elkridge, Maryland, a two stoplight town where I grew up..
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Measuring the Intrinsic Impact of Live Theatre

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By Dudley Cocke
Research firm WolfBrown interviews artistic director Dudley Cocke as part of a report published by Theatre Bay Area in March 2012..
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Mountaineers, Farmers, and Cowfolk Create Two Plays About Place

Essay or Article
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By Donna Porterfield & Dudley Cocke
By Donna Porterfield and Dudley Cocke An NEA case study of a Roadside Theater residency
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Only Connect

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke Theater, Vol..
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Populism is Not the Problem

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke American Theatre magazine September, 2000 Letter to the editor I haven't read Jane Alexander's Command Performance , but I sharply disagree with your reviewer Stephen Nunn's opinion ("..
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Progress

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke The author warns of the dangers of global free-market capitalism, describing its devastating impact on Appalachia. Grantmakers in the ArtsReader, Vol. 17, No..
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Reaching for the Valley of the Sun

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By Linda Frye Burnham
Reaching for the Valley of the Sun: The American Festival Project's Untold Stories By Linda Frye Burnham The Drama Review, Fall 2000
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Rural/Urban

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke From the Urban Institute study, Investing in Creativity As part of a two-year national study, Investing in Creativity , which is being supported by 38 private and public foundations, s..
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“Styles”

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke Grantmakers in the Arts Reader Winter, 2001 ("Styles" by Susan Sontag, Partisan Review [1965], also published in Against Interpretation and Other Essays , Farrar, Straus and Girous, Ne..
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Take Charge of the Stories We are Telling

Essay or Article
By James Smorada
By James Smorada The Jamestown (ND) Sun, September 1988 Old wisdom and Napoleon said that history is written by the victors. True, but what does it mean?..
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Tamejavi

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke Originally published in Grantmakers in the ArtsReader , Vol. 16, No..
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Taming Tensions: Multicultural Festival

Essay or Article
By Tyche Hendricks
Taming Tensions: Multicultural festival could help unite the Central Valley to remedy common ills By Tyche Hendricks San Francisco Chronicle, April 29, 2002 Pai Yang cradled her 2-year-old daughter on..
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Telling Tales and Connecting Communities

Essay or Article
By Dinah Zeiger
By Dinah Zeiger Inside Arts magazine, November/December 1999 I looked up the word "story" in the American Heritage Dictionary recently to see exactly what it meant because I remember my Grandma warnin..
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The Art of Social Imagination

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By Dudley Cocke
A Conversation with Nick Rabkin, Jennifer Williams, Jamie Haft, and Arlene Goldbard; Facilitated and Edited by Dudley Cocke; Grantmakers in the Arts Reader , Vol. 18, No..
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The Arts and Humanities in a Democracy

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke Walter Capps Memorial Lecture 2003 National Humanities Conference Savannah, GA November 8, 2003 I want to commend the Federation for its intention to serve cocktails before something o..
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The Founding of Appalshop and Roadside Theater

Essay or Article
By Donna Porterfield
Central Appalachia and the Founding of Appalshop By Donna Porterfield For the older members of Roadside Theater’s ensemble, this quote resonates in ways that the NewsHour probably didn’t imagine..
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The Joy of Producing Some Lovely Thing

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
The Joy of Producing Some Lovely Thing and Freeing Some Craving for Expression By Dudley Cocke Lecture to the Biennial State Arts Conference Des Moines, IA March 25, 2000 My prepared remarks are divid..
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The Mountains: My Hopes

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By Dudley Cocke
by Dudley Cocke, Blue Ridge Country Magazine ,September/October, 2005
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The Unreported Arts Recession of 1997

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
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Theory of Change

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke, drafted in response to a series of meetings he facilitated in New Orleans on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2006 Effective grassroots organizing around issu..
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Thousand Kites Summit: A Community Arts Focus Group

Essay or Article
By Linda Frye Burnham
by Linda Frye Burnham, Art in the Public Interest and Community Arts Network , Fall 2007 Recently I had an experience that may be unique in the community arts world: a focus group designed to connect ..
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Toward A Durable Pluralism

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
By Dudley Cocke, The author argues for ending the current U.S..
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Using Arts to Bind the Community

Essay or Article
By Sara Terry Gabrels
By Sara Terry Gabrels The Christian Science Monitor, March 19, 1998 Anna Faith Jones is a believer in a simple truth about art..
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Where Has All the Grassroots Touring Gone?

Essay or Article
By Dudley Cocke
The transcript of the May 1, 2006 symposium “ Seeking Solutions to the Past Decade ’ s Radical Reduction in the National Touring of New American Plays, ” sponsored by Roadside Theater and Pregones The..
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Roadside Theater is one part of Appalshop.

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