Thursday, February 19, 2009

World Theater Day

By Ben Thiem, Director of Member Services

Early last week Deb and I were approached by the ever-enthusiastic Jess Hutchinson and Nick Keenan from New Leaf Theatre with an idea. Through conversations on Twitter and elsewhere they came across information for World Theater Day on March 27, 2009. World Theater Day actually began in 1962, but it doesn’t seem like the U.S. has had much of a presence with the program. The mission of World Theater Day is to: “promote international exchange of knowledge and practice in theatre arts (drama, dance, music theatre) in order to consolidate peace and solidarity between peoples, to deepen mutual understanding and increase creative co-operation between all people in the theatre arts.” That’s a great mission, right?

Since we are all about community and collaboration in Chicago, and particularly international collaboration thanks to companies like Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the Goodman, we agreed with Nick and Jessica that it was important for us to have a discussion of how we can be involved with World Theater Day 2009.

We are going to have a meeting at the League offices (228 S. Wabash, Suite 200) this Friday, February 20 from 4:30 p.m.- 6 p.m. to discuss and brainstorm how Chicago can participate. If you are interested in being involved with the program we’d love if you’d join us. Please RSVP to ben@chicagoplays.com. If you can’t make the meeting but are still interested in being involved, please feel free to contact me as well.

Read more about the history of World Theater Day

Read more about what other cities are doing

Read
Nick and Jessica’s blog postings.

2 comments:

Moxie said...

I think this is a fabulous idea, and I would love to attend, but will be out of town. Please blog abotu the results of the meeting! I'll be curious to see what comes out of the discussion.

ChicagoPlays said...

Thanks for reading Moxie. We'll be posting more information soon about how you can participate. Keep checking back. In the meantime read Augusto Boal's message for World Theater Day 09 http://wtd09.wordpress.com/

Ben