Theater of Community: Call for Proposals – Fall 2024
Theater of Community (logo)
CALL FOR PROPOSALS
Dear CTSA Colleagues:
The purpose of this communique is to invite you to be a part of Theater of Community. In an effort to support the commitments to respect, equity, learning, and justice at the University of California, Irvine, there will be a Call for Proposals for CTSA faculty beginning in the early Fall 2024. The CFP will seek creative and critical works from CTSA Faculty for projects dedicated towards confronting bias and bigotry while promoting free speech and principles of solidarity. Proposals from individuals or groups are welcomed.
Theater of Community aims to explore what the principles of community, and even solidarity, look like in a world wracked with decades old rivalries and antagonisms such as antiblackness, islamophobia, antisemitism, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ, ableism, anti-Asian violence, anti-Latinx violence, and settler colonialism. Theater of Community intends to confront bias and bigotry while simultaneously promoting free speech with the aim of developing and sustaining a diverse and equitable community grounded in principles of care and compassion, and while remaining mindful of the contentious discourse ignited by the October 7th murder of Israelis by Hamas and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza. Theater of Community employs a mode of constructive critical engagement referred to in the field of performance studies as “dialogical performance.”
Dialogical performance foregrounds diverse voices, world views, value systems, and beliefs and puts them in conversation with one another—even when there is fundamental disagreement. The ethos of dialogical performance is to bring self and other together so that students, faculty, and the greater local, regional, and global participants can question, debate, and challenge one another in a productive and generative manner.
Within Theater of Community, dialogical performance is a form of practice-based-research and pedagogy that resists set conclusions, and instead is committed to keeping the dialogue open and ongoing. We are living through an inflection moment. Let us acknowledge it and work through it as a practice, carried out in theater, visual art, poetry, music, performance, and film that engages with where we are as disparate peoples in the interest of bringing us closer together even if we remain in disagreement.
The CFP will be solicited and adjudicated as part of the broader Research and Innovation Grant program. We invite you to join us!
Collegially,
Theater of Community
Zachary Price and Bryan Reynolds