Anyone There?: A Workshop on Building Connection

Anyone There?: A Workshop on Building Connection created by Jessica Bauman

This workshop is co-hosted by Theater Alliance and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, where Anyone There? is being developed in collaboration with the Lab's Art of Care Initiative.

ABOUT ANYONE THERE?:

How do we build and keep connections? How do we navigate the obstacles to that connection that life throws our way?  So many of the acute crises we face right now - from social anxiety to device addiction to political polarization - have their roots in loneliness. Yet  just when the need is greatest,  our human connection muscles seem to have atrophied.

Community-engaged theater maker and DMV native Jessica Bauman is creating Anyone There? - a new theater piece that invites us to both explore and actively rediscover our capacity to connect. Using the tools of live performance, she seeks to reanimate something fundamentally human, creating a kind of physical therapy for our neglected connection muscles. 

Jessica’s process is eclectic and nimble, accessible to both theater professionals and community members. It includes devising exercises (using everything from evolutionary biology to personal stories to scrolling on Instagram as a starting place), verbatim theater techniques, and direct audience engagement. 

Jessica will be sharing her work and methodology with community members in the DMV in a workshop on Saturday Feb. 21. Come play! Share stories! Connect! 

This workshop is co-hosted by Theater Alliance and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics, where Anyone There? is being developed in collaboration with the Lab's Art of Care Initiative.

ABOUT THE LABORATORY FOR GLOBAL PERFORMANCE AND POLITICS:

The Lab humanizes global politics through performance. We cultivate a distinctive global community of collaborators that includes students, emerging and established artists, educators, policy leaders, and activists. Our work harnesses narrative, memory, and acts of witnessing with the aim of sparking transformation and change.

The Lab creates and presents innovative high-quality work from around the world that is at the intersection of politics and performance. Our approach raises voices rarely heard in Washington, DC through compelling, authentic, cross-cultural narratives, and engages policymakers, as well as artists, students, and wider audiences in forums that cast critical issues in a new light.

In the midst of increased polarization, division, conflict, and lack of understanding between peoples and cultures, The Lab works to bridge differences and offers opportunities to better understand each other.