A new model for theater and social healing

Our world is broken. We all seem able to see problems clearly, but it is solutions that evade us. We witness the adverse effects of colonization and capitalism both globally and in our backyards, but lack the tools to affect change on a massive scale. This is true for our institutions and their governing systems, as well as for the individuals who comprise and create these entities. The challenges we see in the world live within us. 

 

At Alternative Theater Ensemble the problem we are addressing is disconnection. We have moved further and further away from the collaboration, cooperation, and tightly knit communities upon which human success has long relied.  A prime outcome of living in a late advanced capitalist society is being out of touch with one another and, ultimately, with ourselves. We are strangers in our own bodies. We have lost a hold of the communal origins of storytelling and their purposes. 

​

We see the practice of theater as the ultimate tool for fostering connection and mending broken pathways as it is collaborative and interdisciplinary by design. Even if a given culture or people doesn’t have a specific tradition of theater they likely have some form of live performance, ritual, ceremony, or storytelling that their community gathers around. It is this human drive to connect with, for, and around cultural practice that we will utilize to foster connections in the 9-county Bay Area region and processes to practice our shared values as humans. 

​

​Our efforts to use theater as a means to create connections between people is the best contribution we can make to our divided and fragmented society. We believe that in order to heal the world, we must first mend and repair the social fabric in our local communities.