Our Voices, Our Time: One-Act Play Festival seeks to amplify and celebrate Black voices, stories, and perspectives through the work of three playwrights, selected from a pool of scripts submitted from around the world. Playwrights will be selected in June, and in October, each play will be produced and see its world premiere at the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts before going on to New York.
The collaboration between Penn Live Arts and the Negro Ensemble Company brings together one of the most important Black theatre producers in the United States and the University of Pennsylvania’s nexus of the performing arts, two legacy organizations that share a mission of advancing innovative, contemporary theatre.
The residency, NEC’s first with a major institution, will span the 2022-23 season/academic year with a goal to reflect authentic, underrepresented stories of the Black experience and elevate meaningful and thought-provoking conversations on the monumental role of Black artists in shaping art and culture in our country.
The residency will also include a new play, directed by five-time NAACP best directing award-winner Denise Dowse and with designer Patrice Andrew Davidson, juxtaposing the Civil Rights Movement with the social justice movement of today, which will receive its world premiere in February 2023. This new work will merge live music, dance, 1960s protest poetry, and contemporary writings that reflect on our nation’s recent racial reckoning. The play also takes inspiration from Ntozake Shange’s acclaimed theatre piece, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow is Enuf.
Visit pennlivearts.org and necinc.org.
The residency is made possible in part by a generous ArtsForward grant from the Association for Performing Arts Professionals (APAP) through The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The Association of Performing Arts Professionals is the national service, advocacy and membership organization for the performing arts presenting, booking and touring field. ArtsForward is a new program to support the field’s safe, vibrant, and equitable reopening and recovery. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, believing that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom to be found there. Through its grants, the Foundation seeks to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive.
Additional support is provided through an Extended Artist Residency grant from The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation. The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation provides grants and other forms of strategic support to artists, faculty, cultural centers, students, and other arts advocates at Penn. The Sachs Program’s vision is that the arts at Penn are valued and embraced as a creative catalyst, driving innovation, inspiration, and action.
NEC is the 2022-23 season artist-in-residence of the Brownstein Residency for Artistic Innovation.
