Current Work-in-Progress: The Portal Project
Dancing together through a landscape of grief, across quarantines, through more than 3,ooo burned out lots, over a parking lot where Aidan Ellison was murdered, our Southern Oregon community will arrive at a portal. Led by artists and cloaked in compassion, we will step through together. What we bring will be determined by what we need to survive, what we create will be determined by hope for a reciprocal, just, and kind world for all who inhabit it. We don’t have to accept climate change, racism and sexism as givens. We can realize a better world. Now is our time. Dirt Theatre’s Portal Project takes inspiration from the quote by Aruhndati Roy, “Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it." Practicing sustainability throughout the entire creation process, we will collect stories and movements from diverse citizens of Josephine and Jackson counties, create a soundtrack from these thoughts and feelings, and endeavor to never go back together.
Dirt Theatre artists believe the connection between art and agriculture is inextricable, and that only a return to authentic, community and intention based art making can create a sustainable soil from which emotionally transformative dance and theatre can thrive. In indigenous cultures, dancing together as a community wrapped almost all rituals...agricultural, celebratory, and medicinal. Starving the world, particularly low income communities, of meaningful art has been a strategy of the elite for retaining their unsustainable financial dominance. Dirt Theatre works to undo that reality, and bring heart-bending, mind-shifting, evocative art to all folks, far and wide.