Cornerstone Theater Company

»	Faith-Based Theater Project

Project Description

In its three-year Faith-Based Theater Cycle, Cornerstone Theater is creating original community-based plays in collaboration with specific faith-based institutions, as well as inter-faith communities, to explore how faith both unites and divides American society. The project includes several components. In 2001, the Festival of Faith comprised 21 short site-specific plays at five houses of worship. Working in partnership with the National Conference for Community and Justice/Los Angeles region, Cornerstone and NCCJ experimented with different dialogue approaches and activities that gave congregation members and other people attending the chance to reflect on issues that arose in the plays. Cornerstone presented and is remounting ZONES—part play, part community conversation—a participatory theater experience in which characters confront the challenges of living in a religiously pluralistic city and audience members are encouraged to do the same with each other. The Faith-Based Theater Project also includes five site-specific epic productions at places of worship. Through this epic project, civic dialogue is occurring via community focus groups that develop artistic content, weekly inter-faith dialogue sessions and in various formats associated with the theater-going experience. The Faith-Based Theater Cycle furthers Cornerstone's community collaboration methodology in conjunction with dialogue specialists and explores evaluative means to measure and understand the long-term transformative impact of participatory art-making.