46th in a series of posts on Touchstone Theatre
Eagles game over!
Time to roll on up, down, or over to Payrow Plaza at 5:30 for the Closing Ceremony!
If you don’t, you are missing something truly historic.
Your grandkids’ grandkids are going to want to know you were there.
What is the phenomenally ambitious Festival UnBound trying to accomplish? People have been asking the Gadfly that all week. Here’s Festival Wizard Bill George taking on that topic impromptu-fashion addressing the panel after a performance of “Prometheus / Redux.”
- “There were three primary themes to this Festival. One is the interconnectedness of all things. The second is diversity and the promise and challenge of diversity. The third is the importance of our youth.”
- “And this piece [“Prometheus / Redux”] was intended to land in the center of the problem of the fact that we are much more aware how everything is connected.”
- “So whether you’re talking about planning, land use, agriculture, and apartment costs, and the effect on race, and gentrification, racism, or the thing that’s happening between men and women in our community — this churning, churning, churning that’s going on, and we’re aware that everything’s connected to everything else.”
- “All of those conversations I had, everyone was aware that our institutions seemed to be inadequate to deal with the challenges that we were facing — that our politics is based on competition, who gets to beat the other guy, and then you win, winner takes all, instead of cooperation. Our economics based on bottom line, and if it doesn’t make money, you know, pow, short-term very often.”
- “How are we going to get to where we need to go?”
- “I don’t think we really can answer that in any definitive way, other than, in the play . . . stand close to each other, which is what we are doing now, and then share, take the time to listen, have that meal, believe, just like Olga was saying, the Mayor’s not going to do it for us.”
- “You know, nobody’s coming to save us, which is a beautiful novel by Stephanie Powell Watts, nobody is coming to save us. We’re going to have to do this.”
- “We in a sense of ‘we’ that we have never accomplished before.”
Festival UnBound
Ten days of original theatre, dance, music, art and conversation designed to celebrate and imagine our future together!
October 4-13