Content area
Full Text
JH: Café Vida (by Lisa Loom er, directed by Michael John Garcés) is the first play in "The Hunger Cycle," a multi-year project during which Cornerstone Theater Company will investigate the many and varied kinds of hunger experienced by people in Los Angeles across a broad spectrum of race, class, and culture. Internationally recognized for creating works with, by and for different communities, they give voice to disenfranchised communities by dramatizing their lives. Tiffany, because you've participated in a Cornerstone Workshop Intensive, can you talk a bit more about their methodology?
TAL: Cornerstone's methodology is highly collaborative and focused on process. They begin with a key theme, topic or issue, in this case hunger, and work directly with community members to create theater through story cycles. Cornerstone's professional ensemble members partner with people from a selected community whose lives and circumstances the company honors both within the play and throughout the theater making process. Cornerstone's primary goal is to create art that might then also stage a larger conversation.
JH: How would you describe the story cycle process?
TAL: The story cycle process is the foundation for Cornerstone's work. Community members are invited to participate in a variety of storytelling activities. The creative team, including playwright, engage community members in sharing personal stories, which provide threads to later weave into the play, from character building and dialogue construction to plot expansion. The story cycle process moves participants to see beyond stereotypes, those imposed by the dominant culture as well as those rooted within the community itself. In this way, Cornerstone creates theater that reflects a community that is authentic, nuanced and complex. For Café Vida, the story cycle included many community actors who were recently released from prison and in the middle of reentry and sobriety programming. Cornerstone's focus on the issue of hunger and food led them to approach Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries, an organization that works with disenfranchised community members, many of whom are former gang members.
JH: Father Gregory Boyle, a Jesuit priest, has been paramount in addressing the issue of hunger and food in an internationally recognized effort to rehabilitate young people who have found themselves in desperate circumstances, such as addiction and prison. Founded in 1992, Homeboy Industries...