Theatre Without Borders

"I remember some years ago seeing a play about women in Bosnia during the conflict there.  It was so gripping.  I still see the faces of those women who were pulled from their homes, separated from their husbands, often raped and left just as garbage on the side of the road.  So I think that artists both individually and through their works can illustrate better than any speech I can give or any government policy we can promulgate that the spirit that lives within each of us, the right to think and dream and expand our boundaries, is not confined, no matter how hard they try, by any regime anywhere in the world.  There is no way that you can deprive people from feeling those stirrings inside their soul.  And artists can give voice to that.  They can give shape and movement to it.  And it is so important in places where people feel forgotten and marginalized and depressed and hopeless to have that glimmer that there is a better future, that there is a better way that they just have to hold onto."

---- Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Georgetown University, December 14, 2010 

 

 

 

"Theatre Without Borders is like a dating service for international collaboration. I think it is becoming an essential connective tissue in the global theatre workplace."

--Michael Fields, Producing Artistic Director,
DELL'ARTE INTERNATIONAL, Blue Lake, California
in American Theatre Magazine, October 2005, p.54-55

 

 

 

"Theatre Without Borders is one of the most important organizations to appear on the scene in the past decade.  At a time when the processes of art emulate more and more those of commerce, TWB reinvigorates ritual, community, and the social purposes of art.  In a day when the institutions of the theatre tend toward insularity, TWB reaches across borders.  It reenvisions all theatre as world theatre and all world theatre as local.  While its model, Doctors Without Borders, provides medicine, TWB is medicine.  
 
 
In a few years of operation, Theatre Without Borders has traveled farther, with greater human impact, than any American theatre organization, in part through its radical engagement of individual artists and their collaborative passions. I want to read Acting Together on the World Stage. I want to see the documentary they’ll make to accompany it.  I want the interactive website up and running.  Then I want to send everyone whose work I love and everyone who loves theatre to those same materials.  We need to see what they’ve seen and what they’ve made.  We need to understand how you make art across cultures, how art leads us to peace.
 
 
This is a vital project and an urgent one."
 
 

--- Todd London
Artistic Director
New Dramatists