Michael is the director and founder of The Performing Knowledge Project: where performance and education meet, which is a project of The Sanctuary Theatre, co-founded by Michael, Elizabeth Bruce, and Jill Navarre. For more about The Sanctuary Theatre.
Every person has his or her story to tell: every community, every family, every institution, every issue, every piece of ground, every thing. When we remember the country of our birth, when we stand in the middle of a parking lot and consider what once was there, when we walk with aging parents and listen to the tales of their youth, we are made new by the recollections: because each person, each place, each moment possesses a history, and that history provokes a sense of who we are. When we make sense of those stories and the worlds that inspire them, we rediscover ourselves. These stories are all around us; they are deep inside us as well. We hear these stories everyday.
At The Performing Knowledge Project we care about the stories and the communities they inhabit. The story might be about Edgar Allan Poe’s poetic persona, or it might be about a senior citizens’ home, or it might be about technology and how it affects who we are. We at Performing Knowledge explore these stories, what they look like in line and color, what they sound like with melody and chord. We want to know how they feel, both to the storyteller and to those to whom the story is told, and how they make sense of the world around us.
Stories exist within a context, however; they inhabit a community, to be sure; but they also happen at a particular time and place. At Performing Knowledge we seek to advance the relationships between those stories and the way in which they are told. We synthesize the goals of performance with those of education, and by doing so the two disciplines work in harmony. By orchestrating their relationship with one another, we elevate the “felt-thought” making it all the more palpable, transforming it into an experience.
The story of The Performing Knowledge Project begins with poetry workshops and the production of Embodying Poe: Poetry in Performance. The Sanctuary Theatre, the Project’s parent institution, dates back to 1983 and its inaugural production of Jesse and the Bandit Queen. Its story then weaves through over two decades and dozens of productions, workshops, staged-readings, and educational programs, in collaboration with numerous organizations and communities. The Performing Knowledge Project is the theatre’s new story and announces a decidedly different direction for the Sanctuary organization.
The Performing Knowledge Project seeks to build a collaborative of artists and scholars of all kinds: theatre artists; historians, musicians; poets, literary critics, writers and playwrights; sociologists; technologists and visual artists; dancers and beyond. We seek to create original works in collaboration with communities and individuals, crafting the tales that make worlds come alive.
Our next projects include MotherStory and Song of Myself: the Whitman Project.
For more about The Performing Knowledge Project…