This is the starting point of a weblog about the progress so far with Cornerstone Theater Company's project in Queens, NY. We want to catch you up and bring you in to how things got started, how they are coming together and ideas and information about Queens that we have been learning along the way.
This year, 2018, is the 12th Institute Summer Residency. From 2004 through 2013, we it was an annual program, and after the first Institute we started referring to each one as "I-2" or "I-10," partly because it was a nice short-hand but also we love creating a unique vocabulary. It's an odd thing for a group of people who focus so much on inclusivity, but it's true. Maybe it started with me because I love naming things so the named thing has a special and specific resonance. More on this another time. -- But now this program is on an every-other-year plan. We are also experimenting more with some of the structural elements of the Institute Summer Residency. In 2016, we worked in Venice, a neighborhood of our home city, Los Angeles, with intentionality toward accessibility for Institute participants and company members to commute rather than everyone moving to the community for the 32-day residency.
This year is our first Institute Summer Residency taking place outside of the state of California. Not only are we not staying in California, we are going the other side of the country!
Cornerstone has friends and family in New York and in nearby east coast communities. In the first 5 years of the company- 1986 - 1991-- we brought a few of our productions on tour to New York City. In 1997 our first community collaboration in New York was with the students of Seward Park High School and hosted by the Public Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival. The Too Noble Brothers, written by Alison Carey, was an hour-long adaptation of Fletcher and Shakespeare's The Two Noble Kinsmen.
We were invited by Queens College of the City University of New York and their Drama, Theater & Dance Department Chair Meghan E. Healey, to spend our 12th Institute Summer Residency in New York. Meghan is a frequent artistic collaborator with Cornerstone, having designed costumes or sets for half-a-dozen or more productions with us. Here is part of her initial invitation:
DTD is in serious consideration of next year's season. One of the themes we are discussing in depth is the idea of "community." Obviously that is a really broad theme, so one of the ways we have talked about narrowing it down is to focus on plays that can celebrate and explore our community of Queens/Flushing. [We] have been talking...about having a community based theater company in residence or have them do a summer program that bridges 2017-18 and 2018-19 ...
Meghan, with the support of her DTD Department colleagues, and QC's administrators did a lot of work to be able to offer Cornerstone use of campus facilities, including the gorgeous Kupferberg Center for the Arts and on-campus housing. We have had challenging relationships with universities in the past, but Queens College really came through with generous and thoughtfully planned resources in order to bring Cornerstone to Queens.
And it is true: Queens is an amazing community!
Personally, I had only visited Queens once before, for a family wedding in when I was 13. All I remember is the humidity. Since then I've had many visits to Manhattan, been to Brooklyn twice, and once to The Bronx. Now I have the pleasure of learning more about Queens and the people who live there.
As Meghan mentioned Queens is a large community. It is huge! But our residency is only 32 days long. Our play will only be about an hour long. And we have a very full schedule that includes classes as well as working on the production. So our efforts will primarily focus on the neighborhood of Flushing and even more on the community closest to Queens College, our home-base. That is where we start.
[I love this map I found online! I don't know who the artist is or I would credit them.]
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