Episode Details

This Bonus episode of Change the Story / Change the World is in celebration of the publishing of Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance - 1965-2020 by Those Who Lived It, by Jan Cohen Cruz and Rad Pereira.

Hi this is Bill Cleveland. I'd like to welcome you to a Bonus episode of Change the Story / Change the World in celebration of a publishing milestone. For the past 4 decades Jan Cohen Cruz has been working at the crossroads of theater and social change, as a performer, as a teacher, and as a storyteller documenting the continuing evolution of socially engaged performance. Now, I'm very happy to announce that her new book Meeting the Moment, shines a light on that extraordinary history by sharing the stories of the people lived it.

In this episode, first broadcast in November of 2021, Jan talks about her own history as an activist, performer and teacher, and the genesis of Meeting the Moment, which was recently released by New Village Press. Links to both New Village, and a related episode featuring Carlton Turner who wrote the book's forward can be found in our show notes.

Jan Cohen-Cruz has given a lot to the field of arts-based community development. By that, I mean that there's a significant body of academic and community-based artwork, scholarship, teaching, and organizing that are absolutely covered with her fingerprints.

BIO

Jan Cohen-Cruz was the founding editor of Public: A Journal of Imagining America. She directed Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life (2007-12), and for 28 years before that, was a professor at NYU, directing a minor in applied theatre and initiating socially-engaged projects and courses. She wrote Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response and Local Acts: Community‑Based Performance in the US. She edited Radical Street Performance and co‑edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion. Jan was also a University Professor at Syracuse University. In 2012, she received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement. Here latest book, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Theater, 1965 To 2020 written with Rad Pereira will published by New Village Press in May 2022.

Notable Mentions (in order of appearance)

Carlton Turner is a brilliant artist and creative change agent whose work across the country and in his hometown of Utica Mississippi dramatically proves that if you can "see" a different future you can make make a different future. He makes this point and much more in his eloquent introduction to Meeting the Moment, the new book by this episode's guest Jan Cohen Cruz and Rad Pereira.

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