The Dream of a Center for the Theater Commons at Emerson College

HowlRound: Ten years ago we connected in a moment of mutual frustration at a TCG gathering in Portland, Oregon, called New Works, New Ways. We recognized instantly in our feeling on the outside of that conversation, that we had found in the other (stealing a phrase from Rob Orchard) a “close conceptual collaborator.” We spent the next ten years in numerous conversations with other conceptual collaborators, including Diane Ragsdale and Todd London, considering how to create a more hospitable environment for making new work and finding more space for artists within institutions. When we began to think about the best home for the work we’ve been doing together, though mostly in separate institutions, we dreamed of a place that could activate our mutual desire to stay intimately tied to the world of professional artistic practice, while simultaneously documenting and studying what we were learning from our own practice and the work of others about how to do it better.