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| Like
a Mother Bear I wrote those words five years ago when I began to weave the threads of the story of my journey with the Bear. When I started this journey, I never imagined it would take me from a California hospital room to the Alaskan tundra to the farthest reaches of my imagination. And I never imagined I would write a play about it. But I have learned: when an animal comes to you, pay attention to it. The Bear came to me when I was struggling with a chronic illness five years ago. After fighting my way through a medical maze of doctors, psychics, even an Elvis-impersonating acupuncturist, I found myself with a group of other chronically and terminally ill patients. In a writing exercise, the following words flowed from my pen: “You need to change. You need to release me, waiting inside you like a mother bear, tender and protective.” When I read the words aloud, the leader of the group stopped me. “The bear,” he said. “Stick with that. See where that leads you.” I followed the bear. I — who had never thought about bears, barely ever seen one — began conjuring up the visual image of a fierce and protective mother grizzly bear to help heal me. And then something else happened. What began as “visualizations” on my part gave way to a kind of seamless underground river of prayer and spirit visitation by the Mother Bear. I was no longer conjuring her up. She had come, as the psychologist James Hillman suggests, “on her own terms.” I began researching bears. I learned that the bear has been a symbol of protection, healing, and transformation for humans for millennia: from the prehistoric Bear Mother and Child figurines of Old Europe to the protective goddess Artemis, Bear Woman, of Greek times. Even today, we see the bear as healer: after the Oklahoma bombing of 1995, Americans sent thousands of teddy bears to comfort the victims. But the mythic bear of healing is only one aspect of my story which has become the play, Like A Mother Bear. There is another story that threads itself around the bear, that tangles the story into knots that I still cannot loosen. It is a story of danger, of loss. The real bear, in particular, the grizzly, is being obliterated, along with the wilderness upon which it depends. Poached and hunted, its habitat fragmented by human development, the grizzly bear is disappearing from the earth. After millennia of co-existing with this ancient mediator between the human and divine worlds, this magnificent, and yes, terrifying animal, we are about to do away with it, an event that the naturalist Richard Nelson says, “would rank among the most catastrophic in our nation’s cultural and ecological history.” That’s not abstract. That means that my grandchildren may never have the option of seeing a wild grizzly bear. And here’s where the thread knots tighter: When I look at its habitat, I realize I’m looking at m own home. This wilderness that sustains the bear, sustains me. The forces that threaten the bear’s survival: unchecked development, creation of a non-sustainable ecology, and a rampant disregard for biodiversity — are all forces that threaten my habitat and wreak havoc on my immune system. We are both endangered. If I cannot save this animal, which demands a vast undisturbed and unpolluted territory, I cannot save myself. There is another thread. It is the thread of story. The crazy thread that weaves and loops, curls and flies. The thread of magic. Of meeting the Bear Mother. Fur flying. Her secrets. Her extraordinary stench. The telling. If we lose the stories about the bear, we pave the way for their destruction, because we can always destroy what we don’t understand. And if we lose the bear, the stories themselves will die, because what power does Her story have if there are no more bears? So I tell this story. The threads thicken, weave tighter. The possibility of healing myself, healing the bear — lies only in weaving all of the threads together: the mythic, the wild, and the personal, and it is this interweaving that is Like A Mother Bear. And I can’t tell this story alone. I have learned much from the knowledge and research of many mentors, many of whom I’ve included in this issue of ATJT Review. They include author and naturalist Doug Peacock, the psychologist and thinker James Hillman, the naturalist/writer Terry Tempest Williams, bear biologist Karen Noyce, Sioux bear medicine woman, Carol Proudfoot Edgar, the ecologist Paul Shepard, the poet Gary Snyder, the environmentalists Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke, and the ground-breaking researchers Thea Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers. They speak from many perspectives: the bear as threatened, the bear as threat, the bear as “bearer” of our unconscious, the bear as symbol of the Feminine, the bear as embodiment of wilderness, the bear as healer. They’ve guided me on my journey and I deeply thank them. The threads are never entirely woven
until the personal story becomes communal. The moment
when the lights dim in the theatre and I begin to tell
you my story, and you discover whether or not it is yours
as well. I invite you to come and find out.
by Albert Greenberg There are many stories between and inside of Like A Mother Bear. But perhaps the first story to tell is: Why bears? Why A Traveling Jewish Theatre? What's the connection? While our work has almost always had its inspiration in Jewish history, thought and imagination, it is also rooted in the belief that theatre can be an instrument of healing, and that "telling the story," the truth of our lives, is a sacred act, at once personal and communal. Like A Mother Bear tells an alarming story. All of us who inhabit this earth - Jewish, non-Jewish, straight, gay, meat-eaters, vegetarians, rich, poor, male, female - are in danger. The earth - which has nourished and sustained our species for millennia - is now threatening us. Our air, water, food is poisoned. And our wilderness, containing vast ecosystems upon which we all depend, is disappearing. Ancient forests are being clear-cut, wetlands destroyed, wildlife refuges turned into oil refineries, our national parks polluted and the grizzly bear, perhaps the greatest symbol of wilderness, is on the edge of extinction. But this is not just a story about an endangered animal or even our endangered wilderness. There is another story between those stories. It is about what poet Gary Snyder calls, "the practice of the wild." As Helen writes, "If we lose the story of the bear, the stories themselves will die, because what power does our story have if there are no more bears?" What happens to our dreams, to our imagination, if we no longer have this fierce, mysterious, and powerful animal on the earth? What psychic poverty awaits us? Any of you who saw Helen's work-in-progress showing know that Like A Mother Bear gives voice to issues that cry out to be heard in the din of babble that passes for contemporary culture. It is our hope that you will appreciate the integrity of a work of art that will both challenge you and move you. Like A Mother Bear will take you underground to that fertile place of the imagination. It will bring you home to parts of yourself in ways only theatre can provide.
by James Hillman Animals come in our dreams as guides, helpers, and saviors; as teachers. We still are inflated to think we're saving them, but they may be teaching us about saving.... They teach us something through their woundedness; that they're threatened and endangered and wounded...They teach us something, but they're not part of us. They correspond with part of us. The bear dream that one man had corresponds with his own earthy, shaggy nature, and therefore he can feel an affinity. But that bear is not his own shaggy nature. That reduces the bear to just a piece of himself and insults the bear - it interprets the bear away. The presence of the bear in the dream corresponds with qualities of the human soul but is not reducible to it. From Talking on the Water,
Conversations about Nature and Creativity, by
Jonathan White, Sierra Club 1994.
by Anita Barrows In 1978 I gave birth to my first child, Nora. Soon afterward I began to experience a highly disturbing set of symptoms: depression, agitation, insomnia; chronic sore throat, achiness, and digestive problems, and a pervasive fatigue which left me afraid that I would not be able to care for my infant daughter. I could not fathom why this was happening to me. In the middle of this time I had a
dream: I was walking in a sort of procession. There were
many others walking as well - uphill on a trail. I was
exhausted, lagging behind, afraid I wouldn't make it. I
was carrying my baby, and that made it harder to keep up.
Then, to the right of me on the hillside banking the
trail, there was a bear; I knew she was female. As soon
as she saw me, she came down to match my pace, and I knew
she would walk alongside me from that point on. I felt
her care and protectiveness for me and my child - surely
she was a mother bear! - and I was reassured. From that
point until my illness was finally diagnosed and treated
(it was an auto-immune disease of the thyroid) I was
comforted by the presence of Bear walking with me. I felt
her strongly and intimately. She would even help me hold
my child, as she held me.
By Terry Tempest Williams He
came home from the war and shot a bear. He had been part
of the Tenth Mountain Division that fought on Mount
Belvedere in Italy during World War II. When he returned
home to Wyoming, he could hardly wait to get back to the
wilderness. It was fall, the hunting season. He would
enact the ritual of man against animal once again. A
black bear crossed the meadow. The man fixed his scope on
the bear and pulled the trigger. The bear screamed. He
brought down his rifle and found himself shaking. This
had never happened before. He walked over to the warm
beast, now dead, and placed his hand on its shoulder.
Setting his gun down, he pulled out his buck knife and
began skinning the bear that he would pack out on his
horse. As he pulled the fur coat away from the muscle,
down the breasts and over the swell of the hips, he
suddenly stopped. This was not a bear. It was a woman. Another bear story: There is a woman
who travels by sled dogs in Alaska. On one of her
journeys through the interior, she stopped to visit an
old friend, a Koyukon man. They spoke for some time about
the old ways of his people. She listened until it was
time for her to go. As she was harnessing her dogs, he
offered one piece of advice. "If you should run into Bear,
lift up your parka and show him you are a woman." And another: I have a friend who
manages a bookstore. A regular customer dropped by to
browse. They began sharing stories, which led to a
discussion of dreams. My friend shared hers. "I dreamt I was in Yellowstone. A
grizzly, upright, was walking toward me. Frightened at
first, I began to pull away, when suddenly a mantle of
calm came over me. I walked toward the bear and we
embraced." The man across the counter listened,
and the said matter-of-factly, "Get over it." Why? Why should we give up the dream
of embracing the bear? For me, it has everything to do
with undressing, exposing, and embracing the Feminine. I see the Feminine defined as a
reconnection to the Self, a commitment to the wildness
within - our instincts, our capacity to create and
destroy; our hunger for connection as well as
sovereignty, interdependence and independence, at once.
We are taught not to trust our own experience. The Feminine teaches us experience is
our way back home, the psychic bridge that spans rational
and intuitive waters. To embrace the Feminine is to
embrace paradox. Paradox preserves mystery, and mystery
inspires belief. I believe in the power of Bear. The Feminine has long been linked to
the bear through mythology. The Greek goddess Artemis,
whose name means "bear," embodies the wisdom of
the wild. Christine Downing, in her book The Goddess:
Mythological Images of the Feminine, describes her as
"the one who knows each tree by its bark or leaf or
fruit, each beast by its footprint or spoor, each bird by
its plumage or call or nest." It is Artemis, perhaps originally a
Cretan goddess of fertility, who denounces the world of
patriarchy, demanding chastity from her female
attendants. Callisto, having violated her virginity and
become pregnant, is transformed into the She-Bear of the
night sky by Artemis. Other mythical accounts credit
Artemis herself as Ursa Major, ruler of the heavens and
protectress of the Pole Star or axis mundi.... Women and bears. Marian Engel, in her novel Bear,
portrays a woman and a bear in an erotics of place. It
doesn't matter whether the bear is seen as male or
female. The relationship between the two is sensual,
wild. The woman says, "Bear, take me to the bottom of the ocean with you, Bear, swim with me, Bear, put your arms around me, enclose me, swim, down, down, down, with me." "Bear," she says suddenly,
"come dance with me." They make love. Afterward, "She
felt pain, but it was a dear sweet pain that belonged not
to mental suffering, but to the earth." I have felt the pain that arises from
a recognition of beauty, pain we hold when we remember
what we are connected to and the delicacy of our
relations. It is this tenderness born out of a connection
to place that fuels my writing. Writing becomes an act of
compassion toward life, the life we so often refuse to
see because if we look too closely or feel too deeply,
there may be no end to our suffering. But words empower
us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free. This
is the sorcery of literature. We are healed by our
stories. By undressing, exposing, and embracing the bear, we undress, expose, and embrace our authentic selves. Stripped free from society's oughts and shoulds, we emerge as emancipated beings. The bear is free to roam. If we choose to follow the bear, we
will be saved from a distractive and domesticated life.
The bear becomes our mentor. We must journey out, so that
we might journey in. The bear mother enters the earth
before snowfall and dreams herself through winter,
emerging in spring with young by her side. She not only
survives the barren months, she gives birth. She is the
caretaker of the unseen world. As a writer and a woman
with obligations to both family and community, I have
tried to adopt this ritual in the balancing of a public
and private life. We are at home in the deserts and
mountains, as well as in our dens. Above ground in the
abundance of spring and summer, I am available. Below
ground in the deepening of autumn and winter, I am not. I
need hibernation in order to create. We are creatures of paradox, women and
bears, two animals that are enormously unpredictable,
hence our mystery. Perhaps the fear of bears and the fear
of women lies in our refusal to be tamed, the impulses we
arouse and the forces we represent. Last spring, our family was in
Yellowstone. We were hiking along Pelican Creek, which
separated us from an island of lodgepole pines. All at
once, a dark form stood in front of the forest on a patch
of snow. It was a grizzly, and behind her, two cubs.
Suddenly, the sow turned and bolted through the trees. A
female elk crashed through the timber to the other side
of the clearing, stopped, and swung back toward the bear.
Within seconds, the grizzly emerged with an elk calf
secure in the grip of her jaws. The sow shook the
yearling violently by the nape of its neck, threw it
down, clamped her claws on its shoulders, and began
tearing the flesh back from the bones with her teeth. The
cow elk, only a few feet away, watched the sow devour her
calf. She pawed the earth desperately with her front
hooves, but the bear was oblivious. Blood dripped from
the sow's muzzle. The cubs stood by their mother, who
eventually turned the carcass over to them. Two hours
passed. The sow buried the calf for a later meal, she
slept on top of the mound with a paw on each cub. It was
not until then that the elk crossed the river in retreat. We are capable of harboring both these
responses to life in the relentless power of our love. As
women connected to the earth, we are nurturing and we are
fierce, we are wicked and we are sublime. The full range
is ours. We hold the moon in our bellies and fire in our
hearts. We bleed. We give milk. We are the mothers of
first words. These words grow. They are our children.
They are our stories and our poems. By allowing ourselves to undress,
expose, and embrace the Feminine, we commit our
vulnerabilities not to fear but to courage - the courage
that allows us to write on behalf of the earth, on behalf
of ourselves.
By Gary Snyder Sacred refers to that which helps take us (not only human beings) out of our little selves into the whole mountains-and-rivers mandala universe. Inspiration, exaltation, and insight do not end when one steps outside the doors of the church. The wilderness as a temple is only a beginning. One should not dwell in the specialness of the extraordinary experience nor hope to leave the political quag behind to enter a perpetual state of heightened insight. The best purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same territory -never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. It can be restored, and humans could live in considerable numbers on much of it. Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street. From Practice of the Wild, by
Gary Snyder, North Point Press, 1990.
This story of meeting Bear was told to ATJT ensemble member Helen Stoltzfus by Carol Proudfoot-Edgar, a woman who has, in her own words, "been tracking and studying Bear Medicine for several years." According to Carol: "We do not talk about a Bear but about Bear as spirit animal. Even to mention the name Bear is to invite uneasiness...much better to call Bear Grandfather, Grandmother, Old One, Honey Paws, etc...the very reverence afforded Bear is indicated by not naming Bear as such." She continues: "This story is about a critical moment in my spiritual searching when I was seeking direction by retreating to the wilderness and making supplication to Spirit for guidance." We were in the San Juan mountains. The covenant that each of us had made was: "I'm coming to find my next step." I knew that I was to work in the West. But I didn't know exactly what that meant. I knew that from my culture in the West meant there was Bear, but there was also Stone, and Water. We went out for a 24-hour period. I went to this one area where I found I could whistle, the birds would come and I could mimic their whistle. It was right after the first snow melted and there were tiny flowers everywhere...beautiful. I felt like I was in Paradise. I thought this was my power place, this is where I'm going to learn what my next step is. All the while I'm there, I'm praying to be shown what my next step is. And then I get the message to move, so I start moving out from this bouldered area, move along the edge of the alpine meadow and at some moment, the world is absolutely dark. I'm aware that there's someone watching me. I'm aware that there's a very musky scent in the air. And in some moment I'm also aware that this is Bear, though I've never seen a bear before. But I know this is Bear. So I go very softly and then I know to come to stillness. I turn and look to my right and there's this large bear. To my eyes she seems all black. She's a few yards from me on her hind legs. In that moment I fall into prayer. Not fear. I'm really communicating with her. It's like if you happen to walk into someone else's space. You apologize. Then I hear this scurrying. And out come these two little cubs. In that moment I feel this incredible fear come up in me. I fall to my knees and I really begin praying to her. I share with her that I love children too. And I love her children. I'll protect her children. As I know she protects all children. I have in that moment the knowledge of how much help all the children in our world need, how we need Her help. I'm also aware that we are communicating mother to mother, even though I have no children. Female to female. I look at her, and she looks at me. There's this promise made. Then she cuffs them with her paws and runs off. I return to my friends. Later that
evening I tell them the story and hug each of them. When
I hug them, I'm suddenly aware that I'm Bear hugging
them, breathing on them the musky breath of Bear.
The first time my wife Karen and I were up in the mountains of Montana, we were awed and even a little frightened by the scale and power of the wilderness. Whether buildings or bridges or even hiking trails, the creations of human beings seemed by comparison precariously inadequate, hopelessly finite, fragile. Back East, nature must be preserved and revered. High in the Rockies, it was the opposite. Here we had to be wary of nature lest, in a blind moment, she consume us all. Everywhere, signs warned of bears. They can run, swim and climb faster than any human being. And they have been known to attack without provocation. Stories circulated about an unwary hiker just a few months ago who.... Karen and I drove up to the end of the road at Two Medicine Lake, where there is a log cabin, general store and a little boat which can ferry you to the trailhead on the far shore. Inside, watching hummingbirds dart to and fro around a feeder, having a cup of coffee, I met Charlie Slocum, a retired biology teacher from Minnesota, who spends his summers working for the National Park Service. In the pristine Eden air, I understood why he had returned now for a score of summers. But I was also more than casually concerned about being eaten by a grizzly. "Get many bears up here, do you?" I asked. "Sometimes we get quite a few." "How 'bout on that easy trail around the lake over there? Any chance of running into any this morning - so near the store...?" He paused long enough to hear the question behind the question and took a slow sip of his coffee. "If I could tell you for sure there wouldn't be any bears, it wouldn't be a wilderness now would it?" I thanked him for his candor and we went on our hike. Maybe that is all it ever comes down to: You can walk where things are predictable--or you can enter the wilderness. Without the wilderness, there can be neither reverence nor revelation. Excerpt from Invisible Lines of
Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary, by
Lawrence Kushner. Jewish Lights Publishing, 1996. $21.95
+ $3.50 s/h. P.O. Box 237, Woodstock, VT 05091. Credit
card orders: 800-962-4544. Permission granted by Jewish
Lights Publishing.
The journey of PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) have been traced from a U.S. factory to the breast milk of an Arctic polar bear, thousands of miles away. The concentrations of PCBs multiply 3 billions times as they move up the food chain to the polar bear, the top predator and largest land carnivore. A decade later, the grown female cub - whose mother consumed PCBs - emerges from a den without any cubs of her own. (From studies conducted in Norway's Svalbard region, above the Arctic Circle, Our Stolen Future, by Thea Colborn, Dianne Dumanoski, and John Peterson Myers, Penguin Books, 1996.) There are 51 synthetic chemicals that
disrupt the human endocrine system (a system that
includes testicles, ovaries, pancreas, adrenal glands,
thyroid, parathyroid, and thymus.) These chemicals
include 209 PCBs, 75 dioxins, and 135 furans. Many
scientists now believe that estrogen-like pollutants
found in industrial compounds, pesticides, and plastics,
are wreaking havoc with human and animal reproductive
systems.... According to data from 61 studies spanning
the globe, average male sperm counts have dropped by
almost 50% between 1938 and 1990. (From Our Stolen
Future.)
Oct. 18: Helen Stoltzfus, ATJT ensemble member and creator/performer of Like a Mother Bear. Oct. 24: China Galland, author of Women in the Wilderness, Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna, and the forthcoming Riding the Lion: Stories of the Fierce, Sacred Feminine. Oct. 26: Fundraiser for Cancer Support and Education Center, with Karen Haas (director of CSEC) and Peggy Rogers, (director of client services at CSEC). For more information, call 415/327-6166. Oct. 27: Laurie MacDonald, wildlife zoologist, Chair, Endangered Species and Habitat Issues, Sierra Club, field representative for Defenders of Wildlife. Nov. 1: Anita Barrows, poet, The Limits, The Roads Past the View, translator, Rilke's Book of Hours (co-translator with Joanna Macy), associate professor of clinical psychology. Nov. 7: Fundraiser for Great Bear Foundation, with Matt Reid, executive director of GBF. For more information, call 415/455-4915. Nov. 9: Fundraiser for Plutonium Free Future Women's Network, with Claire Greensfelder, eco-activist, co-founder of PFFWN and Myumi Oda (invited), artist and co-founder of PFFWN. For more information, call 510/540-7645. Nov. 10: Jonathan Seidel, Director of Department of Jewish Education and Jewish Identity, Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona, scholar and teacher working on religion and the environment. Nov. 14: Martha Boesing, director of Like A Mother Bear, ATJT Artist-in-Residence, and head of Environmental Theatre Project with her play, Standing on Fishes. Nov. 15: Carol Proudfoot-Edgar, international teacher and student of the path of Bear Medicine, practitioner of shamanism.
In preparation for hibernation, a bear may feed up to 20 hours in a feeding frenzy called hyperphagia, consuming 20,000 calories daily, about 5 times its normal intake. Mother bears perform the impressive
feat of surviving winter and bearing and nursing cubs.
They do not eat or drink for 5-7 months, and they do not
urinate or defecate. A human woman would miscarry her
fetus if she went without food for a few days.
By Corey Fischer I discovered improvisation in 1968 when The Committee, the legendary San Francisco improv company, came to Los Angeles, where I was then living. I worked with the Committee for a year. I met Naomi Newman, co-founder of ATJT, during this time, and, together with a dozen or so other Committee Workshop members, formed a more experimental sort of improvisational theatre. We improvised a complete evening of theatre at least once a week for three years, floating from one small Hollywood venue to another. After a while, improvisation began to seem more interesting as a tool for developing works of theatre rather than as an end in itself. In later years, Naomi and I drew heavily on our background in improvisation, and Albert Greenberg on his experiences improvising music, to create ATJT's first works. In 1990, I met Nina Wise, Artistic Director of MOTION and rediscovered the joys and terrors of pure, flat-out improvisation. Out of her background in dance and performance art, Nina had developed her own idiosyncratic, highly physical, yet verbally charged style of solo improvisation. It fascinated me. We began improvising together whenever our schedules permitted. After two years in the studio, we began to perform occasionally at venues like The Marsh and The Climate Theatre. We kept experimenting with different structures for weaving together an evening of duet and solo improvisations, working with directors David Ford and, most recently, David Dower (Artistic Director of the Z Studio and director of many Bay Area productions, including Nina Wise's What to Call Home, produced in 1994 by ATJT). Nina, David and I are working in ways that have a lot more to do with jazz and with forgotten traditions of improvised poetry, storytelling and theatre than with the sketch comedy of the Committee-style work. Not that what we do isn't funny. We use anything and everything that is at hand: conversations with audience members, our own personal lives, the day's headlines, voices, bodies, stories, riffs, rants, philosophical discourses - you name it. Since nothing is scripted or rehearsed, it's a particularly democratic form. Neither the performers nor the audience know what will happen next. Anything is possible. The adrenaline runs high as moments of utter panic transform into the most unexpected epiphanies. At its essence, improvisation is nothing more or less than the art of the present moment. Just like real life, only more so. Now What? runs December 5- 21 in ATJT's Space
ATJT was recently awarded a $50,000 grant through the National Theatre Artist Residency Program, administered by Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for the American theatre, and funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts. The grant will fund the long-term residency of Minneapolis-based director, playwright and performer Martha Boesing. ATJT audiences may remember Martha from her earlier work with the company in the late '80s. At that time, Martha co-wrote and directed Snake Talk: Urgent Messages from the Mother with ensemble member Naomi Newman and co-wrote and directed Heart of the World with ensemble members Albert Greenberg and Helen Stoltzfus. Martha was the founder, artistic director and playwright-in-residence from 1974-84 of Minneapolis' At the Foot of the Mountain, the oldest and most long-lived professional women's theatre company in America. She was a core member of the Firehouse Theatre, librettist for the Minnesota Opera, writer/director for the In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre and for the Environmental Theatre Project (all in Minneapolis), as well as playwright-in-residence at the Academy Theatre in Atlanta. Ms. Boesing was the recipient of a Fund for New American Plays award from the Kennedy Center for My Other Heart which premiered at Chicago's Northlight Theatre in 1994. As part of her year-and-a-half residency with ATJT, Martha will dramaturg and direct two of this season's productions, Like a Mother Bear (see cover story) and Old, Jewish & Queer (coming in February, 1997). In the summer of 1997, she will teach in ATJT's new apprenticeship program, following which she will perform her own solo work, These Are My Sisters, as the 1997-98 season opener. ATJT is particularly grateful to
Theatre Communications Group and The Pew Charitable
Trusts for making this opportunity possible.
While many of you reading this newsletter are very familiar with ATJT, its vision, history and programs, we provide the following article for those new to our work. For a complete company brochure, call (415) 399-1809. Vision A Traveling Jewish Theatre is a unique, artist-led ensemble that creates and performs original works of theatre. While much of the company's work is rooted in the Jewish experience, ATJT also collaborates with other artists from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In all its work, the company seeks a generous vision of the human condition. ATJT has created a body of work that defies categorization. In the polyglot tradition of Jewish culture, ATJT speaks many languages. It speaks poetry and it speaks story. It speaks secular Yiddish humanism and ecstatic mysticism. It speaks world history and women's wisdom. It speaks jazz and sacred chant. It speaks Jewish and it speaks American.
ATJT, one of the oldest ongoing ensemble theatres in the country, was founded in 1978 by Corey Fischer, Albert Greenberg and Naomi Newman. In 1987, Helen Stoltzfus joined the ensemble. ATJT has created more than a dozen original works for the theatre. The sources for these works have ranged from the legends of the Hasidim to the assassination of Trotsky; from Yiddish poetry to the reclamation of women's wisdom; from the healing nature of storytelling to the challenge of interfaith marriage and from the politics of the Middle East to African-American/Jewish relations. ATJT recognizes that the roots of theatre lie in the realm of the mythic, the sacred and the communal; that theatre can be an instrument of healing for people and cultures.
ARTISTIC ENSEMBLE James A. Kleinmann, Managing Director Robert A. MacLean, Facilities Manager
& Technical Director Albert Greenberg, Project Manager Ursula Sherman, President |