What are we Doing?  A public gathering and conversation with Ellen Lauren and Will Bond of NYC’s SITI Company about the relationship between theatre makers and audiences.

Any act of theater making involves selecting and organizing images to express a message. But how does that come about, who selects, what are the criteria used in the process?  Most of all, as we face this period of national transition, does theater making have a responsibility to a broader context globally? What is happening to that conversation? What is the relationship of the audience and the theater maker now? What’s going to keep us going? What messages are we tasked with and is the medium of theater still a viable way to exchange energy and time together….what are we doing?

Will Bond is a founding member of the New York City-based SITI Company. His credits include Scrooge in Falling and Loving, The Persians, The Bacchae, Antigone at Getty Villa; bobrauschenbergamerica at BAM; Seven Deadly Sins and Lilith at New York City Opera; Lost in the Stars with the LA Chamber Orchestra; and Bob (drama desk award nomination) with the New York Theater Workshop. Will was an Emeritus Senior Artist-in-Residence at Skidmore College from 2004-2019. He is published in the edited volumes Movement for Actors, Allworth Press 2002; The Routledge Companion to Stanislavski, Routledge Press 2013; and This Is Not a Handbook: the story of SITI Company, Yonkers International Press 2023.

Ellen Lauren was a founding member and co-artistic director of the SITI Company. She has served as the Education Director for all SITI’s training programs nationally and internationally and designed and administered SITI’s four none-month Conservatory programs. She has been on the faculty of The Juilliard School of Drama at Lincoln Center for over 30 years and directed four productions on the mainstage as well as at UCLA MFA TFT program. She is also an associate artist with the Suzuki Company of Toga (SCOT) directed by Tadashi Suzuki and based in Japan. She will be featured the Toga International Festival’s 50th Anniversary season this summer. She recently was a co-creator of Space Bridge at La Mama, a program to highlight the stories of refugee children currently living in New York shelters. She received the Erskine Faculty prize at Juilliard for this work. Ms. Lauren was the first recipient of the TCG Fox Fellowship for Distinguished Achievement in the US.