CORNERSTONE THEATER COMPANY INC
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Mission Statement
Cornerstone Theater Company collaborates with communities. Our work reflects complexity, disrupts assumptions, welcomes difference, and amplifies joy. We aim to advance a more compassionate, equitable, and just world. For over 37 years, Cornerstone has brought together an ensemble of professional artists of the highest caliber with people who would never think of themselves as artists to produce works of excellence based on the stories, concerns and issues of a given community. Our plays celebrate many voices, and are staged in theaters and in parking lots, in factories, schools and subway stations. We strive to include people who have not been on stage or even seen theater. We’ve taken up residence in small towns and urban neighborhoods, collaborating with locals from start to finish to tell their unique stories through theater. By combining the artistry of people with many levels of theatrical experience, we act upon the conviction that artistic expression is civic engagement and that access to a creative forum is essential to the wellness and health of every individual and community.
About This Cause
Cornerstone is a community-based theater company led by a Board of Directors and artistic ensemble, and is supported by a professional staff. The ensemble began in 1986 as a group of theater makers traveling nationwide, primarily in rural communities, performing in different cities and states with each production. Since 1992, we have been based in Los Angeles, focusing largely on urban collaborations, while traveling to many different regions throughout California. Cornerstone has commissioned more than 100 playwrights, produced over 150 new works, trained thousands of students in our methodology, and worked with tens of thousands of community members across the country. Our ensemble of theater artists and cultural workers includes writers, directors, performers, designers and organizers with a commitment to sharing the twin and indivisible goals of excellence and inclusion. We accomplish our mission and act on our vision primarily through our Community Collaborations and Institute programming. Community Collaborations are the core of our work as a theater company. Using an engagement methodology honed over thirty years, members of the community share their stories and civic concerns, voicing their opinions on various issues affecting their communities. Our professional playwrights then weave together a play from these narratives. The final product of this 12- to 18-month process is a professional production with community members – as actors, stagehands, front of house, and in other capacities – which reflects the histories and perspectives of the larger community. Our plays are staged in traditional and non-traditional performance spaces, but always in a location significant to our collaborating communities: schools, community centers, service organizations, and adjacent to sacred land. Cornerstone strives to include people who have never been on stage or have never seen theater; our plays celebrate many voices. Audiences and playmaking participants not only work alongside professional theater artists, but also see themselves, their stories, and their aspirations represented on stage. Cornerstone’s Institute offers multidisciplinary professional training in community-based theater using our unique collaborative methodology through two programs: Intensives and the month-long Summer Residency. The Summer Residency returns to Cornerstone’s original process of living in and with the collaborating community. Participants receive training and experience on a Cornerstone production from story circles and auditions through performance. Our Intensive Training Programs provide working professionals, non-profit organizations, schools, and corporations with a condensed overview of our practices. Designed for up to 30 participants, these workshops rely on the participants’ input and creativity over 13 hours of activities and conversations. Our ability to be in a true mutual dialogue affects both outcome and process in inventive and surprising ways. We are invested in humility and service as core practices. The results have shifted our process and our company toward a model of creation that cultivates cultural equity and counters cultural extraction. We enter into community partnership with decades of knowledge and experience with the inquiry: how can we use our expertise as artists to cultivate equity? The resulting work looks less and less like conventional theater in its aesthetics and outcomes. John King, the Director of Community Engagement for the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA), recently shared with Cornerstone that “the Housing Authority was beyond impressed with what Cornerstone did with A Jordan Downs Illumination. I was personally touched and blown away at the level of professionalism, thought and passion Cornerstone brought with the Jordan Downs effort.” While there are other theater companies and groups doing arts and civic engagement work that collaborate with communities to create new performance work, our work is unique in its duration, the depth and diversity of the engagement, the shared agency of the creative process, and the scale and impact of the work.