Welcome Message

Welcome to Cultural Conversations, the only new works festival of its kind in the country. Devoted to fostering and promoting new dance, visual arts, and theatre pieces based on issues of local and global diversity, Cultural Conversations offers a forum for professional and student artists where social issues can "play out" on a stage.

The past five seasons of this unique festival have brought hundreds of audiences members together over five days to witness artistic debates on race, religion, ethnicity, gender, and violence and each year the theme of the festival changes to address a specific social issue.

The upcoming 2012 season of Cultural Conversations entitled "Difficult Differences" will focus on public and private identities, and each festival presentation will offer views and viewpoints from inside and outside a very specific conversation.

For the third year, Cultural Conversations' school project Body Language will target a specific issue, and in  a semester long exploration called "Straight College, USA: Asking and Telling," CC's Artistic Director Susan Russell will use playwriting and performance as a means to discuss how perceptions of the LBGT community affect growing up gay in our local school system. Body Language will also move into the LBGT community of Penn State, and high school and university students will work  together in an in-depth exploration of one of the most controversial identities a young person can claim in the twenty-first century.

As with every year, the Body Language project opens festival in a historically sold-out public performance, and this year, due to public demand, the Body Language project will be presented for two evening performances. After Body Language, artist and activist Kimberly Dark, whose sold out performance of Complicated Courtesies rocked CC audiences in 2011, will return in 2012 to perform her hard hitting and hysterical solo work Dykeopolis: Queer Tales and Travels in Our Times. On the heels of Dark's solo piece written espceially fo CC 2012, the festival will offer audiences our first film, which is the cutting edge documentary entitled Code of the Freaks. This highly acclaimed documentary is an exploration of disability in Hollywood films, and film maker Dr. Carrie Sandahl, one of the foremost disability artist/ theorists of the 21st century will be there to bring this revolutionary film to "life." CC 2012 will also offer 5 One-Act plays by PSU playwrights Max Simone, Laura Conrad, Adrianna Mathews, Isaac Perry, and Tim Hartman. These student works will be featured along side student dance works from the PSU Dance Department and selected students from Penn States School for Visual Arts will fill the lobby of The Downtown Theatre during February and March with pieces devoted to "public and private identities."

This year's festival will open and close with two public Town Hall meetings. The first Town Hall will explore LBGT issues locally and nationally and the second Town Hall will explore local and regional implications of natural gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale Gas Play. Each Town Hall will give citizens a chance to ask questions of local academics, politicians, religious leaders, economic professionals, law professionals, and scientists. Come prepared to listen and to speak because these Town Halls will be a unique opportunity to engage with your neighbors on issues that are defining the 21st century in our local cities, townships, and our state and our nation.

All in all, the sixth season of Cultural Conversation will prove that the power of art rests it its ability to create pubic debate, and the sixth season of CC will continue to prove that the strength of our society lay in its willingness to Stop the Violence and Start the Conversation.

Please check the Upcoming Season tab for the schedule of our performances.