Jan Cohen-Cruz:

The Non-Fiction Writer's Voice

A special two-part writing workshop

with renowned applied theatre author and practitioner Jan Cohen-Cruz

March 4 and 11, 6:00-8:30pm

Here’s the secret: writing non-fiction is not only documentation and analysis, it is also a process of discovery. Writing allows for reflection, leading to insights that simply seeing the work does not reveal. This two-session workshop opens up how we as applied theater makers and scholars write about applied art so as to document, analyze, and discover.  Equally important, we’ll experiment with keeping our writing lively, tasty, and self-expressive while focusing on an aspect of the work, not on ourselves. We aspire to thoughtful writing that the people who do the work would want to read, that brings our own perspective into the picture, and still provides clear pictures and analyses of the work under investigation. We’ll play with different kinds of writing—letters, journaling, sci-fi, stream of conscious—to bring alive applied theater subjects that compel us. We will read our work out-loud to each other and read the work of scholars who have inspiring ways of communicating their subject matter. And we write, write, write, looking to find the joy in it!

Jan Cohen-Cruz is director of field research for A Blade of Grass and content editor for their magazine. She was director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life where she also served as senior editor and co-founder of Public: A Journal of Imagining America. Jan wrote Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the US,  Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response, and Remapping Performance: Common Ground, Uncommon Partners, edited Radical Street Performance; and, with Mady Schutzman, co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism and A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Art and Cultural Politics. As a longtime professor at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Cohen-Cruz produced community-based arts projects with students and neighborhood partners. She directed the minor in applied theatre and Tisch’s Office of Community Connections, and was among the founders of the Department of Art and Public Policy. She received the Association for Theatre in Higher Education’s Award for Leadership in Community-Based Theatre and Civic Engagement (2012). She was the evaluator for the U.S. State Department/Bronx Museum cultural diplomacy initiative smARTpower and more recently, for New York City’s Public Artist in Residence for the Department of Cultural Affairs. (From A Blade of Grass)