CURRENT As 2012 begins, we are at work: conceiving and curating a Festival at Duke University and in Durham, NC called STRANGER: A Festival in search of Hospitable Acts; creating a new work with collaborators The TEAM called WAITING FOR YOU (on the corner of...) to premiere at Kansas City Rep in Winter 2013;

• adapting the game structure we developed for our 2008 show BUILT with the New River Valley Planning Commission in Southwestern Virginia to be used as Public Engagement tool in 5 mostly rural Counties;
  
  
• developing a new project with our Milwaukee partners that considers public transportation and home-care as site(s) for a modern re-telling of Robinson Crusoe called Shipwrecked.

RECENT

Since 2010, Sojourn Theatre was featured on the cover of American Theatre magazine; we presented our work as a Best Practice Arts & Civic Dialogue model at National Conferences in San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Philadelphia and Virginia; we created our most ambitious cross-community project yet, On The Table (which explored contemporary urban/rural tensions and conversations in the US), during which 100 people a night traveled 50 miles and had meaningful interactions with strangers from a different place; we completed work on The Penelope Project in Milwaukee, WI, a two-year partnership with UW Milwaukee, The Center for Age & Community and a long-term care facility by producing Finding Penelope, an adaptation of The Odyssey created in collaboration with and performed by facility residents living with Alzheimer’s and dementia alongside Sojourn actors and caregivers. The project lives on as we help design a curriculum for long-term care facilities and a book to be released about the project.

MISSION/HISTORY

Led by Michael Rohd and based in Portland, Oregon, Sojourn Theatre’s ensemble of 12 core artists makes new theatre around the country. Our work is a rigorous practice that blends metaphor with public reality to bring strangers together amidst experiences where the ethical possibilities of imagination are placed alongside the communal muscle of responsibility. National/international touring, a body of 24 major works over the last 12 years, and a reputation for consistent innovation as artists and engagement practitioners has led to our work being featured regularly at conferences and universities nationwide as a "best practice model" for arts-based civic dialogue.

In 2005, Sojourn was one of only 12 National Exemplar Organizations selected by the Ford Foundation/Americans for the Arts as "important and vital incubators of emerging artists' work, sites of artistic experimentation and innovation, and leaders in community and civic engagement." Our unique, often site-based and frequently participatory approach has led to acclaimed productions engaging issues as diverse as democracy and war (The War Project: 9 Acts of Determination), public education (Witness Our Schools, toured 32 towns/cities in 32 weeks), business ethics/personal responsibility (GOOD, created and staged in an operating Subaru dealership), demographic change/civic planning (BUILT, created and staged in a high-rise condominium realty demo-space) and contemporary urban/rural conversations in the United States (On The Table, staged in a church, a barn, school buses and a riverside parking lot). Presenters/hosts have included Dell’Arte in California, The Town of Molalla Oregon, The National Touring Anne Frank Exhibit, The Connecticut State Legislature, Georgetown University, Duke University, The Pacific Edge Festival in Australia, Kansas City Repertory Theater, The Orchard Project in NY, and Americans for the Arts.