our Recent History…
The last decade has been dedicated to learning how to work in countries in crisis. In 1996, Artistic Director Joanna Sherman received a Masters degree from NYU in International Politics and Cross-Cultural Communication (and earned a nomination for valedictorian). At the same time, Mary Dino completed a Masters at the NYU School of Social Work and now is on the Bond Street Board of Directors. The feeling was that after years of creating socially responsive theatre, we needed to look at some of the underlying issues which effect our vision on a global level. What are the implications of theatre in a shrinking world; how can we best offer our abilities without imposing our culture; how can we be helpful in the most imaginative and yet practical ways?

Responding to the growing interest in arts as humanitarian aid, from artists both here and abroad, we are forming a cultural peace corps which will directly connect artists of all disciplines with organizations in areas of conflict and disadvantaged communities around the world. The organization will bring creative, healing, hands-on, joyful aid in the form of artistic expression, a sustainable means of community involvement, and social progress. Our goal is to empower communities by strengthening their own cultural resources. There is no other organization exclusively devoted to coordinating international artistic programming as humanitarian aid in critical regions of the globe. Stay tuned as a new Bond Street Theatre project takes shape.

Bond Street Theatre is now 25 years old, more experienced and clear in its mandate, and still dedicated to the vision of those five sitting in the loft on Bond Street so many years ago. The company celebrates the arts as a means of healing in crisis, a mouthpiece in the face of injustice, the purest expression of the human spirit, and the finest gift we can offer each other as humans sharing a small planet.

In the beginning:
It all began on October 8th 1976. Five actors/directors brainstorm in a loft on 2 Bond Street: Patrick Sciarratta, Joanna Sherman, Michael Teitelbaum, Ray Abruzzo, and Naseer El Kadi lay out the concept for an ensemble theatre company which would create new work steeped in the dynamic physical traditions of the European theatre laboratories and flavored with the unique zaniness of the American vaudeville. Our topics: social commentary and classics. Our first home was LaMama and Ellen Stewart our kind benefactor and stern critic. The first ensemble of ten (including Lisa Loving, Ann Lyon, Nameer El Kadi, Ross Quint, and Gerard Drazba) presented Kafka’s The Hunger Artist, Moliere’s The Flying Doctor, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and Lars Forsell’s Charlie McDeath at LaMama, and the ensemble’s own creation, The Myth of Erysichthon (about Westway, the mega-highway that New York City still threatens to build), which was performed in the parks during the summer.

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The Park Shows…
Our summer parks tours quickly became popular events. The huge audiences that came to see us every Friday night in Washington Square and weekends in the parks around town loved our wicked satires, full of comedic antics, good music, bad puns, and dauntless energy. These high spirited works gave us our signature style and confirmed our belief that if you want to develop an audience for theatre, go where the people are. The funky blue van, a donation from Con Edison, with performing permits taped to the windshield, would lumber into the park full of actors and theatrical “stuff”. With a choreography finely tuned by repetition, the set, props, mats, tarp, and band were set up in maybe 20 minutes. Then we would launch into an ensemble acrobatic and vocal warm-up that was a show unto itself. Just the set-up attracted a crowd, but the warm-up clinched it. And thus we would start each performance. The Myth of Erysichthon in 1977 was followed by Capidome (about shopping malls) in 1978, a serial called Powerplay from 1979-83 (concerning nuclear power, waste, and war), La Caja Fuerte in 1980 (a political fable which toured northern Spain), What a Mess in 1984 (the elections, of course), and Roadworks in 1985 (an intercultural street pageant). The stories we could tell about these street shows would fill a book – and some day they will – but, for now, we move along to our next adventure.

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…early tours…
Our street tours put us on an exciting theatrical circuit of mime, circus, movement theatre, clown and puppetry Festivals and colleges around the country: the Festivals of American Mime in Wisconsin, Syracuse, and West Virginia, the International Clown Theatre Festivals in New York City, the Movement Theatre International Festivals in West Virginia and Philadelphia, the International Youth for Peace and Justice tour in Montreal, the Performing Artists for Nuclear Disarmament in Atlanta, and many other gatherings of creative minds.

…and workshops.
In addition, we conducted workshops to teach our collection of skills and bring new members into the group. Inspired by The Valley Studio, a retreat dedicated to the intensive study of mime, movement, mask-making, and related arts situated near the beautiful Wisconsin Dells, we began designing our own retreats for movement artists. In the chill of January, we would bring together a dozen or so dedicated students and teachers for two-week sessions of intensive study in inspirational rural settings. The first retreats were held on Shelter Island at the tip of Long Island amid fishing villages and water, then at Apple Farms in New Jersey, and finally Palenville in the Catskill Mountains from which evolved the Palenville Interarts Colony, our summer home for 12 years. But that is another story. Each of these periods of intense study with master teachers gave us and our students a deeper understanding of the diversity and complexity of the theatre craft. At this time, Swedish director Ingemar Lindh introduce us to the work of Eugenio Barba and the Odin Teatret, an ensemble devoted to intercultural study and travel which most dramatically influenced our research, style and vision in the following years.
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Performances in the Mountains
Meanwhile, in 1982, while on a tour that took us from North Carolina to Vermont, we were invited to a tiny festival in the Catskill Mountains. The location was an abandoned children’s camp on the edge of the town of Palenville. We performed Powerplay on the lawn to a crowd of about 35 people — everyone in town. But the rustic cabins nestled in the woods struck our imaginations and the next year we lived at the camp, cooking over an open fire, and bringing our music and madness to small town festivals throughout the area. The highlight of the summer was our Shakespeare in the woods, A Shakespeare Party, with witches convening in the pine grove, Lady Macbeth lamenting by the stream, recorder trios drifting from the rocks, and Death (on stilts) carrying poor Ophelia off into the trees. The season was a great success: people who had never seen live theatre were enthralled, the neighborhood kids quoted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream for years to come, and Bond Street was the top story across the County.

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The Palenville Interarts Colony
So we invited friends and colleagues of all artistic disciplines to join us at our new found haven. And as creativity attracts creativity, thus the Palenville Interarts Colony was born. Start-up funds came from the State of New York which thought it a good idea to bring a major new arts center to a small town. This helped us to revitalize broken down buildings and create studios out of old walls. The vision and enthusiasm of a few initiators must be mentioned: painters Francis Cunningham and Allen Barber, director Torben Bjelke, Dave Brubeck and sons (who gave us two Benefit concerts), Kevin Kennedy (who owned the camp), and, of course Bond Streeters all: Mary Dino, David Feder, Stephen Ringold, Luanne Dietrich, Fred Collins, Michael McGuigan, and Directors Joanna Sherman and Patrick Sciarratta. The stories of moving mattresses, homemade bagels, and late night poetry in the pines could fill another journal (and probably already has) but again we move along. Lasting 12 years, the Colony was a feather in our creative caps and we received the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award in recognition. The Colony provided facilities and inspiration to over 1500 artists, and produced performances by Paul Zaloom, Charles Moore African Dancers, Sachiyo Ito Japanese Dance, Bread and Puppet Theatre, Eiko & Koma, Gail Conrad Tap Dance, the Chinese Acrobats of Taipei, the Brubecks, and many more, and the first US International Conference on Theatre Anthropology with key speakers Eugenio Barba, Richard Schechner and Edith Turner.

Between organizing artists’ applications, producing other artists’ shows, managing the household, staff, and fundraising, the company was also creating and performing new works, such as Of Sand and Thunder (1987, directed by Carey Perloff), The Case Of the Missing Universe (1988, directed by Pat Sciarratta), Heartbeast (1989, directed by Stephen Ringold and his own ensemble), and Nightmare On Wall Street (1990, directed by Polina Klimovitskaya). Patrick returned to the stage after many years to perform a one-man show, Feynman (1995, directed by Marlene Abraham), about the famous physicist. Meanwhile, Michael spent a year performing The Tempest at the Delacourt Theatre and at the Broadhurst on Broadway directed by George Wolfe. Our vision has always been to reach high artistic levels while remaining accessible to the community in which we live and work. The Colony served us well in both ways: it brought the actors into the richly creative worlds of sculptors, poets, painters, musicians, dancers, and writers, and gave us the opportunity to make this distinctive world open to a community which had never experienced art up close. The company was growing in many ways, but it was becoming more and more difficult to maintain a theatre company and an artists’ colony.

Audiences Across the Seas
During the Reagan years, we saw funding for arts drop at an alarming rate. In New York City, higher rents sent many theatres packing and producing theatre in the City became a very expensive proposition. Solo shows became more popular as spaces got smaller. Bond Street Theatre began to seek inspiration and audiences across the seas. The Odin Teatret provided us a model and introduced us to aspects of touring which resonated with our own vision. Odin Director Eugenio Barba used the analogy of neighbors on two banks of a river: “One does not row across to carry on ethnographic research, to observe the other’s way of life, but rather to give and receive: a handful of salt for a piece of cloth.” This sense of giving and exchange has motivated all of our international journeys.

Bond Street Mime a mime show by Joanna and Patrick, could be called the first Bond Street international tour, appearing at the Festival Theatre d’Avignon in France in 1975! But our first tour with a vision of exchange was our five week residency at the prestigious Israel Festival in 1984. Bond Street Theatre created and trained Jerusalem’s first street theatre company, an ambitious project involving 60 performers (both Arabs and Jews together) in four street pageants which, we have discovered since, made us quite famous on the theatrical scene there for years. In addition, we mounted 5 different mainstage performances and 3 children’s shows within the 5 weeks – we ought to be famous for our endurance.

We decided to travel lighter when our musical show, the Shinbone Alley Stilt Band, went to Nagasaki, Japan in 1987. The company enjoyed some individual excursions as well: Joanna and Michael went off to research in Java and Bali, while Stephen went to work with Dario Fo in the Netherlands. In 1989 Joanna and Michael went to Italy to collaborate with Teatro Abraxa di Roma, performing with them from Milan to Sicily. Stephen and the Heartbeast gang were off to Estonia, collaborating with musical groups there and performing in the villages. The next year, Nightmare on Wall Street toured in Germany, Ireland, and the Netherlands for two and one-half months, while Fred and Luanne spent six months performing in Japan. Two months later, Joanna and Michael brought Tokyo Domo to Japan. In 1991, Dancing the Fire, Joanna’s one-woman show was presented at the Women In Comedy Festival in Denmark. The company headed south in 1992, when Nightmare on Wall Street went on a five city festival tour in Brazil. A workshop production of Werk went to Beijing, China, in 1995 for the UN Conference on Women, and the fully staged version brought us back to Brazil in 1996. The tour of summer ‘98 brought _Cozmic Jazz_—A Short History of the Universe to open air festivals in Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands. This popular production has since toured to major festivals in Colombia (1999), Venezuela (2001), France, Netherlands and Belgium (2002), and Singapore (2003). Meanwhile, Luanne had a baby in 1994 and little Madeline was already on the road with us at two years old in Brazil and again at age four throughout Europe. Our dauntless touring group has variously included Rob O’Neill, Jeff Hess, Vicky Rabb, Sean Nowell, Matt Schmidt, Danny Evans, Amanda Clark and always Luanne.

A host of fine musicians have joined our ranks over the years: Bruce Williamson who created the music for Werk; Sima Wolf, co-creator of Pythagoras Plays the Blues, a young audience program; and Sean Nowell who created the haunting music for Romeo and Juliet and toured with the production with percussionists Amy Salsgiver, Alexandre Fortuit and Matt Aiken. World-renowned rubab artist, Quraishi, provided live music for our Afghan collaboration, Beyond the Mirror, with additional music by Andy Teirstein. Our incredible Shinbone Alley Stilt Band looks and sounds great thanks to all of the above plus trumpeter Joe Schufle. Throughout the decade, Bond Street’s popular Young Audience Programs continue to bring performances (Travels With Tricksters, Pythagoras Plays the Blues, Peter and the Wolf) and workshops in “**Actor-batics**” to schools, libraries and community centers.

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Artistic-Humanitarian work
In May 1999, in an immediate response to the war in Kosovo, Joanna and Michael left for the Kosovar refugee camps in Macedonia, to bring joy and laughter to more than 10,000 Kosovar children in 7 refugee camps. The experience was tremendously energizing and rewarding; they were surrounded by hundreds of children from the minute they entered the camps, reaching, grabbing, watching, waiting, ready for anything. They gave workshops, performances, and the gift of love to the many children who had been heavily traumatized by the war. This project clearly demonstrated to us the value of interactive theatre, and the healing power of the expressive arts. The project, facilitated by UNICEF, marked the beginning of a very fruitful partnership with that agency and brought a new meaning to the company mission to reach out to diverse audiences.

On each of our tours, the company has always made a point of giving more than just performances. Over the years, our unique combination of artistic and humanitarian work has become more focused and purposeful, from our initial work for peace in Israel to our recent work in the Balkans and Afghanistan. In Germany in 1990, just after the Berlin Wall came down, the group presented Nightmare on Wall Street (a satire about capitalism) to an amazed crowd in Alexanderplatz, East Berlin, the first “legal” street theatre in East Germany for 50 years. In Northern Ireland, the company worked with Circus Belfast, teaching Catholic and Protestant children circus skills side by side. In Brazil, the company performed street theatre for beggars and politicians side by side, and gave workshops for the multitudes of street children. In Colombia, for the II Internacional Festival al Aire Puro, we first encountered the phenomena of having armed bodyguards with us — one of the hazards of being American in a hostile zone.

The Balkans
Our latest artistic-humanitarian work has brought us frequently to the Balkan region, beginning with a tour throughout Kosovo after the war. In July-August 2000, Bond Street Theatre collaborated with a Bulgarian theatre company, Theatre Tsvete, to create a visual, non-verbal version of Romeo and Juliet which toured to war-torn theatres throughout Kosovo. The two troupes chose to bring this play, in which neighbor fights neighbor, because it so aptly expresses the situation of young men in many areas of the world today who must confront the choice between love and warfare. Most important, the story does not take sides but offers a provocative plea for peace. The response to the play in Kosovo was overwhelming and emotional, and encouraged the two companies to continue their creative and humanitarian work together in Serbia, Bosnia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria and Macedonia.

The company, with dynamic new members, Robert Lok (Romeo), Christina Gelsone and Meghan Frank, has returned to the Balkans many times now to use the arts to encourage peace. Bond Street’s engaging physicality in combination with Theatre Tsvete’s compelling imagery has been a model for successful intercultural collaboration, and was featured in the National Endowment for the Arts Annual Report. Our most current project is the creation of Performing Artists for Balkan Peace, an inter-Balkan network of artists devoted to artistic exchange and dialogue as a step toward regional cooperation. Our role as cultural ambassadors is crucial at this time, and we thank the Trust for Mutual Understanding, ArtsLink**—a project of CEC Partners, **Arts International, and National Endowment for the Arts for their generous and continued support.

Afghanistan
Now we are addressing the crisis in Afghanistan and the region. Our response to the events of September 11th was to reach out to the thousands of Afghan refugees on the Pakistan border who were fleeing US bombing or had fled their homeland over 20 years of Soviet war followed by brutal civil war and Taliban takeover. The UNHCR called it “the single largest refugee crisis is the world.” In the camps we found intense poverty, scores of street-working children, and a very conservative environment where all entertainment (music, television, film, dance) was frowned upon or forbidden as it was under Taliban rule.

Our work there was very rewarding—the children had never seen anything like us or our performances. Even the teachers told us their cheeks hurt from laughing because they never laugh. How did they accept us coming in with music, stilt-dancing, and clown routines with acrobatics, slapstick, and outlandish behavior? We were so different from anything they had ever seen, we were almost beyond rules. Also, we were performing in the safety of the refugee schools; outside of schools, our presentations would have been impossibly dangerous. Following our shows, the children were thrilled to learn the skills in our workshops. To see something so amazing as stilts and then to try it yourself was a kind of miracle. The little girls, who are so reserved with so few chances to be physically adventurous, just came to life — all smiles… and maybe their first feelings of self-confidence.

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We thank Afghanistan-Schulen, the small but dedicated German organization that built 32 schools for boys and girls throughout Afghanistan, even throughout the Taliban era, and then built schools for the refugees in Pakistan. They have been our kind hosts in Pakistan and later in their schools in the rural villages of northern Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, in the camps, we searched for artists – what had become of the painters, writers, actors who had fled Taliban rule? We were introduced to Mahmoud Salimi, a dynamic young director and founding member of Exile Theatre, a group of filmmakers, playwrights and actors who were determined to sustain the arts and speak out even in a hostile environment. This daring group also included Siddiq Barmak, Director of the award-winning film, Osama, and the well-known actress, Anisa Wahab. Upon meeting the group in Pakistan, we established an immediate bond.

The two theatre groups reunited the next year at newly-reopened Kabul University, Exile Theatre’s home base, and began a wonderful period of exchanging techniques, beginning with music, dance, acrobatics and other physical expressions that transcend the need for language. Rob, Christina, Joanna and Michael, Bond Street’s hardiest travelers, worked in the rough environs of Kabul’s ruins and then traveled to small villages in the north, performing for 20,000 children and adults in 10 villages. Our first work with Exile Theatre, Beyond the Mirror, began as a stylized, non-verbal depiction of Afghanistan’s recent tumultuous history. The piece grew over the next two years into a sensitive, visual portrayal drawn from real life stories and woven with video images of the people whose stories we told. With live accompaniment by Quraishi on the Afghan rubab, and exquisite lighting by Jeanne Koenig, the play became a stunningly beautiful piece of theatre which Margo Jefferson of The New York Times called, “truly powerful.”

We have now performed with Exile Theatre in Afghanistan, Japan, the USA (yes, we got visas for three Exiles: Salimi, Jamil and Anisa), and next, India. We cannot forget the Afghan people now that attentions are turned to Iraq and elsewhere! Thanks to a grant from the DOS Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, we will continue our multi-year theatre project with Exile Theatre working with Muslim youth in both Afghanistan and India.

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