Community Connection & Conversations

Community Connection & Conversations (CCC) is a program that aims to foster reflection, conversation, and connection, striving to deepen our communities' experience with our programs, our theatre, and to each other. This format is intended to create space for our community to share their experiences, building a sense of mutual understanding and therefore, a stronger Central Arkansas community.   

CCC is our effort to break down the walls between audience, artists, and space, by engaging in prefigurative conversations with our diverse artistic community. We aim to focus on the future of the performance space and how we hope to transform it. We hope to capture the socio-political landscape of our industry and take advantage of the global online community. We will elevate our relationships as we’ve learned they are not often on the same plane as the product. We will talk “with” our community, rather than “at” our community, as we are all learning.   

Our conversations will include topics such as the future of the theatre industry, the existential question of why we do theatre, anti-racism and solidarity among BIPOC communities, dismantling anti-blackness in diversity conversations, theatre with a political agenda, theatre as community care, the happiness and well-being of artists, creation methods that challenge capitalists structures, and many more.   

Our community needs these conversations, the opportunity to sit and talk, and look one another in the face and listen and gain perspective and hear different points of view. Every community needs that. That’s really a core value that we are bringing as an institution to Central Arkansas. It’s a place where we can talk about topics that really matter in our daily lives in a safe way, in a healthy way, and in an informed way. Theatre is much more than entertainment - it is an opportunity for communities to come together, to see their stories told, to put themselves in the shoes of others, and to provide them with catharsis.