BAC & Columbia Law School Announce Returning 'Theatre of Change' Course

The Broadway Advocacy Coalition (BAC) and Columbia Law School will continue their four-year partnership with the announcement of an in-person participatory course entitled The Theater for Change: Reimagining Justice Through Abolition. This year, the collaboration will expand to include students from Columbia University School of the Arts, Brooklyn Law School, and NYU Law School.

Applications are now open to participants from any artistic discipline interested in learning how to use their own skills and expertise for social change. The course will run from January 24 through April 25, 2022. In keeping with Broadway Advocacy Coalition's working tenet of paying collaborators for their labor, participants will be compensated for participation in this course.

The course blends artistry, law, policy, and community engagement to produce powerful artistic projects with the potential to change the broken criminal justice system and imagine new ways forward. In social change work, the arts provide a critical space to imagine alternatives and promote those envisionings as achievable realities. The semester will focus on issues of abolition, reimagining justice and strengthening communities. It will be informed by the expertise of community leaders with extensive experience both fighting and feeling the effects of these systems.

Artists will join forces with law students and community advocates to create performance pieces that envision a path to abolition and strategize how and where these performances can occur to achieve sustainable impact. The course will also build artistic capacity to merge high quality, high impact, rigorous artistry with community narratives, policy analysis and effective policy advocacy. The goals of this course are not only to facilitate an exchange of ideas across disciplines, but to form lasting partnerships that can continue to generate game-changing work into the future.

To apply, please visit https://www.bwayadvocacycoalition.org/theaterofchange.

Applications will be processed beginning December 3, 2021 and participants will be selected and informed by late December 2020.

Information sessions will be held on November 22 and 23. Participation is encouraged but not required for artists interested in the course. RSVP for the informational session via this form.

The Theater of Change was originally created by Britton Smith (Be More Chill, Shuffle Along), Ben Wexler (2019 Jonathan Larson Grant Winner), Zhailon Levingston (Tina: The Tina Turner Musical) and Columbia Law School professor and Director of the Center for Institutional and Social Change Susan Sturm. BAC's Associate Director of Curriculum Leia Squillace serves as one of the instructors on this year's course.