Our Voices Festival
of New Plays

Presented by Black and Brown Theatre

 
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Culture, community, and education connect through Black and Brown Theatre’s Our Voices Festival of New Plays. This festival supports students in writing and directing short plays relevant to their own experiences, then realizing productions performed by Black and Brown Theatre’s growing database of diverse talent. The plays are performed in both school and community contexts to reach students’ peers, parents, teachers, administrators and the broader communities of Northwest Detroit and Hamtramck. This youth-driven approach helps build skills and confidence, validating students’ experiences and perspectives. Developed by award-winning playwright and educator Emilio Rodriguez, Our Voices empowers students as leaders to tell the stories of their neighborhoods, aspirations, and the issues important to their lives.

The power of storytelling and performance provides Detroiters an opportunity to reclaim their city, to fight harmful media narratives and displacement from their communities. Our Voices reinstates community voices as a vital part of the city’s cultural landscape and provides Detroit’s youth with meaningful relationships and mentorship, illustrating how resilience and hard work can combine to showcase the everyday brilliance of Detroiters.

Date: June 7, 2019
Partner: Samuel C. Mumford High School
Location: 17525 Wyoming Ave, Detroit, MI 48221
Coordinates: 42.42142, -83.16323

Date: June 29, 2019
Partner: GEE White Academy
Location: 5161 Charles St, Detroit, MI 48212
Coordinates: 42.41226, -83.04916

Community Venue/Partner: Planet Ant Theatre
Location: 2357 Caniff St, Hamtramck, MI 48212
Coordinates: 42.39849, -83.06388

 

About the Artist

Emilio Rodriguez is a playwright whose works tell the untold stories of underrepresented audiences. Focusing on a Latinx experience, Emilio creates a wide range of characters, from college students and teenagers in coming-of-age stories, to animals like sea lions. Emilio is the artistic director of Black and Brown Theatre.

Black and Brown Theatre is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit theater that celebrates the voices of people of color onstage, backstage, and beyond the stage. Since its formation in 2016, Black and Brown Theatre has produced stage plays, workshops, and special projects for people of all ages. Black and Brown Theatre maintains a free digital database of actors of color in the Detroit area for local directors to cast stage plays, films, and other acting projects.