AATE 2025 National Conference

This workshop encourages theatre professionals to think beyond technical specifications and dimensions to create more meaningful and interesting spaces that encourage creativity and accommodate the performers within it. This approach is especially impactful for neurodivergent students, providing them with a creative and flexible platform to explore, express, and connect with the production in ways that feel authentic and inclusive.

Launching and sustaining a theater program in an under-resourced public school presents unique challenges—especially when funding, space, and administrative buy-in are limited. This hands-on workshop equips educators with practical strategies, a take-home toolkit, and templates to develop a thriving program that serves their students and communities. With a strong emphasis on culturally responsive pedagogy and trauma-informed practices, this session explores how to create an inclusive, student-centered program that fosters creativity, engagement, and belonging. Participants will gain actionable insights on: Maximizing Limited Resources: Finding creative solutions for space, materials, and production needs. Sustaining Funding & Partnerships: Budgeting strategies, grant-writing tips, and building partnerships with local organizations, including universities. Using Data for Advocacy & Growth: Collecting qualitative and quantitative data to secure administrative buy-in, attract grants, and expand resources. Student Engagement & Program Culture: Trauma-informed strategies to build a program that students invest in and take ownership of. Marketing & Branding Your Program: Creating an identity and leveraging community outreach to boost participation and support. This highly interactive, solution-oriented session ensures that participants leave with concrete tools, strategies, and next steps to develop and sustain theater programs in any environment.

Applied theatre seeks to promote dialogue and connection among people groups. One underserved population is older adults, including those living with physical and cognitive decline, and those living in long term care facilities. This workshop asks us to consider, what if older adults experiencing dementia and age-related disabilities reconnected with their creative abilities? What can we discover when undergraduate theatre students create collaborative theatre pieces with them? How can theatre create connections between residents in a long term care facility and young people? What might cross-generational original theatre contribute to our communities? In recent years various applied theatre models have emerged to serve older adults. This workshop will explore the Timeslips method, a collaborative creative storytelling method developed by MacArthur fellow and former theatre professor Anne Basting. Professor Norah Swiney discovered Timeslips during her training to become a drama therapist. She developed a program to bring undergraduate students together with older adults to devise theatre pieces through a series of collaborative storytelling workshops. The workshop series culminated in performances for the community in which the students enacted the original works they created together. In this experiential workshop, participants will receive a brief introduction to applied theatre and drama therapy interventions for older adult populations. Next, the presenter will lead a brief exploration of the current research in this area. Then the presenter will share experiences of implementing cross-generational theatre programming and offer lessons learned. Then participants will learn the Timeslips method of collaborative creative storytelling, and how to use it to devise original theatre pieces with artists living with memory loss and cognitive decline. The workshop will culminate with a devised piece from stories created by the group.

The Teaching Artists at the Cleveland Play House (CPH) use the principles of trauma-informed care and culturally relevant teaching as the cornerstone of their four-pillar theatre education model. This approach deepens artistic understanding and social and emotional competencies in safe and constructive environments. They have found that by creating community-friendly theatrical events and programs that gently start dialogues between children and their family members, you can open multi-generational conversations and begin to shift the burden of change from individual solutions to community solutions. Using examples from CPH Family Theatre Productions and the CARE Theatre Education Program, you will walk through the steps of creating an engaging and impactful curriculum for your performances and programs that can be shared with schools, families, and community members as a catalyst for community development and social change.

Personal stories provide a window into the unique ways people make meaning of their lives, their traditions, and the world around them. Listening to others tell their stories can help develop listening and interviewing skills, emotional and cultural intelligence, and empathy through understanding the different ways people live and think about their lives. Add to this the element of turning interviews into a performance, and questions as how to represent these voices authentically and ethically, yet shaped to share with an audience, also emerge. This workshop explores how oral history storytelling and verbatim/documentary theatre projects based on interviews can be conducted around themes that impact the students and their communities. How does one guide the selection of a theme for a student or class project? What does preparation and ethics look like for conducting interviews, shaped to the age and abilities of the students? How does one guide the process of working with the material or devising to produce a storytelling or theatre performance? What does an economy of care look like in this process, and when is it important (and how) to give back the performance to those whose stories are being shared? The workshop provides a hands-on opportunity to try out methods, reflect on these questions in a collaborative space, and share any personal experiences with interview-based art or performance projects. Dialogue is what happens along the way in project-based learning.

This story drama workshop centers around the picture book, "Encounter" by Brittany Luby, and illustrated by Mikaela Goade. Participants will be introduced to drama and movement exercises encouraging active engagement in an anchor text, rather than being objective observers or audience members. They will participate as their students would, while still having an opportunity to ask questions and engage in professional discourse as educators. They will learn how to conduct a story drama class by guiding their students through text exploration using character, relationship, and environment-building, writing in role, improvisation, soundscapes, dialogue, creatively and deliberately moving through space, and more. Teachers will discover that drama does not require a culminating, rehearsed performance piece that is scripted and needs an audience. Instead, drama often resonates deeper when students are invited to use their imaginations to bring a story to life. Story drama helps students understand differing perspectives, build empathy, and gain a deeper understanding of themes in a book, poem, or other text. Story drama encourages problem-solving, teamwork, creativity, risk-taking, openness, and imagination. This presentation will show participants how drama can be embedded across the curriculum to help students understand a wide variety of academic and interpersonal topics, rather than just in its own “drama silo.”

This session examines the effects of competition in educational theater and its potential harms to students' community-building and emotional safety. Through a mini-workshop, participants will explore how competition may influence student performance and group dynamics by comparing two performance groups—one with competition and the other without—followed by a discussion on the effects of competitive environments in theater education.

This session focuses on integrating social and emotional learning (SEL) practices in K-8 drama classrooms. Participants will explore how theater educators can foster emotional intelligence, empathy, and self-awareness through drama activities, supporting students’ social and emotional development alongside their artistic growth.

This session explores the Courageous Cadence project, which uses spoken word poetry, devised theater, and personal storytelling to empower youth to address social injustices, including racial, gender, and climate justice. Attendees will learn how youth-led arts-based research can promote justice-centered dialogue, activism, and leadership through performance. The session will include best practices for integrating justice-oriented performance into educational and community settings, and strategies for empowering young people as leaders in advocacy and social change.

This research-based session presents findings from interviews with public high school theater teachers about their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. The discussion focuses on how teachers adapted their practices, curriculum, and performances to continue providing theater education in virtual, hybrid, and socially-distanced formats. Attendees will reflect on the resilience of teachers and discuss how these adaptations can inspire future theater education practices in an ever-changing educational landscape.

This interactive workshop will guide participants through the process of adapting classic literature for the stage, focusing on the transformation of classic texts into engaging, dynamic scripts for modern audiences. By analyzing source material, exploring scriptwriting techniques, and collaborating on adaptation exercises, participants will walk away with practical skills for adapting classic works while honoring both their historical significance and theatrical possibilities.

How can theatre artists, educators, and administrators contribute to research and scholarship in theatre education? In this panel discussion and workshop, journal editors, editorial board members, and/or scholars will share insights about how they have turned a conference session into an article for publication—and will engage participants by facilitating writing strategies in order to begin drafting the outline for an article. As this conference is meant to embrace progress and tradition, this session will be facilitated by members of the research and scholarship network and we encourage participants from all other networks who are curious about how to document and share their work—whether from this conference or beyond—to attend this writing workshop in order to amplify and ignite new voices in research and scholarship.

This panel explores the evolving representation of Jewish identity and liberation in American theatre, examining how playwrights balance cultural tradition with progressive storytelling. Through dramaturgical analysis, we will discuss key plays such as Awake and Sing! by Clifford Odets and Angels in America by Tony Kushner, assessing how these works reflect and challenge Jewish assimilation, resilience, and activism. The session will consider how theatre serves as a space for negotiating cultural identity, showcasing both historical perspectives and contemporary shifts. Presenters will analyze the impact of staging choices, audience reception, and evolving dramaturgical frameworks that shape Jewish storytelling today. By addressing the duality of progress and tradition, this discussion aligns with AATE’s 2025 theme, “Stages of Change,” illustrating how Jewish narratives navigate continuity and transformation. Attendees will gain insights into how theatre can both honor heritage and embrace innovation, creating meaningful spaces for cultural expression.

grief
noun
/ˈgrēf/
1: deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement

Grief shows up in a number of ways besides death: moving, friendships, relationships, change, etc. Especially in young people, it can be difficult to understand the full breadth of when they are experiencing grief because we cannot seem to understand how often it can happen. Through creative drama, theatre, playwriting, etc., we can help others process grief through the creative arts. Together we can discuss how to make this morbid topic more prominent in our discussions so that everyone feels comfortable grieving when they need to—and using theatre as a way to process.