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The Interactive Theatre Project was instituted in the spring of 1999 as a collaborative effort between Wardenburg and Housing. As an initiative within CU Boulder's Building Community Campaign, ITP was charged with bringing issues of conflict within the campus community to the attention of faculty, staff, and students for the purpose of creating an ongoing dialogue about them. Audiences are given an opportunity to discuss the scenario with the actors in the drama, relating it to their own lives and drawing conclusions about the stories presented...
...ITP's training and performance portfolio has grown steadily since the program's inception. From 57 performances in fiscal year 2003, ITP has increased its output annually to a total of three trainings and 78 performances in FY 2006. The troupe currently rosters two graduate student assistant directors and 14 paid student actors. Co-director Norman hopes to keep pushing the envelope to provide more thought-provoking performances to CU audiences. 'It's None of Our Business' confronted anti-Semitism. 'An older gentlemen told the audience after the show how much it meant to him,' said Norman. The situations are real, not abstract.'..."
'There's an element of people being caught up in the 'Survivor' culture. Don't lecture to me, show me how they really live out,' says ITP co-director Trent Norman, referring to the popular reality TV series. 'And this is a way for people to participate in some way.
'I think there's a need for people to be engaged in people, and this is interactive theater. You get to stand up, you get to ask questions.'
Rebecca Brown Adelman, the other ITP co-director, first started using theater to look at social issues on campus in 1999 when she worked for CU's Victims Assistance program. Adelman wanted to develop a theater troupe at the university that could address topics of race, gender, sexual orientation and socio-economics. When she would bring it up in administrative meetings on campus, though, she often would hear the remark 'but theater can be so cheesy.'
...Along with its directors, ITP includes two assistant directors and 14 student actors from a variety of majors. A racially diverse group, they meet weekly for rehearsals, and average two to three performances a week. Auditions are held at the beginning of each school year to fill vacated spots. Adelman says most of the actors end up staying in the troupe their entire academic careers...
...Over the past several years, ITP has created a portfolio of performances on a variety of topics, such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, privilege/oppression, racism, sexism and suicide..."
'I have no idea what's going on and nobody will explain it to me,' she told Talia Goldenberg, with tears in her eyes.
Hersch is hysterical and inconsolable at times, if you didn't know it, you'd think she's real. However, Hersch is a character being played by Lauren Yormack, an actor with Interactive Theater Project, one of several who were in a University of Colorado at Boulder classroom helping journalists in professor Amy Herdy's class learn how to interview victims of a disaster..."
...Amy Herdy, a former investigative reporter at 9news in Denver, is now a teacher at the CU school of journalism. She came up with the idea for a workshop that uses actors to simulate what it's like to interview trauma victims."
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