Cadence Theatre Company Announces New Sitelines BLM Project
Photo by Jay Paul Photography
Commissioned filmed plays and screenplays will feature the stories that Richmond places are now telling
Richmond, VA — Cadence Theatre Company launched its Sitelines project in 2015 as part of its mission to bring challenging contemporary theatrical experiences to the Richmond community. By moving productions outside of the Theatre Gym and into innovative locations in the city, Sitelines has enabled Richmond audiences to attend free, contemporary theatre and to deepen their engagement with our city spaces.
Today, in collaboration with Oakwood Arts, professional film artists, William & Mary Program in Africana Studies and the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance, the University of Richmond Free Theatre & Dance, VCUarts Theatre, and Virginia Repertory Theatre, Cadence announces a new expansion of the Sitelines initiative that furthers these goals even more urgently: Sitelines BLM. The project, devised and helmed by director, dramaturg, and literary critic Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, seeks to uplift new voices in the community and to provide an artistic platform that directly engages our notions of place in Richmond, particularly those places that are being reshaped through the Black Lives Matter movement.
Like the other Sitelines offerings, Sitelines BLM will venture into new areas of artistic production beyond live performances in the Theatre Gym. The Sitelines BLM project will involve a series of short films and filmed performances, commissioned and produced by Cadence Theatre Company, that engage the stories that specific Richmond locations are now telling: Marcus-David Peters Circle (the location of the Robert E. Lee Monument), Reclamation Square (City Hall), and the African Burial Ground, among many others.
“The Black Lives Matter movement has called for unprecedented levels of responsiveness and accountability for artists within Black, Indigenous, People of Color communities, who have been decentered and creatively marginalized in predominantly white institutions,” said Green. Thus, through Sitelines BLM, Cadence seeks to both bring the artistic expression of Black, Indigenous, People of Color into our sightlines and provide an institutional platform that focuses on the historicities, relationships, tensions, joys, healing, and futures being shaped and conjured in the new “seeing-places” of Richmond that have developed as a result of the global pandemics we are facing—COVID 19 and systemic racism.
To launch Sitelines BLM, Cadence Theatre Company is seeking to commission work from five local writers, focusing on giving voice to marginalized artists in the Black, Indigenous, and Writers of Color communities. The filmed artistic experiences developed from their work will explore individual relationships to space and how various spaces shape, and are shaped by, structure and history — places of memory, reclamation, injustice, and resistance. Interested writers are invited to read the request for proposals here.
Anna Senechal Johnson, Cadence’s Artistic and Managing Director, said that the project is in perfect alignment with Cadence’s mission. “Cadence Theatre Company is committed to community building through antiracist practices, artistic exploration and expression, and the examination of ourselves through storytelling,” she noted, “particularly in ways that allow us to gain profound levels of perception and understanding of each other.”
Sitelines BLM is made possible through the support of the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Virginia Public Media (VPM).
For more information about Sitelines BLM, contact Project Director Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green at avgreen@wm.edu or Cadence Theatre Company’s Artistic and Managing Director Anna Senechal Johnson at info@cadencetheatre.org.