About VETERANS THEATER

Our PLAYS Getting to SOLUTIONS Media Financials How Cities React to Homeless TENT CITY SOLUTIONS CONTACT US

SOLUTIONS WE WORK TOWARD

We want cabins instead of tents, so temporary day camp city tenters can move into sustainable 'tiny houses' with solar heating, photovoltaic (off-the-grid) electric, and living spaces.

We are helping homeless veterans put on a series of theater plays in order to invite 'pre-reflexive' entrepreneurship ventures into their community that would displace mindless operative intentions that are inhumane. The book and article we are writing explores successful and failed attempts to use crowdsourcing to initiate entrepreneurial partnerships. We study the the mindless everyday ways cites are coping with homeless veterans. People with an interest in helping with innovating better ways of care than London's spikes for homeless veterans, or Albuquerque's rocks for homeless veterans, were invited tothe April 30 2015 theater performance by the veterans at the New Mexico State University Center for Performing arts. This study contributes to Boje's (2001, 2011, 2014) theory of antenarrative. An antenarrative is pre-thetic, tacit, un-themed, non-coherent, yet at the same time it is an operative intentionality 'before' reflexivity, 'beneath' reflexivity, in-between reflexivity that contains 'bets' on the future of homeless veterans in particular cities.

 

I am proposing a program: Building Change through storytelling for Veterans Transitioning form Homelessness in Peace Time. We are building sustainability in the Veterans’ Theatre business venture. For example, as an amateur blacksmith, I am recycling rebar into ten pegs for Camp Hope, so the tents don’t blow away.  I am also making a Kiln to melt beer and soda aluminum cans so they can be sand-cast into parts of life-size veteran-Marionettes that can be used in our stage productions of Veterans Theater

You can help by recycling rebar or aluminum, or donating directly at http://GoFundMe.com/mol1wc 

Above is Matt Mercer, whohelped found Camp Hope in 2011 after several years of living homeless in Las Cruces. Today, Mercer works for the Mesilla Valley Community of Hope, which runs the camp. (Source: Andres Leighton/For the Albuquerque Journal)

 

'Forum Theatre' where formerly Homeless Veterans Share Their Story And Move Forward on the Mirror Stage by Improving their Four Selves

 


 

How we started?

It started with Liz and I applying Anete Strand's Material Storytelling Method, not your usual sandtray work, rather an Object Theater of one's whole life depicted without words, just assembling objects to spatialize and temporalized and embodied storytelling.

It started with sandtray work with homeless veterans, move along to EAGLE (equine-assisted-growth-and-learning-events)with our student veterans and families, now we are taking our own Forum Theatre on-the-road. Forum Theatre is Augusto Boal's way of getting the actors on the stage to interact with the audience spectators, until the spectators become actors, or as he calls them 'spect-actors'. Our innovation is to make this part of Lacan's Mirror Stage. Veterans recognize themselves in the strange reflected images of the Mirror Stage.


WATCHED
21:34 

Embodied Storytelling Healing for Veterans by David Boje and Liz EnglandKennedy.

Then Professor Erika Gergerich and I began developing improv to take the theatre to the next level, and develop VETERANS THEATER as a small business enterpreneurial venture the veterans themselves operate to create their own ECONOMIC SUSTAINABILITY.