Mosque Alert: An Interactive Play by Silk Road Rising
For the past two weeks I have been doing an artist residency at Ragdale in Lake Forest, just north of Chicago, IL. Ragdale tried something new with this residency specifically for three teaching artists from three organizations: Marwen (where I teach), Old Town School of Folk Music, and Silk Road Rising. (Ragdale houses thirteen residents total, so the teaching artist group is 9/13 artists.)
Rather than trying to sum up all the amazing experiences I’ve had here at Ragdale (which I would highly recommend to any artist, whether you are a visual artist, musician/composer or writer) I will share one of the many exciting projects from Silk Road Rising, a theater company in Chicago. Silk Road Rising creates both live theater and online videos focusing on the stories of Asian Americans and Middle Eastern Americans. Founders and partners Malik Gillani and Jamil Khoury came to Ragdale to work on in-school curriculum centered around one of their current projects, Mosque Alert.
Mosque Alert is Jamil’s eight-step, online, interactive, new play development and civic engagement process. Inspired by similar events around the country, it tells the story of two suburban families from Naperville, IL on opposite sides of a proposal to build a new mosque in their community. Silk Road Rising encourages people to view and comment on the material for the play on their website, which is in the form of video blogs by the characters, conflict scenes, and a draft of the play. Jamil will then take the comments into account as he makes the final version of the play, to be performed as a staged reading.
Feel free to be a part of the dialogue and check out other live and video plays at Silk Road Rising’s website: http://www.silkroadrising.org/video-plays/mosque-alert
-Suzie
