• The Arts and Healing of Trauma

    Many of our faculty first worked together in FIRE IN THE HEART, first performed at the California Women’s Conference in 2014 and again in conjunction with Cabrillo College Theatre Arts in Aptos, CA in 2016. Co-directed by Deborah Allen and Delores Burgess, we are 22 artists performing in the art forms that saved our lives: gospel, hip hop, classical music; spoken word; dance; film and poetry.

    In 2019, we brought the show to the White Theater in Kansas City, in collaboration with the Jewish Community Center of Greater Kansas City. We brought a core group of our original company and added to the show amazing artists from Kansas City.

    We are a collective of humans and artists who have a strong belief that art can create resilience, build stronger communities, help young people think in new ways, change attitudes, and most of all, be part of a world that is paying attention to how we heal and what it means to be part of “repair of the world.”

    All of our projects are designed to take pressing (and personal) social issues and let the arts weave the stories so that our audiences can tolerate confronting difficult issues, and still come away with a model for human decency and the ability to survive and thrive even after trauma.