Dear Participant,

A year ago, when I wrote to ask for your support of City Council Meeting, the project might have seemed like some kind of cheeky joke: how do you make theater out of procedures and meetings that are often tedious at best? Even I wasn’t sure exactly where the thing was going. I just knew I wanted to see if it would work.

Because the piece was so new to all of us, I reached out to individuals for start-up support and you came through. Everything that is happening for this project was made possible by your initial support. I'm hoping you'll stay with us as we grow.

CLICK HERE TO CONTRIBUTE NOW.

Thanks to an awesome collaborative team that includes director Mallory Catlett, designer Jim Findlay and performers and viewers from many walks of life, City Council Meeting is coming into focus. In addition to our lead presenters - HERE in New York and DiverseWorks in Houston - We have commissioning and presenting partners in two new cities – San Francisco’s Zspace and Tempe, Arizona’s ASU Gammage have come on board. We have major financial support from The New England Foundation For The Arts’ National Theater Pilot, NPN, the MAP Fund and Jerome Foundation.

Creatively, we’re at a really exciting place, too. We’re devising ways to make the piece truly local, by creating it with a cohort of artists, politicians and activists in each city. It's starting to become a lively and explosive performance. And we’re looking into building a stand-alone education component that schools can use to incite impressionable young minds toward civic participation. City Council Meeting is becoming an affirmation of the value of human empathy. Plus, also? We have a website!

CLICK HERE TO CONTRIBUTE NOW.

We would love to have your help as we continue building it. We're trying to make this something that is both local and national, that fits into a number of kinds of spaces, and that is certainly bigger than anything I've ever made.

The grants and commissions are taking care of much of our fees, travel and space rental. What we want to do now is hire a line producer in New York, as well as an education consultant who can make sure our ideas about bringing this into schools is viable and worthwhile. Last, we want to provide free or sliding scale tickets for at least some of the performances at HERE.

The first $4,000 we raised from you last year was instrumental in getting us started. And as you can see, we leveraged it many times over.

Now we’re trying to raise $8,000 to go a big step further. Can you contribute?

CLICK HERE TO CONTRIBUTE NOW.

Through the fiscal sponsorship of HERE, your donations are tax-deductible, and will take you all of about two minutes to complete. And even better, every dollar you give will go right into the project; none of it is spent on processing or handling fees.

Please let me know if you’d like to talk further about the project, if you have any questions, or if you’d like to come to an open rehearsal this winter in New York.

The next time you can take part in City Council Meeting will be January 26th at HERE's Culturemart. We'd love to see you there.

Did I mention our new and fancy website?

Best,

Aaron

"art is politics. politics is art."     - Plato.