UMass Professor Mwalim Receives Grant to Explore Arts & Civic Engagement with 'Stone Soup Project'

Internationally recognized performing artist and writer, and UMass Dartmouth professor, Mwalim (Morgan James Peters), received funding from the Healy Fund, Osborne Foundation and New England Foundation for the Arts Native Arts Program to pursue the current phase of his Stone Soup project. Using the Federal Theater project of the 1930's as a model, Mwalim is working in cooperation with the Leduc Center for Civic Engagement at UMass Dartmouth and New African Company in Boston to develop community and regionally based Theater Productions that engage the community as artists and audiences.

With drastic cuts to funding, theater companies closing down across the country, and a presidential candidate who has made his intentions to cut funding to PBS a part of his campaign; while funding for the arts has never been a priority for the US, to the extent that it is in other countries, survival is the key word for theater as a whole. When you get into the area of theater that explores the experiences and insights of non- white people, the avenues of support are even fewer. While attending the 2007 National Black Theatre Festival in Winston- Salem, North Carolina, Mwalim (M.J. Peters) saw the writing on the wall and realized that the continuation of professional theater, by for and about people of color, they were going to need to explore a new paradigm and recognized the academy and consortiums as two readily available models.

Theater and the performing arts remains one of the socially segregated parts of the American landscape, whereby Black, Latino, Asian and Native American theater companies remain one of the places that people of color can gain training and experiences in the various aspects of theater, thus moving on to advanced training or opportunities in film and television. Historically and presently, artists of color are often marginalized in "mainstream" theater companies; and playwrights are generally ignored.

Collaboration and workshop are the means by- which Mwalim's civic engagement project will provide training and opportunities in theater for experienced and aspiring theater artists, writers and administrators. Utilizing the original purpose of regional theater, the project will bring performances and forum discussions about the arts to communities in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, New Bedford, Brockton and Cape Cod. One of the upcoming legs of the project is the November production of Mwalim's play "Wetu in the City: An Urban Indian Play" at Hibernian Hall.

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