Feature: NEW PARTNERSHIP ANNOUNCES SITELINES BLM at Cadence Theatre Company

Extending its Sitelines site-specific theater initiative, Cadence Theatre Company has announced its introduction of Sitelines BLM. The project, devised and helmed by director, dramaturg and literary critic Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, seeks to uplift new voices in the Richmond, VA community and to provide an artistic platform that directly engages notions of place in Richmond, particularly those places that are being reshaped through the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Sitelines BLM project will involve a series of short films and filmed performances, commissioned and produced by Cadence Theatre Company, that engage the stories that specific Richmond locations are now telling: Marcus-David Peters Circle (the location of the Robert E. Lee Monument), Reclamation Square (City Hall), and the African Burial Ground, among many others.

"The Black Lives Matter movement has called for unprecedented levels of responsiveness and accountability for artists within Black, Indigenous, People of Color communities, who have been decentered and creatively marginalized in predominantly white institutions," said Green. Thus, through Sitelines BLM, Cadence seeks to both bring the artistic expression of Black, Indigenous, People of Color into our sightlines and provide an institutional platform that focuses on the historicities, relationships, tensions, joys, healing, and futures being shaped and conjured in the new "seeing-places" of Richmond that have developed as a result of the global pandemics we are facing-COVID 19 and systemic racism.

To launch Sitelines BLM, Cadence Theatre Company is seeking to commission work from five local writers, focusing on giving voice to marginalized artists in the Black, Indigenous, and Writers of Color communities. The filmed artistic experiences developed from their work will explore individual relationships to space and how various spaces shape, and are shaped by, structure and history - places of memory, reclamation, injustice, and resistance. Interested writers are invited to read the request for proposals at https://cadencetheatre.org/sitelines-blm.

Partners in the new venture are Oakwood Arts, professional film artists, William & Mary Program in Africana Studies and the Department of Theatre, Speech, and Dance, the University of Richmond Free Theatre & Dance, VCUarts Theatre, and Virginia Repertory Theatre. Sitelines BLM is made possible through the support of the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Virginia Public Media (VPM).

Photo credit: Jay Paul Photography