For any artist interested in combining artistry with activism, Broadway Advocacy Coalition is here to help: the artist-led social justice group has partnered with Columbia Law School to offer a course called “The Theater for Change: Reimagining Justice Through Abolition.” Applicants don’t have to be Columbia students to attend.
The applications are open to participants in any artistic discipline who wants to learn how to take their skillset and use it for social justice. The course will run Jan. 21, 2021 through April 8, 2021. Participants will be compensated for their participation in this course. There will be an information session Nov. 24. Applications will be processed starting Dec. 6 and participants will be selected by late December. The application can be found on Broadway Advocacy Coalition’s website.
According to the course description, the course “blends artistry, law, policy, and community engagement to produce powerful artistic projects with the potential to change the broken criminal justice system and imagine new ways forward. Amidst resounding calls to abolish the current state of the country’s criminal legal system, notably prisons and the police, the arts provide a critical space to imagine alternatives and promote those envisionings as achievable realities.”
The course will also include a performance component, where the artists will join with law students and community advocates to create performance pieces.
Broadway Advocacy Coalition began partnering with the Center for Institutional and Social Change at Columbia Law School in 2019 on its educational programming for artists, called Theater of Change.
Over the summer, as protests were underway nationwide in support of Black Lives Matter and against police brutality, the Broadway Advocacy Coalition led a three-day virtual forum called Broadway for Black Lives Matter Again, where it discussed racism on Broadway. The Broadway Advocacy Coalition was founded in 2016 as a direct response to racism and police violence, and has since led forums and events around other social issues, such as immigration and education equity.
Resources During the Black Lives Matter Movement “We’re often asked to hold the red bucket [for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS] or get dressed and raise money at a gala, but when it comes to police brutality and racism and mass incarceration, there’s something beyond raising money that needs to happen,” said actor Britton Smith, who co-founded the Broadway Advocacy Coalition, in an interview with Backstage in June. “We also need to understand, What are the laws that allow what happens to all these people? We decided it was important for the arts to finally meet law and policies, so we built this relationship with the folks at Columbia Law School and since 2016 we’ve really deepened our practices of how art and law and policy work for the people.”