Baltimore Butterfly Sessions: BCS Looking Back to Look Forward
  • BCS Looking Back to Look Forward

As we celebrate Baltimore Center Stage’s 60th anniversary this season, we’re using our Baltimore Butterfly Sessions to think 60 years into the future! But in order to look forward, first we need to look back on how we got to the present. In our first Baltimore Butterfly Session of the season, Dr. Durryle Brooks of Blaq Equity and Gavin Witt, BCS’s former longtime resident dramaturg and associate director, will help us reflect on BCS’s historical role as a cultural anchor in the changing contexts of the social and political movements which have shaped our city.

This event is free, please reserve your seat by clicking book tickets above.

The event is full at 200 attendees, so please arrive early to guarantee admission. RSVP alone does not guarantee admission to the event, there is a limited capacity – first come, first served.


Headshot Durryle Brooks
Durryle Brooks, Keynote Speaker

Durryle Brooks, Ph.D (he/him) is an interdisciplinary researcher and a scholar-practitioner from Baltimore, MD. He has a B.A. from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in Religious Studies, an M.A. In Sexuality Studies from SF State University, and a Ph.D. in Education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in Teacher Education and School Improvement with a concentration in Social Justice Education.

Durryle is deeply invested in love as liberation work and believes that we can create a world where everyone is mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually secure. He strives to live up to his father’s favorite maxim: “If I can help somebody as I pass along, if I can cheer somebody with a word or song, if I can show someone they have traveled wrong, than my living has not been in vain.”

Headshot Gavin Witt
Gavin Witt, Keynote Speaker

Gavin Witt spent nearly 20 years at Baltimore Center Stage helping program, plan, and implement individual seasons and multi-year strategic plans; dramaturging, adapting, and directing mainstage productions; and developing commissions and other new work. He served  as well as artistic director and producer for the First Look and Play Lab developmental series, which included dramaturging and directing numerous workshops and readings.

Additionally, he introduced and oversaw the Wright-Right-Now and Wright-Now-Play-Later projects, featuring emerging local playwrights and generating hundreds of newly commissioned short plays and an innovative series of live-streamed, site-specific performances. This followed nearly 15 years in Chicago as an actor, director, dramaturg, translator, and teacher. His creative output includes adaptations of a half-dozen Shakespeare plays, Granville-Barker’s The Voysey Inheritance, Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, and translations of several classic French plays. Most recently, his adaptation of Macbeth was performed in New York by Word to the People Theater. He has also directed productions and readings of work ranging from early modern classics to world premieres in Chicago, New York, Baltimore, DC, and virtually; and provided developmental dramaturgy at new play festivals, workshops, and retreats all around the country.

A graduate of Yale and the University of Chicago, he has taught on faculty at the University of Chicago, DePaul, Johns Hopkins/Peabody, and Towson University as well as guest lectured at numerous other colleges and universities. He has adjudicated plays and grants for KCACTF, NEA, Maryland State Arts Council, the Jerome Foundation, The Thespian Society, Philadelphia Theater Initiative, PlayPenn, National New Play Network, New Harmony, Williamstown, the O’Neill, Playwrights Center, American Shakespeare Center’s Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries, and others; has served on the advisory boards and strategic planning committees of several theaters and academic departments; and spent more than a decade as a regional vice president of LMDA. In addition to his current faculty position in the Department of Theatre Arts at Towson University, he serves as an Ambassador-at-Large for the National New Play Network and a member of the Board of Directors of LMDA.

Headshot of Catrina Brenae
Catrina Brenae, Musician

Catrina Brenae is a classically trained, multi-disciplinary artist from Baltimore, Maryland with a degree in Music and Vocal Performance from Clark Atlanta University. Before answering her calling to the theater and the stage, she initially studied Visual Art. To this day she sees herself as painter both on and off the stage “voice colors the words, cloaks it in spirit and aura. So, in that way, I continue to paint with language and voice.”


The Baltimore Butterfly Sessions: A civic dialogue series at BCS

Inspired by Citizen University’s Civic Saturdays, The Baltimore Butterfly Sessions will bring together music, poetry, literary excerpts and thought-provoking keynote addresses to catalyze conversation and build awareness around today’s most pressing issues. Tapping into some of the brightest voices around the nation and in Baltimore, each Butterfly Session will convene artists, activists, organizers and thinkers to unpack a civically resonant topic. Through the Baltimore Butterfly Sessions, BCS aims to create a space for civic dialogue & fellowship across differences and stay firmly rooted in our local community. Come for the music, come for the poetry, come for the conversation.

 

Why “The Baltimore Butterfly Sessions”?

A symbol of growth and emergence, transformation and borderless migration, butterflies remind us that tiny shifts in one place can set profound change in motion. Butterflies also have a special resonance in Baltimore. You may or may not know that the city of Baltimore is sometimes referred to as a “Black Butterfly and White L.” According to Dr. Lawrence Brown of Morgan State University, “Baltimore’s hypersegregated neighborhoods experience radically different realities.” Typically, Black neighborhoods fan out to the east and west resembling the shape of a butterfly while white neighborhoods run down the center of the city in the shape of an “L.”

Through the Baltimore Butterfly Sessions, BCS aims to create a space for civic dialogue & fellowship across difference and stay firmly rooted in our local community.


Sponsored by

Mellon Foundation

Doris Duke Charitable Foundation

PNC Bank

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