From @austinseminary ... "The Reed" for August 2018

• Austin Seminary Hosts Theater-in-Residence Program

This fall, Austin's Salvage Vanguard Theater (SVT) will begin its second year as the theater-in-residence at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary. When rising rental costs forced the company from their performance space in 2016, the SVT found new homes, including the Hicks Community House on the Seminary campus which SVT uses for rehearsals and workshop productions open to the public.

Photo by Katy Taylor

SVT is a nonprofit organization that strives to encourage artistic expression, making resources and performances available to everyone. Austin Seminary student Diana Small, SVT's co-producing artistic director, says that this move will offer artistic exchange and collaboration between the Seminary community and the SVT community. Small is earning her MDiv at Austin Seminary with an interest in exploring the intersections of live storytelling and art, spiritual development, and community engagement.

One of the ways that SVT supports artistic expression is through workshops in their Works Progress Austin series. These workshops provide resources for playwrights while giving audiences a chance to see the early stages of a play's creation. The combined SVT and Austin Seminary communities can look forward to several of these workshops on campus during the upcoming fall semester.

The first of these free performances will be presented August 24 and 25, a staged reading of Casta by award-winning playwright Adrienne Dawes. This reading will feature Casta's first completed bilingual draft, new puppets, and a new song by composer Graham Reynolds. Casta is inspired by a series of paintings by Miguel Cabera that depict different racial mixtures in a social hierarchy. These paintings attempt to separate and divide identities into orderly categories, but instead they illuminate a complex portrait of fluid Latinx identities, according to playwright Dawes. Casta will explore the complexities of these identities. After the performance on the 25th, an artist talk with Dawes and UT Professor Laura Gutiérrez will follow.

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