Step One: Gather the TE'A Company

First, TE’A gathers a Company of talented young artists who are committed to an exacting, constructive, and creative examination of the cares, threats, and cultural assumptions that lock people into conflict with each other on issues of race, class, politics, and religion.

Step Two: Conduct Insight Conversations

Second, TE’A trains the artists to listen to the voices of individuals in the community—individuals representative of groups whose collective voice is marginalized, misunderstood, or stereotyped by the larger, dominant culture.  TE’A artists gain insight into what these individuals care about, what feels threatening to them, and what decisions they make.  They also gain insight into themselves. 

Step Three: Create a Theatrical Performance Piece

Third, the TE’A Company then engages in a collaborative, interactive, theatrical workshopping process during which they transform their insight conversations with community members into high-quality theatrical performance pieces.

Step Four: Inspire Curiosity

Fourth, the TE’A Company performs these pieces for target audiences in schools, colleges, religious institutions, and other community venues. The goal is to replace suspicion with curiosity, misunderstanding with genuine insight, and hostility with openness to new ways of relating to each other.

Step Five: Facilitated Dialogue

Fifth, facilitated dialogues, what we call “the Third Act”, are integrated into each TE’A performance.  The combination of high quality drama and expert facilitation creates the condition for creative, candid interactions that provide audience members with the opportunity to deepen their insight into each other’s cares, to re-examine their own personal and cultural assumptions, to question the reliability of their spontaneous feelings of threat—even to delink these feelings from their interpretation of the other’s actions and customs.

The TE’A Project makes it possible for artists, audiences, and community members to negotiate the profound, difficult, yet exhilarating learning curve entailed in the shift “(from us and them) to (a new us).”