40 Distillation Guidebook Co-Lab • 9.18–9.19 2025 the work would lead. We were entering into a daring collaboration – between the Bethlehem Parks and Recreation Department and our Lehigh University Improvisational Street Theatre Troupe – and failing spectacularly. The clash of differing agendas (those of our audience, the City recreation department, and the artistic leadership of the production) should have been no surprise. The key to whatever success we have managed to accomplish since then is: we kept at it. We didn’t give up, and we learned. We entered into an ongoing process that led to changing our stage techniques, our performance styles, our subject matter, our preparation of the audience before performance, our relationship with the City and other artists around the country, and on and on. Emblematic of the maturation that took place, was the production of Steelbound on the grounds of Bethlehem Steel’s Iron Foundry, where iron was first forged in the City back in 1863. Twenty three years after The Death of Geronimo, our first embryonic efforts on the playgrounds of the City, we co-produced with Cornerstone Theatre, a mammoth effort – over 70 performers – in 1999, a production that still reverberates in its implications and power throughout the country. From what we’d learned from our street theatre work, the relationships we’d built through collaboration over the decades, and the opportunity provided by a region-wide and national trauma— Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt and, over a several year period, shut down— we were in a position to address our psychic needs as a community through performance creation. Bill George is a co-founder of Touchstone Theatre in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he has worked as a performer, director, and community collaborator for fifty years. He was a founding member of Bethlehem People’s Theatre, which grew from street theatre performances in South Bethlehem’s parks and neighborhoods into one of the Lehigh Valley’s most enduring civic arts institutions. He recently co-produced Rooted, a documentary film exploring the relationship between artists and place, with colleagues from the Bach Choir of Bethlehem, Godfrey Daniels Music Club, and Mock Turtle Marionette Theatre.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==