Partnership

We are in a moment of time where both our local and our global capacity of living together peacefully is at risk. Our perspectives remain primitive in response to others and this impedes both our ability to access our higher gifts and our clear capacity to build a peaceful world for ourselves and our children. We are more easily manipulable because we are not evolving and this allows a fear-driven society to take root. This is not, in any way, the only path ahead of us. But if we continue as we are, without deep change both relationally and individually, we will continue to refine our repetition of history with more and more dangerous results.

The potential impact of a partnership between Community Renewal International and The Global Theatre Project offers a powerful response to this very precarious moment in human history. The partnership responds directly to what Lewis Mumford speaks of so eloquently in “The Transformations of Man:”

“. . . the intimacies that they share, the cooperation that they pledge, are essential to the development of man’s basic humanity . . .The world will not become a neighborhood, even if every part of it is bound by instant communication and rapid transportation, if the neighborhood itself as an idea and a social form is allowed to disappear.”

What Mumford is offering when he wrote this in 1956 is a pathway for peace and a more humane planet if we do two things: 1) establish healthy neighborhoods and 2) apply the values found there toward consciously establishing global interconnectivity. It is up to us whether our homes are healthy and our planet at peace. Mack McCarter developed a process through CRI toward building healthy neighborhoods. He has identified and put into practice the basis of that – developing the Whole Person who can then have healthy relationships with others and together share the ‘intimacies’ and ‘cooperation’ mentioned by Mumford above. The GTP was established to utilize theatre practices as an activation for responsible and empathetic global citizenship. Through a process that engages community and inspires the experience of individual creativity and intellectual curiosity, the theatrical events contribute to healthy local environment and social-issue engagement of global concerns.

The crisis of the moment is that our perspective both locally and globally of ‘the other’ is becoming weaponized and utilized for the formation of seeing more enemies then allies. But through the partnership of CRI and The GTP – we will work to counter this movement.

This relationship will demonstrate and champion the development of the individual as both a Whole Person and a Whole Artist – recognizing this development as a necessity for the world to, in fact, become a neighborhood of mankind in active engagement toward one common goal – caring and supportive relationships.

The premise this relationship stands upon has evolved into what surely is one of the most unique partnerships between an arts and non-arts entity enlisting artists and community members committed to positive impact on our society.