In this intensive weekend, we will explore:

The Creative Domains of Intimacy and Collaboration

Civic Practice as Theatre

Playwriting as Activism

Mapping Ourselves in the Creative Constellation

Next Steps: Collective Action We Can Take Now

with renowned practioners in the field:

Catherine Filloux

Maruicio Tafur Salgado

Yazmany Arboleda

Sophia Skiles

David J Diamond

STAGES OF CHANGE: Theatre Artists at the Forefront of Societal Transformation

 OCTOBER 23-25, 2026

La MaMa ETC, Community Space

74 East 4th Street

New York City

Stages of Change brings leading practitioners together for an immersive weekend of participatory workshops exploring how theatre can transform the ways we connect, collaborate, and create change. Stages of Change offers theatre artists a rare opportunity to experience diverse approaches to embodied practice, collaboration, and community engagement. Through hands-on workshops with leading practitioners, participants will gain new tools, perspectives, and possibilities for their work

SESSIONS

Opening Conversation

David J Diamond, Facilitator 

Session Facilitators discuss the current landscape and the initiative of theatre artists to make changes immediately. They will introduce their inspiring individual practices which they will share over the coming weekend.

Live-streamed on HowlRound.

The Creative Domains of Intimacy and Collaboration

Mauricio Tafur Salgado

How are we cultivating the "beloved community" through creative practice? In this interactive workshop, participants will share and reflect on diverse, bridge-building efforts. Together, we'll explore the 5 domains of intimacy and its potential as a practical framework designed to deepen mutual care, connection, and trust across all collaborative work.

Mauricio Tafur Salgado identifies as unromantically mestizo + spanglish speaking +  first generation US born to proudly subversive Colombians with graduate degrees + brown-skinned + aspiring bio-regionalist + beloved + father + artist pursuing justice and healing through a decolonial framework. His educational background began in the public schools and community centers of South Florida among migrant farm workers. At NYU, he is currently an Associate Professor, the Director of Applied Theatre, and the Chair of Tisch Drama. He is a co-founder of Arts Ignite and the Remember 2019 Collective, a Core Faculty member with artEquity, a Program Director with the Collective Fund of the Distracted Globe Foundation, and a Faculty Fellow with The Arts and Health Lab@NYU, where he recently co-authored a commission for the World Health Organization titled, Creative Care: A Resource Guide for Artists Working in Humanitarian Conflicts. 

The Impossible Thing We Can Do Together: Civic Practice As Theater Yazmany Arboleda 

In this participatory workshop, artists will explore how the tools of theatre—story, ritual, embodiment, play, spatial design, listening, and collective authorship—can help create meaningful encounters between people who may hold very different experiences and points of view.

"Drawing from my work across public art, civic practice, and community-based creative projects, we will experiment with ways artists can move from making work for communities toward making work with them: creating conditions for trust, imagination, agency, and shared authorship. The central question we will carry together is: What impossible thing can we do together that we cannot do alone?"

Yazmany Arboleda is an artist, architect, and civic practitioner whose work explores the power of art to create relationships, shape public life, and invite people into acts of collective imagination. He is the Founder and Chief Artistic Officer of The People’s Creative Institute and serves as a People’s Artist with the New York City Civic Engagement Commission. His practice spans participatory art, performance, public space, civic design, education, and large-scale community collaborations, often asking how creative practice can help people encounter one another across difference and become authors of the places, institutions, and futures they share. Across his work, he treats art not simply as an object or event, but as a form of social infrastructure—a way of practicing belonging, curiosity, agency, and collective possibility.

 Playwriting as Activism

Catherine Filloux

Catherine Filloux is an award-winning playwright and librettist whose activism takes stage both in and outside of the theater. Inspired by the world and suffering around her, Catherine has written forty plays that all join the fight for universal human rights. Through complex characters and trying times, this dialogue for change is only part of the performance. It is integrated with meaningful collaborations, post-show conversations, legislative support, and mentorship. www.catherinefilloux.com

 CATHERINE FILLOUX (Playwright/Librettist) is an award-winning French Algerian American playwright and librettist who has been writing about human rights for many decades. Filloux’s 40 plays and libretti have been produced in the U.S., internationally, and are widely published, anthologized and written about. Catherine’s new trilogy of plays about the environment includes “Olivia,” “Medusa,” and “Deep Time,” developed as part of The Olivia Project at a variety of theaters in New York City. Her new opera “Allegra & the Cello, in Movements” (composer, Julia Schwartz) will premiere at La MaMa in New York City in 2026. You can read more here: www.catherinefilloux.com

Mapping Ourselves in the Creative Constellation

Sophia Skiles

Through reflection and embodied celebrations, we honor our connections to those who give us breath to rest, endure and expand into the present moment and beyond. Developing and committing to a rest ethic and celebration practice as remedies to supremacy culture are core to the pedagogy informing Liberatory Strategies for Whole Artists Collaboration, a semester-long course created at Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA Program as recent Associate Professor of the Practice and Head of Acting.

Sophia  Skiles is a theater worker, educator and facilitator based in NYC.  Sophia brings nuanced theater-specific experience articulating and practicing anti-racist commitments in higher education theater training, in partnership with theater companies, with individual theater artists and as a professional theater actor.  Sophia currently serves on the board of CAATA (Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists) and is at work on a book for Asian American actors.  www.sophiaskiles.com

FACILITATOR

David J Diamond

Founder and Artistic Director of Stages of Change, Diamond uses his forty years of experience as producer, director, curator and facilitator of conversations in developing opportunities for artists to learn from each other. The goal is to continue to investigate how our theatre work can push the bounds of social interaction, collaboration and community to instigate change and further social justice. For over 25 years, Diamond has been the Artistic Co-Producer of the La MaMa Umbria International Symposium for Directors, Playwright Retreat and other programs. This weekend is designed to introduce more theatre artists to specific approaches and processes they may not be familiar with, by engaging the experts to provide participatory workshops that will both educate and inspire.