Join us for a book talk with Aaron Landsman, Mallory Catlett and Ebony Noelle Golden discussing their latest publication, The City We Make Together.

In 2009, theatre artist Aaron Landsman was dragged by a friend to a city council meeting in Portland, Oregon. At first he was bored, but when a citizen dumped trash in front of the council in order to show how the city needed cleaning up, he was intrigued. He began attending local government meetings across the country, interviewing council members, staffers, activists, and other citizens. Out of this investigation, Landsman and director Mallory Catlett developed a participatory theatre piece called City Council Meeting.

The City We Make Together looks at how we make art with communities, how we perform power and who gets to play which roles, and how we might use creativity and rigorous inquiry to look at our structures of democracy anew. Published by University of Iowa Press, 2022.

Mallory Catlett is an Obie award winning creator/director of performance across disciplines from opera to installation art. In New York her work has premiered and performed at 3LD, HERE, Ontological-Hysteric, PS122, Abrons, Chocolate Factory, EMPAC; featured at COIL, Prototype and BAM’s Next Wave; and toured internationally to Canada, France, UK, Ireland & Australia. She is a recipient of a 2016 Creative Capital Grant and a 2015 Foundation for the Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She is the founder of Restless Production NYC, an Associate Artist at CultureHub, a member of the Collapsable Hole, an artist-run development and performance venue, and Co-Artistic Director of Mabou Mines.

Ebony Noelle Golden devises site-specific ceremonies, live art installations, creative collaborations and arts experiments that explore and radically imagine viable strategies for collective black liberation. In 2020, Ebony launched Jupiter Performance Studio (JPS) which serves as a hub for the study of diasporic black performance traditions. JPS is integral to the development of a five-part theatrical ceremony that will be developed and produced over teh next three years with partners in Harlem, Brooklyn, Durham, and Ashfield, Massachusetts. In 2009, Ebony founded Betty’s Daughter Arts Collaborative, a culture consultancy and arts accelerator, that devises systems, strategies, solutions for and with education, arts, culture, and community groups globally. Golden’s current projects include Jubilee 11213 (in partnership with Weeksville Heritage Center and generously supported by Creative Capital, Coalition of Theaters of Color, and Black Spatial Relics), free/conjure/black, and In The Name Of (commissioned by Apollo Theatre).

Aaron Landsman is a researcher, performance-enabler and teacher. His work has been presented in New York at The Chocolate Factory, The Foundry Theatre, Abrons Arts Center, HERE and PS 122. The working group he started called Perfect City is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York’s Artist Employment Program and The Architectural League of New York. His newest performance Night Keeper is commissioned by The Chocolate Factory and funded by Creative Capital. Aaron has performed with ERS, Tim Etchells, Tory Vazquez, Julia Jarcho, and Richard Maxwell. He teaches Theater and Interdisciplinary Humanities courses at Princeton.