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2 books match the query 'Cornerstone'

cover of Cornerstone on College Hill: An Illustrated History of the University of Alaska Fairbanks

Cornerstone on College Hill

An Illustrated History of the University of Alaska Fairbanks

Terrence Cole

University of Alaska Press, 1994

No college campus in America has a wilder or more magnificent natural setting than that of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This history of UAF commemorates the colorful past of one of America's most unusual educational institutions. It tells the story of how the University of Alaska Fairbanks has changed the lives of thousands of people over the past seventy-five years.
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cover of Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater

Staging America

Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater

Sonja Kuftinec

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

This captivating studymaps a history and theory of community-based theater in the United States through the Cornerstone Theater Company. Detailing how the performance-making process contributes to an ongoing negotiation of American identity, Sonja Kuftinec investigates community-based theater to trace the historical affiliations of the form and critically examines how community-based theater both enables community and challenges the very notion of “community” as a stable site.

The process of making and unmaking community is vividly illuminated in the work of the Cornerstone Theater Company, a Los Angeles-based ensemble founded in 1986. From 1986 to 1991, Cornerstone toured nationwide, working mainly with rural towns to create adaptations of classical texts. A Wild West musical Hamlet was performed with residents of Marmarth, North Dakota (population 190), and The House on Walker River, an adaptation of the Oresteia trilogy, was developed with a Native American reservation in Nevada. Since 1991, Cornerstone has performed with urban communities, developing original shows and adaptations of Western and non-Western texts incorporating local histories and community players. These performances rearticulate distinctions among various urban group and between amateur and professional theater.

While Cornerstone’s contemporary work can be contextualized within a historical tradition of grassroots performance, it also complicates this tradition, suggesting that identity may be more dynamic than rooted. By using Cornerstone as a case study, Kuftinec’s analysis of community-based theater’s impact upon rural, urban, and professional sites across the United States proposes that “community” and “America” are vital terms of negotiation rather than fixed entities.

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