Every person has his or her story to tell: every community, every family, every institution, every issue, every piece of ground–every thing.

When we remember the country of our birth, when we stand in the middle of a parking lot and consider what once stood there, when we walk with aging parents and listen to the tales of their youth, we are made new by the recollections.

Why?  Because each person, each place, each moment possesses a history, and that history provokes a sense of who we are. When we make sense of those stories and the worlds that inspire them, we rediscover ourselves. These stories are all around us; they are deep inside us as well. We hear these stories everyday.

At The Performing Knowledge Project we care about the stories and the communities they inhabit. The story might be about Edgar Allan Poe’s poetic persona, or it might be about a senior citizens’ home, or it might be about technology and how it affects who we are. We at Performing Knowledge explore these stories, what they look like in line and color, what they sound like with melody and chord. We want to know how they feel, both to the storyteller and to those to whom the story is told, and how they make sense of the world around us.

Stories exist within a context, however; they inhabit a community, to be sure; but they also happen at a particular time and place. At Performing Knowledge we seek to advance the relationships between those stories and the way in which they are told. We synthesize the goals of performance with those of education, and by doing so the two disciplines work in harmony. By orchestrating their relationship with one another, we elevate the “felt-thought” making it all the more palpable, transforming it into an experience.

The story of The Performing Knowledge Project begins with poetry workshops and the production of Embodying Poe: Poetry in Performance.  The Sanctuary Theatre, the Project’s parent institution, dates back to 1983 and its inaugural production of Jesse and the Bandit Queen. Its story then weaves through over two decades and dozens of productions, workshops, staged-readings, and educational programs, in collaboration with numerous organizations and communities.

The Performing Knowledge Project is the theatre’s new story and signals a decidedly different direction for the Sanctuary organization.

The Project seeks to build an ensemble of artists and scholars: theatre artists; historians, musicians; poets, literary critics, writers and playwrights; sociologists; technologists and visual artists; dancers and beyond. We seek to create original works in collaboration with communities and individuals, crafting the tales that make worlds come alive.

Michael Oliver is the founder and director of the project.  He combines more than thirty years of educational and theatrical experience, with a Ph.D in Performance Studies from the University of Maryland at College Park and an MFA in Directing from Virginia Tech, he has worked with people of all ages both as an educator and as a theatre artist.  He, Elizabeth Bruce, and Jill Navarre were co-founders of The Sanctuary Theatre and former Director of the High School at The New School of Northern Virginia.  He has been actively engaged in theatre and education issues, projects, and explorations for more than thirty years.

The Performing Knowledge Project includes:

1. Original interdisciplinary performance pieces that tackle a wide range of subjects.

2. Workshops on the art of teaching as a performing art. The concept of a performing art covers everything from the creation of the script, as in both the course taught and the lesson plans delivered, to the presentation of that script to an audience, i.e., the students.

3. Workshops on the art of performing or exhibiting knowledge to others. These workshops cover everything from the organization of knowledge into a meaningful and effective presentation to the techniques of synthesizing visual-support materials with logical and emotional arguments.

4. Workshops on the art of plays and poetry, using the concept of performance as a guiding tool to both the creation of both and to their revision.

 where performance and education meet.