The Cornerstone Institute Summer Residency offers an immersive, hands-on collaborative experience creating theater and exploring strategies for community engagement while living with and within a small, diverse community.

Participants learn both through classroom training and hands-on creation of a community-specific production. Cornerstone company members and carefully chosen guest artists lead the artistic process and serve as faculty and mentors. Student participants and staff live and work with and within the collaborating community to cast, rehearse and produce a full production.  The Institute Summer Residency is the most comprehensive way to learn Cornerstone’s methodology for creating community-engaged theater.

Institute Summer Residency

“The Institute Summer Residency gave me invaluable insight into a professional community-based performance company.  The classes provided an opportunity to explore the principles behind the work, while the practical production component put these principles into action while demonstrating the real-world, logisitical challenges in doing so. This Institute is a truly unique and valuable opportunity.” - 2011 Institute Participant

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2012 Institute Summer Residency in Arvin, California

Cornerstone’s 9th annual Institute Summer Residency will take place in Arvin, California, an agricultural town in Kern County. From July 5 – August 5, Cornerstone staff and Institute students will live in the town and collaborate with Arvin residents to stage an original play.

A shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe at St Thomas Catholic Church in Arvin (across the road an oil derrick can be seen amid the grape vines- a classic Central Valley sight)

Arvin is a town of about 15,000 residents- 92% of whom are Latino. It’s at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, about 15 miles SE of Bakersfield and 100 miles north of Los Angeles.

Clara & Jesus work on one of many community-generated murals.

Arvin has a small town feeling and is defined by its mostly agricultural identity. Carrots, table grapes and almonds are just a few of the crops grown here and eaten all over the country.  Cotton is another popular local crop and has been for many years.

Apply for the 2012 Institute Summer Residency.