Welcome to the Broadway Curious Digital Magazine for Stage Mother Earth.
While we have taken care to make this content accessible on all devices,
for the best experience we suggest checking it out on a desktop or laptop to fully enjoy some of our visuals.
Thanks for being here and have fun.
As we were putting together this issue, the depth and breadth of this subject caught me a little by surprise. We were inspired to pitch the subject of Mother Earth because it feels omnipresent in ways it didn’t a few years ago, with all the climate crises, and space exploration, and humanity seemingly hellbent on our own destruction with all kinds of weapons. Because humans, after all, are nature, right? The vastness of it makes us want to jump in the ocean and hike to the summit and swing from a tree branch and bask in the sun and marvel at the enormity of whales and galaxies. And it makes us sing, “I’d like to swim in a clear blue stream,” “The hills are alive,” “If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow,” “Stars, scarce to be counted,” “You are sunlight and I moon,” and on and on and on.
So we asked questions. We met with fascinating people who inspired us to think about how theatre and science can and do intersect. We discussed what role artists have to play in these big conversations. We learned a lot, from Beltane to creation stories to eschatology. we renewed and reinvigorated my love for old songs and found a few new favorites, including the eco-musical Treeson by G. Victoria Campbell. And our live show brought so much of this to our audience, with incredible performances and lively discussion.
Thank you for being on this journey with us. The musical theatre-colored world suits me fine!
Brenda Foley & Will Rogers
Co-Hosts, Broadway Curious
Savannah Alfred last appeared in The Color Purple at The Phoenix Theatre Company. She was also seen in PTC’s The Devil Inside (New Works Festival) and Kinky Boots. Previously she played the Caterpillar in the Broadway World Award-Winning production of Curiouser and Curiouser 2 at Theatreworks. Before that, she was in the National Tour of The Snowy Day with Childsplay.
Rachel Bowditch (PhD/Full Professor): Rachel spent the first 18 years of her life growing up internationally–Rome, Italy; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia; Jakarta, Indonesia, Singapore, Tel Aviv, Israel, London, and Paris. She fundamentally believes theatre is a transformative art that has deep healing potential. She is a visual artist whose canvas is the street and the stage–painting visual, visceral poetic portraits through bodies, light, sound, media, and costumes. She received her BA in Theatre (Directing) from Skidmore College, a certificate of completion from Ecole de Jacques Lecoq International School of Physical Theatre in Paris, France, and her MA and PhD in Performance Studies from New York University. She is one of the six certified Rasaboxes teachers.
From 2018-2022, she held the position as the Coordinator of Graduate Studies for Theatre in the School of Music, Dance, and Theatre in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University overseeing 8 graduate programs: MFA in Theatre for Youth, MFA in Dance, MFA in Directing, MFA in Performance, MFA in Dramatic Writing, and MFA in Interdisciplinary Digital Media as well as the PhD in Theatre for Youth and PhD in Theatre and Performance of the Americas. From 2014-2022, she directed the MFA in Performance program that focuses on devising, actor-creator methodologies, and new work development.
Read more about Rachel at Rachelbowditch.com
G. Victoria Campbell (she/her) is an Indonesian-American singer-songwriter, musical theatre composer, lyricist, playwright, industrial-organizational psychologist and DEI expert. Born and raised in Seattle, she moved to Switzerland in 2019, and then to NYC in 2022 to join the world-renowned BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. Her mission as an artist is to uplift and empower marginalized communities by inspiring humanity toward collective action to help transform our society to have greater belonging, equity, and inclusion.
Her songs have been selected and performed at New Musical Project (Boulder, 2022), Spotlight on New Musicals (London, 2022), Women in the Arts & Media Coalition Conversations in America (2022), Tin Pan Alley 2’s Concert Series (2021), The Latest Draft Podcast (2021), It’s Time Climate Festival (2020), and Red Piano Productions Emerging Artists Showcase (London, 2020). She is a member of the Dramatists Guild, BMI and Maestra Music.
She writes music in a variety of genres including musical theater, folk, pop-rock, nu jazz,
melodic metal and Nordic EDM. She has a Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology and previously worked in human resources and management consulting. She spent the majority of her career helping drive positive organizational change before pivoting to theatre in 2020 to create art focused on positive global change.
Daniela Crispo is a theatre director and actor. Originally from the New York metropolitan area, Daniela has been involved in theatre since childhood. A graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, she has worked in New York City as a director and actor with various critically acclaimed theatre companies and artists. She also earned a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Fordham University at Lincoln Center. Upon moving to Arizona in 1998, she worked as a social worker and subsequently created her private practice. She joined the theatre community here in 2006, and has worked in various theatres around the valley as a director and actor. Daniela has been an active artistic and board member of The Bridge Initiative since 2015. With them she has found her theatrical and social awareness kindred spirits. Most recently she directed Bridge’s production of Sarah Treem’s A Feminine Ending.
Lance Gharavi is an experimental artist and scholar, associate professor in the School of Film, Dance and Theatre and an Affiliated Faculty in the School of Earth and Space Exploration, and the Center for Human, Artificial Intelligence, and Robot Teaming.
An early pioneer in the field of digital performance, Gharavi specializes in collaborating with transdisciplinary teams of artists, scientists, designers, and engineers to create original and innovative works of media-rich live performance. Recent projects have involved research robots, architectural projection, social media, 3D projections, and planetarium systems. Much of Gharavi’s artistic work focuses on intersections of art and science. His efforts make scientific research and history accessible to the general public, query the implications of scientific theories and technological innovations, and explore ways in which artists, scientists, designers, and engineers can collaborate to advance research and produce compelling experiences.
Gharavi’s scholarship on religion, technology, and performance has been published around the world and in several languages. His work appears in journals including Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Text and Performance Quarterly, Ecumenica, The Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, PAJ, Esoterica, and Performance Matters. He is the author of “Western Esotericism in Russian Silver Age Drama” (New Grail 2008), editor of the anthology “Religion, Theatre, and Performance: Acts of Faith (Routledge 2012), and the translator for the special 100-year anniversary edition of Aleksandr Blok’s symbolist masterpiece, “Roza I Krest” (Tsentr Knigi Rudomino 2013), published in Moscow. He collaborated with EarthScope—the largest solid Earth science project ever funded by the National Science Foundation—to write a children’s book about earthquakes. His ongoing research project into robotics and performance, Ars Robotica, was selected as a Transdisciplinary Exemplar by the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru). He recently completed working with a team of artists and physicists on a project about the Earth’s deep interior called Beneath, and is currently working on projects about robots and the future of humans in space.
