Artistic & Community Partnerships

What’s the best way to fill your house? Open the doors and invite your friends!

That’s exactly what Round House Theatre has done in Silver Spring: we’ve made the facilities available to partner arts organizations for their rehearsals, performances, classes, discussions, and other activities. As a result there are a wide variety of exciting activities happening all the time. These partners have filled the Silver Spring theatre with an on-going array of artistic offerings from dance to classes to children’s theatre. Round House Theatre Silver Spring has emerged as a vibrant hub of diverse artistic activity right in the heart of a revitalized downtown Silver Spring.

For more info on our Silver Spring artistic partners, please visit the website of the following partnering organizations.

• Art Stream is a regional organization whose mission is to create artistic opportunities for individuals traditionally underserved by the arts through classes and performance.

• Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is a professional company of dance artists that creates, performs, teaches, and engages people in making art.

• Lumina Studio Theatre seeks to offer the highest quality performance-oriented training in voice and movement theatre techniques through public performance opportunities with both classical and original scripts.

• Happenstance Theater (Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell) is a professional company committed to devising and producing original, performer-created visual, poetic theatre. With the simplest means, they seek to elevate the moment when the performers and audience meet, to lift the encounter beyond the daily and pedestrian into the realms of dreams, poetry, and art. Meaning is often found by happenstance.

• Music Together Montgomery provides music and movement classes for parents/caregivers and children from birth – 4 years in the RHT Education Center 5 mornings a week.

• Playwrights Forum is a non-profit organization dedicated to the artistic development of talented playwrights from the DC area.

• AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center is a state-of-the-art moving image exhibition, education and cultural center. The AFI Silver’s year-round programming includes SILVERDOCS: AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival, which brings the best new documentaries and a world-renowned International Documentary Conference to DC.

Forum Theatre – our resident theatre company in Silver Spring

Photo of "Angels in America" courtesy of Forum Theatre

Forum Theatre produces adventurous, relevant, and challenging plays that inspire discussion and build community around productions that are accessible, affordable, and entertaining.

Since Forum Theatre’s inception, they have aimed to be both the home for stories that provoke discussion and the place to host that discussion. Their plays are conversations with the audience. They tell stories about who we are as a local, national, and global community.

Founded in 2003 as a nomadic, multi-media performance company, Forum Theatre chose the Nation’s Capital as its home base because of the exploding theatre scene and for the diversity of its truly global community. The name was chosen to harken thoughts of the Roman Forum where artists, politicians, philosophers, and citizens of all walks of life could gather and exchange ideas. Within a short time, the ensemble developed a focus on plays that tackle social, cultural, and political questions. Much like the Roman Theatre of its time, Forum wanted to be a place where everyone could gather and, through storytelling, explore the ways that we can all live better with one another – as a local, national, and global community.

In its first five seasons, Forum produced at a range of venues around the metro region, ultimately settling at the H Street Playhouse in Northeast DC.  Just before their sixth season, Round House invited Forum to become the first resident theatre in the 150-seat Silver Spring venue – nearly twice the size of Forum’s former space on H Street NE. For its inaugural production in Silver Spring, Forum chose a seven-hour repertory of both parts of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, involving over forty local artists and technicians and drawing 3,500 audience members. Angels was nominated for eight Helen Hayes Awards, ultimately winning the awards for Leading Actor and Lighting Design.

To open its seventh season, Forum produced only the third US production of Wajdi Mouawad’s epic Scorched. In Winter 2011, Forum mounted Naomi Wallace’s One Flea Spare in conjunction with a month-long Wallace Festival, which launched the new initiative “Forum ReActs,” in which musicians, dancers, and writers respond to shows in their own medium. Forum’s 2010/11 season continued with a limited engagement of solo performer Zehra Fazal’s Headscarf and the Angry Bitch and Forum’s largest ensemble show in years, bobrauschenbergamerica by Charles L. Mee.

Contradiction Dance – our resident dance company

Photo courtesy of Contradiction Dance

In residence at Round House Theatre, Contradiction Dance holds dance & dance fitness classes at the Round House Education Center, as well as performing as part of Round House’s Silver Spring Series.

Contradiction Dance is a place where dance, theatre, and pop culture meet. The company’s vision is to make dances that report on, reflect, and question the world in which we live. Nurtured on the belief that artists and audience members communicate in a dialogue through the chosen medium, Contradiction Dance fosters discussion, reflection, and change through live performance and dance education. Contradiction Dance blends several dance forms with aspects of storytelling and theater. This mix allows the company to create an exchange between art and life for audiences, performers, and collaborators alike.