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

•Art Stream is a regional organization who 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.

•Open Circle Theatre Company (OCT) is Washington DC’s first professional theatre dedicated to producing professional productions that integrate the considerable talents of artists with disabilities. OCT was formed by a group of people with and without disabilities.

•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 Washington D.C. area.

•AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center 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 Washington, DC.

Forum Theatre – our resident theatre company in Silver Spring

Photo of "Angels in America" courtesy of Forum Theatre

Forum’s mission is to produce adventurous, relevant, and challenging plays that inspire discussion and build community around productions that are accessible, affordable, and entertaining. Forum aims to engage audiences and keep the conversation going well beyond the performance. Here’s how Forum describes itself:

“Since our inception, we wanted to create a theatre that could be the home for stories that provoked discussion and the place to host that discussion. We want our plays to be a conversation with the audience. We want our plays to be about who we are – as a local, national, and global community.

So what is a Forum show? That’s never been the easiest thing to describe, but certain things seem always to be true: A Forum show asks big questions. A Forum show can be challenging, but has a big heart at its center. And a Forum show gives you something to think about and a lot to talk about.

OpenForum embodies Forum’s goal to expand upon the typical theatre experience. We see our productions as springboards for conversation and exploration. After many performances, audiences are invited to bring their chairs up to the stage and discuss the work that they have seen in a more open, free-form manner than a traditional post-show discussion.

Forum Membership allows audiences to take their relationship with Forum a bit further. Members are given an all-access pass to every step of the creative process of a Forum production. From readings to rehearsals to the shows themselves, we put out the welcome mat and open our doors. Members can even attend any show as many times as they’d like.”

Founded in 2003, Forum seeks to bring new and seldom-performed plays to DC. They have produced the world premiere of UpShot by Israeli writer Ami Dayan and a new translation of The Gas Heart, as well as area premieres of Vaclav Havel’s The Memorandum, Kid-Simple: a radio play in the flesh, Caryl Churchill’s The Skriker, and Don DeLillo’s Valparaiso. Forum also co-produced the first DC Samuel Beckett Centenary Festival – sponsored by the Embassy of Ireland, University of Maryland, and Kennedy Center.

Forum truly made its mark during the 2007/08 season with the area premiere of The Last Days of Judas Iscariot. The production earned a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Best Ensemble and the final weeks sold out so quickly that Forum offered a remount the following winter. Forum continued to grow, artistically and institutionally, in 2008/09. In response to the final production of the year, dark play or stories for boys, Post theatre critic Peter Marks dubbed Forum “a small local company with its foot on the gas.”

Just before its sixth season in the fall of 2009, Forum was selected by Round House to become the resident theatre company at its black box venue in Silver Spring. To begin the season in their new home, Forum made the ambitious choice to become the first theatre of its size in Greater Washington to produce both parts of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. From October to the end of November, the Angels repertory production drew nearly 4,000 audience members to Silver Spring and employed over 40 local artists.

Angels won Helen Hayes Awards for Outstanding Lighting Design and Lead Actor and received nominations for Outstanding Resident Play; Director; Lead Actor; Supporting Actress; and Canadian Embassy Award for Outstanding Ensemble (both productions). It was the number four pick for “Best of Theatre 2009” in the Post and City Paper listed it in the “2009 Highlights of Theatre.”

This past spring, Forum produced the area premiere of Amazons and Their Men by Jordan Harrison, which City Paper called an “ardent, haunting production [which] immerses us in its speculative mysteries.”

The 2010/11 season, Forum’s second in Silver Spring and seventh overall, opens with Wajdi Mouawad’s Scorched, only the third production of the play to date in the US, continues with Naomi Wallace’s bawdy Black Plague comedy One Flea Spare, and closes with bobrauschenbergamerica by innovative American playwright Charles 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 the Silver  Spring Series.   For more information, please visit www.contradictiondance.com.

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.