2010 Director’s Statement

We're an indigenous ensemble located in the coalfields of the Appalachian Mountains. Our home community is comprised of parts of the four states of Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee. For the past 120 years, our region's economy has been organized by absentee energy conglomerates and marked by high rates of poverty. Culture has been our saving grace. So many pickers and singers and songwriters and storytellers have risen from these hills that just outside my window I can see Country Music Highway, Route 23. Here is a rich place from which to make theater.

From Roadside's inception in 1975, during the federal War on Poverty, our purpose has been to help our local life become aware of itself. With our audiences, we explore Appalachia's strengths and weaknesses, its heroes and villians and, most importantly, its complexity. To accomplish its goals, Roadside has created the first body of Appalachian plays, which we tour nationally, and honed a community cultural development residency process to help communities anywhere use their cultural assets for self-development. Over the course of 35 years, Roadside has conducted hundreds of such residencies and performed its original plays in 43 states and Europe. Along the way, we have created a dozen innovative, often bilingual, intercultural plays with other indigenous theater companies. We continue to explore how drama, in its many shapes and forms, contributes to democracy and to the health of communities in Appalachia and away.

Dudley Cocke