Page 26 - BusinessWest July 24, 2023

CREATIVE ECONOMY >>
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JULY 24, 2023 << CREATIVE ECONOMY >> BusinessWest
Art and
Soul
Double Edge Theatre Reflects a Holistic View of the World
BY JOSEPH BEDNAR
[email protected]
ouble Edge Theatre isn’t the easiest organization to describe. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s not an entity that lends itself to one obvious description. And that’s a positive thing,
said Adam Bright, the company’s producing executive
director.
“If you ask a different Double Edge ensemble member or anyone
who works here, they’ll have a slightly different answer, I would imag- ine,” Bright said. “But for me, it’s simply that we’re trying to live together with an understanding, with certain agreements, about how we want to leave the world after we’ve stepped through it.”
That said, “we’re definitely an arts organization first, and everybody here is extremely creatively minded,” he noted. “We all come from different educational backgrounds, different parts of the world, we
all grew up in different places, but we’ve all been magnetized to this strange little place.
“Everything you’ll see here comes from that seed of creative think- ing,” Bright went on. “The way we’ve renovated the buildings that could
no longer be used for dairy farming and were repurposed. The way we create theater and art, and how we integrate that with our work with conservationists, the Native peoples of this area, and how they approach the land. It’s a holistic way of thinking and being.”
Double Edge was born in Boston in 1982 but moved to Ashfield, a bucolic Franklin County community, in 1997, repurposing, as Bright noted, a former dairy farm into a theater company that stages perfor- mances, including ‘spectacles’ the audience follows across the grounds (more on those later), but also hosts training programs, workshops, and much more.
It does so while centered on values that are painted in large letters on one of the property’s buildings.
“Our vision is to prioritize imagination in times of creative, emo- tional, spiritual, and political uncertainty,” the message reads. “Our mis- sion is to pursue authenticity, interaction, and identity with whomever is seeking creative, emotional, spiritual, and political clarity. Our art is grounded in a rigorous ensemble aesthetic unfolded in dream, imagery, metaphor, mystery, and symbolism. Our work is created and sustained within an open, honest, meaningful, relevant shared experience. We call this ‘living culture.’”
Photo by Douglas Mason