With support from the California Arts Council, El Teatro Campesino is offering another year of its free “Community Circulos: Creators In Community” program: a year long series of storytelling workshops open to residents of Santa Clara, San Benito, Monterey, and Santa Cruz Counties. Aligning with the seasons, four sets of community workshops will be themed around: Elders, Storytellers, Children, and a culminating “Flor y Canto.” Funds will support the hiring of multidisciplinary artists from around the region to co-facilitate this series of workshops, the hiring of an experienced program manager, and programmatic costs associated with the creative sessions.
Founded by Luis Valdez in 1965 as the cultural arm of the UFW movement, El Teatro Campesino (ETC) functions as a multi-generational theatre company. For fifty-nine years now, ETC has been at the forefront of using theatre as an artistic generator of social change and continues to empower artists and communities from its home in San Juan Bautista. The spheres of ETC’s work can be summarized into three core areas: professional arts, arts education and community arts. Within these areas, ETC runs an annual theatre season, a developmental lab to create new work, regional/statewide tours, cultural festivals for Latino holidays, community based art making and arts education programming within schools.

