Community Partners Get Involved

COMMUNITY PARTNERS

Aurora Theatre Company’s new Community Partners program connects each of our productions to a partner organization, grounding Aurora into the life, work, and culture of our community. Aurora’s artists learn from our partners about the cultural and historical context of the stories we tell, and in return, we offer access to Aurora’s process, spaces, audience, and resources. By sharing resources between Aurora Theatre Company and our partner organizations, we build lasting relationships that further our mission and yours while strengthening our community in Berkeley, the East Bay, and the Bay Area.

Previous partnerships include Berkeley High School, Mills College Theater Department, Bay Area Women’s Theatre Festival, and California College of the Arts. We are always looking for more!

Learn more about becoming a Community Partner!

2023-2024 season community partners

MANAHATTA

Cafe Ohlone

For Manahatta, Aurora is thrilled to partner with mak-'amham/Cafe Ohlone, whose latest iteration, ‘oṭṭoytak, is located outside the Hearst Museum at UC Berkeley.

Cafe Ohlone, the only Ohlone restaurant in the world, opened with two goals: to provide a physical space for their Ohlone people to be represented in the culinary world with a curated space that represents their living culture; and to educate the public, over Ohlone cuisine, in a dignified, honest manner about the original and continuous inhabitants of this land. Learn more at makamham.com.

BORN WITH TEETH

California Shakespeare Theatre (Cal Shakes)

For Born With Teeth, Aurora is thrilled to partner with CalShakes. In this present moment of crisis for the American theatre, supporting local artistic organizations and the communities they serve is vital. CalShakes and Aurora both believe strongly in working together to continue innovating, adapting, and evolving our practices to ensure not only the survival, but the growth and abundance of theater for years to come, and are excited to invite you along for this first step in such a partnership.

Under the leadership of Executive Director Clive Worsley, California Shakespeare Theater (Cal Shakes) enters its 49th season as a nationally recognized leader in drawing on the power of authentic, inclusive storytelling to create more vibrant communities. Serving more than 43,000 people annually, Cal Shakes invites people from all walks of life to make deeply felt connections with our shared humanity through its work onstage, in schools, and with people in non-traditional settings throughout the Bay Area who have little or no access to performing arts. For more information, visit calshakes.org.

2019-2020 SEASON COMMUNITY PARTNERS

EXIT STRATEGY

Berkeley High and the Berkeley Federation of Teachers

BULL IN A CHINA SHOP

Mills College Theater Department and the Bay Area Women’s Theatre Festival

AURORA LOBBY EXHIBITS

This season, as part of our new Community Partners program, Aurora Theatre is partnering with art students at Berkeley High School and California College of the Arts for our lobby exhibits. Each show will feature student works that have a thematic link to the play. Please take a moment to read about our artists here:

EUNHA KIM

Eunha Kim was born and raised in South Korea and immigrated to the U.S. in 2004. She served as an assistant professor at Defense Language Institute in Monterey, CA after receiving her masters degree. She has been painting and drawing for five years. Having struggled with feelings of displacement, cultural clashing, and disorientation between past and present, she constructs a vivid visual vocabulary portraying anxiety, alienation, and a desire to belong. Humor and joy frees the image from homogeneity. Kim uses traditional Korean masks to represent herself as well as the unknown. The theatricality of the masks accentuates and exaggerates the complexities of humanness. Kim poses thought-provoking and challenging questions regarding race, class, and gender.
_{On display during Bull in a China Shop - NOV 8-DEC 8}