Jessica Litwak is a performance-based activist who seeks peaceful solutions to conflicts on local and global levels, as well as greater openness towards minorities and refugees. She shows that by using theatre to process concerns, clarification and problem-solving is more likely to occur. The project is supported by the prestigious U.S. Department of State’s Arts Envoy program and the U.S. Embassy Prague. Jessica Litwak, will present her socially engaged theater project in Prague, Brno, České Budějovice, Pilsen, and Ústí nad Labem over a three-week period in February and early March. Her project is focused on theatrical exploration of the subject of fear, particularly fear of those who are different than ourselves, by presenting thoughts on public reaction towards immigrants and refugees.
Jessica Litwak is a registered therapist and qualified instructor of playback theater, psychodrama, sociodrama and Theatre of the Oppressed. She is the Artistic Director of the H.E.A.T. Collective and the New Generation Theatre Ensemble. She has taught and performed socially-engaged theatre in many theaters and universities in the United States and throughout the world (Iraq, Lebanon, India, Palestine, Israel, Turkey, Hungary, Egypt and the United Kingdom and Italy).
Litwak is a key member of Theatre Without Borders and the recipient of U.S. Fulbright scholarship. Litwak defines the term socially engaged theater as performances, which react to a situation, demographics, mission, problem or idea, act in the interests of art, explores particular community or purpose, uses theatrical tools for eliciting personal or societal changes while operating on a high artistic level. Jessica shows how individual instruments of H.E.A.T. (Healing, Education, Activism and Theatre) interact to create high-quality theatrical performances.
