Community Partners
Re-Storying the West is built on the belief that story is infrastructure, that the stories communities carry are worth celebrating—and worth passing on. Our partners and their projects are the living proof of that. Rooted across the region, they work through music, public art, youth engagement, and place-based practice to make space for voices at the heart of Wyoming’s story. We support them in ways that fit their needs: sometimes as co-organizers, sometimes as funders or amplifiers, always as partners who believe their work matters.
Play/Write
Play/Write, a partnership with Relative Theatrics, is a 21-week theatre and creative writing program for fourth and fifth graders in Albany County schools — and a homecoming of sorts. Theatre practitioner Will Bowling brought the program to Wyoming three years ago, adapted from a model he helped launch in New Orleans in 2010, and each spring it culminates in a public showcase of original student-written plays performed by artists from across the state.
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RT’s PLAY/WRITE program has two main components:
Yearlong playwriting classes during which RT teaching artists work with fifth and sixth grade students on playwriting and performance. Each student writes many original plays and chooses one to be edited and expanded into a full length play, which is published by RT.
A performance Showcase featuring 9 student-written plays presented by professional theatre and dance companies at Buchanan Center for Performing Arts and the University of Wyoming. There are two performances: one in the daytime when students attend on a field trip, and an evening show that is open to the public.
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Re-Storying the West was proud to partner and collaborate with this incredible initiative and creative act. We provided hospitality — food and drinks for the adult actors and crew who gave their time and craft to making young playwrite’s words and stories come alive on stage.
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From RSW team member Aubrey Edwards:
PLAY/WRITE is a the radical act of taking kids seriously, listening to them, appreciating their imagination, and bringing their stories and lived experiences to a larger audience.
There is a palpable moment at the PLAY/WRITE showcase when the room shifts. A professional actor delivers a line — something a ten-year-old wrote, something specific and strange and entirely their own — and the audience, full of kids who came on a field trip and weren't sure what to expect, goes absolutely electric. They recognize it. They know that voice. Maybe it's their friend's. Maybe it sounds like theirs.
That moment is the whole point.
PLAY/WRITE is Relative Theatrics' arts education initiative, now in its third year in Laramie. The program works with students at five elementary schools — Linford, Rock River, Slade, Spring Creek, and Indian Paintbrush — over a twenty-week residency, guiding 4th, 5th, and 6th graders through the full arc of dramatic writing: prewriting, drafting, revision, publication. At the end, each student receives a bound, professionally formatted copy of their own play. And nine of those plays get performed at Buchanan Center for the Performing Arts and the University of Wyoming — by professional theatre and dance companies, in front of a real audience. A truly beautiful thing to witness.
