Community Engagement
Theater at MIT uses creative practices as a pathway to making meaning from our increasingly complex and rapidly changing world. We collaborate with neighboring institutions, organizations, and individuals to foster a greater sense of connection between MIT and the greater public.
The Gus Solomons Visiting Artist Series was developed to bring a contemporary dance artist to the MIT Theater Arts program in order to share and create their work with students and MIT’s broader community.
Gus Solomons Jr. (1938-2023) was a groundbreaking queer BIPOC American dance artist and graduate of MIT (Architecture, 1964). As a seminal part of the performing arts at MIT, Solomons offers a legacy that continues to inspire MIT students and faculty.
In the spring of 2024, the series launched in a spectacular manner with contemporary choreographer Ogemdi Ude developing and sharing her project Major with the MIT community. Major is a contemporary dance work exploring Black Femme Identities and Majorette dancing. Over the course of a week, Ude and her team not only researched and developed a piece based in an exploration of Majorette Dancing, but guest taught Choreography classes, held workshops for the Black Student Union and LGBTQ+ community, and presented a work in progress showing of their piece that at one point had the entire audience on stage dancing.
This workshop had a significant reach across the institution. Members of our community who knew of Majorette Dancing had the opportunity to dig into a form of great significance to them. Those new to the genre had an opportunity to gain new knowledge of a uniquely American dance form with a long history and deep cultural significance. The finished piece premiered this past summer in Hamburg, Germany, and will have its American premiere this November at New York Live Arts.
The 2025/26 Gus Solomons Jr. Visiting Artist Series brought together three-time Bessie-nominated artist Stefanie Batten Bland and Emmy Award-winning composer and violinist Daniel Bernard Roumain to present the World Premiere of Close Up, an intimate new concert of music and dance where sound and movement entwine to reveal the stories our bodies carry.
In addition to guest artists, members of our group model their own meaning making practices through their creative output. During the summer of 2025, Lecturer Blythe de Oliveira Foster conceived and directed the immersive, community event Saudades in the lobby spaces of Building W97 as an alternative memorial celebration for the artist’s Vovó (grandmother), Saudades opened a creative space where attendees moved through an interactive, tropicália-inspired memory house filled with theatrical prompts calling up the axé (spirit/energy) of loved people, places, and experiences.
Visitors engaged with a variety of pop-up activities of their choice, shaping the community work by sharing their reflections, writing recipes and messages to loved ones, recording video stories, painting nails, listening to local samba bands, and eating homemade Brazilian orange cake with collage art by San Francisco-based visual artist Crystal Vielula, design and engineering from local artists Joseph Lark-Riley, Kevin Fulton, and MIT alumna Emi Grady-Willis, and creative contributions from current MIT students.
