How I Learned What I Learned

In association with the UCLA Beloved Community Initiative (BCI), the Los Angeles Inner City Cultural Center (LAICCC) partnered with the African Grove Institute for the Arts, Inc. (AGIA), and CHARTOR Entertainment, LLC to present the 25th Anniversary Retrospective AGIA Town Hall which was originally held at the Los Angeles Theatre Center In 1996. Pulitzer Prize® and Tony Award® winning playwright August Wilson, also a LAICCC alumnus, prior to co-founding AGIA, called for a National Black Theater Summit at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire to discuss the issue of equitable funding of black theaters, artists, and arts organizations. For those unable to attend that conference, August and summit leaders were invited to convene a Town Hall meeting in Los Angeles. It was there that the formation of AGIA was publicly announced. The outgrowth of the Town Hall was followed by two California African American Theatre Roundtables and eventually the first AGIA California State Chapter was formed. In homage to August, his and AGIA’s efforts to gather people together for a common cause, Inner City worked with CHARTOR and AGIA to present the Wilson play “HOW I LEARNED WHAT I LEARNED” a one-man play written by Wilson and starring Rocky Carroll (“NCIS”). A post-show discussion utilizing the 7-principals of True Storytelling® to guide and engage audience interaction in the story being shared took place at this reading. As a collective, we discovered the 7-Principals of the True Storytelling Institute®, and ATS™, i.e., Answerability, Togethertelling, and Sensemaking components could be “restoried” as “How We Learned What We Learned”. This was the second leg of our DEIG journey engaging the community in storytelling utilizing arts and cultural artifacts in a safe place as the entry point and safe space to guide communities in a cross-cultural communication conversation that might serve as an effective change agent in both individual and collective societal situations.