His workshop on writing plays and performing pieces was so incredibly engaging and useful. I was terrified and self-conscious of such exercises at first, but Dan made sure none of us felt judged. It didn’t take long until I was having a blast.
Engage your community by bringing forward its stories and truths.
Dan’s playful exercises help people explore and express themselves through art.
There’s no pre-requisite—whatever level of experience in theater and writing, all are welcome and encouraged to participate.
Add a workshop to any performance to deeply integrate Dan’s visit to your community.
In this one-day workshop, participants will explore themselves deeply; write narratives with truth, honesty, and compassion; and can present them at an open-mic event in the evening.
Maximum Workshop Participants: No limit.
In this two-day intensive, Dan guides participants through the process of creating short plays, including exercises in playwriting, acting, and performance. The participants will also collaborate in small groups to create staged readings and performances of their plays.
The compressed nature of the intensive teaches participants about collaboration, teamwork, communication, time management, and quick thinking.
Maximum Workshop Participants: 24.
Dan Bernitt makes performance work that puts audiences inside systems of belief and asks how ordinary people, inside ordinary institutions, arrive at cruelty, crisis, or collapse. His shows don’t explain these systems from the outside. They inhabit them, finding the internal logic that makes violence, conformity, and self-destruction feel, for a moment, completely reasonable. That’s what makes them useful long after the curtain comes down.
His solo performances Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods, Phi Alpha Gamma, and Thanks for the Scabies, Jerkface! have been presented at universities, festivals, and performance series throughout the United States and in Ireland. Phi Alpha Gamma enters the interior world of a college fraternity reckoning with homophobia and complicity. Yelling at Bananas in Whole Foods tracks how certainty curdles into isolation. Both have generated sustained conversation on campuses about masculinity, belonging, and the cultures institutions build without meaning to.
Bernitt has taught creative writing at Amherst College, Christian Brothers University, and the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. He founded Sawyer House Press, publishing the debut poetry collections of writers who later found homes at Bloomsbury, HarperCollins, Northwestern University Press, and Penguin Random House. His writing has been supported by an Al Smith Fellowship from the Kentucky Arts Council and a residency from the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. His work is documented in For the Gay Stage (McFarland, 2017), a comprehensive history of gay theatrical performance from Aristophanes to the present, as a bridge between solo performance pioneers and the multi-character work that followed.
He lives in Memphis, where he continues to make work that arrives before institutions know they need it.
You encouraged me to find my voice in a way that I had never imagined. Your prompts and speeches led me to new edges I didn’t know existed for myself, and I’m glad to say that I have confidence in tackling them after working with you.
Dan let me see that even if I’m writing about a topic people would turn away from or would hate me for it that it was okay to write it. He let me know that I can write about my culture even when most people would shut me out and ignore the words that I had written. He encouraged me to write more about it and let the world know that I cannot silence my voice.
Dan was honest and encouraged all of us to open up and be honest with ourselves and in our writing. This helped not only our art, but also our mindsets.
Dan broke down walls we didn’t even know we had, got us to feel strong emotions, and then channeled those emotions into our writing. He taught us how to dig deep within ourselves so that our audience can feel what we feel.
Now booking for the 2021-2022 academic year
Submit the form below, and we can discuss your programming needs.
All that’s required to start a conversation is your name, email address, and phone number—but if you have everything else, that’s great, too!