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TJT was founded in 1978 by Corey Fischer, Albert Greenberg and Naomi Newman. In 1987, Helen Stoltzfus joined the ensemble. In 1998 Aaron Davidman joined and in 2001, Eric Rhys Miller became an associate artist. Karine Koret, who first apprenticed with the company in 1997 and acted in several productions in the 2003-04 season, will join TJT as an artist-in-residence for the 2004-05 season. The company's longevity confirms the vitality of its work. That vitality comes, in no small measure, from TJT's willingness to take risks in both the form and content of the theatre it creates. TJT has created scores of original works for the theatre. The sources for these works have ranged from the legends of the Hasidim to the assassination of Trotsky; from Yiddish poetry to the reclamation of women's wisdom; from the healing nature of storytelling to the challenge of interfaith marriage and from the politics of the Middle East to African-American/Jewish relations. TJT does not deal with social or political issues in isolation. It searches for the living images that burn themselves into our consciousness. It recognizes that the roots of theatre lie in the realm of the mythic, the sacred and the communal; that theatre can be an instrument of healing for people and cultures. TJT has performed in over sixty cities world-wide, including Chicago, New York, Berlin, Oslo, Jerusalem and Whitesburg, Kentucky. Members of the ensemble also teach solo performance, improvisation and ensemble creation privately and through TJT's professional training programs. In addition, the company has produced a 4-part series for Public Radio International, entitled Heart of Wisdom: Audio Explorations in Jewish Culture. The impulse to found the company grew out of a shared desire to create works of theatre that, while grounded in the specifics of the Jewish experience, would be accessible to audiences of diverse backgrounds. Fischer had been acting in film, television and theatre since 1968, just before founding TJT, he had been working in New York with Joseph Chaikin (the "Winter Project" of 1977 and 1978 and Chaikin's production of The Dybbuk at The Public Theater). Albert Greenberg, a singer and composer, had been increasingly drawn to experimental theatre as a more appropriate arena for his explorations in music and language. Naomi Newman, a classically trained singer with a strong background in Jewish culture, had been acting in Los Angeles theater and television while pursuing a second career in psychotherapy. Forging a theatrical style that was influenced by the American avant-garde theatre of the 1960's, vaudeville, liturgy, and storytelling, and drawing on themes from Jewish history, legend, literature and folk tradition, the company developed three pieces that were co-written by Greenberg, Fischer and Newman, performed by Greenberg and Fischer and directed by Newman. Between 1978 and 1982, TJT was based in Los Angeles where it performed at the L.A. Actors' Theatre (forerunner of the L.A. Theatre Center) and The Mark Taper Forum Laboratory and other venues. The company toured extensively to festivals, performing arts centers theatres and universities, including the New Theatre Festival in Baltimore, Theatre for the New City in New York and Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco. In 1982, the company relocated to San Francisco, hired its first full-time managing director and embarked on its first tour abroad (Holland, Denmark and Israel). More U.S. touring followed as TJT sought the widest possible variety of audiences. The company performed in New York, Boston, Kentucky, Georgia, Maine, Utah, and California. In these years, the company formed an ongoing relationship with Roadside Theatre of Whitesburg Kentucky and The Junebug Theatre Project of New Orleans. This alliance contributed to the founding of An American Festival Project and, most recently, led to the collaboration between TJT and Junebug on Crossing the Broken Bridge. In 1984, Naomi Newman joined the ensemble as a performer and, for the first time, the company collaborated with an outside director and a dramaturg (Michael Posnick and Susan Griffin, respectively). The piece that emerged in 1985, Berlin, Jerusalem and the Moon, was an examination of the condition of German Jewish intellectuals during the Weimar period juxtaposed with the American Jewish struggle for identity. Deepening the vocabulary that TJT had been developing, Berlin, Jerusalem and the Moon used masks and puppets, extended physical and vocal expression, extant and original music to create a work of enormous power and density that drew enthusiastic responses in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, Oslo, Stockholm, Berlin, and Vienna. In 1986, the company embarked on a new direction. Fischer and Newman each began developing solo works while Greenberg collaborated with guest artist Helen Stoltzfus on a work-in-progress. Out of this period of experimentation Snake Talk, Urgent Messages from the Mother, Newman's solo, emerged and became part of the company's permanent repertory. In 1987, TJT had the good fortune to collaborate with director Joseph Chaikin and dramaturg Mira Rafalowicz during a six week "Special Project" supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Although the results of this effort did not become part of the repertory, the experience of working with Chaikin and Rafalowicz marked the beginning of a period of artistic revitalization during which company members continued collaborating and studying with a wide range of theatre artists including director/dramaturgs Martha Boesing and Mark Samuels, the Roy Hart Theatre of France and Sweden 's Jordcirkus. Other developments during this period including the addition of Helen Stoltzfus to the permanent ensemble, the production of Bruce Myers' two-actor version of The Dybbuk (the first time TJT worked with an extant script), the creation of Heart of the World in collaboration with Martha Boesing, and continued touring of the highly successful Snake Talk. Moreover, the company began forging alliances with several resident theatres around the country such as Chicago's Wisdom Bridge, The Eureka Theatre Company in San Francisco and The Group Theatre in Seattle. In 1990 TJT became one of the first American theatres to tour post-Warsaw-pact Eastern Europe bringing Heart of the World- Greenberg and Stoltzfus' exploration of intermarriage- and a revival of The Last Yiddish Poet, one of our earliest creations, to Bratislava and Prague in Czechoslovakia and to the Festival of Open Theatre in Wroclaw, Poland. Polish and Czech audiences and critics marveled at the sort of cultural pluralism that could give rise to a company like Traveling Jewish Theatre. In a climate of growing divisiveness, the notion that cultural differences could be sources of celebration rather than enmity had an undeniably tonic value. In 1991, the company entered the field of radio production. The California Humanities Council (with matching funds from The National Endowment for the Humanities) provided support for a series of sixty-minute programs on various aspects of Jewish culture explored in relationship to world culture. The series, Heart of Wisdom, been distributed by American Public Radio and broadcast on several hundred public radio stations across the country. All programs have been produced, written and narrated by ensemble members, in collaboration with independent radio producer, Claire Schoen. During this same period, TJT founding member Naomi Newman and John O' Neal of the Junebug Theatre Project of New Orleans, began a long term collaboration with director Steven Kent on a piece exploring African-American/Jewish relations. The piece that evolved, Crossing the Broken Bridge, uses the lens of African-American/Jewish relations to examine the forces that divide and unite the human community. In several cities, such as Detroit and Los Angeles, the piece was co-produced by organizations in the African -American and Jewish communities who found themselves working together for the first time in many years. The piece had a double premiere at San Francisco's Life on the Water Theatre and at the Oakland Ensemble Theatre in June, 1993.