An Interactive Theatre & Storytelling Performance

by Window Seat’s theatre company, Brave Practice.

Thursday, October 3, 2024, 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.

The Evergreen State College Children’s Center

2824 Fireweed Drive, Olympia, WA 98505

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Part of Return to Evergreen Alumni Weekend

Driftwood Daycare Exhibit Activation Event

Evergreen Alumni, Students, and Friends of the Children's Center

‍"That's What Community is All About" is a performance by Window Seat that activates one of the origin stories apart of our Community Roots Oral History Project collection, Driftwood Daycare, which was a childcare center at Evergreen founded in 1971. The daycare moved from the small abandoned farmhouse located on Driftwood Road in the mid-’80s to the current location of the Evergreen’s Children’s Center. The exhibit panels and audio stories will be on display at the Children’s Center and our theatre company, Brave Practice, will engage the public in exploring project themes of community-based learning, collective organizing, and access to shared physical space. Come join!

About Us

Window Seat is a community nonprofit oral history and storytelling organization in Washington's South Sound region. We launched Community Roots in 2023 to document and elevate our community's rich history of activism and organizing that often intersects with local arts/cultural initiatives. Featuring artists, organizers, and activists, the project documents “micro-histories” or oral histories about specific moments, organizing efforts, or projects that are important to our collective history in the South Sound. The project shares wisdom from local visionaries central to these efforts and activates their stories through an exhibit and ongoing series of community gatherings, workshops, and performances. Through engaging with these stories, we aim to create opportunities for intergenerational conversations, nurturing community wisdom, and imagining possibilities of tomorrow.

2023-24 Community Roots Project

Community Roots is about how people come together to make change and create new possibilities for themselves and their neighbors. The project highlights individual contributions toward a collective effort or vision for the future, amplifying the vital and diverse ways we each contribute to our local ecosystem of creativity, mutual aid, and social change. As a community-based effort, we invite public involvement in all aspects of the project – from conducting interviews and editing them into short audio stories to community mapping, curating an exhibit, planning community gatherings, and more. In 2023, our cohort of community oral historians worked on documenting three micro-histories. This event centers on the origin story of the Evergreen Childcare Center, formerly known as Driftwood Daycare.

Project Themes and Essential Questions

Community Roots explores themes of community organizing, community-based learning, and access to physical space.

• How do people come together to care for their neighbors, to create beauty and belonging in times of hardship, and to activate a shared vision for their community?
• How do the origins of organizing efforts and local arts and culture initiatives intersect with social justice issues? 
• How can we identify and adapt to the needs for physical space? What is the potential to share, repurpose, and co-own space?
• What does it mean to be “educated?” How does learning happen in communities in informal spaces and places through sharing stories and lived experience?
• How can we evolve and grow as a community without tokenizing, displacing, or erasing individuals and communities?

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Suggested donation: $5-$25. Please email meg@windowseatmedia.org with questions.