About Us

Halcyon Theatre was formed to in 2006 to connect people, transform our borders and ascend towards a more just union. 

“Think Big. Build Simple. Act Now.”

That’s a saying from a coffee cup. Not super fancy, but it’s a pretty good reminder of how to grow. It’s easy to get caught up in the trappings of building an organization, and to forget what is really important.

Value is more than buildings and budgets. Connecting our communities and the growth of our artists is more valuable than box-office receipts. (Though we still need to pay some bills to do that.)

Our artistic philosophy is driven by our continuing belief that at every point of human history where there has been an explosion of artistic creativity, it has happened when different cultures and traditions have connected and learned from each other.  If every artist working with an organization looks and thinks the same, it is difficult for them to grow. A homogeneous group produces homogeneous art. 

We try to build an environment for people to create in that is safe, welcoming, encouraging and honest. What we have done since the beginning is advocacy through performance. It took us six years to realize that was what to call it, but it’s been there from the start. 

Inspired by the use of art in the struggle for social justice of Jane Addams and Cesar Chavez, among others, we strive to make our art an agent for change. You can read about our vision here. If you wanna know more about why we do what we do, here’ ya go.

We usually do 2-3 full-scale productions a year, along with the Alcyone Festival. Here’s what we’ve put onstage to date.

For the past five and a half years, we’ve been able to meet thousands of fascinating people in our audiences and we’ve been able to work with hundreds of amazing artists. Because our audience, our artists and our work are so diverse we’ve been able to learn about and see an incredible array of different performance disciplines and traditions. However, often those skills haven’t been able to be seen in our shows. We wanted to find a way to share the awesome. So we created  the Ceyx Series. Performances are once a month, and are also livestreamed.

In addition to our public perfomances we also run our Compass Lab, which is set up to explore different modes of performance and training outside of naturalism, and our Nest writing workshop and lab, which help develop writers and plays.