RESEARCH-BASED THEATRE - choose an image & read about the play Farmscape
PATV Channel 18
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15th October 2012
Live From Prairie Lights : Mary Swander presents "Farmscape"
Iowa Poet Laureate, Mary Swander reads with a group of students and authors from their collaborative drama Farmscape, which has been incorporated into the ne...
FARM AID
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11th October 2012
Farmscape, a play about the challenges of farming
Big shout out to Mary Swander, Iowa poet laureate and English prof at Iowa State University, and her students, who in 2007 created “Farmscape: The Changing Rural Landscape.” “Farmscape” is a grassroots documentary play based on Swander’s students’ own extensive interviews with Iowa farmers, big and small, conventional and organic, young and old. Those farmer voices are embodied on stage from the opening farm auction scene, and the play is built on their own words and dramatizes their own experie
GRIST
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1st October 2012
Drama for your farmer: A play captures the demise of the small farm
In late 2007, Mary Swander, Iowa’s poet laureate and a professor at Iowa State University, assigned her students a verbatim play about the challenges farmers face.
“I wanted them to learn the complexity of the farming issue, how political, how contentious it is,” she recalls.
Fanning out across the state, the students, many of whom had never set foot on a farm, conducted lengthy interviews with farmers big and small, and immersed themselves, literally, in the agrarian world of livestock, slaug
