Celebrating Bethlehem's Southside Culture
From September 27th-October 1st, Touchstone Theatre held its fifth annual Festival Unbound, a hyper-local arts celebration full of community workshops, theatrical performances, and visual art exhibitions. Since its inception in 2019, Festival Unbound has used the arts to explore the identity of the Lehigh Valley. Guided by this mission, the festival seeks to understand our…
PC: Emma Ackermman On October 24th, Basement Poetry hosted a live poetry reading at Touchstone Theatre that Diedre Van Walters, the MC of the event, framed as a form of protest. As Van Walters put it at the start of the event, these artists and poets did not share their thoughts and experiences, their ways…
On October 2nd, Touchstone Theatre hosted their annual “Homecoming” event as part of Festival Unbound 2020. In some ways celebration, in other ways a touchpoint for resistance, this event highlighted local Black voices of the Lehigh Valley. The event included local musicians and artists, as well as poetry readings and opportunities to engage in activism…
As part of the ongoing programming for Festival Unbound 2020, Touchstone Theatre put together a socially-distanced concert, called “Songs of Hope and Resistance,” to champion “diversity, community, and freedom” in the Lehigh Valley. The Touchstone ensemble felt that the pandemic and the urgent struggle for racial justice must be marked by music. Music provides our…
As part of their digital events series during the Covid-19 period, Touchstone Theatre is offering “deep listeners of the Lehigh Valley and beyond” an absurd, hilarious, and suspenseful radio play called “Iso/Nation Presents.” The radio play is part of Touchstone’s “Fresh Voices” program and is made by Sean Patrick Cassidy and Adam Ercolani, Touchstone Theatre’s…
Twenty years ago in 1999, Bethlehem’s Touchstone Theatre created an arts and cultural festival to help the community through the devastating closure of Bethlehem Steel. “Steel Festival, The Art of an Industry” aimed to celebrate everything Bethlehem had become during the years in which the plant was in operation. Two decades after the first Steel…
To open the recent Festival UnBound, Touchstone Theatre staged the play Prometheus/Redux at Lehigh Valley Charter High School for the Arts from Oct. 4-6. Long term residents of Bethlehem will know that this production connects with the play Steelbound produced in 1999. Touchstone Theatre created the 1999 production to give residents the opportunity to process…
One year after Bethlehem Steel shut down in 1998, Touchstone Theatre hosted Steel Festival: The Art of an Industry, which created and assembled several works of art and cultural projects to help the community cope with the loss. As many in the city worried about the economic future of the city, lost jobs and pensions,…