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…
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…
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,…