Selected Chronological List
1976-1977 "Urban Appalachian Tour," theater and film tour to major Midwestern cities with large Appalachian populations.
1976 Co-founder of Alternate ROOTS, a coalition of grassroots performing artists in the southeastern United States.
1978 Residency at Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City (Red Fox/Second Hangin').1981 "The Other America" Festivals, Sweden, Denmark (South of the Mountain).
1982 San Francisco "Peoples Theater Festival" (Pretty Polly).
1983 "Tell Me A Story, Sing Me A Song" festival with Junebug Productions and A Traveling Jewish Theater, Anniston, Alabama, and Whitesburg, Kentucky; 30-minute video documentary is distributed nationally.
1984 Co-founder of the American Festival Project, a national coalition of performing artists collaborating with communities to make conversations about issues of race, class, and injustice an exciting part of the community’s life.
1984 Ongoing Ensembles Award, National Endowment for the Arts (eight awards granted nationally).
1987 Los Angeles International Theater Festival (South of the Mountain).
1988 Statewide North Dakota Tour, connecting the stories of participating communities through daily reporting of the tour on public radio (Pretty Polly and Mountain Tales & Music).
1989 London International Festival of Theatre, "Pine Mountain Trilogy." Subsequent tour to the coalmining valleys of Wales, attracting international media attention as a result of a bitter coal strike taking place back home in southwest Virginia.
1990-1993 Three-year residency at Cornell University.
1992 Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund five-year grant for the theater’s leadership in diversifying American theater audiences.
1992-1993 United States and Czech Republic performance exchange with theaters in Prague and Brno (Leaving Egypt). Roadside meets President (and playwright) Vaclav Havel, who attends a performance.1993-1996 Residency in Dayton, Ohio involving more than 100 community story circles, the creation of a Dayton stories archive, and the creation of two popular and critically acclaimed Dayton plays.
1996 Residency at The College of William and Mary. Roadside member Dudley Cocke is named Eminent Professor of Theater.
1996-1999 Three-year residency at Arizona State University involving 35 campus and community partners as well as Idiwanan An Chawe from Zuni, New Mexico. Participant in Baltic Dance Festival, Poland
2000-2001 Two-year residency in Patapsco, Maryland involving an oral history collection project and the creation and presentation of five community performances.
2001 Roadside Theater appears on Kentucky Public Television's "In Performance at the Governor's Mansion" (Mountain Tales & Music).
2002 Roadside member Dudley Cocke co-creates and co-directs Why the Cowboy Sings for the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.
2002 Eighth Annual Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities (Shared Ideas Realized) awarded to Roadside member Dudley Cocke.
2002 Roadside Theater, in partnership with Appalshop's "Voices from Home" project, conducts a six-month community-building residency with the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts in San Francisco's Iron Triangle. The residency results in the creation and presentation of Stranger at the Table, four different site-based community performances of the same name featuring the stories and music of three diverse cultures--Mien, Mexican-American, and African-American.
2002 Roadside, Pregones Theater, and Junebug Productions perform Promise of a Love Song and conduct workshops as a part of "The First Annual Tamejavi Festival."2002 Outstanding Alumni Award from the University of Virginia's College at Wise presented to Roadside member Ron Short.
2003 "Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni--Appalachia Collaboration" receives the Silver Addy of Excellence from the American Advertising Federation
2003 Roadside and Idiwanan An Chawe premiere Zuni Meets Appalachia in New York City at the National Museum of the American Indian and in Washington, DC at the National Museum of American History.
2003-04 Roadside produces two workshop performances of Betsy, a collaboration with jazz musician Beegie Adair, at the Nashville Jazz Workshop in Tennessee.
2004 Roadside playwright/composer Ron Short collaborates with community members, students, and faculty at the University of Virginia's College at Wise to compose the score for Miners and Millhands, a musical; a part of the Continental Harmonies project.
2005 Roadside receives the Paul Green New Play Award for its musical Betsy, a collaboration with Beegie Adair.
2006 Roadside creates a play, Thousand Kites, that tells the stories of prisoners, corrections officers, and their families. The play is one part of "Thousand Kites," a web-based national criminal justice dialogue project.2008 Roadside collaborates with Pregones Theater to further develop and produce Betsy in The Bronx with three performers and a five-piece Latin jazz ensemble.
2009 Roadside receives the Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theater.
2010 Roadside’s Director, Dudley Cocke, participates in two discouraging meetings at the White House to discuss arts and culture policy.
2011-12 Roadside conducts three community cultural residencies -- in Philadelphia, PA with Liberian Refugees; in Albuquerque, NM with grassroots groups working on criminal justice issues; and in Big Stone Gap, VA with an agency on aging incorporating new media into their programs.
2013-2014 Roadside conducts a community cultural residency with the Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail and Natural Tunnel State Park, Duffield, Virginia to create a new play, Frontier Muster and Trade Faire, and a new theatrical form.