CULTURAL DIPLOMACY
Art and Statecraft

Company | E was founded for international engagement, most often in parts of the world where Americans are only known by the way they are portrayed on local news. Working most often with the U.S. Department of State, the Company serves as cultural diplomats. The dancers, musicians, storytellers, mentors and craftsmen of Company | E bring people closer together, supporting the belief that there is more that unites us, especially on a people-to-people level, than divides us. 

Company | E's global engagement extends into performance, capacity building, social entrepreneurship, education and, increasingly, into the new toolbox of 3D World Building.    

We are asked to go to places where we are a bridge against the geopolitical divide -- In April of 2015, Company | E staged the first cultural programs supported by the reopening US Embassy in Havana, Cuba in that new, though short-lived, era of diplomatic cooperation between the US and Cuba. 

Over the last decade we created half a dozen extended programs in Russia before Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine took us into a deeper engagement with the Ukrainian struggle for freedom. 

The Company has brought its art, its talent, and its commitment to dialogue and mutual understanding to the Diplomatic fore on five continents in partnership with the U.S. Department of State.

A partial list of Company E's programs with the Department encompass Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Serbia, Madagascar, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Egypt, Russia, China, Cuba, Turkmenistan, Uruguay, Algeria, the Palestinian Territories, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, the Republic of Georgia, Armenia and the United Kingdom.

"This is the work the Company was built to do," writes Paul Gordon Emerson, the Company's Executive and Co-Artistic Director. Cultural Diplomacy is not about getting a plane, doing a few concerts or a few dance classes and coming home. It's about trying to engage, to share, to listen and to learn. Its about the time spent working side-by-side, not from across the divide between audience and artist."

What happens on a Cultural Diplomacy Program? They're unique experiences, country-by-country and often day-by-day. Here's an inside look at just a few.

Situated to the immediate South of the Russian Federation and immediately north of Iran, bordered by the Black and Caspian Seas, the South Caucasus nations of Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan are at the nexus of countless years of conflict and possibility. Over a two year period the Company is working with the Smithsonian Institution and the U.S. Embassies in Baku, Yerevan and Tbilisi to bring social entrepreneurs from each country to the U.S. for extended internships and training in their chosen areas of Social Entrepreneurship. The goal is to support the next generation of leaders who seek to make a difference in their home countries alongside engagement that breaks down barriers between their nations.

Perhaps no single diplomatic transition since the end of the Cold War was as dramatic as the normalization of diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba. The deepest and coldest holdover from that Cold War era, our neighbor 90 miles to the south was, and remains, a flashpoint.

While the Trump Administration has undone much of what President Obama's normalization was meant to do, the excitement, and the profound possibilities, were the reason the Department of State came to Company | E to be the first cultural program to come to Cuba under the U.S. flag in 60 years.

The Company spent two weeks in Havana in 2015, breaking barrier after barrier, performing and teaching in places which would have been impossible a month earlier.  A year later, Company | E returned to Cuba, this time moving outside of Havana and dancing in cities which hadn't seen an American since 1960.

The Company has deep hopes of returning, and building on, the work done. The video below offers a glimpse into Company | E's days in Cuba.

The challenges faced by the people of Georgia in their pursuit of democracy are endless.

When Company | E was asked to create a new partnership with, and a new evening-length work for the Movement Theater of Tbilisi, Paul Gordon Emerson, Company | E's Executive and Co-Artistic Director created a show which combined Georgian traditions with 1960s New York, highlighting political and societal challenges in Georgia today with the U.S. 50 years ago. Bringing in a U.S. choreographic and muisical team, working with two dozen Georgian artists, the outcome is a show which has become a mainstay of the Movement Theater's repertoire.

The language might be the same, but little else is between Uruguay and Cuba. The U.S. could not have more different relations with these two nations. Yet the goal was very much the same in our trips to Uruguay. Meet. Engage. Teach. Learn. Exchange.

Company | E's three week program in Montevideo centered on our signature BROADWAY BOUND program, an interdisciplinary music, dance, theater engagement in which half a dozen members of the Company and our musical team bring the magic of the Broadway stage to in-country artists. In Montevideo that meant a full orchestra, a choir of 100 and a dance cast of 50, drawing from all over Uruguay to create the wonder of the Great White Way in the Southern Hemisphere. 

Russia. Nowhere has culture played a more critical role in creating and maintaining dialogue. Throughout the Cold War Culture was a key two-way tool that attempted to humanize two populations separated by a profound political and military divide. Until the Russian invasion of Ukraine n February '22  culture held its place along the path to understanding and dialogue. That dialogue, like so much of Russia's relationship to the world, fell by the wayside with the invasion.

Before the Russian Invation of Ukraine, Company | E had made six extended trips to Russia, with four in the Urals region since 2015, working in a dozen cities large and small, creating workshops, concerts and programs to use the magic of American art to bridge the divide perpetuated by distance and dissonant media. 

In 2022 the Company was scheduled to  return to Orenburg to write and stage an entirely new musical for the Musical Comedy Theater, crafting an orinal story set to a suite of the great Broadway songs.

Here's a snapshot of a single day in Yekaterinburg, part of a series of videos ED/Co-AD and film-maker Paul Emerson created of our time in the dead of winter in the heart of Russia.

These four takes on our work overseas are just a glimpse. There are literally dozens of additional programs to explore.