This spring, the Pig Iron Theatre Company received a $150,000 Knight Arts Challenge grant to strengthen Philadelphia’s contemporary performing arts scene by launching a two-year training program for actors and directors in the Crane Old School space in the Fishtown area. This week, the Philadelphia Inquirer profiled the project and its founders and artistic directors Quinn Bauriedel, Dito van Reigersberg and Dan Rothenberg.

The Inquirer writes of Pig Iron’s conception: “After teaching for more than a decade, the desire to develop something deeper than a weekend workshop had grown in Bauridel. He saw his theater students from Swarthmore and Princeton leaving to pursue their interest in physical and ensemble theater at schools in Paris, London, and beyond, and wanted to develop a local program to keep emerging talent closer to home.  Not only did the Pigs seek to pass on what they had learned from Lecoq – his theories on movement, physicality, and “the neutral mask” – with their own diabolical twists, they and Bauridel wanted to teach Pig Iron’s philosophy that an actor is the creator of his/her material, and how to convey that to producers and stagers.”

Click here to read the complete story and here for info about the Pig Iron Theatre Company. Pig Iron’s next show “Twelfth Night, or What You Will” will be performed at this September’s Philadelphia Live Arts Festival (the Festival is also a Knight Arts grantee).