Pillsbury House Theater | Breaking Ice

Cultivating courageous dialogue around issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in your workplace.

Keynote | Wednesday, October 4

Breaking Ice, one of Pillsbury House Theatre’s signature, award-winning programs, is an entertaining and thought-provoking theatre experience designed to foster better understanding and communication around difficult issues. Each customized Breaking Ice performance uses drama, humor, poetry and monologue to explore how systemic inequities, unconscious bias and misperceptions show up in relationships among people, creating friction that impedes innovation, motivation and productivity. An organized discussion facilitated by trained Breaking Ice artists follows each performance and uses deep reflection and dialogue as a springboard to positive action.

About Pillsbury House Theater

The Mainstage Season consists of three productions per year with a focus on high-quality, contemporary scripts that confront diverse issues in an urban context, as well as two weekends of performances by early career performance artists who have completed the Naked Stages Fellowship. PHT has garnered great critical acclaim for its provocative staging of both classical texts by celebrated playwrights and more and more new work by emerging artists.

The theatre’s innovative and award-winning community engagement programs include Breaking Ice and the Chicago Avenue Project. Breaking Ice is a multi-racial, socio-political improvisational theatre program that has developed performances and workshops for schools, corporations and community groups since 1996 around issues such as racism, homophobia, sexism, and domestic violence. The program has both an adult performing company and a youth arm, which creates peer education shows around issues such as tobacco-use and violence prevention. The Chicago Avenue Project, based on the 52nd Street Project, is a theatre-mentoring program that brings youth together with adult, professional artists to create original theatre.

Mission

Pillsbury House Theatre’s mission is to create challenging theatre that inspires enduring change towards a just society. Through the Mainstage season and other community engagement programs, Pillsbury House Theatre (PHT) illuminates the differences that make each person unique and the similarities that bring people together, within an artistic environment that promotes understanding and leads to positive action.

We also support two McKnight Community Engaged Artist Fellows each year.

More information is available at breakingice.org and at Pillsbury House Theater.