D-Tours is a partnership with the San Diego Unified School District and beyond to bring LGBTQIA+-themed shows to middle and high school campuses across San Diego Unified School District and community centers and other performance venues across San Diego County. This traveling program provides an important opportunity to meet the students where they live and work with a powerful performance exploring LGBTQIA+ themes and issues, providing exposure to the theater arts for youth from a broad spectrum of socioeconomic backgrounds. D-Tours reaches hundreds of students annually in San Diego County and is provided FREE of charge to schools.
At Diversionary Theatre, we believe it’s important to provide students from diverse backgrounds with the opportunity to experience live theatre, as well as have access to content that explores LGBTQIA+ themes and issues. That’s why we created D-Tours, which allows us to connect with schools and students otherwise unable to participate in our Student Matinee series or other programming we offer as a way to ensure that educators across San Diego have the opportunity to provide their students with this unique experience.
About the show:A one-woman show centering the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. Told through a series of vignettes, this new poetic work traces lineages of Latina lesbian activism, expression, and desire, placing Denice in conversation with her elders to explore their interiority. In other words: how they love, who they love, and how they survive.
Denice Frohman is a poet and performer from New York City. A Pew Fellow and Baldwin-Emerson Fellow, she’s received support from CantoMundo, Headlands Center for the Arts, the National Association of Latino Arts & Cultures, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The BreakBeat Poets: LatiNext, Nepantla: An Anthology for Queer Poets of Color, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Women of the World Poetry Slam Champion, she’s featured on hundreds of stages from The Apollo to The White House. Recently, she debuted her one-woman show, Esto No Tiene Nombre, centering the oral histories of Latina lesbian elders. She lives in Philadelphia.
Questions? Email Wilfred Paloma, Director of Education & Community Engagement
We toured (Un)Documents by Jesús Valles in San Diego area schools.
About the show: With a single phrase, you can give up your country. With a single signature, you can tear a family apart. With a single word, you can learn to transform. In their first full-length solo show, (Un)Documents, award-winning actor and poet Jesús I. Valles journeys across both sides of a river with two names, moving between languages to find their place as a child, a lover, a teacher, and a sibling in a nation that demands sacrifice at the altar of citizenship
(Un)Documents won three 2018 B. Iden Payne awards for Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama, and Outstanding Direction of a Drama, and was nominated for Outstanding Production of a Drama.
Jesús I. Valles is a queer Mexican immigrant, educator, storyteller, and performer based in Austin, Texas, originally from Cd. Juarez, Mexico. Jesús holds a Master’s in Communication Studies from California State University, Long Beach, with a focus on performance and qualitative research methods. Jesús is a recipient of the 2018 Undocupoets Fellowship, a fellow of The Poetry Foundation and Crescendo Literary’s 2018 Poetry Incubator, runner-up in the 2017 Button Poetry Chapbook Contest, and a finalist of the 2016 Write Bloody Poetry Contest. Their work has been published in The Shade Journal, The Texas Review, and The New Republic (forthcoming). Jesús currently teaches social and emotional learning to high school students, focusing on those recently arrived to the U.S.
Fill out this form with any questions or comments you may have and Diversionary Theatre’s Director of Education and Community Engagement, Wilfred Paloma, will be in touch with you shortly.
Alternatively, you can call us at
(619) 220-0097 x 109.
Arts Education is thriving at Diversionary Theatre, and our programs spread the seeds of understanding and tolerance around our unique mission as the third oldest LGBTQIA+ theater in the country. Watch this video to learn more about each of our education programs.
By sharing LGBTQIA+ stories with our community we bring stories that need to be told, directly into people’s lives. We provide a safe place for all students, and we are excited to extend a lifeline to our LGBTQIA+ youth who may not have the support at home or at their school. We are giving people permission to be who they are, and for many this might be a life saving experience.
All of these programs are only made possible by the generous support of our donors and our community.
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