We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Powell. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.

Sarah, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

As a producer for The Table Co\Lab, a tiny start up company dedicated to producing new work by people of marginalized genders, I was able to get the rights to produce the world premiere of The Danger Year, by Georgia Stitt. She’s a huge name in our industry, not only because of her compositions, but also because of her work as founder of Maestra, an organization dedicated to promoting gender equity in the music theater industry. I was able to connect with Georgia personally, and she worked with our company through the production process, even writing new songs that were heard for the first time in our production. It was a huge leap reaching out to her to land the show, and it was such a satisfying experience to produce it, and act in it as well.

The story goes further: through Georgia, I was able to make contact with Danielle DeMatteo, founder of SheNYC Arts. Their mission is so much in line with that of The Table, so I wanted to know if they’d consider bringing a SheNYC festival to Dallas, and she said yes! The SheDFW festival will make its premiere in the fall of 2024, and I will serve as Executive Director.

Sarah, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My journey in this industry has been kind of a wild ride! I started out in college as an Opera Performance major, but eventually found my way into musical theater, which had been a love of mine since childhood. I’ve performed all of DFW, and I have a voice studio of 25 high school students. More recently though, I’ve felt the desire to create theater of my own, and also to make the industry a safer, more inclusive space.

I began producing—first my own one woman cabaret, “The Glamorous Life: Parenting in a Pandemic”, and then as producer for La Ti Do DFW and The Table Co\Lab. Both companies have been conduits through which I’ve been able to collaborate with the best in the business and cultivate the type of theater I wanted to see being made: intimate cabarets, new works by local writers, creative teams filled with people of marginalized genders, races, ethnicities.

Both La Ti Do and The Table are still in their infancy, but we’ve received beautiful and encouraging feedback from our community, both patrons and professionals, and we know we are headed in the right direction.

How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?

See a show! We are putting on amazing productions with too few butts in seats. Often times if you call or email to inquire about discounts, there will be one, even if it’s not public—theater makers do NOT want money to prevent you from seeing a show. That said, we also can’t operate for free—so if you ARE able, donate! And talk about the shows you see on social media so more people will go to see them.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I think one thing non-creatives struggle to understand is that we are ALL creatives. Human beings are inherently creative organisms, it’s a need we all have. Some of us just end up doing it more publicly than others—but we all have it within us. If you watch a child for any length of time, you’ll see them conjuring worlds and trying on new personalities,, and I think somewhere along the way we forget that to PLAY is to CREATE. You don’t need permission to express that part of yourself.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thetablecolab.com, www.latidoproductions.com
• Instagram: @thetableco_lab, @latidoproductions
• Facebook: @thetableco_lab, @latidoproductions

Image Credits
Landon Roseberry Kris Ikijeri