Community + Connection
Firelight is for you, with you, and because of you.
Learn about how we collaborate with our community, connect with our audience, and develop partnerships.
How we connect.
Tiny Stories features our Firelight community near + far as writers and performers. Each year, we invite you to submit a 100-word story or scene, prompted by a theme. Then, we assemble actors and non-actors to share the stories in unexpected spaces as a communal, participatory experience.
Our first theme was Friendship, and volunteers of all ages shared the stories in an immersive live performance in downtown Peterborough. The following year, we partnered with Monadnock Area Transitional Shelter to share stories about Home. In this immersive event, audience and participants were moved by the vulnerability and tenderness of the stories shared. And during the pandemic we invited artists of all disciplines to create a piece in response to our tiny story submissions. The theme was Liminal Space -- offering an opportunity for all participants to unpack the limbo we experienced in 2020.
We continued post-pandemic with Tiny Stories: Reunion, a walkabout + participatory theatre experience in downtown Peterborough. We partnered with the Harrisville General Store for Tiny Stories: Tiny Store, a giant immersive event with live scenes on-loop in and around the iconic store. And most recently, Tiny Stories: Trees invited audience to experience solo and duet performances among the trees of Putnam Park.
Tiny Stories: You Write + Perform
Site-Specific Performance + Community Partners
Since Firelight’s inaugural season in 2018, we have reached audience by going to them. We create work in order to share it in our community, redefining spaces. Shared experience, we believe, unites community.
We have performed in partnership with the following with organizations + local businesses + public areas, creating new memories in familiar spaces:
Monadnock Area Transitional Shelter, Peterborough Town Library, Harrisville General Store, Monadnock Center for History and Culture, Steele’s Stationers, Toadstool Bookshop, Thing in the Spring, Peterborough Community Theatre, Mariposa Museum, Roy’s Market, Mayfair Farm, Hancock Town Library, The Cobbs Auctioneers at Noone Falls, Great Brook School, Antrim Elementary School, Jaffrey Recreation Department, The Wilton Town Hall Theatre, The Park Theatre, Nova Arts/Brewbakers, Jaffrey Civic Center, MONIFF, Putnam Park, The Concord Museum, and more. We even performed in Peterborough’s Bagel Mill. Well, actually, you sat inside the Bagel Mill. Our We Were Friends characters Margaret and Ralph were outside in the snow, bundled up and mic’d, so that you could stay toasty inside the cafe: ideal conditions for eavesdropping.
We were honored to partner with Rise for Baby and Family and Monadnock Developmental Services on our 2025 Fall Play, Mary Jane by Amy Herzog. The play explored themes of caregiving for chronically ill children, so we connected with caregiving organizations to discuss the realities of this service and its representation onstage. We were honored to have a performance dedicated to staff from Rise for Baby & Family.
We take great care in selecting the material we produce. We choose to work on plays that are meaningful artistically to us at FIreilght, offer ways for us to creatively stretch. And top of mind for us is the audience experience. We ask ourselves, what will the audience expect? How might they feel? How can we surprise + delight them? How can we go deeper, get closer, bring them in? How can we redefine the audience’s relationship to the space? We want our audience in on the experience. These values inform what we do + how we share it.
We consider our proximity to you — we’re close to each other. And we always want to leave you enough room to have your own experience.
Audience Relationship as Aesthetic
