One-page history of Developmental Theatre
History
The Colorado Caravan story, NEA Title III grants, and the fifty-year lineage DT:FC still carries.
The Colorado Caravan (1971)
When Richard Knaub, Martin Cobin, Chuck Wilcox, and Lola Wilcox launched the Colorado Caravan at CU Boulder in 1971, they set out to justify expenditures from federal, state, and local sources — and ended up inventing a model that would outlast all of them. The Caravan was built around a bare-stage aesthetic: five or six actors in a single van, performing in gymnasiums and cafetoriums in-the-round, serving elementary, middle-school, and high-school audiences across Colorado. Performances were stripped of excess, allowing total focus on story, character, and action. What emerged was a style where mime and concise movement unlocked imagination at every age level.
The design required CU theatre students to work alongside professionals. Actors learned script development, staged original pieces using minimal costumes and props, built workshop skills, and developed the company rapport needed to sustain a six-month touring season. A strong Asian Theatre influence at CU during this period added further texture to the emerging aesthetic. Demand grew quickly: twice each year a new tour was mounted to meet requests from an ever-widening circle of schools and communities statewide.
The NEA Title III grants
Federal Title III funding required more than Shakespeare — it mandated programming for four age levels and interactive workshops following every performance. That requirement became a structural gift: Caravan actors routinely led workshops immediately after shows, multiplying the reach of each visit many times over. Coordination with teachers and administrators deepened the workshop component until it stood on its own as a distinct artistic and pedagogical practice.
Title III also enabled the creation of an M.A. programme in Developmental Theatre at CU, institutionalising the practice inside a university department for the first time. The programme, led by Dr. Martin Cobin, gave graduate students a proving ground for intensive arts-education practicum work and launched careers that have carried Developmental Theatre’s tools into schools, community theatres, universities, and therapeutic settings around the world.
What came of it
The minimalist touring model proved replicable. The Overland Stage Company, founded in Wyoming in 1978, was the first offshoot. Similar companies followed in Maine, Montana, Hawaii, Denmark, and Australia. The Caravan’s bare-stage, workshop-forward approach traveled wherever a small company of committed artists could carry it.
Across more than fifty years, the Caravan and its successor companies have performed for audiences totalling over six million people on three continents. The M.A. graduates who spread the work did not simply replicate it — they adapted it to institutional settings, community contexts, and therapeutic environments, proving the efficacy of an approach rooted in imagination, presence, and the live encounter between player and audience.