George Takei, best known as Captain Sulu of Star Trek, says it’s been his “lifelong dream” to make it to Broadway. He came close in 1960 when he was invited to audition for a show. But he did not get the part.

“It was a body blow,” says Takei. “Suddenly, New York turned into a cold, heartless city.”

But now, at age 75, Takei is ready to try again. At TEDxBroadway, Takei tells us why he wrote a musical called Allegiance with composer Jay Kuo and writer Lorenzo Thione. The play speaks to an often-forgotten part of American history: Japanese American internment during World War II. It’s a story Takei knows very well.

“I was 5 years old when my parents got us up early one morning and hurriedly dressed us,” says Takei in this heartfelt talk. “My brother and I were in the living room, looking out the front window. I saw two soldiers with bayonets on their rifles come marching up the driveway. They stomped up the front porch and they banged on the door … We were ordered out of our home.”

Takei’s family spent four years in a prison camp in Arkansas. “Our only crime was looking like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor,” he says. “I remember the sentry tower with machine guns pointed down at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made night runs to the latrine. As a 5-year-old kid, I thought it was kind of nice that they lit the way for me to pee.”

In this talk, Takei shares the profound impact the experience had on his family with humor and tenderness. And he talks about how he built interest in an unlikely musical about a subject he calls a “dark and shameful chapter of American history.” When Allegiance opened at the Globe Theater in San Diego in late 2012, it broke all box office records for the theater.

Maybe he’ll get that chance on Broadway soon.

To anyone who thinks of arts festivals as a fun bit of window dressing, David Binder’s rejoinder is: look again, and look more closely. In this spirited talk, given at TEDUniversity, the accomplished theater producer (he was behind the New York City phenomenon De La Guarda, a dance performance staged over the audience’s head) describes today’s arts festivals as “radically open” and marvels at their ability to “transform cities and communities.” Binder is fascinated by the role festivals play in cities’ self-understanding and evolution.

“I’m interested in how a festival helps a city to express itself, how it lets it come into its own,” says Binder. “Festivals promote diversity, they bring neighbors into dialogue, they increase creativity, they offer opportunities for civic pride, they improve our general psychological well-being. In short, they make cities better places to live.”

In this talk, Binder describes a number of festivals that explode boundaries and expectations. He begins by describing Minto: Live, an event he discovered while in Sydney, Australia. Taking place an hour southwest of the city, this event turns the suburban streets of Minto into a stage, with residents stepping out of their homes to perform on their lawns and in their driveways.

To hear more about what defines the new breed of arts festival, watch Binder’s talk. And after the jump, a roundup of more out-of-the-box arts festivals — some Binder mentioned and some he would simply love.

1. The French company Royal de Luxe mounts shows in which giant (really: enormous!) puppets inhabit a city and perform a story. In “Sea Odyssey,” performed this year, a giant becomes trapped inside the Titanic and drowns—but, through a century-long journey, his brother rescues a letter the giant has written to his daughter. Throughout the performance, the audience moves underneath the giant puppets.
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2. The German group Rimini Protokoll uses concrete, site-specific situations as springboards for shows that demand “an intense exploratory process.” For one project, the group created a radio drama out of archived meetings and conversations from the Stasi records office. For another, groups of 100 people who represented their cities’ demographics took the stage to share stories about their lives, capturing a snapshot of the city.
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3. Binder himself produced the New Island Festival, involving performances by Dutch artists on New York’s Governor’s Island. Like the festivals Binder admires, in his own, he encouraged viewer-performer collaboration. One event, Archeological Dig, allowed festivalgoers to join archeologists at a dig site; ANYtime connected New Yorkers with Amsterdam residents through videochat; and in Silent Disco, participants could either dance to music piped into their headphones, or stand on the sidelines to watch a soundtrackless dance party.
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4. The Back to Back Theater, an Australian outfit, mounts performances by “people who are perceived to have a disability.” In one project, called “small metal objects,” the audience wears headphones and sits on a set of bleachers overlooking a public space. They watch and listen as two members of the company meet a couple of executives for a business transaction. The performance, Binder explains, reminds us “who and what we choose to edit out of our daily lives”—people who, like the disabled, are often forced under the radar.
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5. The annual Utah Arts Festival, which takes place in June, this year included the “Open Road Project,” in which festivalgoers could contribute to a mural, which changed “daily from pastoral road to city graffiti,” and a team slam poetry competition.
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6. Some artists are incorporating the spirit of these groundbreakingly interactive festivals, too. Tino Seghal’s performance art pieces revolve around audience participation. Two years ago, for a piece called “This Progress” at the Guggenheim in New York, he briefly trained a motley group of civilians, who engaged visitors in one-on-one conversations. Last month, in “These Associations” at the Tate Modern, he coordinated “an assembly of participants whose choreographed actions use movement, sound, and conversation.”