The following narrative statement:

• seeks to describe how I have met the New York State Standards for Theatre through examples of professional, artistic, and academic works,

• includes an overview of the culminating study I hope to propose,

• and illustrates how my work to this point have prepared me to carry out that study.

Introduction

I am a theatre artist: practitioner, maker, and educator: performer, director, and (now-ish) writer. I see theater education as also an artform, a skill that I have honed through thousands of hours of school and practice. My art feeds my educational practice and vice versa. My personal, artistic work has always existed at the intersection of theater of justice, as well as the work that I have chosen to pursue outside of my own creative career. I have been an activist and organizer with Chicago groups whose missions include achieving social equity for all black people and that operate under a black, queer feminist lens understanding that only by freeing those most marginalized can we free us all. My artistic practice is multifaceted, and I consider my work as a theatre educator a strong and necessary component of that practice, and at the essence that work for me is about creating space for young people who look like me to begin imaging their own personal artistic practice. It is about holding space for youth to produce work about issues they face in their lives and amplifying their voices. It is about offering theater arts experiences that are culturally relevant.

Aside from my some of my roles as an actor, the work I make either on my own or with community tends to be about and for underserved communities and issues they face. This is the reason I initially was interested in applied and educational theatre. As an artist-researcher. I am interested in: counter-narrative; in the stories that people themselves can tell about themselves; in changing systems and policies that not only are unhelpful, but are explicitly and intentionally harmful; and in using art as a way to call for, make space for, and practice that change.

What follows is an inventory of project descriptions that seek to illustrate my proficiency in, mastery of, and some challenges with the New York State Theatre Standards of Creating, Performing, Responding, and Connecting. With the artifacts I’ve chosen, I also hope to elucidate my passion and track record as an artist and educator to use theatre as a tool for justice, and to “make new words”, or counter-narratives, in and with communities. Barone and Eisner (2012) noted this as one of the possibilities of Arts-Based Research. I conclude this narrative with an overview of my project to be proposed, currently titled Re-Writing the Declaration, which seeks to combine my experiences as an artist, activist, and educator, and will be an exploration of using participatory theater to make new worlds collaboratively.

Creating

To demonstrate my competence as a creator, I include a short play I wrote as a student in the Educational Theatre program (Zoo), images from a short theatre piece I directed and lead-devised with a Chicago-based theatre company (Coming Home), and a poem I was commissioned to write for a Black Lives Matter exhibition (...freedom; psalm 151:1). These pieces all speak to my focus and ability to respond to the socio-political, specifically in these examples joys and trials of black life, as an artist.

Zoo

I wrote Zoo in my second semester (Fall 2018) in the Ed Theatre program, under the guidance of Judy Tate in the Beginning Playwriting course. I had written, or rather co-written a few plays prior, and had devised several others, so I had some understanding of dramatic arc. I took this class, however, because although I didn’t know quite what my culminating project would be, I was quite confident that it would be a play of some sort, and never having formally studied playwriting, I thought it would be good to start at the beginning.

Zoo began as a writing prompt; we had to pick pairs of cards, write character profiles for the descriptions we received, and then ultimately put them in a scene together. According to my notes, I pulled: “runner up, security guard” and “bookworm, recognized by zoo animal”. From there I developed Chris, the security guard at the Southside Chicago Zoo (there is no such thing) who wanted to be a cop, and Tabitha, the bookworm who falls asleep making drawings of the animals and who is afraid of something I hadn’t yet discovered in the first drafts. Throughout the term, I received feedback from Tate and my peers about how to make the scene stronger. I re-learned during this process that when I’m stuck on an idea, it’s really hard for me to let go. I wanted something bad to happen to Tabitha. She was a stand in for the innocent black girls on the south side who encounter violence and trauma daily, and I wanted the audience to know that, to feel that. The challenge with our ten-minute plays, however, was that they had to occur in one setting and be continuous in time. I struggled with the feedback from Tate and my classmates through several drafts, and finally caved in for the last version. I still like to follow rules and try for good grades even when I think I disagree. I was able to get my point across and still meet the guidelines of the assignment. I appreciated, and needed, the creative limitations supported by this project.

Coming Home

In June 2019, I directed and served as the lead-deviser on Coming Home, which was a part of Free Street Theatre’s “50 in 50” project, a city-wide quasi-flash mob wherein teams of artists were deployed to perform 50 plays in each of Chicago’s 50 wards in a single day. (Sidenote: I may or may not have given them this idea in a brainstorming for how they could celebrate 50 years of making free, street theater.) My crew of actors was assigned five south side wards because that’s where I had connections. I chose actors who were reflective of the communities we would be playing in and who also had roots there.

We were invited to consider joy and justice as those were the theme’s for the overall anniversary. Because we were going to be in south side communities, I was most interested in exploring joy, and black joy specifically, with my team. We began our work building community as an ensemble, sharing images and lines of “where we came from” rooted in Chicago specific, black Chicago specific, memories of joy. We litanied that we came from corner store candy-ladys and bar-be-ques and block parties.

With this as our starting point, in three rehearsals we developed a short piece that takes place at a summer family cookout. One of the grandchildren, after reconnecting with cousins and encountering aunties who think they can cook and drunk uncles, has a long-awaited talk with grandma. The grandchild comes out to her as queer. As a group, we wanted to focus on family and love and be resonate with the feeling of “summertime Chi”, but also address a topic that some in our cast had to navigate with their own south side family. We wanted to address it, with seriousness, but also portray a realistic and redeeming grandmother character, who says that of course this was no secret or surprise to her, and that she fully accepted her grandchild for who she was. The play ends with the family, in typical cookout fashion, doing the electric slide to that summer’s hit, Beyoncé’s cover of Frankie Beverly and Maze’s “Before I Let Go”. The audience is invited to join, to get up and dance, and hopefully think of their own such gatherings and the ways in which they accept their kin and others around them who may be of any difference.

...freedom; psalm 151:1

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom.

It is our duty to win.

We must love each other and support each other.

We have nothing to lose but our chains.”

This is the text the poem “...freedom; psalm 151:1” is written after, words from Assata Shakur in her autobiography, Assata, words I chanted with few and many black and other bodies at too many protests to count, words I have wrapped around my shoulder.

In April 2016, I, along with several other Chicago-based artists, was invited to create work with Chicago families who were still fighting against injustices that had come to them at the hands of police. The idea was that each artist would pair with a family to create a piece to honor their fallen loved one; I was to be paired with Sandra Bland’s sister. The organizer was unable to make that connection, and instead invited me to create a piece for the exhibition program booklet responding to Assata’s words above, as that’s also where the exhibition title came from “our duty to fight”. Still honored to have been included in the first place, I said of course. These words had already come to mean so much for me.

I found it difficult to devote the time to working on this project, and it presented other new challenges for me. I had never had a poem published, or listed anywhere publicly really, I was intimidated by the caliber of the other artists in the exhibit, and I was working a full time job and likely in rehearsals for some show or another. I was fortunate enough that just two weeks before the submission deadline, I was scheduled to go on a work retreat just out of the city at the Ragdale artist residency. I took advantage of my evening time over the course of three days to read and re-read Assata’s book -- I had never actually read it and thought that might be wise -- and craft my poem.

The poem isn’t just an ode to Assata, but to the black, queer women who were leading the movement in Chicago -- who taught me not only about activism and organizing, but about myself, and who struggled in so many ways against older folks, against men, and sometimes, against each other, but were nevertheless committed to justice and accountability. It is an ode to the people I fight for freedom with, and of course, those gone who we’re still fighting for.

I hope these artifacts demonstrate not only my capacities as an artist and maker, but as well my priorities as such. My goal in creating isn’t to do so just for the sake of creating, but to develop new artistic ideas based on the needs around me, often with and/or about others, to advocate for or lift up stories that are still not yet quite enough in the mainstream narratives.

Performing

Performing was my first love as a theatre maker. I’ve recently begun to wonder if I should more accurately refer to it as my gateway drug. When I went to college as an undergrad, I went to become a capital-A Actor. I didn’t enter with the intent to minor in Applied Theatre, and certainly not for that to be the path that my career has taken. I’m absolutely grateful for my journey, and for that initial spark as a performer that still burns quite brightly. Through my performing artifacts, I seek to demonstrate my competence as a performer, able to realize artistic work through interpretation and presentation.

Acting Performance Stills

As indicated above, I am still a quite active performer. I have included in this section a number of photos from recent plays I’ve acted in with Chicago companies. The stills are from a number of plays: The Green Book at Pegasus Theatre about the travel guide African-Americans developed and used in the 1930s; Lines in the Dust at eta Creative Arts looked at educational inequities; The Young Playwright’s Festival at Pegasus which is an annual festival of short plays written by high schoolers; American Revolution with Theatre Unspeakable, a tale of America’s founding performed continuously in 50 minutes by seven actors on a 3x7’ platform; and two web series Brujos, in which I play a queer witch in a coven called to fight against the wealthy, white, cis-het patriarchy; and Rural, about differences in a suburban town. My focus as an artist and educator is present in these performances. These shows all either highlight particular social injustices, or were developed with or for young people.

How to Become a Protest Mime

I took Dr. Nancy Smithner’s Physical Theatre Improvisation course in the fall semester of 2018. I already had a foundation of physical theatre. My undergrad program at NYU Tisch Drama was in the Experimental Theatre Wing, which dealt a lot with the body as the starting place for our work in addition to devising work that we called then “self-scripting”. I’d also done a fair amount of physical theatre work with Theatre Unspeakable, a company built off of the Jacques Lacoq technique. I entered this course because I’m drawn to body based work. As a Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, I have come to believe that the body contains knowledge that can sometimes only be spoken through the corporeal. Image Theatre, in Theatre of the Oppressed, tells us that the body, and therefore the images it makes, contain history, memory, and information. Boal (1985) noted that image has “extraordinary capacity for making thought visible” (137). I also believed at that time of this class that my culminating study would have an emphasis on the body and images, and that a deeper dive into physical technique could serve that project.

During this course, I studied the political intentions and impacts of a few physical-based performance companies (The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, La Pocha Nostra, and the Living Theater) and discovered that they each used body-based work to a. interrupt systems of power by playing with proximity and closeness to the power, and offering a counter-image b. to create a new image altogether, to construct a new culture, a new environment. They offered examples and models of using physical performance and body-based theater as a way to build, and invite the audience into that building, of the revolution. These learnings will absolutely serve my culminating study, and I began exploring those concepts in the class.

For my final project for the course, I landed on a black power mime. I wanted to explore a technique I had not previously in my own creative work, but apply it to concepts I was interested in exploring, both in my typical creative life and for my culminating study. Somehow I made a connection between the aesthetics of mime performers and those of the black power movement, berets and leather jackets, and that was my jumping off point. I also wanted to investigate what power I had as the only black student in a graduate theatre course. In developing this piece, I realized that I needed the input of other black artists, and before my final performance, I invited a colleague who was studying in the Performance Studies program to preview the piece and give me feedback. He was able to help me clarify the points I was trying to make, ultimately strengthening the piece. Overall this performance helped me to reflect on how I develop and present work for different audiences, and to not be afraid to be vulnerable in seeking support from other artists. This is an area that has been difficult for me as creator/performer.

The Image of Justice

I was granted a slot in the Santa Fe Art Institute's Equal Justice residency in November of 2017. During this month, I was able to devote uninterrupted time to exploring the idea that has become the basis for my proposed culminating study. At that point, all I really had was the idea of Re-Writing the Declaration of Independence. I didn’t know if it would be a play or a poem or something else entirely different. I spent much of this time reading other artworks, trying to get a sense of the shape of the thing, as well as connecting with the other artists there and getting their input.

Through such conversations and things that were happening in the media at the moment, I developed The Image of Justice monologue, attempting to play these ideas out and see how they would land with an audience. I knew at the moment that I wanted to explore the connections between the declaration, current experiences of black women, and audience interaction. The challenge was that I only had 140 seconds to do so. During the month that I was in residence, artists were invited to present or perform in a format of 140 seconds. I developed this monologue and corresponding slideshow for my performance, connecting contemporary issues of the lack of autonomy black women have over their image and bodies, with some of my own personal experience, and how the state, controlled by white men now and in 1776, plays into that. This was another moment in which I had to consider what would work for the particular audience I was performing for. How to bring up “black issues” to a predominantly white audience? How to encourage them to see that “black issues” are their issues? How to employ humor and get to the heart? I believe I found an answer to those with this performance as many people come up to me afterward remarking how powerful they thought it was, and I was invited to perform the piece at another event that the Sante Fe Art Institute hosted the following year, which then presented a new challenge: how to transform the performance for a larger, further-away audience. I am grateful for the opportunity to have been able to revise my own work and performance, as well as for exploring the seeds of an idea in front of an audience.

Responding

In the spirit of practitioner reflexivity, the “process of self-reflection to understand how personal biases may affect the research project” (Creswell and Poth, 2016, p. 141), this was the area I struggled the most with identifying artifacts for. This prompted me to consider how much of my practice I spend on truly responding to others’ work in a meaningful way, and engaging in public dialogues around such.

One of my roles in the Chicago theatre community is Co-Curator for Theatre on the Lake. My partner and I see as much non-equity theatre as we can throughout the typical season to recommend shows to get a remount during the summer with the Chicago Park District. Even though through this work we are evaluating work based on a number of artistic criteria, we don’t write up a comprehensive account of why and how we made the decisions we made, which could be useful to theatre companies looking to be awarded this opportunity. While I acknowledge my difficulty in this area, the artifacts included in this section demonstrate a few ways in which I have understood and evaluated how the arts convey meaning.

Theatre of the Oppressed Article, Workshop Plan, and Games Guide

I have included three interconnected artifacts around my work in Theatre of the Oppressed. The article, entitled “Setting the Stage for Black Choice: Theatre of the Oppressed as Container for Resistance, Black Joy,” was submitted and accepted into the Pedagogy and Theatre of the Oppressed Journal, Volume 2 Summer 2017. I wrote it about a Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) program I developed at the University of Chicago’s Arts Incubator, an arts space in the Washington Park neighborhood, a few miles west of the Hyde Park campus.

My work in the program was to utilize the tools of TO with this community of black teens to help them navigate issues they were facing and open that up to a public conversation. As an ensemble, we responded to pressing social problems such as peer pressure, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, and police and inter-community violence by building community, zooming out to understand the multiple levels of oppression, and creating and presenting a short play to peers and parents. Boal (1985) talked of “theatre as discourse” (p. 126), and the potential of events such as these for the spectators to become actors, to be called into rehearsing possibilities for addressing such issues.

The related games guide and workshop plan were developed after the article was written, and about the same program. I led versions of this workshop at a few conferences, including NYU’s Forum on Educational Theatre before I was a student in the program in April 2017 and the Allied Media Conference. I developed the workshop because I wanted to share the successes and challenges I found within my program, to demystify TO exercises, and to engage with other educators around how they were supporting black and brown students in the midst of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. The workshop’s name was even a play on it, #AppliedTheatreMatters, as I wholeheartedly believed that applied theatre and TO could offer concrete tools for addressing the challenging conversations many of us were having. I created the related Games Guide as a tool to give it at the workshops. Too often I attend workshops, conferences, and master classes and such resources are not provided. I wanted to be able to provide references for where I pulled the activities and explanations for how to conduct them so that participants didn’t have to worry about scrambling to write down the instructions but could be present in the moment.

The article, workshop plan, and games guide were my way of responding to and conveying what a Theatre of the Oppressed practice meant within and for a particular community, as well as disseminating the learnings to a broader audience.

Reviews: Spongebob the Musical and Bouff’Honestly Though: A Live Bouffon Talk Show

I took Advanced Directing and Physical Theatre Improvisation with Dr. Nancy Smithner in Summer and Fall of 2018 respectively. In both of those courses, she assigned performances reviews to be conducted on the topic of study. I’m including my reviews for both of those courses as together they demonstrate my ability to examine productions for their use of theatrical device and technique, and evaluate how they did so to demonstrate meaning.

These assignments reminded me to be descriptive, thorough, and paint the picture for the reader as they would not have seen the show, to be able to relate how the artistic choices conveyed meaning or were impactful. These are elements I’ve often struggled with in my writing and will be important as I continue research. “Rich thick descriptions” is a term I encountered last semester with Dr. Elizabeth Norman that will be invaluable in my qualitative research. Creswell and Poth (2018) posited that a researcher's detailed descriptions are one way that readers or reviewers can validate a study.

Having to write these reviews for the courses I did additionally forced a container around or lens through which I had to use to critique the work. This helped me to focus my arguments, and again, will be a necessary skill as I continue my research and have to consider epistemologies and research frameworks.

As noted at the beginning of this section, responding to artistic work in meaningful and public ways is an area of challenge and growth for me. Reviewing these pieces, I recognize that I could have made stronger and more fluid connections between the artistic choices made and how they conveyed meaning. This, too, is an area of learning for me as an artist, to be able to pinpoint specific techniques and assess how effective they were. My role as co-curator for Theatre on the Lake is helping to strengthen the muscle, but I can continue to practice responding to work in other areas of my practice.

Connecting

Connecting is another core competency I had a little difficulty identifying from my existing body of work. Again, it is not an area that I often think about explicitly when I’m making work, but it is certainly happening. This exercise is helping me to think more intentionally about how I connect artistic ideas to an external context and with personal meaning. I identified two projects I completed as part of my coursework in Educational Theatre that fulfill this requirement.

Verbatim Theatre Project

I participated in Professor Joe Salvatore’s Ethnoactor & Verbatim Performance course in Fall 2019. As the course was beginning, I was also starting a new project with a theatre company and organization I am a member of: For Youth Inquiry Performance Company housed under the Illinois Caucus of Adolescent Health. The work of the organization is to advocate for and provide resources for young Illinoisans’ sexual health and rights, and as a theatre company, we create work for and with young people that is rooted in power, perspective, power, and pleasure. To this end, our work is play-based and participatory (we invite students to play games in the middle of scenes), and relevant and medically-accurate (we also invite them to condom demo races on actual dildos not bananas or cucumbers or other pieces of produce).

A current campaign the organization is working on is to repeal the Parental Notification of Abortion Act, which requires that people under the age of 17 must notify a guardian before going through with the procedure. We know that this is harmful for many young people for a number of reasons, and the new project I was starting at the same time as the Ethnoactor course was looking at a way to respond to and organize around this campaign in a theatrical way.

I decided to use my project in the course to explore some possibilities of connecting this issue to new kinds of theatre-making that we as a company have not used. Through the project, I was able to use performance to investigate a pro-life advocate and activist to examine what of her strategy and rhetoric could be useful in my own artistic and organizing for the pro-choice movement. My guiding questions for the exploration were:

• How might embodying an anti-choice rhetoric and approach be used to understand their point of view and justifications in a new way?

• What might I learn about her thinking and her strategies that I could use for a pro-choice argument?

My biggest learnings were about the use and impact of storytelling in conversations about abortion issues, no matter which side of the spectrum the audience falls on, as well as gaining strategies for engaging in discussion with people who do fall right of center. I think those will be invaluable to my continued storytelling and art-based organizing to support the reproductive healthcare and justice of young people.

Color Struck

I wrote Striking Color, a short response play, to fulfill different assignments for two courses I was taking simultaneously in the summer of 2019: Images of Women in Theatre with Nan Smithner and Problems in Play Production with Joe Salvatore.

Salvatore’s assignment was supposed to be a fun, ungraded challenge. We’d spent several weeks critiquing new plays, and at the end, he essentially said, “Alright, now you give it a try.” I had been thinking about writing a response play to Zora Neal Hurston’s Color Struck since I had read it a week or so prior in Smithner’s course. Hurston’s short piece from 1926 demonstrated some effects of colorism in the black community of her day. Reading it, I thought, “Well, not much of this has changed,” and wondered how a response piece could pick up with Hurston’s characters, plop them in the modern version of her setting, and explore how the effects of that issue have and haven not shifted.

With this piece, I was able to connect elements I was learning in the respective courses -- effective strategies and techniques in playwriting with power and agency in dramatic women characters, attention to magic and the spiritual realm by playwrights of color with the use of the absurd, the poetic, and the sensual -- with my own relationship to colorism. Trin T. Minh-ha (1989) discussed the “triple bind” of the overlapping identities of one who is writer and woman and of color who is “at odds with language” because it follows the “white male-is-norm ideology” (p. 6). With this assignment, I began to wonder, and explore answering, what it would mean to re-write from a woman-of-color-is norm or queer-woman-of-color-is norm ideology. I am most certain my culminating project will take shape as cyclical and non-linear, and other tools that women writers of color use in subverting the “norm”, in writing themselves. As this assignment was a play, and one without any real criteria or expected judgement, I felt the freedom to ponder this on paper, and to employ artistic devices to examine how I really felt about the issue of color struck-ness, based on conversations I’ve had in my own life, and the stories that students have shared with me over time.

Theatreform, Arts-Based Research and Practice-Led Inquiry

In this section I will weave my understanding of arts-based research and practice-led inquiry around artifacts that seek to demonstrate my competence within those areas. I will then briefly discuss my plan to apply that experience to my proposed project for completion of the EdD in Educational Theatre.

“Trust what you know as an artist,” Professor Joe Salvatore (personal communication, September 17, 2019) said as a guest early in Dr. Amy Cordileone’s arts-based research course in the Fall of 2019. As a Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) practitioner, I feel as though I have been moving in my professional work as an arts-based researcher and with practice-led inquiry for some time. In 2015, I developed a program called the Community Actors Program (CAP) that merged TO with performance training to investigate issues the teens in the program wanted to investigate. At the time I was running the program, I didn’t refer to it as “research” or as practice-led inquiry. I just saw it as a way to use the tools that I had gained to support young people who looked like me. For me, there still weren’t enough narratives about us that were for us and that were by us, and I knew that theatre of the oppressed was a body of work built to give people back their own power.

Each session began with one, or several, guiding questions:

How can we use performance to see/understand ourselves?

How can we use performance to explore people and places?

How can we use performance to explore ourselves, and how we "perform" self in community?

How can we understand/explore our community's and our own assets/resources/skills?

Having taken Methods and Materials of Qualitative Research with Dr. Cordileone, and Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Dr. Elizabeth Norman, I now see these as research questions, designed to address problem statements (there aren’t enough narratives by young, black people about their experience which can lead to internalizing the negative images and stories we are bombarded with), built from particular lacks and needs (tools for teens to be able to see themselves fully, and to be able address interpersonal and oppressive, societal conflicts).

I’m still discovering how to refine those elements in a research context, but I have more knowledge now of how to do so. When leading the CAP and the Intergenerational Theatre of the Oppressed Project (ITOP), a similar program I developed for people across the age spectrum, I failed to regularly write about our practice and our learning, or how the programs changed me as a leader and practitioner. I neglected to constantly check-in with myself, about what I was bringing of my own background into the work, what biases and preconceptions I was showing up with. I just did without always reflecting why. Only when applying for programs or publications did I remember to notate the challenges we experienced and how we moved through them. This is another element of the research process that has become more instilled in me as a practitioner; that rigorous documentation, of all participating voices, is essential.

When I began both research courses, I was terribly afraid of the process, partly because I knew what it would entail, and because in my prior practices, I had not been so good about those things. While taking the courses, however, I was reminded to trust what I know, as an artist, as a maker, as a questioner, as a community gatherer. That, was easy. Simply applying a research frame and lens over my work, I now feel that I can move forward with confidence in conducting my proposed project, and with carrying out elements that once terrified me. Arts-based research utilizes art in either the gathering of the data or in its dissemination. I have been doing both of those. In CAP and ITOP, we used Theatre of the Oppressed to investigate the self and the social, and we created short plays about what we learned for audiences of peers and family members. As a devised-theatre maker, I use similar methods to gather the info to create plays. Story circles, interviews, workshops where we embody survey responses, and the output is a play that invites the audience to continue that investigation. I used some variation of that process for ob/li/ves/cence, an assignment for first year acting students at The Theatre School at DePaul University that became a play about memory and the way we forget things; First, a participatory play about the myth of virginity; and This Boat Called My Body, also a participatory play about the troubled waters that young people accessing abortion care have to navigate. All of these I directed and lead-devised.

These experiences help to demonstrate my capacity and readiness to engage in my culminating study. For the Methods and Materials course, I conducted a mini, or sample, version of the study that I seek to propose. The interactive We Come From poem is the arts-based dissemination of the data that I gathered for that sample project. The poem combines research themes, direct participant responses, and is also designed to be performed with audience participation. All of these elements will be used in the ultimate project, an investigation into creating, collectively, new ways or being, or making new worlds. Barone and Eisner (2012) remarked of the power of arts-based research to do such a thing: “Only the compositions of artists and arts based researchers can redirect conversations about social phenomena by enabling others to vicariously reexperience the world” (p. 20). Re-Writing the Declaration will invite participants and audience members into an embodied and dialogic theatrical conversation to not only reexperience the world, but propose, perhaps, a new one.

Overview of Culminating Study

Introduction

“We’re not free until we’re all free,” is a refrain I began to hear often, starting maybe about five years ago. After Trayvon, after Mike, probably in the midst of Rekia and Sandra, but before Laquan, I literally followed protests and marches on Twitter until my feet found them in person. I used tweets to locate where these demonstrations were happening, and kept showing up until I found the ones actually led by young, black people. Creatives, poly-sci students, grassroots organizers, educators, young people who truly cared about what happened to people who looked like them, who could connect the police violence on black and brown bodies to historical divestment from the communities in which they lived, and who knew that freeing the most oppressed among us -- the black, queer or trans person -- was (and is) the only way to free us all. Following on twitter led me to my tribes: BYP100, or the Black Youth Project 100, and the #LetUsBreathe Collective. Through them, I began to see the world through a black, queer, feminist lens, which sits between and across critical race, queer, and feminist theories, and understands the compounding oppression that those who contain those identities hold.

Organizer and prison-abolitionist Mariame Kaba presented me with the initial charge for conducting this project. We were riding a bus either to or from Cleveland where we attended a convening of the Movement for Black Lives (often referred to as the Black Lives Matter movement). At the end of the convening, as hundreds of black and other organizers of color were exiting the campus where the convening took place, the police tried to arrest a young, black male for some innocuous reason like being asleep on the bus stop that I can’t quite remember. What I do remember is that we weren’t having it. After successfully de-arresting the young man using organizing tactics and strategies, we headed back to the bus to return to Chicago. It was either in this moment, or two days before any of this began, that I was engaged in a conversation around the fact that many current policing strategies and judicial system are still informed by our nation’s founding documents, including the Declaration of Independence. Kaba turned to me and said, “You’re an artist, you should re-write it”.

Statement of Research

Catalyzed by the Movement for Black Lives, while reading the Declaration of Independence I realized that America’s founding documents were never intended to include many of the people who call this country home today. The justice system doesn’t protect black and brown people for many reasons, one of which: because it wasn’t designed to. Because of these and other shortfalls, I wondered what would happen if to rewrite the Declaration as an artistic, performative, and participatory rendering of a new and more inclusive Declaration, utilizing participatory performance, photography, and theatre-based workshops.

The purpose of this arts-based study is to explore the re-writing of the Declaration of Independence, particularly within a community of artists and activists of color, beginning in Chicago, through a participatory play and process. The play and process of creating the play seeks, specifically, to amplify the stories of and celebrate women and femmes of color, those most often at the margin. This participatory, arts-based study will invite activists, artists, and community members who identify as women or femmes of color to investigate:

a. the relationship of the act of re-writing a founding document to more just social practices, and

b. the potential of participatory theatre for collective action.

Need for and Significance of Study

In an article highlighting the renewed energy in theatre responding to issues of race in a post-Rekia, post-Trayvon, post-Mike, post-Eric, post-Sandra, post-fill-in-the-blank-with-the-name-of-an-unarmed-black-person-shot-by-police America, Simpson (2013) furthers a conversation about theater being a place for multicultural connection, where people of all backgrounds can recognize our responsibility. She cuts, “what the Trayvon Martin case reminds us—and what makes the conversation about race freshly painful—is the extent to which the lives and the potential of young black men in this country are still systematically devalued, the way they are automatically seen as a threat, and the fact that they are seen, in some terrible sense, as disposable” (p. 3).

This sentence describes how black men are “seen”, and how they have been seen historically in this country. This study seeks to leverage that multicultural value of theater to address this issue. Research has demonstrated the capacity of theatre as a tool for social change, through empathy and community building, and providing ways for communities to solve issues that impact them greatly (Cohen-Cruz, 2005; Martin, 2004). By inviting research participants and audience members to move from passive spectator to active participant, the project seeks to engage in community building and exchange of empathy. As an arts-based study, Re-Writing the Declaration looks to utilize theatre as a tool to investigate a current, pressing social issue. It will attempt to interrupt the negative image of blackness so often pervaded in popular culture, to turn that image on its head, allowing the “devalued” subject to become the holder of the pen, the new creator of the image.

Relation to the Field + Broader Social Concerns

Participatory theater is a form of applied and educational theatre, both often political-based and tied/connected to social issues. This study seeks to add to the discourse of educational and applied theater, investigating and adding to the literature on how these forms are used in more traditional theater spaces with more traditional audiences as well as how this kind of theatre encourages community building, critical consciousness, and social action.

This study is greatly informed by issues and concerns of systemic oppression, specifically as they manifest in areas of police brutality and the judicial system. I imagine other areas that may arise in the workshops and consequently the play may include other by-products of such oppression, such as low-income communities that have been intentionally divested from, food-desserts, Chicago’s public education system, and Chicago’s history of redlining and segregation.

Questions Underlying the Research

Major Question:

How might a participatory play centering the stories of black, queer, and trans women of color provide space for community building, critical discourse, and collective social action to combat issues of oppression in the US?

Sub-Questions:

• To what extent can the revising and reinterpreting of a document such as the Declaration of Independence include and center voices of marginalized communities?

• To what extent can people not included in this nation’s founding (re)claim this is a space where they feel they belong?

• To what extent can direct, immediate action be taken throughout the process of making and witnessing a participatory play?

One purpose of this project is to explore these questions and create an original theatre piece that interactively poses them to the research participants and attempts to re-write the document that defines us a nation, in a way that acknowledges everyone who makes up, travels to, and trades with this nation today, beseeching true justice and equality.

Stance of the Researcher

My interest in this particular research project exists because of the varied communities I’ve been privileged to be a part of, primarily as an applied theater artist and practitioner, as an activist with groups in the Movement for Black Lives, and as a black woman who grew up in several physical communities on the south side of Chicago. These experiences culminate into my interests as an artist, which are to create art that supports and affirms black and other marginalized people. Because of my work within two particular activists organizations, the Black Youth Project 100 and the #LetUsBreathe Collective, both in Chicago, I have come to see the world through the black, queer, feminist lens, and as such seek to center those most marginalized (the black, queer woman or trans person) in American society. The combination of this work as well as my work as a theater artist, educator, and deviser with practice in participatory and applied theater both lead me to believe and call me to practice within a transformative framework, which is to create work that supports challenging and changing unjust systems, to get closer and closer to freedom.

Positionality

While I believe that my intersecting identities and experience serve as a springboard for my interest in and of value to the proposed project, I also realize that they support me having bias towards those communities. Barone and Eisner (2012) note that the arts-based researcher should not enter the research project with an “ideological agenda”, and I certainly felt implicated when I read that (p. 133). To hold myself accountable and work against this tension I plan to be as open as possible to potential outcomes. I realize I need to interview and include in the process people who are not only from the impacting identities I seek to affirm, and who in fact may hold positions of power that support systems affecting such identities.

Because I am drawing specifically from communities that I have worked so long in, I will know and have worked with many of the workshop participants and survey respondents. To counteract this, I will work to de-identify the surveys, and encourage people I know to share all aspects of the process with people they know, creating a snowball effect in the sampling.

Perhaps one of my greatest fears about this project is navigating the tension of being a “lead” artist, or researcher, on the project while it is at the same time participatory. It is not quite action research, though it does borrow from that paradigm. I will seek to appropriately compensate and credit participants throughout when it does not compromise confidentiality.

Research Methodology + Frameworks

This arts-based, participatory project will exist within critical and transformative frameworks. As it is steeped in and informed by a black, queer, feminist lens, I will use critical race, feminist, and queer theories to support and frame the research and creation process, the data analysis stage, and the construction of the play and dissemination of the findings. Carruthers (2018) illustrates that the black, queer, feminist lens is beneficial to those who are deemed the “furthest away from normal,” and that organizing from it can lead to alternatives (pp. 8-10). Delgado (2001), speaking from a critical race perspective, also argues that we must “look to the bottom” to solve our issues (p. 27); this is precisely what the black, queer, feminist lens does. Mertens (2007) holds that a transformative paradigm supplies a “framework for examining assumptions that explicitly address power issues, social justice, and cultural complexity throughout the research process” (pp. 212-213). These frameworks will be used because they specifically support the research purpose of centering the stories of those most at the margins and provide some tools for exploring possibilities of liberation.

Conclusion

Both the play and its development will be participatory, utilizing an arts based research approach to engage Chicago artists, activists, and marginalized communities in imagining a new declaration, what society might look like under an alternative founding document, and how we might begin practicing those images. The play cannot just talk about the issues; it must present models for the alternative, for the system, or un-system, we want to see in place. The re-writings and images developed in the research phase will inform the play’s content and structure. Communities know what they need, and in making art about systemic change and injustices that affect those communities, it is imperative that the art-making process include and center the communities that the art is for and about. An additional, yet perhaps primary, purpose of this project aims to do just that: center community narratives; amplify, celebrate, and reflect their experiences; and by doing so, enact and practice a model of the world we want to see.

References

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Simpson, J. (2013). The Trayvon factor: Playwrights and theatres are revisiting issues of

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https://www.americantheatre.org/2013/12/04/george-zimmercan-case-sparks

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The U.S. Declaration of Independence; John Hancock, et al.; 1776

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