Project History

Re-Writing the Declaration is developed, in part, as an culminating project for an arts-based research study for candidacy of the EdD degree in NYU Steinhardt's Educational Theatre Program.

Quenna Lené Barrett's personal, artistic work has always existed at the intersection of theater and justice. Her artistic practice is multifaceted, with her as work a theatre educator a strong and necessary component of that practice. Re-Writing the Declaration seeks to combine her experiences as an artist, activist, and educator, using participatory theater as an exploration to make new worlds collaboratively.

What follows are key summaries that highlight the origins and research questions in the development of this project.

THE CATALYST

“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.

THE PROJECT

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.”

THE PURPOSE

As I read the Declaration of Independence, I realized that the United States of America’s founding documents were never intended to include many of the people who call this country home. The justice system doesn’t protect black and brown people for many reasons, in large part because it wasn’t designed to. Because of these and other shortfalls, I wondered what would happen if I were to rewrite the Declaration as an artistic, performative, and participatory rendering of a new and more inclusive document, 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 through a participatory play and process. Utilizing a black queer feminist lens, the creation and articulation of this play is designed specifically to celebrate and amplify the stories of queer, black, indigenous and other women of color—communities that have historically been pushed to the margins. This collaborative, arts-centered study will invite activists, artists, and community members to interrogate:

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

and

b. the potential writ large of participatory theatre for collective action.

One aim of using the arts-based approach is to explore the following research 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.

THE QUESTIONS

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?

THE SIGNIFICANCE

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.

THE FRAMEWORK

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.

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.

"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."

~ Quenna Lené Barrett, EdD Candidate 2021

THE ACTION

I don’t, and I solely shouldn’t have all the answers, or even all the questions.

The play will be a framework for having difficult conversations, for building together with community members. It will have prompts that invite the audience to consider collectively what questions we need to be asking, to whom, for whom, and hopefully proposing some steps and alternatives, some ways forward. The play will be a play, with characters and a narrative, but the audience’s participation will help move both the play forward, as well as, hopefully, our collective, real-world story.

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.

I want people to act in the moment. And then I want them to commit to actions of justice in the future, and take them.