Creating Community Change - My Theater Making and Leadership
The job of an Actor is to be a student of life experiences, and that study has turned me into a researcher of the human experience through conversation. I research the possibilities of community sharing to generate content focused on the intersection of performance, possibility, and change. Leading with vulnerability and honesty guides my research goals of using experience sharing to bridge the gaps between us and our neighbors. This is how I find the clearest and most applicable conversations for the community where I am trying to impact change. By creating a space where our experiences and actions can define who we are and what we want, rather than the labels placed on us by society.
As an African immigrant who is perceived as a Black American, I’m sober to the reality of perspective and projection that comes from people having a lack of exposure to the experiences of other people in their community. That experience inspires me to imagine theater as an institution generating conversations through art, actively engaged in the growth and health of our community. It inspires me to imagine a theater that looks to its community and its neighbors as fuel for how we plan, create, and develop the richest way to build the bridges that support us all. How we treat our neighbors is the way our neighbors will treat us. Daniel Banks, Co-founder of DNA WORKS shares this quote by Yavilah Mcloy ``We have to create spaces for people to fall in love with each other.” I believe in creating art that starts from a space of community, vulnerability, and reflection. We are connected in an ever expanding circle of shared experience. The cultural landscapes artists are exploring now, that we explored then, and that we explored way back when, are all generated from our experiences as humans existing in relationship with each other. How do the stories we tell engage us to learn from the past, in the present, to imagine a new future? How do we find the threads that connect us all? With art that is generated by desires to understand and share experiences. Theater that sews those threads, quilting our experiences together.
What stories we share, how we share those stories, why we share those stories, who we share those stories to, and when we share the stories must be in line with the voiced experience of our community. I believe that’s how we take the institution of the “Theater” and transform it into an experience of Community. My goal is to take the theater away from solely being a spectator sport, and turning it into a community event at every level. Making collaboration for change a community engaged event, thus leading to a shift in mentality for those that interact with our interpersonal ethics, by modeling a culture that demonstrates the necessity of community.
