As everyone reflects on the decade, I feel the past 20 years coming to fruition.
Twenty years ago, I decided to turn back towards theater making after being type-cast/stereotyped and kept out of many performance and storytelling spaces.
I turned back towards theater not as a profession but as my life’s calling.
I began to understand what it was that originally drew me in.
Theater as a way to heal humanity, as a way to re-ignite the desires and creativity of people who had been told time and again that they were not creative nor were they creators, theater as catalyst for change.
Twenty years ago, I stepped onto my true path.
The methods and life-work of Augusto Boal + the training and mentorship I got through the Theater of the Oppressed Laboratory changed my life.
I feel like all the pieces of my life have come together in my latest project There is a Portal. Not only is this the first personal piece of storytelling I’ve created, it is the thing I would have wanted as a young person when I was desperate to understand who I was and what impact I could have.
There is a Portal is participatory theater experience and social justice education program that transforms activism by creating new definitions of belonging, repairing the ties that bind us, and collectively creating new narratives with immigrant and refugee students. This project puts gorgeous storytelling, culturally resonant content, and well-designed, creative tools in the hands of English language learners, working class youth, and the educational spaces that serve them.
Together we will develop expansive definitions of belonging and transformative ideas of how to make America home, for all.
This work is the result of my thinking and practice over the past 20 years, but it is most importantly a result of the relationships I’ve forged with passionate, brilliant souls — mostly women, many mothers. I am deeply indebted to my current team of thinkers and artists, from the brilliant director Rania Lee Khalil to my advisor and institutional partner at Queens College Sophia McGee. But beyond this work, I’d like to recognize the many mentors, guides, friends, and comrades whose support, inspiration and own work in the world has kept me on my path. (Many of you are reading this right now — I love and appreciate you.)
Finally, this year held the most profound, meaningful transformation I’ve experienced in my life, that of becoming a mother. It is truly a new path, yet the most well-worn. Deeply magical and absolutely mundane. I never knew how much I would love being a mother and how much I could love another soul. Thank you to all the parents and caretakers who have made a path for me to follow. I am the beneficiary of those have fought for childcare and dignified treatment of children, for the rights of nursing mothers, for time off, and for so much more.
Here’s to a decade that brings the possibility of a better world, happiness, peace, and an equal chance for the children of every species.
With all my love.
