The Art of Optimism with Theresa Chavez

Theresa Chavez: You have to be resilient. You have to believe deeply in what you’re doing, and I think you also have to have optimism at the core of what you’re doing. Optimism that you’re going to survive. Optimism that the work is valuable, and it’s going to be received. Optimism that you’re going to get the resources, at least as many as you can get so you can survive the things that don’t come through for a particular project, like a grant, or whatever it might be. You just have to let those slide off your back, and just, “Okay, we’re just moving forward.”

Yura Sapi: You’re listening to Building Our Own Tables, a podcast produced for HowlRound Theatre Commons, a free and open platform for theatremakers worldwide. I’m your host, Yura Sapi, founder of multiple organizations, including LiberArte, a nonprofit nurturing artists for liberated futures; Protectores de La Tierra, a farm and food sovereignty initiative based out of Colombia; Balistikal, an LGBTQ+ healing and art space for communities in Latin America. And through all my programs, workshops, coaching, and this podcast, I’ve helped countless founders and leaders unleash their brilliance and build thriving movements. In this podcast, we share visionary solutions, stories, and snapshots to support you as a leader on your own journey of creation and transformation.

This fifth season is especially meaningful. I’m recording while eight months pregnant, and this experience of bringing a new life into the world has brought a deeper opportunity for lessons in leadership, in legacy, and in creation, all of which I’m sharing in this season alongside the powerful voices you’ll hear from. You’ll hear extraordinary founders building their own tables for their communities, their lineages, and for the planet in this evolutionary time. You are here for a reason, and I’m honored to be on this journey with you. So, stay tuned and enjoy.

Welcome to the Building Our Own Tables podcast, pulling up a seat to liberation. Today I’m joined by the wonderful Theresa Chavez of About...Productions. It’s so great to be with you. Thank you so much.

Theresa: Thank you. It’s an honor to be here. I’m very excited about this conversation.

Yura: Me too. So, you are an award-winning interdisciplinary theatre artist, writer, director, producer, Chicana, seventh generation, Californio. And you talk about the work that you do is uncovering buried cultural histories, really tapping into this idea of cultural identity, cultural authenticity, cultural spirituality, as the co-founder and producing artistic director of About...Productions, which is now in its thirty-seventh year, based out of greater Los Angeles. And the work that you do at About...Productions, you all talk about it as “interdisciplinary theaterworks and educational programs that provoke new perspectives on history, humanity, and culture,” unearthing, and illuminating Latinx cultural stories of the Southwest California, and Los Angeles. And this is really exciting because I was connected to you from the Los Angeles Latinx Theatre Commons gathering. So, I’m really glad that we are connected. And I’d love to just start us off by letting you share a bit more about this journey of thirty-seven years ago. What inspired you to start building your own table?

Theresa: Again, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about this. Thirty-seven plus years ago, I was a student at CalArts exploring an interdisciplinary art practice and trying to figure out what that meant to me. I had come from a performing arts background, but I was getting my MFA in photography. My undergraduate education was very interdisciplinary. I designed my own undergraduate degree that looked at post-1945 racism and sexism in the United States, and that was a multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary social science degree. But I always had one foot in the arts, and I never went to a formal arts school. I was trained as a dancer, growing up, and a musician. But then I went to CalArts to do some formal training, and there I started working on an interdisciplinary theatre practice with the support of three other wonderful collaborators, and we started building what eventually became About...Productions at CalArts. We started building these medium-scale original theaterworks, and when we graduated, or most of us were graduating, we decided that the only way to keep this work going was to become a not-for-profit, because the scale of the work was medium-scale.

We did some solo works, and one of the founders—there were four co-founders—was more of a performance artist doing solo work, but we were collaborating on these large projects and going into it without a full understanding of exactly what that meant. We knew, legally, in a sense, and structurally what that might mean, but of course you don’t have the big, huge picture. That was part of the journey, was to develop this means, this structure, so that we could support the work, which… The company’s work is very project driven. We’re not traditional anything. We don’t have a traditional season. We don’t produce in a traditional way. We don’t own our own theatre or rent our own theatre. We move; we’re itinerant. We move around not only LA County, but have moved around the country, meaning the work has moved around, not the company itself. So, we work in multiple spaces, and we work in different types of spaces from cultural centers, to performing arts centers, to libraries, classrooms, site pieces that are outdoors, indoors, what have you.

We always have this sensibility that each piece has its own logic, and that we approach the work by the collaborative process at searching for the logic of the piece: the artistic logic, the political logic, the spiritual logic, even the logic of who should be at the table. So, we created this entity with the notion that there would be a circular table at the center of our practice, and at the center of that table would be the ideas, or the content, or the story, or whatever the piece that we’re focusing on is searching to be about. What is it about? What is its nature, and what do we want to say about this content?

And so the content’s in the center, we are around the center, and so it diffuses the ego a bit, because you’re all serving the purpose of what’s at the center of that process. And you’re only at the table because you have a passion about that, what that entity, that story, whatever, that’s at the center of the process. You’re connected to it. You have a deep relationship with it. You want to explore it more. You’re super curious about it. You have the skills, or the tools, or the interdisciplinary nature to sit at that table, and share your disciplinary point of view as well about this content. And then we’re going to build this piece, because each piece that we’ve done really is its own… You could find some themes that are, in a sense, consistent, but we really honor each piece and say, “what does this piece need?” Not “what do I need?” In a sense that comes into play obviously because you are artists, and you do want to serve each other’s efforts, right? You want people to get something powerful out of the process. But more than that, again, you want to make sure that the work has resonance, that the work has power.

My sensibility is that you can't expect the art to be responsible for everything. The art needs to be art, and it needs to have the space for that. It needs to have the aesthetic room, and the qualities that art brings to our world.

Yura: And that’s where the name About...Productions comes from. It’s clicking for me this idea of what is it about, what is the [inaudible] about?

Theresa: Exactly. And it was a conceptual choice, but I think it has grown in its meaning. And also that we are about the work itself, meaning we don’t do the theatrical, the common theatrical practice of creating work that never gets produced. We do have a process, of a two- or three-year process, where we develop a piece. We might do a work in progress, or share it with a certain community, geographic community, or ethnic community, whatever it might be, and then work on doing a full production of it that has all kinds of ancillary related educational components, which we can talk more about. But we’re really also into—I say ancillary, but they’re really very focused and important things. When you talk to someone about a work, whether it’s a painting, or whatever it might be—it’s some kind of massive outdoor carnival, or outdoor theaterwork, or whatever—you often ask, “Oh, what’s it about? What was that film about? What was that theaterwork about?” And that’s one of the first things you ask. You want to know that, “Oh, is it... How am I connected to it? How am I connected to that?” And if it sounds like it’s something I can connect myself to, I want to learn more about it, I want to go watch that thing, or go, and see it, or follow that artist, or whatever. And it’s also, I think, one thing that we have tried to do, and still work to do is center the artist as a very important person, a very important producer in of course our work, but just in general. The artist is an important part of our society, our culture. They deserve in and of themselves that kind of support, or whatever it might be.

So, from the very beginning, we’ve always paid our artists. It was important for us to raise the money so everybody got paid in our process, and that’s also been factored into how do we develop a piece. We don’t develop it without knowing we have certain funds to do that, and we don’t ask anyone to work for free, because we really feel like it’s very, again, very important to give the artists their due. We wish we could be paying a lot more, even to this day. We do speak—we talked a little bit about your journey, and how you work for Actors’ Equity. A lot of our shows are equity shows. We have to follow those rules, but there are other artists that we hire that are not working through an equity umbrella, and they get paid as well. All our teaching artists, all of our lead teaching artists who manages our young theaterworks, everyone. We have a small staff. We’re a small company structurally, but we like to say we are a small company that does big work.

Yura: One of my goals with LiberArte, our organization, is in this kind of intersection of racial, social, and climate justice through the arts, trying to really get into these other sectors, and their funding, and their visibility to promote artists, artistry. This idea of creativity, of emotional connection, of empathy, as these skills that you experience in the arts (witnessing, or being a part of) and those being actually the big catalyst for the social change that we’re trying to see in these sectors. That it’s not going to be a study, or a written report, or there’s going to be a limitation on what really inspires people to change, what really inspires the movement, if it doesn’t include storytelling, if it doesn’t include an activation of creativity, of emotional connection.

Theresa: That’s what the arts do most powerfully is, especially, the emotional connection. A lot of our work will look at certain histories, or be inspired by certain, integrate certain histories into our theaterwork, and your youth work as well. But what art does is provide the emotional history in that particular example. What is the emotional history of that event? How did that event feel? How does it feel now? How does it impact you now? How does that move you now? Because without that, people are not going to be moved to do anything. Is that is part of why you’re doing the work, and it is part of why we’re doing it. We do want to enlighten people. We want to bring more consciousness to people’s sensibilities about any number of things that we work on that enlighten people about Chicano history, LA history, land developments, the spiritual aspects of the history of art making….

I could go on and on about all the things that we want people to be moved by. We’ve even done things where I brought these little things that we do. This was an info-zine that we created for Adobe Punk, this show that we’ve been working on the last few years. And it folds out, it has all this information, and it has a map of LA punk clubs, and deals with women in punk and people of color in punk, punk and squatting, the notion of housing. It goes on and on. And then it has the QR code that takes you to a bunch of research as well. But this kind of thing is something that we’ve actually learned to do really well. My sensibility is that you can’t expect the art to be responsible for everything. The art needs to be art, and it needs to have the space for that. It needs to have the aesthetic room, and the qualities that art brings to our world. You need to honor that. And so if you’re going to piece in things that are political, or that are more concrete in the sense of them being in the real world.

Yura: It comes back to this idea of the Building Our Own Tables of that impulse to say we are valuable, our stories, our ideas, our tables to be seen and to be heard, and so we’re going to go ahead and take action to do that. I am curious to hear more about as these years have gone, the challenges that you’ve faced, and how you’ve overcome them in building your own table.

Theresa: You have to accept if you’re going to be an artist in this world, and have an arts organization, or a company, or whatever, that it’s going to be a challenge. And so you have to be resilient. You have to believe deeply in what you’re doing, and I think you also have to have optimism at the core of what you’re doing. Optimism that you’re going to survive. Optimism that the work is valuable, and it’s going to be received. Optimism that you’re going to get the resources, at least as many as you can get so you can survive the things that don’t come through for a particular project, like a grant, or whatever it might be. You just have to let those slide off your back, and just, “okay, we’re just moving forward. We’re just moving forward.” That’s okay. That’s something that occurred, and not get too wrapped up in just… One of the worst things that’s ever happened in that way just happened to us where we lost our NEA [National Endowment for the Arts] grant. That’s never happened to us. Ever. We’re just going to take away something that you worked for, that you received that you were set to receive. And I was angry for a while, and then I turned it into a way for us to reach out to our community, and say, “Can you help us? We need your support now.” And people really stepped up. It was really beautiful to see how people are outraged by that kind of thing going on. So, in other words, how do you turn something that seems negative into something positive? You’re artists, you’re creative, by hook or crook, again. You’re going to find a way to create something out of nothing, and you have a vision, you have an idea, but that’s all it is.

And now you’re going to build that in whatever way you’re going to, and that might take a month, or it might take three years, or five years, or whatever. And that’s the hope I think, in optimism, and the sort of joy of creativity that artists have that that is what we’re going to do. That’s our offer; that’s our gift. The gift we’re going to bring into this world. And it has just, again, as much value as any other kind of gift that someone else has to offer that maybe is more, considered more concrete, or more… Not to say that’s not valuable. The other things that people do that other things that people, the kinds of occupations that they choose to have, it’s all valuable.

Yura: And awakening, helping to awaken the creativity in everyone, just by seeing, mirroring the creativity of an artist. You get anybody there around can access that frequency, that energy, absorb some of that creativity, and awaken from within, and affect whatever they might be going through in their life, and create solutions for challenges. I definitely think that’s an important quality of founders, in particular: to be able to tap into that creativity of the challenge of a destruction of a loss, and then not getting stuck in that framework, in that mindset, in that spiral of “This is the end. This is the worst.” And then being able to have that kind of arising from the ashes of “Actually, let’s try this. Let’s do something else.” How could this story that I’m hearing now actually turn into a different story?

Theresa: Or a different approach even when you’re in, for us, it’s the space where we’re making this work, like the theatre, whatever it is. A lot of times the creation comes out of the lack of a resource, or a mistake, or surprise, or something you’re working. And then it was like that was never written into the script or the outlin, or whatever, and we’re finding it right there in the moment, and that’s a beautiful choice. And I think pivoting to be facile about the way you’re pivoting. Just a slight pivot the other way and moving on.

Yura: Yeah, and then inspiring others, too. I’m sure this is a big thing for you with having a team, with having others involved of that leadership journey, that leadership experience to be able to inspire others for a change, or in challenging moments to come together, and say, there’s other options, and we’re going to keep going. How has that been for you?

Theresa: We’ve been about collaboration since the get-go. So the notion of teams of people working on projects, artistic teams, even marketing teams, or administrative teams, or our Young Theaterworks team. That is how we do the work. We do it in teams, and my approach is that have as much to learn from anyone at the table as they might have to learn from me. After thirty-seven years, there’s a lot that I’m carrying, but nonetheless, that’s how I also approach when I was teaching. I have as much to learn from my students as they have to learn from me. That is the joy of it. That’s how you continue growing. That’s how you continue opening up the vision and the perspective in your life, in your world, in the company, etc. That’s our model. We’re still working from that model, and I love it. I’m a collaborator at heart, and that’s been an incredible influence on me, and the work itself, the artistic work.

Yura: I love that. Before we get further into this episode, go ahead, and hit subscribe on this podcast. This is the best way to stay updated on new episodes, and it helps spread the word to other visionaries who are making a positive impact on the world. So, go ahead and hit subscribe, and let’s keep this good energy going.

How would you describe what success looks like now for your table, and if that definition evolved over time?

Theresa: It’s interesting, the evolution. I was thinking about this earlier that when we started. We were artists, was an artist startup, so to speak (that term didn’t even exist when we began) but it was an artist startup focusing on the art making, raising enough to get projects done, and we’re still in a sense doing project to project, but it was really focused very much on that. And then about twenty—twenty-five, actually—years ago, we started a project program called Young Theaterworks, which works with public high school students in the classroom. And we’ve had all different types of programs. The current ones that—the major ones—are social justice residency where we bring community leaders/elders into the classroom, and they’re interviewed by the students. And then the students write plays about their life story, pick some aspect of it, and then those plays are produced in different forms, so different formats from a reading to a full production.

And then those productions are called Seeds of Resistance, and they’re super inspiring to everyone. But in particular to the high school students who are learning more about who made a difference in their community: What are the issues that they addressed and changed? And which ones are intractable, which ones are we still dealing with? And giving them the inspiration to say one person can make a difference. One person has the power to, whether it’s organize or whatever it might be, to work around an issue in my own community. And that’s a really powerful program that we have, and it’s very intergenerational, obviously, which is also very important to us. And we’re working in LA public high schools. A majority of the students are Latinx, very close to 95 percent I would say. We’re working in LAUSD [Los Angeles Unified School District] and Pasadena Unified School Districts. And it’s not after school; it’s in the classroom. And that gives us an infrastructure that is very complicated but is very strong because it’s part of their curriculum. It’s not an option to go after school and participate in something. It’s something that they’re going to get credit for. In some cases, they’re getting really important credit that they need to graduate because, in some cases, we’re in what are called continuation high schools where the students are in smaller high schools, not the larger high school that they would normally be in, because they’re having trouble in some way with their academic progress.

And then we have a program called Art of the Monologue, and that is introducing students to different forms of monologues and getting them to write their own personal monologue and then present that on stage, usually, before them seeing a professional production of ours. So, they’re on the stage that we’re on. This year we’re also going to do a production with those monologues that we don’t normally do. And then we’re also doing a related project called The Art of Dreaming: A Landscape of LA Voices. And that is connected to the Young Theaterworks work, because it’s our teaching artists are writing the monologues, and they’re going to share their stories with everyone, including the students that we work with. So, we’re elevating the voices of our teaching artists who normally just work for us as teaching artists in the classroom, but they’re all professional writers, directors, performers.

And so just going back to your question about what does success look like—there’s been an evolution of who are we impacting, and how wide is our umbrella, so to speak. And it now includes schools, and these teenagers, and their families. And because we’re in different schools around the county where our geography has spread out because of that as well. We’ve always, as I mentioned, been itinerant where we have produced all over the place because LA County, as you probably know, is it’s a massive entity. Even the city of LA, which is part of LA County, is massive. So, it’s given us… Being itinerant gives us that flexibility to say, we’re going to do this piece in this community. We don’t have to be tied to our home base, our home theatre, or whatever. It’s also allowed us to tour. At one time we were doing a lot of touring, and I think that we’re able to do that because we had that sensibility. A lot of theatre companies don’t tour because they can’t. They’re too grounded in that one geography that they’re in, whatever that might mean to them. But with us, it was always, “Let’s take the work out. Let’s work in this neighborhood,” or whatever that we need to engage with, or that the content that we’re working with is something that they’re interested in.

Yura: What have they said? What have been some of the responses from the students, or the communities, and parents?

Theresa: Oh, the response is so positive. The teachers really understand that we are elevating the students’ ability to become social justice leaders, even if it’s—in the case of that particular program—even if it’s not going to happen tomorrow, they’re a few years from going to college, or going out in the world, and it’s inspiring to know that they can make a difference somehow. They see a problem. Maybe there was someone that was working on that. I feel a connection to that kind of activism. It’s not just, “Oh, I’m lost inside of the fact that my neighborhood has this or that problem, or my culture has this or that problem.”

So, the teachers love what we do. We have a team of teaching artists that go into the schools. Speaking of teams, again. When we’re in the continuation high schools, I think of it a little bit like a triage kind of thing where… Because those students tend to have super more complicated needs because they’ve been moved out of their main high school, and they’re struggling to get through the classes they need to take, and they may have problems at home. Now we’re holding our breath with what we’re going to be facing this fall with the immigration crackdown in LA, and how that’s going to impact our students. That’s going to impact most of them, whether they’re in a large high school or a smaller high school. The super heavy part of it happened in some cases right before, or right as school was ending. This God-awful, just disgusting ICE actions.

And then we had summer, right? We’re still in summer school’s about to start again. So, is it going to impact who’s coming to school? People are afraid about picking their kids up from school. How is that going to just impact their everyday, if they are in school, their mental health? All of these things. So, we’re, again, holding our breath to see. But we also feel that what we’re doing gives, especially the Art of the Monologue right now, it gives them the room. It started to show up in this past spring. It has shown up before, but in a way where it’s showing up the fear that some of these students live with, in a sense, all the time. And that’s starting to show up in these monologues that they’re writing. And it’s just really powerful for them to have the opportunity to write about that, and to speak the words.

Many of them have never spoken in public, so that can be a very powerful experience, and transformative. When we’re working on the plays, the social justice plays, there’s this moment where we read them in class, like a table read in a sense, and we bring in—the teaching artists are also reading with them. Sometimes we need to bring in other actors to read because there’s more characters, and all of that. But the moment they hear their words obviously come off the page—it happens with anybody who’s writing—but it’s just mind-blowing for them to hear. So, that’s one of the first transformations. There’s other transformations before that, because we have to take them through a process of trusting the process, and that’s a transformative moment, too. Because most of them have never been through any kind of theatrical process. They’re not in the kinds of schools that would have the opportunity to do that. Some have, they’re in a super massive high school that happens to have some theatre teachers, but some of the schools we’re it.

Yura: Wow. Yeah, you definitely start to feel a purpose, an important need to continue. I can see that after so many years, too.

Theresa: Yeah. And that was not there at the beginning. So, what success was at the beginning has definitely evolved, and it’s great. We’ve been able to evolve so that we have the resources to do these other things other than make the professional work. And we’ve also now, for the past probably about ten years or so, really made an effort to how do we integrate the professional work with our young theaterworks in different ways. They may study the content of the work that we’re doing. We’re teaching them about collaboration. They’re coming to see the work, they’re sharing their work on stage, on our stages, etc. There’s different things, like this Art of Dreaming Project is really super integrated because, like I said, the teaching artists are going to write the monologues and perform them.

A lot of times the creation comes out of the lack of a resource, or a mistake, or surprise, or something you're working. And then it was like that was never written into the script, or the outline, or whatever, and we're finding it right there in the moment, and that's a beautiful choice.

Yura: What are you dreaming into being now? What’s the future that you’re building, would you say?

Theresa: We are working on this Adobe Punk project that was a theaterwork, but it’s also a musical work. Not a musical, but it’s a punk rehearsal in real time. And it was actually watching a group of punks in the early eighties who were squatting in a historic Adobe, which they don’t realize is a historic Adobe. They think it’s just an empty house, or vacant house. And so all the songs are original. They’re punk songs that I co-wrote with a woman named Nina Diaz, who is a rock and roll, amazing rock and roll musician slash punk musician, and she’s in a band called Girl in a Coma out of San Antonio, Texas. So, it’s like you’re watching the evolution of these songs, because they’re rehearsing them, and creating them, and writing them, and some of them are in reaction to learning about the Adobe history. Some of them are about staking their claim on this empty house, and so in a sense, more personal. So people use the term, it’s a play with music. It’s really a hybrid. And that’s true for a lot of our work, but it is a hybrid. And so what we’re doing is we’re going to have some concerts that are separate from the theaterwork where the band is performing in clubs in LA in particular, so that there’s that sort of entity. And we’re going to release some of the songs as well, or all the songs from the piece, probably on cassette is what we’re thinking. It’s set in the early 1980s in Bell Gardens, which is this small city south of downtown, and part of an area called Southeast LA. It was a very mixed neighborhood at one time. It’s very almost all Latinx now, but it used to be very white. Then it became mixed, and that’s at the point where our piece takes place is when it’s mixed. So, we have an Asian, White, and Latino character in the band. The band is a three-piece band, and that’s very LA as well.

So, just exploring more about, I guess the example with Adobe Punk is exploring more how does the work get out? How does the work, where can it exist, and how can it exist out in the world? Does it always have to be within a theatre space, which has been the history of the company as well, but this is a super aggressive way of thinking about it, and actually producing around it.

Yura: When does this come out? When is this available?

Theresa: The concert, and the recording will be released around March, April-ish. We don’t have an exact date, but around March, and then we are hoping to remount Adobe Punk as well, the theaterwork, but that’s a separate process. I feel like spreading out the leadership, as well, of the company is sort of part of what’s happening in the near future.

Yura: Yeah. Listeners will know, because I announced this in the podcast, but I’m actually pregnant right now.

Theresa: Oh, my gosh.

Yura: Yeah. One of the big gifts of this time has been, and right now, eight months pregnant.

Theresa: Oh, my. You are ready.

Yura: Yeah. One of the big gifts has been to really be able to let go of that, and offer, delegate, bring more people in. And actually recently we did do a festival here in New York where I am right now at Rockaway Beach called the Afro Diasporic Ocean Festival. This is the second year we’re doing it, and so this year we were able to bring on someone, who was a volunteer last year, as the festival producer. That role was hers, and her name was Tanya Alfonso, and she did such an amazing job, and has now also stepped into this role going forward, too. So, it was really just exciting to see how this is possible. Even on our podcast now, we have someone who’s producing, Yara Aly, so each of the projects that I’ve been working to build up, and create now also have leaders, producers, those who are taking on that role of running it.

And it’s really been a gift, but not only for me as wanting to say, “Okay, I want to take off some of that responsibility,” but I can also see how it’s really important for the future of these projects, and for the organization on the whole, and the impact that it makes on everyone else. So, definitely has been such a gift to really be pushed into that. There’s no other options at this point. There has to be other people who are gonna be—

Theresa: You’re forced to have to do it, but it’s very smart of you to see that ahead of time. And I have a son who’s thirty, and I remember when he was born, and I had to pass things over as well, and say, “Okay.” And I can’t remember, I think I took six months off from the company. I was in and out of what was going on. And it’s such a natural thing to just be in that space with the child. It’s an amazing time, not that a whole thing is an amazing time. You are in a space that’s super connected to the universe. It sounds corny, but it’s yes, and you’re in this very watery space that you’re floating in, and it’s so nice just to be in it, and not have to think about time. That’s the one thing that children bring is they don’t have any sense of time.

It’s almost, it’s so obviously the opposite of how we live our lives, where everything’s on the schedules, and what time is it, and the time, and then all of a sudden it just gets sucked out of your daily life in so many different ways. The ways that have to do with taking care of a child who’s waking up all the time, and all of that. There’s that, but I’m also just talking about even when they’re a little older walking, and there’s still no sense of time, and it’s really nice to just, “I’m going to go with that. I’m going to be in that space with them.” and it’s another way of exploring the world with them taking their lead on, there’s no time. This is frustrating. Like, no, we really do have to get home, or do this, or do that, but they’re just in the world.

Yura: Yeah, a presence. I always do say time is not linear, and I always bring that into my work, and perspective. But I know that this—and this is a kind of maybe taking the narratives, and switching the stories sometimes of different workplace situations where in the arts, and also in other sectors, there’s this narrative that children, or having children is a bad thing for the work, for the art. It’s going to take away the business, or your ability to be there.

Theresa: Yeah, there’s so many things like that.

Yura: Yeah. There’s also the other option to actually say the opposite, that actually having children, having kids around, tapping into their wisdom, and their ability to be very creative, to be in this—

Theresa: Bring that creativity. Yeah.

Yura: It’s actually probably the best thing that could be for your business, for your work, for your art, for your artist.

Theresa: The transformation that you’re going to go through is there’s no way to describe it. People talk about it, and you can read about it, but when you’re in it, when you finally are in it’s completely, it is literally completely transformative.

Yura: How can we stay up to date with you? How can we stay up to date with About...Productions?

Theresa: Our website, and our socials are all AboutPD, A-B-O-U-T-P-D. You can also join our mailing list, eblast list on our website, so just go to aboutpd.org, and then you can get up-to-date things. Follow us, but follow us, please. Follow us on social media, and that will obviously keep you up to date as well.

Yura: Amazing. Thank you so much for being here today, Theresa Chavez, About...Productions. This has been wonderful. 

This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and any HowlRound show wherever you find podcasts, including non-commercial, open-source apps, like Anytime Podcast Player for iPhone and AntennaPod for Android. If you loved this podcast, please share it with your friends. You can find a transcript for this episode, along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content, on howlround.com. Have an idea for a meaningful podcast, essay, or TV event the theatre community needs to hear? Visit howlround.com and submit your ideas to this knowledge commons. Thanks for pulling up a seat to liberation with us at Building Our Own Tables. Catch you next time.