Theatremakers as Movement Builders

One Nation/One Project (ONOP) was a national arts and health initiative co-founded by Lear deBessonet and Clyde Valentin, the latter being a co-author of this essay. Our work emanated from the seed of an idea nurtured by Lear during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and cultivated amongst many of our friends and colleagues nationally. In 2021, Clyde and Lear began the process of realizing the idea. They homed in on a working group of collaborators, secured fiscal sponsorship from the Tides Center, and started raising money. Our official Tides Center launch was June 2021, and we formally close as a project on 30 June 2025. During this four-year period, ONOP quickly scaled up as a national operation through a network of collaborations, partnerships, and alliances and additionally added Nataki Garrett as a third co-artistic director to expand on our shared leadership model. In June 2023, we launched Arts for EveryBody, an audacious narrative campaign designed to be a national celebration of diversity and creative expression in the United States and to make more visible the relationships between the arts and health.

The project was inspired by the Federal Theatre Project, a fiscal recovery program of the Works Progress Administration. In 1936, eighteen theatre companies premiered the same play on the same day around the country. So for ONOP and its Arts for EveryBody campaign, eighteen sites premiered eighteen community-designed, participatory public art projects focused on arts and health on 27 July 2024. Over the project period, ONOP partners provided more than 2,000 opportunities for arts participation across our eighteen sites, with over 110,000 people participating in site activities.

A description of the projects and places, which represent vastly different economic, social, racial, and geographic experiences, can be found in a final impact report we are releasing towards the end of June and will be available via HowlRound and our own website.

The work of 27 July is only a piece of ONOP’s far-reaching story. We also invested in major initiatives designed for fieldwide impact, including a significant contribution to the body of research on the impact of arts participation on social cohesion and wellbeing, as well as a national narrative campaign designed to galvanize investment in this type of programming, which culminated in a convening for 250 attendees in Dallas, Texas in February of this year.

As a foundation for a series on our work, this opening essay explores the expansive potential of artists across all disciplines who choose to create in relationship with community, whether that community is rooted in identity, geography, or shared values. Theatremakers in particular possess a unique set of leadership skills developed through their practice: collaboration, listening, creative problem-solving, narrative framing, and an acute awareness of group dynamics. These are not just artistic tools—they are civic ones as well. These tools can be applied across multiple sectors including health, government, affordable housing, and other economic development initiatives.

How might we position ourselves, our institutions, our companies, and/or our classrooms to meet the moment in ways that lead to meaningful, lasting change?

Theatremakers—directors, designers, writers, performers, creative producers, stage managers—can be important team members and leaders. They can also be vital to strengthening the social cohesion of any working group to help foster even more efficiency towards almost any goal. This isn’t hyperbole; it is based on our own experiences looking back at our development and design work to realize ONOP and 27 July 2024.

The ONOP initiative, which was rooted in civic engagement and cultural collaboration, brought together eighteen communities from across the country—from Providence, Rhode Island to Honolulu, Hawai’i and from Seattle, Washington to Gainesville, Florida. Our work reflects how theatrical practices can serve as foundational tools for leading complex, cross-sector projects that foster connection, creativity, and collective purpose. Our series includes articles that reflect on the importance of community co-design; approaches to values-driven, arts-based research; the costs of pluralism; and, finally, reflections on the political backdrop of this work and the current assault on liberal democracy.

Notably, our approach is not a critique or dismissal of creating art for art’s sake. There is a profound value in simply telling great stories. If your calling is to craft compelling narratives that move, delight, challenge, and inspire, then by all means do it. We need that work. Bring us joy, empathy, sorrow, and laughter. Help us consider questions and make discoveries. We need all of us to make a difference, to bring us together, and to inspire possibilities. We need all of us doing all of the things, especially now amongst the “shock and awe” of intentional cruelty and chaos, desensitization, intense isolation, the dismantling of social infrastructure, and countless other efforts to subjugate the many in favor of the few.

In these times, how might we position ourselves, our institutions, our companies, and/or our classrooms to meet the moment in ways that lead to meaningful, lasting change? We offer this as a beginning of that conversation here, with you, now. 

As we developed momentum for this project, we had to illustrate what could happen on 27 July. We had to ignite the imaginations and spectrums of possibility for anyone sitting across from us.

Theatre Skills for Movement Building

Below is an outline of a few of the skills we think carried over to help build this cross-sectional, time-bound collaboration.

1. Exceptional Collaboration Skills: 
   Theatremakers, by nature, are collaborators. Our work demands an ability to engage a myriad of partners from a variety of professional backgrounds. We are skilled at managing high levels of complexity and driven to solve problems and discover new opportunities. 
   
   Collaboration is a muscle that takes practice to build. Movements, campaigns—any significant group enterprise, really—takes a ginormous amount of energy that can only be stewarded at the hands of an effectively collaborating collective.

   Collaborating over time helps one identify the distinct assets of each collaborator that will make meaningful differences to the whole. A theatremaker has the capacity to understand the function and expertise of the highly skilled workers around them and how each role works together to reach a collective end. This nuanced insight powerfully transfers over to supporting large, complex initiatives and lends itself to high adaptability within effective collaborations, ensuring all voices have a seat at the table.

   For ONOP, a big moment of transition was growing from our first nine sites into eighteen. For funding reasons primarily, we could not immediately build a cohort of eighteen sites. So we started with nine, working with these cities for nearly a year before onboarding a second group of nine sites. As our funding picture became clearer, we expanded to eighteen but had to be highly intentional about how to integrate nine additional locations onto a moving train. Our central task was to support the cohort in the way one does a production team, to nurture a community of diverse partners, each contributing uniquely to a larger whole.

2. World Builders and Stewards: 
   Every theatremaker engaged in a production is actively working to build a world that doesn’t yet exist. We are first and foremost agents of imagination. This is an essential skill in movement building. Before we can construct a new world, we first have to—together—conceive what it will be. Dream of the alternative. Then, we distill and communicate that world to others, each step moving us closer to a world being realized and inspiring others to believe in it.

   Along the way, as we developed momentum for this project, we had to illustrate what could happen on 27 July. We had to ignite the imaginations and spectrums of possibility for anyone sitting across from us—be it a potential funder or a local community leader. We had to invite them into the vision. Moreover, as we arrived at eighteen sites and began to nurture the cohesion of this group into a national cohort, 27 July—this dream, this end goal—maintained our focus and served as the “North Star.” As theatemakers, we understand end goals. We understand opening night. No matter the challenge and local or national decision point, this North Star informed and centered the collective goal of achieving a “national premiere” on 27 July.

3. Human Literacy: 
   As collaborators and storytellers, theatremakers are exceptional communicators. This core skill of communication and human understanding leads to stronger group functionality in creative work. The same is true in movement building. 
   
   Leading with genuine curiosity and the knowledge of what motivates each of us matters—it generates trust and connection. You need people who trust each other in the trenches of deep and meaningful organizing and movement building work—people who understand the needs of others and who can lift up those needs through story and image.
   
   This unique skillset lends itself to cultivating the labor conditions necessary for safe spaces in massive group enterprises where the stakes are high—be that the opening of a new production or the building of a new transportation system or food distribution network.
   
   Our efforts as the national nexus of eighteen distinct, locally led projects were about being open and nurturing an openness to each site’s learnings and work. As a national team, we—to the best of our own ability—took a bespoke approach with each site, viewing and supporting local capacities and opportunities in relationship to each site’s own set of goals leading up to and well beyond 27 July. This approach was rooted in the understanding that just as each production has its own artistic timeline, needs, and desired outcomes, hyperlocal effort requires hyperlocal care.

We also reject the false binary that an artist must choose between making great art or making a difference.

Co-Designing the Future

Fundamentally, we believe that theatremakers possess an untapped reservoir of civic leadership potential. Their craft requires them to move fluidly between roles—collaborator, visionary, communicator, listener, organizer—and it is precisely this multiplicity that makes their skills so transferable to broader community contexts. The same capacities that allow a director to harmonize a cast, a playwright to distill truth from chaos, or a stage manager to keep hundreds of moving parts synchronized can be brought to bear on the challenges facing our neighborhoods, cities, and public institutions.

We also reject the false binary that an artist must choose between making great art or making a difference. The work of creating transformative theatre and the work of building resilient, equitable communities are not mutually exclusive—they are deeply interwoven. In fact, the most enduring art often emerges from deep engagement with the world. We’ve seen firsthand how theatre artists can hold space for complex dialogue, design processes that foster inclusion, and imagine new ways of living together—all while maintaining artistic rigor and excellence.

We invite you to reflect with us on how your own creative instincts have helped navigate community conflict, reimagine public systems, or bring people together across lines of difference. Perhaps your understanding of ensemble work, storytelling, or spatial design has contributed to civic, educational, or health-centered initiatives. Maybe you’ve found yourself using the language of theatre—rehearsal, scene building, improvisation—as tools for coalition-building or public engagement. What would it mean to position theatremakers not just as cultural commentators, but as strategists, co-designers of the future?

We want to learn from your experiences because we believe that artists—especially those trained in the deeply collaborative and adaptive world of theatre—are uniquely suited to contribute to the work of social healing and transformation. Whether designing a community-based art intervention, serving on a local planning council, leading a public health campaign, or mentoring the next generation, theatremakers bring a set of tools that help groups imagine beyond limitation, practice shared leadership, and hold space for the full complexity of human experience.

So let us build a broader, more expansive understanding of how creative practice can be a form of community care. In a time marked by fragmentation, disconnection, and systemic inequity, we need artists who are willing to step beyond the proscenium and into public life—not to abandon their artistry, but to deepen it through meaningful civic engagement. Together, let’s widen the frame: theatre not just as performance, but as practice for collective action.

We are eager to listen, learn, and build alongside you. Share your stories. Offer your insights. Let us co-create a future where artists are not only storytellers but architects of belonging, wellness, and shared purpose.

The subsequent essays in this series will examine four distinct corners of ONOP’s work. “How Creative Research Strategies Can Center Community Voices” introduces ONOP’s research agenda and methods and illustrates how artistic practice can be a tool for research and deeper learning in community. Sharing learnings from the eighteen-site initiative, “The Cost of Pluralism” considers new pathways and muscles necessary to build stronger, more cohesive communities capable of holding the weight of our growing complexities and emerging challenges. Our fourth piece “From Engagement to Co-Design: Shifting Power in Community” unpacks the potential of more authentic partnerships between artists and other sectors through community based local design initiatives. The final conversation, “Liberal Democracy in Practice as an Artistic and Cultural Act” reflects on what ONOP leaders have learned from their multiyear work about the change that is possible in America across its great diversities of geography, culture and people—and the unique role of the artist in conserving our collective body politic.

We hope you follow along.