Liberal Democracy as a Cultural Practice

As the national team of One Nation/One Project (ONOP), we travelled to each of the eighteen individual locations for the Arts for EveryBody campaign. We split our travels up according to our own geography, interests, and personal relevance, as well as where we could be most useful in serving the goals of the local partners. The only individual who traveled to each of the eighteen locations was photojournalist Scout Tufankjian, who we commissioned to document each site leading up to 27 July 2024. Our travels put us in a position to experience different parts of the country while the United States presidential election was underway, and our big day, 27 July 2024, fell exactly two weeks after the Republican National Convention and two weeks before the Democratic National Convention.

In this conversation, national team members Tyler Thomas, Michael Rohd, and Clyde Valentin, together with Scout Tufankjian, reflect our experiences that paralleled the most consequential election of a lifetime. It is in retrospect that we use this national political cycle as a prism for our current work as artists collaborating with local leaders from multiple sectors and diverse communities of all backgrounds to achieve some common goals.

Our brief conversation, edited and abridged here, is around our travels and our insights, reflections, and ideas. We also reflect on the roles theatremakers—and all artists and cultural workers, actually—can play to strengthen our democracy now and move forward in these times.

Keep in mind that we are having this conversation approximately one hundred days into this current administration (mid-April 2025), so there is no telling what will be happening by the time of publication.

Observations on Traveling Across the Country

Scout Tufankjian: Part of the way that I do my job is through building connections with people and acknowledging explicitly that I know that I am not a part of their community—and I am open. What I want to hear is how they see their community, what they think I should see, and how they would tell their story. Especially with this project, where the eighteen different cohort sites were not the same. They all had different artistic practices and different goals, but they all have chosen to be under this big tent.

Michael Rohd: I’ve also spent a lot of time being an artist coming in to do residency work from the outside, and this project was sort of an intense version of that. All the visits were short, but we had these long virtual relationships. So I, for the most part—like you Scout—am very explicit and playful and respectful, hopefully, about being not of this place, about entering as an outsider.

Scout: Drawing connections between people and communities as the project went on became something that the sites were super interested in. For example, hearing what, say, Appalachia and Honolulu have in common, or the things that the border communities have in common with Honolulu or Kansas City. People were really interested in the connections between the communities. So I was able to give insight into that through my own insights and understanding of what people were doing in other places. At the same time, I was bringing myself and my own background, explicitly saying, “This is who I am. This is where I'm from. These are the things that my background has in common with where you're at.”

We were helping to shorten the distance between these places through the stories we were able to share with each other and leverage for those places.

Michael: I had two moments over the duration of the site visits we did where some folks thought I shared their point of view and discovered I didn’t. In those awkward moments, I experienced the larger cultural and political conflicts, both historic and present, very much alive in these places. We were incredibly fortunate to be in dialogue in all these different spaces and step into that complexity, hopefully in useful, meaningful, at times disruptive ways.

Clyde Valentin:  This makes me think about the disparity of geographies—knowing that there are pockets of Chicago in Phillips County, Arkansas, and there are pockets of Utica, Mississippi in places like Seattle or Harlan County, in terms of the commonality of some of those experiences…

But what feels acute, and this came up in a couple of places, was the high degree of isolation and lack of access, which is something I was very aware of in several of the site visits.

Savannah Barrett from Art of the Rural said during our Capstone Convening that “the shortest distance between two people is a story.” In some ways, we were helping to shorten the distance between these places through the stories we were able to share with each other and leverage for those places.

Michael: What you just said is crucial to answering the question, “What can theatre artists be doing right now at this chaotic and traumatic moment in this country?” I believe one of our core jobs should be shortening the distance between different people and communities, and that is one of the things we are most suited to do and have skills to do. And we so desperately need it because everything gets so nationalized so quickly. Our project showed that even as things get national, focusing on the local and building connections across locales can help build relationships. Theatre folks can do that and need to be doing that: We need to be shortening the distance between people.

Scout: The theatre provides a community for those who wouldn't have a community otherwise, who would be alone otherwise.

The future of storytelling is wider apertures, greater empathy, more willingness to press into the consciousness of the "other" or “the opponent.”

Michael: On this other project I've been working on these past years, State of Mind (which looks at public and behavioral health across Montana), somebody just said last week, in a town of 725 people, “We have kids and adults who are not seen. If they're not a star athlete, if they're not from a family with one of the four names that owned the ranches outside town, they're not seen. And when people aren't seen in our communities, they can't be healthy.”

So, a lot of this is about us figuring out at the local level how to help people be seen. And at the national level right now there is a very conscious effort to unsee, not see, or make us see people in subhuman ways. So, how do theatre artists contribute to making sure everyone is seen?

Scout: And safe.

Michael: Seen is a step towards being safe.

Scout: Absolutely.

Clyde: Acknowledgement comes first.

Tyler Thomas: It's a step towards, certainly, but is also distinct from.

I think this point about refuge and sanctuary is so important. Right now, I'd say an essential question for us to be asking as a theatre community (and any community) is “What does true sanctuary look like in our theatre spaces? And for whom and with whom?”

This aspect of storytelling as a vehicle for new sight or deeper ways of seeing is also abundantly crucial. A lot of the existential crisis that we're facing as a country right now, yes, comes from the inevitable tension of the myth of this country as being a white, Christian nation, but also from the fact that many of the people who are bought into this myth feel largely unseen by a rapidly changing society. So the future of storytelling is wider apertures, greater empathy, more willingness to press into the consciousness of the "other" or “the opponent”—not just to make space for greater visibility along the presumed margins, but to provide space for new ways of seeing and understanding people at the presumed center.

With a wider aperture come longer bridges of connection—from rural Wisconsin to the island of O’ahu—distances that are shortened by the power of a good story and a good teller.

Clyde: In February, we were together in Dallas for a full week, preparing to host our friends and colleagues from all eighteen communities around the country at the Arts for EveryBody Capstone Convening. What reflections can we bring forth in relation to the chaos that was ensuing around us and that continues to surround us?

Michael: One thing that stood out for me is how joyful people were to be together and to be in a space where they could be themselves, where they could feel safe and have moments that were not just about resistance and protecting oneself and strategizing out of duress. They could be generative, joyful, and connective. People seemed hungry for that and deeply moved to get that time with folks from all these different communities.

Tyler: I think this is so key, Michael, to us as theatre artists and producers in the fight to withstand the chaos and trauma of this moment: the importance of intentionally creating restorative space. The joy and celebration are key to survival. It's how we assert and protect our humanity. It’s how we heal.

Scout: I mean for me what was really great was that I was able to walk into a room and see all the people connecting who I thought would connect, from across the different sites. I sometimes explicitly tried to make introductions, but a lot of times they just found each other. I’d be like, “Oh yes, you four, I knew you guys would have interesting things to share with each other.” So what I really liked is people really taking advantage of the moment.

Clyde: I agree, and it's no coincidence that at all the wellness programming we set up—be it the chair massages or the one-on-one consultations with the Ayurvedic practitioner, the 7:00 a.m. sunrise yoga—there was not an empty space.

Michael: There were a couple people who came up to me and said something along the lines of, “I have been shocked to come to Texas and feel so cared for and safe. It gets me thinking about what's possible in our country.”

Our closing pleneary session included curated respondents from several of the sites and one national guest—our friend and colleague, Marc Bamuthi Joseph. He, as we know, participated as an artist in Oakland’s No Place Like the Town 27 July event and served as the narrator for our five-episode podcast documentary. In his closing plenary response, he spoke to his role at the Kennedy Center and his thoughts about being an artist within a nation experiencing oppressive and unjust policies and actions. His words to us coincided, in the most surreal way, with national news.

Scout: I mean literally the announcement that Trump was taking over the Kennedy Center happened in the middle of his speech.

Clyde: Yes. Marc Bamuthi Joseph himself has gone on media outlets to talk about his experience, and to paraphrase him, based upon his experience inside the Kennedy Center at this time, it's about the erasure of everything Black. The Pentagon is choosing to delete historical text on its own website that illustrates and champions the narratives of diversity in America. Across all federally controlled websites and agencies, references to social justice and the historical achievement of Black folks and many others are being erased. Talk about the power of narrative.

How Bamuthi closed for us became something else that was, I think, much more spiritual from my experience.

Michael: It became testimony.

Clyde: Powerful. It really opened up our participants, practitioners, and local colleagues and how they were holding this work.

Michael: What do we want our colleagues in the field and the readers of this essay to think about, or more importantly to do, over the next few years?

Scout: You saw a huge difference between the sites who kind of treated this like another grant and people who saw it as being part of a larger community and a different kind of project. Some were kind of gatekeeping the access to the larger group and didn't see the benefit of being in cohort with eighteen different sites across the country. You saw a real difference in the outcomes.

Michael: I think it's important that folks in the theatre commit to nourishing and developing our capacity for curiosity, because it's really easy for curiosity to dissipate or seem less important in times of challenge, stress, and trauma. We must be helping people look for connection, and curiosity is just crucial for that.

How does the artist fit into that messy definition of the democratic process?

Clyde: Which makes me think about the charge moving forward and this idea, again, of fostering connectivity, shortening the distance between people, the kind of actions that we can take. Even in creating ONOP, we took very deliberate steps to function as a theatre ensemble during much of design and decision-making processes as a national team. So at times, certain decisions weren’t my favorite decision, but the consensus was there. It made sense. It spoke to the larger goals. It worked. In many ways, that's the democratic process: It's messy, you don't always like the outcomes, but you all agree on the larger things, and you acknowledge that this helps move us forward.

Michael: How does the artist fit into that messy definition of the democratic process? What did we learn about that over the project, and what do we want to ask readers to consider in terms of the theatre artist's role in the mess of democracy?

Clyde: I want us to think about how we move towards this very complicated birthday that this country is careening towards, which is 4 July 2026, the semiquincentennial. I think it offers another moment, quite frankly, leading to another major electoral cycle where folks locally can choose to stand up and gather around some very big ideas, to be seen, to create space, and to shorten the distance between ourselves and each other.

Michael: If our federal, self-appointed cultural ministers are going to insist on a certain message, a certain type of cultural expression around that date, how can we as theatre artists and educators say, “You know what? It's also about histories of dissent. It's also about challenging power. It's also about curiosity.” How do we make critical thinking just as patriotic as tradition, bombast, and cheer? By making compelling, omnipresent artistic works across scale and discipline that exemplify defiance, intelligence, and connective opportunities and that stand in response to and against monolithic retellings of a revisionist, fearful national narrative.

Tyler: I think this idea of becoming an outsider is really critical. Perhaps another strategy for us as we think about our role and practices in these times is to be thinking about what it is to get outside? To intentionally go outside of our comfort zones. Go to restaurants or public spaces across town. To practice entering someone else’s community. To change our daily traffic or travel patterns. To partner with new people, exclusively for the sake of building the muscle to be able to—and along the way, drawing your own connections.