Reclaiming Power in Community with Gabi Sanchez and Erlina Ortiz

Erlina Ortiz: I think for the first time in my life, probably in the last couple of years, meaning the last two years, I don’t feel like an imposter in most spaces. When somebody invites me to a table and when somebody is saying like, “Hey, we want to hear your voice or your opinion,” so many times in the past I would be like, “Oh my God, why do they want me? What do I know?” And now I don’t feel that way as much. I’m like, “I know what I have to offer.” And I think that I’ve gotten to that point because of—

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 we are joined by Erlina Ortiz and Gabi Sanchez of Power Street Theatre. I’m really excited to be with you both today. Thanks so much for being here.

Erlina: Thanks for having us.

Gabi Sanchez: Yeah, thanks for having us.

Yura: So Erlina, you are a Dominican American theatremaker, and you are one of the co-founders of Power Street Theatre. You serve as general manager and co-artistic director. And Gabi, you are Puerto Rican theatremaker, also co-founder, co-artistic director, producer of Power Street Theatre. And Power Street Theatre is an organization dedicated to this idea of art for social change, which I definitely resonate with. And there’s so many interesting aspects of what you’ve created over a decade for this organization. Interesting access to arts, like pay-what-you-decide ticketing, free childcare for productions, arts education courses for adults, community roundtable discussions, free open mic gatherings, digital arts programming on social media, free transit for people to attend. So much interesting examples of how you’re actually building this access and social change within the art that you’re producing. So, would love to hear more about where this idea came from. What was that moment that really sparked for you both to decide that this was going to be the journey to embark on, that you were going to start building your own table?

Gabi: I think at the heart of the origin story for Power Street, it was really about feeling siloed. And for me, being a Philly jawn, born and raised, as a Latina, I always found myself siloed whether if that was growing up in West Philly and being the only Latine family on the block. So I grew up with a lot of my Black siblings, which was amazing because also I think the experience of West Philly was that there was a melting pot, and so I was growing up in different cultures. I was eating Ethiopian food as a kid. I was just exposed to a lot of different cultures. I was hyper aware that I was often the only Latina in certain spaces from middle school to high school. I think in my high school graduating class, I went to the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Center City in Philadelphia, and I think we had probably less than ten people, in my graduating class of two hundred, Latine folks.

And then I went to Temple University, one of the most diverse universities in the country, and still found myself siloed, still found myself very alone. And even in that graduating class, I think there was a handful of us. And for me, I wasn’t a musical theatre person, unfortunately, I wasn’t the triple threat. I could not sing, even though I probably sang with every character I performed. Acting like you could sing, there’s a difference versus the sang. But just that component, even going to the university level feeling very alone in many identities I embodied. As the plus size girl, as a girl with curly hair, as someone who had an accent that maybe wasn’t Spanglish but had the neighborhood hood feel that Philly has. So that was something that really showed up for me in my experience. And I think there was a desire to see if there were others that felt like me.

I definitely had folks who were beyond teachers that took the role to teach me some of the hard lessons in life around when you come up with vulnerability to a professor that not all professors are going to see you. There was some navigating around my self-worth that I had to learn really early on of just even folks telling me, “If you want to make it, you need to go to LA where all the Mexican theatre artists are.” And me having a moment of being like, “Oh, you don’t see me because I’ve been in your class for two years, and I’m not even Mexican. You didn’t care to know that about me.”

So I had to learn quickly that in order to make it in this field, I couldn’t do it alone. And what that meant was that I was going to have to build my own table but find the people to do it with. There was no way I was going to be able to do it alone. We put a call out for this show called MinorityLand, and it was really about, “Does anyone else feel like a minority? Let’s create a devised piece together.” And I had a letter that I was giving around to folks, and Erlina Ortiz was one of those people that I gave the letter to.

Erlina: I was already like, I was in that state of, “Oh crap, I’m about to graduate. I have no idea what’s coming next. I don’t feel like I’ve gotten what I needed out of this program.” We were never friends when we were undergrads, which is the funniest thing ever. I think naturally there’s a sort of something set up that puts us against each other because we are a handful of the Latinas. And then whenever there’s the one role that pops up for the Latine person and it’s like all the Latinas are in that audition room together. I guess we’re all competing against each other even though we’re all completely different and we should not all be competing for this role.

So I think that was something that was probably embedded into us even subconsciously. And so Gabi taking that step to say, “Actually I need to do this with my people,” was a big step and perfect timing for me because I was in that state of just, “What’s next, what’s next, what’s next?” And as soon as I saw a multicultural theatre company, I was like, “All right, I’ll come show up to this meeting.”

Gabi: And that’s key: multicultural. Because my people wasn’t just Latine people. My people were Black people, my people were Asian people, my people were folks who felt on the margins, and were women, were LGBTQ+ identified folks. It was wide and ranging and we all had different lived experiences, but the commonality was the amount of emotional labor it took to exist in spaces. The access to liberation that maybe I don’t think any of us quite honestly have because I don’t think we could be liberated until we’re all liberated. That’s my philosophy. But I do think there’s an access that the privileged folks have.

I love that multicultural component that I just want to highlight with Power Street. Although it has been to Latinas running Power Street, and a lot of our stories have inherently centered the experiences of Latine folks, but we have always, even in that, when you think of backstage, when you think of designers, when you think of community organizing, it’s all multicultural, which is also really beautiful when it comes to Power Street. But I will say what was sad about it was what you just said, Erlina. It was our senior year, and it was the first time we looked each other in the eyes, and we saw each other. And I think I always go back to that moment, I said, “What if we would’ve never looked each other in the eyes and essentially said yes to each other and essentially would say yes to our baby?” Because imagining something and then creating it not by yourself, but together with someone, we always joke around that we’re like platonic life partners.

We both are married, and we both told our husbands, “You’re in it with this other person too,” because we are lifelong partners in this very unique way, in this sisterhood. That has been one of the best gifts in my life, quite honestly. So also I think I always go back to that moment if there’s any advice I could give out there is: Who are you not seeing? Who are you not looking in the eye? Because Erlina and I were around each other for four years every Friday. I just think about that. I’m like, “What if we would’ve saw each other a little sooner?” But I believe we saw each other at exactly at the time that we needed to.

We don’t know it all alone, but we know a lot more together.

Erlina: And after that, we did the open call for, “Hey, come create a play with us, if you identify as a minority,” which was the word that was being used at the time. We co-created a show altogether. I ended up writing that show and directing that show. Now as a playwright, I had never written a full play before. But through just the support of this community that we were creating together, I was able to take that leap, and we did our first show. And then for me, the moment that it went from this is a one-time thing, I think there was still for me at least an energy of, “We’ll do this play and then hopefully after that I’ll get a real job,” or, “After that this other thing will happen,” or, “After that, the real opportunity would come.” It still felt like this was going to be just an opportunity as a stepping stone.

But we did our first show in North Philly in a predominantly Latine community. So it was the first time in my life as a theatre lover that I was in a theatre space that also was my people. Seeing for the first time in my life this thing that we had created, which was a show about multicultural people in North Philly, performed by multicultural people from Philadelphia, and then witnessed by a multicultural predominantly Latine audience in North Philly. My brain chemistry changed at that point. And then I was also doing the lights. So I’ll never forget that. Sitting in the back doing the little light board, and just looking at this audience that was full, because we filled up the Puerto Rican Cultural Center with this play. And just having that moment of, “Oh, okay, this is what I got to do. I got to keep doing. Whatever this is, and however we can keep doing this, we got to keep doing this.”

So I still have right here the final letter that Gabriela… I’m going to show it up on my wall over here. There is the letter that Gabi sent after our first production with the split of money that was eighty dollars of the ticket money to say, “Here’s a little bit of money for your effort,” because we did it for free obviously. She mailed that to everyone that was involved and say, “Let’s get together and start talking about what comes next.” And I was so happy when I saw that letter because I was like, “Yes, okay. I’m not the only one that’s this isn’t a one-off thing. We got to keep doing this.”

So yeah, that was the impetus. So from there, we just kept doing shows, but then also finding other ways to continue to engage our community that was not the full production. We had talkbacks after every show and they were incredible, sometimes longer than the show itself. People were so ready to sit and talk about the topics that we were exploring in these plays. So we were like, “What if we had talkbacks but they weren’t after the show? What if we had pre-talkbacks? Like, how do we start to engage our community in these conversations ahead of time to do that sort of community engagement in that way?” So that’s how our story circles evolved and are still ongoing.

Then we were both teaching artists to youth—we had both worked with young people—and then I had the opportunity to teach for adults at a theatre company in Delaware when it was a bilingual adult theatre class. And I’ll always give them credit because David Stradley at Delaware Shakespeare Theatre came up with this idea to partner with the Latin American Cultural [Community] Center in Delaware. And I remember teaching this class and for the first time being like, “Oh, I can use literally the exact same activities that I use with kids. I can teach this class as if it were children and just obviously not treat them like children, they’re adults.” And people need that so badly. They need that space to play. They need that space to be creative that’s outside of a “professional,” quote-unquote, setting. So I went to Gabi and was like, “Classes, we need classes. Our community needs this. We got to do this.” And so now we’re in our seventh year now of having regular full adult theatre class.

Then the final big program that we’ve had is the open mics, which is so funny because we started, our first fundraiser that we ever did for Power Street was an open mic. So we’ve always had open mic or variety show type energy. We’ve done open mics in the park, or we’ve always done little projects that are not as big productions. And then when Jose Alicea joined Power Street, he already had an organization called Souletri, which was all about curating these really amazing open mics. And so we naturally then absorb Souletri, and now we have our sometimes twice a month Souletri Sunday open mics with Power Street, which again is another ongoing program that’s almost plug and play at this point. People just show up because they know it’s going to be a good time. So that’s where we’re at right now.

Yura: I love that. Tell us about the name Power Street. Where did that come from and when did that come in?

Gabi: Power Street actually came out of an iteration with another group, shout out to them. Power Street actually started with some folks that I had went to high school with that were also dreaming up with me, but were going to different universities. And there was this desire, but we weren’t going to the same university so there was that natural challenge there. There was a moment that I was like, “Should we keep the name?” Because it really came from really a brainstorming group with a whole different group of people. But there was something about it that Erlina and I remember being like, “Should we change the name? Should we not?” But we loved it, and it was still rooted in community, and there was something about the reclamation of power. I think there was something about having street in there that the barrio, the neighborhood, the street that we want it to be for the people, and so we kept the name. And everyone has wished us well who are part of the process or part of the ideation of the name early on.

Yura: That’s so real. Thank you for sharing that because I feel like that’s such an important thing that happens when we’re building these initiatives or projects or collectives. That there are going to be changes in who is a part of it, and there’s something about being able to continue and figure it out and move forward and decide to keep going. There is something there about that reality that can happen for founders.

I’d love to get into this topic more on challenges that can come up, whether with people leaving or having different dynamics when it comes to who is a part of the group, but what are some other challenges that you faced in building this table over the past decade?

Gabi: I think this would be a perception of a challenge. And I wanted to bring it up, that Latine people, one, that there’s no Latine artists out there. They’re not going to do any productions because we don’t exist. Even though we’re here, we’re in the departments, we’re studying, we are storytellers. So that, and then also that Latine folks don’t support theatre. I can’t tell you how many times I would hear that over a decade ago. Even now, I think people are more cautious with their words compared to a decade ago. But that was something I would always hear. And as Erlina shared that visceral feeling of her doing the lights and she saw the audience that were our people and we were sold out for all of our shows and we were twenty-something year olds. I’m playing of a yayita on stage. We didn’t even have money for a wig. We were spray painting my hair gray, and I would try to hide my fingertips because they probably had gray on them.

I think Erlina talked about doing the lights and I did the whole set. I did the set design. I also was working at Taller Puertorriqueño at the time, which is a very historical organization in Philly, as their cultural enrichment facility manager. So I was able to also use some of my money from that to invest in the show as well. I think that was a big challenge, too, that came up, is everyone was essentially offering free labor and time or investing. For me, I was investing a lot of my resources and my own money into it, and the artists were investing their transportation to get to rehearsals, all of the things, even their own resources or helping with costumes. Everyone was like, it was all about resource sharing for this dream.

There was such a desire to, one, see if this idea could work, but also know that it already working because we saw each other. That was also the work. It was beyond the product, but it was the process. The process was so healing and also challenging. In theatre, there’s always tough personalities that show up or people go MIA [missing in action], and you’re like, “Wait...” Erlina was doing the lights—perfect example—that was not planned for her to be in the lights. But we had someone drop out, and she stepped up.

And I think that was a moment, too, that there was no egos. I think for the leadership, the folks who were really committed and part of Power Street, everyone was helping clean, bringing some snacks. Everyone was involved with the care that it took to care for one another, to care for the space, and to care for the vision, to see that it was beyond that moment. Even thinking about how funding was such a challenge at that time, we weren’t grant writing. I didn’t even know about grant writing at that point. But realizing, if I did know about grant writing, maybe we wouldn’t have had the strategies that connected us so deeply in community, like doing open mics to fundraise for money. Our money was coming from the community.

Erlina: I think that there’s two challenges that come to mind first for me. The biggest one was in the middle of our second show, I got very ill and ended up in the hospital and we had to cancel our show. And so that was a huge lesson for us that I’m glad we learned early on, which was the show does not have to go on. The show should actually wait if you are needing to go to the doctor, because I think we were young and we were ambitious and we felt like we had endless amounts of energy that we were just pushing ourselves, and that led to me being seriously ill. And now one of our values is wellness, and one of the reasons that we are constantly having to relearn that value and push ourselves to put that value at the front. And I’m glad that we at least have it because it forces us to go, “Wait a second, is this leaning into our value of wellness?” It’s because we know that we need to take care of our bodies first, and we need to take care of ourselves as people first.

And that ties into my second thing that I think of as a challenge, which is we had to redefine our own version of success because we had only seen what we saw as success. So even though we were leaning into creating this new thing, we didn’t really actually know what it was going to look like because it didn’t exist before, which is always the hardest thing. When you’re building something and you’re like, “I think I know the shape of what this might be or what it means. Something inside me is telling me this is important.” But you don’t really know what does that structure actually mean? We had to learn, for example, urgency culture and different tenets of white supremacist culture that are infused into the theatre and how we in our own way had moments of, “Oops, we just totally followed all of these values that are not our own because we have this pressure to succeed.” And also, sometimes we’re operating within certain structures that aren’t created to hold a healthy space for creation.

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Erlina: For example, we had got a grant, biggest grant that we ever got. And when we got it was this month before rehearsal was supposed to begin. And so it was just this crazy sudden scramble of, “Who’s going to sleep? We got to figure out what we’re going to do because we’re supposed to be doing this grant that we said we were going to do.” And we weren’t smart enough at the time where we were learning that now we know how grant cycles work a little bit better, and so we’re able to plan, “All right, if we get the money by this day, then that means we really can only start rehearsal by this day, blah, blah, blah.”

Learning what are our actual values, we thought the biggest sign of success for us would be a building. Once we have a building with our name, Power Street Theatre, across the front, that’s going to be when we’ve reached the peak of success. And no, I’m so freaking glad that we didn’t get a building because then how many theatres were struggling and almost falling apart and dying during the pandemic because they had these huge bills for a building that they had to pay that was just empty. And I still have moments of what would it mean for us to have a space that folks know is a Power Street Theatre space, even if it is still a community. The times that we’ve had the most success of our shows have always been when we’ve partnered with organizations that are already embedded within the community in some way.

We always had this dream of, “What would it mean to have the cultural center, the Power Street Theatre cultural center, that is theatre and story circles and classes and has all the things and is leaning into our values, but is an open-door, welcoming space for people?” We know now that’s not necessarily the definition of success. So yeah, relearning what actually success is and making sure to lean into our own values and questioning the values that we inherit from the culture that we’re in.

Yura: I found it so helpful to tap into the feeling that we’re looking to be living in when it comes to that visionary leadership work where we’re trying to create something that isn’t here yet, or isn’t here at this time in this modern moment. Maybe it was there ancestrally, and it’s coming in the future. But when you tap into that feeling, then it feels like an intuitive path. But really it’s also a very clear directed opportunity to be like, “Yes, this aligns with that feeling to get there,” or, “No, it doesn’t.” It is a big thing to create new systems, new ways that need more evidence of that, that it’s working or examples. But sometimes, and especially in our cases, we are creating the examples. We are setting the evidence for then others to come through. So that’s really exciting.

Gabi: And that requires a lot of vulnerability because, I will say, leadership is hard. I think one of the things was is that we weren’t afraid to fail, and we failed often. But I think one of the ways we’ve also been able to navigate that feeling of failure, quote-unquote, is shifting it to saying, “Okay, how do we learn from this?” And I think we’ve always—even in our practices around having postmortems with our partner organizations, with former staff, collaborators—we take in the feedback, and also we realize when are moments where we can take accountability, but the reckoning, too, of folks taking accountability. Because it’s easy to say the leader’s at fault, right? “You’re the person in charge. You’re supposed to know it all.” And I think we have been open to be like, “We’re figuring this out together, guys.” Being open to saying “we don’t know it all alone, but we know a lot more together” kind of philosophy.

And I think we’ve been transparent in that even from doing our musical back last summer, none of us had ever produced a musical before. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, and it stretched me in ways beyond my own beliefs. We were always honest, “It’s going to be a little messy because we’re doing it for the first time and we don’t have all the answers.” And I think that allowed for some grace to come through from folks, and, more importantly, the grace for ourselves. There’s something really beautiful about co-artistic directors, co-founders that we didn’t say we were going to do this alone. And so we’re able to reflect with each other, we’re able to lean on each other’s strengths, we’re able to check each other, we’re able to cry together. And that I think has helped with the longevity of Power Street. Because quite honestly, there were many times I was like, “I’m done.” I was like, “See you later. I’m stretched thin. This is going to eat me alive.”

I had vision, and she was the ground that could be like, “Wait, have you thought about this? Have you thought about that?” And so we really complimented each other, and it organically happened. And that was really cool too was that we were able to speak a new language. I feel like we’ve discovered a new language with each other that I don’t know how to explain. It does feel like its own language, and our relationship with each other in relationship to this bigger ecosystem.

We had to learn, for example, urgency culture and different tenets of white supremacist culture that are infused into the theatre and how we in our own way had moments of, “Oops, we just totally followed all of these values that are not our own because we have this pressure to succeed.”

Yura: That’s so beautiful. Wow. There was so much in there too that I’m just reflecting on. I know one thing that really came through to me going back to this art for social change that you’ve mentioned about the organization, but it is one thing that LiberArte, our organization, is really passionate about, is helping bring the arts to the global understanding that it’s really the arts that are a pathway towards the change that we’re looking for in these different areas. For us specifically racial, social, and climate justice. But that it is the creativity, the skills of emotional empathy and storytelling that bring people in to take action around a lot of these challenges that we face. It’s about the reconnection to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet that happens when you experience art, when you experience community gathering in a way that just isn’t possible otherwise, or just with a study, or from afar, or without really getting to know something or experience the story and the emotion.

Erlina: This is the first time in our career that we are actually knowing what’s happening more than a year in advance because we got a three-year grant. So we are able to, for the first time now in thirteen years, look forward and plan way in advance, and also know that we have a guaranteed basic income, nothing to write home about, but enough to pay the basic bills and to have that foundation where you don’t feel like, “Oh my God, oh my God.”

Gabi: I’ve always had a full-time job and did Power Street. So that also meant that we were doing rehearsals usually evenings, and then I was grant writing after rehearsal. It was wild. That was pre-me being a mother. I’m a toddler [parent] of a three-year-old, and I have a bonus son who is thirteen. They’re both in their toddler stages, I’ll tell you. The amount of energy and sacrifice. And I will hold that word big—sacrifice. There’s been a lot of sacrifice, I’ll speak for myself, that I’ve had to do for this company. And I think there has been a shift for me personally at this stage in my life of, “What am I not willing to compromise and sacrifice anymore, and how do I use our values and my own values to guide that, be my guiding star?”

And one of the things I think after the musical, we were like, “We need a year off from doing a production point blank. What needs to get sunset? What needs to remain? What gives us passion?” I think I have been in this space in my life that this discovery state of, “How do I want to spend my time? What brings me joy?” And Power Street brings me an immense amount of joy, and I have limited capacity compared to who I was a year ago to three years ago. So there’s been a lot of grace that I feel like Power Street has provided for me to find myself in that. And it’s been beautiful and messy and an emotional roller coaster at times because I think as you grow with a company, you are also growing. And sometimes who I thought I would be has shifted.

Right now, I’m actually in philanthropy. I’m the executive director for the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, which was the first grant I ever got for Power Street. Beautiful circle there. But I never even saw myself in philanthropy. And now I really have loved it. And that has created a beautiful wrench in some ways of me being like, “Whoa, I never even imagined myself here. What does that mean?” But the beautiful part too, I’m learning so much, and I’ve been able to bring that back to the team. And quite honestly, what’s been really cool in this part of my career and discovery has been like I have never met another funder like me. There are no other funders who are on the ground currently still doing the work and are navigating both sides.

So I fight like hell. I understand the grantees. There’s just a level of what I’ve been able to do for the wider sector of Philadelphia is really because of Power Street. All of those things I learned in this space, and I’ve been able... And even thinking about the rehearsal room, how I try to make the board meetings like a rehearsal room. And the rehearsal rooms that I’ve experienced in Power Street, because those are very different than other rehearsal rooms I’ve been in.

Yura: I really appreciate everything you shared, especially the offering too to first be true to what you need in terms of having other jobs. I think for me, with pregnancy, it’s been really an opening and opportunity to dive into the next stage of our startup, of our organization because it’s not just “for the first time” type of thing. And so now bringing in more people to take on a lot of the roles that I do as CEO, as founder: the marketing, the fundraising, the programs, the finances. So having an additional person for all of that, if not more for each program, having someone who is the program coordinator or producer, and having someone who’s training in grant writing, having a marketing team of people who are able to handle all of the different aspects, and then preparing to go on leave, to pause myself, but have the organization still going.

So it’s definitely been the right time to say this is the moment for the organization to take the next level because it is helpful to have more voices, to have more perspectives, to have more support. And then also for me to be able to let go easily, more easily, because it’s like it has to happen. So yeah, it’s been a really wonderful thing. And I think sometimes we can tap into those offerings that the universe, that time just gives us as to, “Here’s the moment, this is the time, go ahead and take that opportunity.”

I think when we’re just starting an organization, it is true that what we do have is a lot of time, passion, and vision, and the ability to bring other people together as well. So I think it does make sense. And I think across all sectors, there’s that story of the founder, especially in the first few years, you’re really putting in 1,000 percent of what you have, time- and effort-wise, to bring something up. There’s a shift that has to happen eventually where you do need to let go and move towards wellness and be like, “Is this what’s really sustainable physically, emotionally?” We share about this truth that it happens where we do just go completely full for those first few years, and then later it does pay off. There is other things that end up coming through, the connection with that funder that now you’re working for that organization, and that was the early on work that you’ve been doing. There’s these things that you can’t really put a value to, but they’re connected to that initial work that we put in. It’s like the universe balancing out the effort.

Erlina: Gabi has always been somebody who’s been very helpful with that for me. I would be like, “Oh my God, I got hired for this project.” And she’d be like, “How much are they paying you?” I’d be like, “What do you mean?” And, “Did they tell you how much they’re going to pay you?” Or just even us thinking big when we’re applying for grants, there’s times where we’re like, “All right, let’s say we’re going to ask for five thousand for this,” and then we’re like, “Wait, why are we just asking for five thousand? Let’s ask for fifteen. Let’s ask for twenty. Let’s ask for what we really need and not be afraid and not think that we’re not worth what we’re asking for.”

In terms of the question you were asking before of just a challenge is like changing your own mindset of even what you’re worth and what you’re capable of is a big one. I think for the first time in my life, probably in the last couple of years, meaning the last two years, I don’t feel like an imposter in most spaces. When somebody invites me to a table and when somebody is saying like, “Hey, we want to hear your voice or your opinion,” so many times in the past I would be like, “Oh my God, why do they want me? What do I know?” And now I don’t feel that way as much. I’m like, “I know what I have to offer.” And I think that I’ve gotten to that point because of having these thirteen years of working together and building what we’ve built and taking risk and then seeing it pay off in the end.

Yura: What are you dreaming into being right now? What future are you building towards?

Erlina: We’ve always had in our early mission statement or about the company, we would always say, “In Philadelphia and beyond.” In the beginning of the company, we were just broke twenty-year-olds. And now where we are in the company is we’re both parents, we have responsibilities in different ways. But I still dream of what does it mean for Power Street to have a co-production in another city, to do work in Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico, where we’re from. I want to translate all my plays into Spanish. What would it mean to go do a series of my plays through Power Street in a Spanish speaking country? So I think that’s a big one for me that I really hope that as we’re dreaming forward and as we’re reaching towards that twenty-year anniversary, fifteen-year anniversary, that we can also think what does it mean for us to follow our own dreams of traveling and being able to do theatre in other cities, and then spreading the values of Power Street beyond Philadelphia?

Yura: I love that. I’m super aligned. I’m Colombian and Ecuadorian, and I spend a lot of my time in Colombia. My partner is there and from there too. So definitely very aligned with this kind of global aspect of the impact our work can make.

Erlina: That’s a big dream of mine, like an audience with my tías and cousins in the DR.

Yura: Yeah, there’s opportunity for exchange. We were able to bring a music group from Colombia last year for a big tour, and then we helped their festival in Colombia. So there’s people that come from here, from New York or from the US to Nuquí in Colombia where we are. So there’s a lot there. I’m definitely an advocate for that part.

Gabi: I think what I miss a lot from Power Street was the days when I was a creative. I think I’ve been in the administrative bubble for some time now.

Erlina: And mom bubble.

Gabi: Yeah, mom bubble is real. And so yeah, I think that I’ve been in the bubble actually, quite honestly, of extending all of myself to benefit community, and I think that’s inherently who I am. And in some of that I’ve lost myself as an artist, and it makes me sad and sometimes resentful. And I would love to discover with Power Street who I am as a mother artist now at this stage in my life. And I don’t know what that means or looks like.

But I know that we’re doing a comedy class hopefully this fall. I think I was like, “What would it mean for me to be a participant of our program? What would it mean for me to be vulnerable and do that?” And so that’s something I’ve been exploring of what would it mean for me to participate as a participant and experience our programming in that way. And that’s exciting because I’m like, “We are also the people we’re serving. We are also artists. We are also part of the community. How does my artist self take up more space in the company again?” So that’s something that I’m dreaming for myself.

Yura: Yes. I love that for you. Thank you both so much. Please tell us how can we stay updated? How can we follow Power Street Theatre?

Gabi: Yeah, if you go to our website, you can check us out. You can check all of our programming at powerstreettheatre.com, and you can also sign up for our newsletter, which goes out monthly, sometimes a little bit more than once a month if we have a big event happening. But that’s a great way to stay connected to our work. And you could also follow us on social media. We have a YouTube. We have a Facebook. We have Instagram. Instagram is a big one. That’s probably our most activated social media platform, as well as YouTube. And then you could go to our website and if you want to connect with any of us, you can look at our emails and reach out.

Erlina: And if you’re in Philly, look up Souletri Sundays because they happen, or just Souletri open mics in general, because if you’re in town, it’s definitely worth it to stop by. They’re pretty much every month. We only take off in December and January. So if you’re in Philly at some point, look us up, and there’s a chance that there might be an open mic happening that you can come through to.

Gabi: Yeah, a popping open mic. And shout out to Jose Alicea and Jaleigh Croft, who are also part of Power Street, who help this creation and this continue.

Yura: Yes, thank you so much, Erlina and Gabi. This has been a wonderful time. Thanks for joining us and we’ll be in touch.

Gabi: Thank you.

Yura: 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.