Anti-Racist Theatre

This week, Yura Sapi is join by Tierra Allen who shares about creating The Real Work, a podcast about theatre culture and transformative justice that is co-produced with We Rise Production. This episode’s topics include learning from non-humans, sharing poems and songs, and being the change.

Victor Vazquez joins Yura Sapi to share his experience creating X Casting, a casting company that spans theatre and film in the United States and worldwide through a shared purpose of collective liberation and anti-racism. This episode’s topics include thinking about our role in the political landscape, globalism, and a curiosity for generous solutions.

Abundance Zaddy joins Yura Sapi to talk about creating Cause Reign, an oral history project that connects Black people—with a focus on Black trans and queer folks—to their histories through dreamwork, the practice of remembering, recording, and activating the healing potential of dreams. Topics in this episode include prioritizing love and sweetness, transcending time, and asking for consent.

How exciting is it to transform our future and be the future ancestors we dream for? Yura Sapi opens the space with a gratitude ritual and shares about what’s to come on the new season of the Building Our Tables podcast. Topics for this season include evolutionary times, the four elements, and sounds of nature.

In this episode, Leticia and Jordan finally explain what they mean when they say Black feminism, especially in theatre and performance. They engage Lisa M. Anderson’s tenets of Black feminist drama, alongside other contemporary scholars and artists expansion of Black feminist theatre. They discuss Black feminist theory, black feminist practice in creative work, and black feminist theatre theory.

As a part of the New Deal, the Federal Theatre Project of the 1930s funded theatre in the United States at an unprecedented level, providing paid work for trained theatremakers and low-cost performances to audiences all around the country. Corinna Schulenberg and Dr. Elizabeth A. Osborne discuss the history of the Federal Theatre Project and its potential to act as a model for a New Federal Theatre Project formed in conjunction with racial justice, climate justice, and Land Back movements.

Dr. Ibby Cizmar joins the Theatre History Podcast to share her research on Ernie McClintock, who worked to develop a system of training and performance that could serve the specific needs of African American actors in the mid-twentieth century. A significant influence in the Black Arts Movement, McClintock’s methods continue to influence institutions and theatremakers today.