What Makes a Theatre an “Apartheid Free Zone”?

In 2025, three theatre and performing arts organizations in the United States became the first in our industry to officially be designated Apartheid Free Zones (AFZs): Theatre of the Oppressed NYC, Bechdel Project, and Festival of Latin American Contemporary Choreographers (FLACC). The AFZ campaign is inspired by the South African anti-apartheid struggle and the international solidarity movement that emerged in support of it. Like the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, the AFZ campaign is a form of nonviolent action aimed to end all forms of complicity with apartheid Israel to compel it to comply with international law.

Theater Workers for a Ceasefire (TW4C) exists to organize United States based theatre workers in solidarity with the people of Palestine. Recently, TW4C sat down with Sulu LeoNimm, executive director at Theatre of the Oppressed NYC; Maria Aparo, co-creative director at Bechdel Project; and Liz Duran Boubion, artistic director of FLACC. We talked about what motivates their action in solidarity with the Palestinian people and what role they see the American theatre industry playing in international struggles for peace and justice.

TW4C: What drew you and your organizations to join the movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people? Can you talk about how you first got involved—either as theatre organizations or as individuals—and how that involvement has evolved?

Maria Aparo: We have a contact at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center who reached out to us because they were looking for a venue for The Gaza Monologues. Of course, we said, “Yes, come on, bring everybody,” and we hosted a presentation of that. As an intersectional feminist company, Bechdel Project believes issues like apartheid cannot be separated from gender equity, so it was kind of a no brainer. We are eager to always adopt social justice movements within the organization. There's no shyness about it. We've actually doubled down in the current climate. We've done the opposite of some other places.

TW4C: That's wonderful.

Sulu LeoNimm: I knew that there is a very prominent corner of Theatre of the Oppressed work by Palestinians and in solidarity with Palestinians, so this is a legacy of the work. We're a small organization and have a focus on the chronic issues in New York City, like racial inequity and how that intersects with immigration and gender justice. We assess opportunities outside of our community programs based on capacity. For The Gaza Monologues, a former staff member had plans to produce the event and proposed that we co-produce. This was alongside us shifting into becoming a worker self-directed nonprofit, so these are decisions we are now doing collectively. We said, “Yes, go. This is something we can do, so let's do it.”

Liz Duran Boubion: There's an internationalist approach that we're taking as an arts organization to understand that our struggles as Latine and Indigenous artists of the Americas align with the struggles of Palestinians. The root of that shared problem is Western capitalist agendas and settler colonial militarism. So, we've demonstrated solidarity with Palestinian artists and activists since 2023. I believe that the arts can be a place where we change hearts and minds by igniting really important conversations about soft power oppression in the arts. If those of us who have public platforms don’t exercise our First Amendment rights, they will continue fly out the window.

TW4C: For many performing artists and arts organizations, this is an especially frightening time to take a stand on any political issue, let alone one as contentious as Palestine and Israel. Tell us about how you made the decision to take a public stand and become an AFZ. What kinds of discussions did you have within and beyond your organization? What obstacles did you face?

Maria: We're a small organization. On one hand, we can be nimble. We can pivot quickly. But it also means our capacity is not as large.

Conversations circled around: What’s our risk tolerance as an organization? As individuals? What kind of protections do we naturally have by privilege, by how we look, our legal status? Were we willing to risk our nonprofit status or funding? We took into account what that could mean for staff livelihoods, programming, and the artists that we serve. 

The conversation was less pro/con and more if/then, like: If this happens to our organization and we lose our status, then let's game out options for how we can navigate that. If our funding goes away, what are some other alternatives to keep our programming going? It was the right thing for us, and we absolutely stand by it 100 percent.

Sulu: Yeah, I really appreciate the if/then framing. Where other people were feeling fear of retribution or losing funding, that was not really our position for a couple reasons. One was that we were already losing a ton of funding. We are currently a salaried staff of two. Three years ago, we were around six or seven. We were already navigating our work being systemically devalued. 

There's a general sense that nonprofits can't be political, which isn't true. Because we wanted to understand the bounds of how our work could be political, we had already, for years, done a lot of investigation: What are the bounds of supporting legislation? What is our board allowed to weigh in on? If there is any pushback from a donor or from somebody who’s coming at us legally, we have tactics for navigating that. We’re already on the problem list. We’re adjacent to people who are already being investigated. 

Maria: Why not add something else? 

Sulu: Yeah. And it’s been lovely, I will say, to see the other people doing that and taking a stand. 

Liz: As a small group of organizers, we were writing the newsletters during our tenth annual festival when 7 October happened. As early as November 2023, FLACC encouraged people to sign on to the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) and honored the lives of people who were martyred, like Aaron Bushnell and Refaat Alareer. A lot of our work is connected to Dia de los Muertos and honoring those that we've lost.

The following year, our curatorial theme was titled “El Grito Por Thawra” (“A Call for Revolution”), which highlighted Latine and Palestinian artists in collaboration to raise awareness and embody solidarity. We didn’t get as much funding as we were expecting, but we formed bridges in our community that were invaluable. One setback during our October 2023 festival was that our social media got hacked, and we lost our Instagram account. We were deplatformed during this time that it was important to be vocal in solidarity with Palestine. My response was to write an article interviewing several other dance artists in the Bay Area who were taking a stand, which was published in the San Francisco-based INDance magazine. FLACC simply recreated its Instagram account, and we continued to be active. But it kind of radicalized us and our audiences even more when we were censored.

The larger the institution and the more they’re run by people who are closer to right-wing, who are conservative, who are from wealth… those institutions are going to stay aligned with US empire work.

TW4C: At various moments in history—certainly during the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, in some ways even during the Black Lives Matter uprisings of 2020—fairly mainstream arts organizations have embraced a sense of political responsibility and used their platforms to support the oppressed. The United Nations, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and basically every respected human rights organization in the world—along with many world governments—have declared the assault on Gaza a genocide, yet what we’ve heard from mainstream theatre and dance organizations is overwhelmingly silence. Why do you think this is? What makes this moment or conflict different from, for example, the South African struggle?

Sulu: We are often taught that everybody was on board for things like ending apartheid in South Africa or for the Civil Rights Movement. The reality is that’s not true. I was a young person seeing the AIDS crisis—not in the industry yet, but entering the theatre world—and seeing that was not a space where mainstream support was aligned. I feel like it's a bit clearer to speak now in solidarity with Palestinians.

It lines up with how the industry moves with any liberation work, any work around disrupting power. The larger the institution and the more they’re run by people who are closer to right-wing, who are conservative, who are from wealth… those institutions are going to stay aligned with US empire work. 

Maria: I think the key word is “industry”: an industry is fueled by commerce and money. When you have a lot of stakeholders standing to lose money and that's their primary focus, it's hard to make that change upward. It highlights, for me, obvious class inequality globally and in the United States. Unless that is disrupted and restructured, it's very hard. 

Sulu: The silence is connected to institutional resistance to looking at power dynamics. 

Maria: Yes! 

Sulu: What’s painful for so many arts and culture workers is that their institutions have benefited from their other liberation work. We saw money to spaces for diversity, equity, and celebrating other cultures. Now things are being shut down, and people are being discarded.

Maria: It begs the question: Was this performative from the get-go? How many big grants did huge cultural institutions get because they adopted these diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) measures?

Look at the whole nonprofit industrial complex. You have executive directors and boards that are being paid who knows how much money, and you have staff who are barely able to pay their rent. I think it makes a lot of sense that larger institutions aren’t coming out to be Apartheid Free Zones. The people at the very top don't have an interest in that because it hurts their bottom line.

Liz: Israel and the United States are working very, very hard to shape a narrative. Hundreds of thousands of dollars go into that kind of thing. It's tough—there's so much propaganda.

For the arts, I think it comes down to relationships. Everyone's on their own personal timeline when it comes to being politicized or radicalized and have their own ways of rooting their work into a particular politic. I did send out maybe fifteen personal invitations to other organizations here to become an AFZ. Half of them, I'd say, are definitely in solidarity, but they're not wanting to put their name on a list. Some would rather respond with programming that is pro-Palestine and encourage support to artists who are doing this work. Additionally, some dance companies here decided to focus their energy on organizing with existing groups they have proximity to—either in the university setting or solidarity groups like Queers Undermining Israeli Terror (QUIT), Artists Against Apartheid, Dancers for Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, the Hala Collective, or the Palestinian Youth Movement, to name a few.

TW4C: Speaking of which, all of your organizations already produce theatre and dance that has a social conscience. Why did you think it was necessary to go further than “letting the art speak for itself”?

Maria: That goes back to exactly what we were just talking about. To me, “letting the art speak for itself” qualifies as performative activism. In your organization, if the values are not matching with what you're putting out, that's a disconnect.

Liz: In a way, I have nothing to lose, and I have everything to lose. But I can't look at my phone and witness genocide without doing something really concrete. My hope was that people would feel emboldened to do the same, and that if everyone did it, we'd all be safer. That goal to decentralize our position took a long time to achieve, and we still have a long way to go, but no matter the cost, it's worth it to take a moral stance.

And the Palestine exception feels very real here in the liberal/neoliberal land of the arts. At FLACC, we understand the struggle more viscerally because of who we are and where we come from. For example, Israel uses surveillance technologies by Elbit Systems, and those are the same ones that we're using here at the United States-Mexico border. That's a very concrete and literal tie. 

Sulu: Our work is a practice of saying, “the art is not enough.” Augusto Boal’s intention was that people feel unsatisfied, sending people out with a sense of, “Now I have to do something.” The roots of my practice are in Paulo Freire’s work Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has such a clear ethical stance. I see institutions, as they try to develop their values, somewhat flounder. With the PACBI movement, it's not up to us—it is Palestinians saying, “If you are in solidarity with us, you need to commit to doing these things.” That is the call. It’s the people experiencing the oppression who need to be listened to.

TW4C: Thinking beyond the AFZ and BDS campaigns: What would you like to see from the performing arts industry in this critical and frightening historical moment? How can the arts contribute to the fight against ultra-right movements and the struggle to build a more just world?

Liz: The last festival we produced in 2025 was called Santuario, which means “Sanctuary.” I felt like we needed to respond to what our artists needed: safety, for all these folks who are really vulnerable right now, and that included creating an AFZ. So we had a SantuarioPalestina in one of the five spaces we liberated in the venue we were in. We also had Coro de Nueva Era, a chorus of low wage workers that was developed by one of the FLACC’s community partners. Additionally, a santuario for the imagination and for the LGBTQ community.

We need more safe spaces where people can connect. I think people are doing that more and more these days to respond to the need to keep our nervous systems regulated and feel a sense of belonging. 

We need more safe spaces where people can connect. I think people are doing that more and more these days to respond to the need to keep our nervous systems regulated and feel a sense of belonging. 

Maria: That's a big question. Going back to what Sulu said about the AIDS crisis—it took a long time, but now we do have Broadway Cares and fundraising. I would hope that there's incremental steps being put in place with people doing what they can within the spaces they're at—even though I just said I don't have much faith in it. It's so hard. It feels like Sisyphus at times. Honestly, the only other thing that would completely restructure things would be if Broadway tanked and we saw grassroots, values-aligned organizations getting their work out. That'd be ideal.

Sulu: I fear that folks will think, “Okay, there's been a ceasefire. Now we can move on.” 

Maria: I have that fear as well. 

Sulu: In some other Palestinian solidarity work I'm connected to, it's so clear as we communicate with people in Gaza that this situation is continuing. It has been continuing for decades.

And here's my first petty thought…

Maria: I’m here for it.

Sulu: Receipts! I would love for there to be some flow of understanding of how leadership failed people, the implications of their donors and boards in weapons manufacturing. Let's put that out there. This work could be supported if the industry really gets embarrassed about the distribution of money and wealth. 

Maria: The PACBI movement gives a great blueprint for anyone who wants to look at disrupting the things that you're talking about, Sulu. In our own country right now, we're being faced with a lot of inequity. The more people that can get curious about where the money comes from, what people are doing with it… Look at it globally, too. We're not the only ones being oppressed by our own government. Our government's welfare colonialism is also oppressing people, and it has interests around the world to do so. How do we remove those interests for people higher up?

Once you start pulling a thread, it all kind of unravels. And once you see it, you can't unsee it. My hope is that somehow we can pull threads for more people.