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Hi! I’m Sharon, and I’m new here.
Well, new-ish. I took on the title of Producing Artistic Director back in March, but I was easing out of my previous full-time role, so I’ve only been able to dedicate my whole focus and energy to this company for the past month.
And it’s been a while since this company has been in touch. There have been some pretty big changes over here, not the least of which is my appointment as the company’s second ever artistic leader. The Board of Directors has also turned over by half, including three quarters of the executive roles.
So, we thought we’d introduce ourselves a little bit, and I’m going first. Over the next little while you’ll see some posts from our board members, our artistic collaborators, and our community partners. The prompt we are all working from is:
“What does feminism mean to you?”
While I’m still feeling pretty new to this specific role, I do feel like I’ve been “at this” for a long time, where “this” = “working toward social justice.”
To me, feminism is not distinct from any other social justice advocacy work, except that it prioritizes equity across the gender spectrum. I believe that feminists and other social justice advocates are (or, should be) fighting the same fight. We can and should be learning from each other, taking in one another’s best practices, engaging in thoughtful and sometimes challenging conversation. We should all be fighting for access to the Rooms Where The Decisions Are Made, and whenever we get in there, taking note of who isn’t in the room with us.
Theatre work is Empathy work
The causes of social inequality are, of course, extremely complex, and I don’t pretend to understand all or even most of them, but I do think one of the biggies is a failure of empathy.
It is very hard to imagine other people as fully human; that is, as human as oneself. It is even harder to imagine this when the other person in question is significantly different from you, if they don’t share your language, your culture, your family structure, your socioeconomic status, if they are from another country or another generation.
It is both easier and harder than ever to empathize with other people on a society-wide scale.
Easier, because we have access to stories from around the world, more immediately and more bountifully than we did before the internet age. We can toggle between languages with a few keystrokes. We can see videos and photographs the faces and hear recordings of the voices of the people who tell those stories.
Harder, because so many of us live so much of our social lives online, using platforms that have been designed to disincentivize thoughtful discourse and to privilege quippy point-scoring. Scoring points is not an empathetic activity. If we spend too much time in these "spaces," our empathy skills start to erode.
So, we need the arts. Artistic expression is uniquely positioned to present nuanced perspectives. It is also founded (mostly, I believe) on the premise of helping the audience to feel, or think, in a way that they normally wouldn’t… and that’s how empathy takes root. Making and taking in artistic work is a form of empathy practice.
What I love about live performance in particular is that the audience isn’t just taking in the work after the fact; they are making the piece of art alongside the artists with their presence and attention. At the theatre, the audience becomes a creative collaborator.
If I’m doing my job right, when I tell a story on stage, the audience feels for and with the characters in that story. It’s a stretch of the empathy muscles.
But what stories do we tell?
It isn’t enough to make theatre. We can’t just tell stories about the world as it exists today, or as it has existed in the past, with humour and without critique, and assume that we are improving the world through empathy practice. Stories are just as capable of being regressive as they are of being progressive. And they are powerful tools to wield, whether for or against the status quo.
To pursue social justice through theatre, we have to reframe those stories to address the path we want for the future.
We have to privilege stories that haven’t been told often enough, or loudly enough, or at all.
We have to ask ourselves: who isn’t in the room yet?
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Sharon King-Campbell is Producing Artistic Director of PerSIStence Theatre Company. Bio.