Theater to the People: MISSION
Theater to the People: HOME seeks to inspire greater community organizing and resilience by building creative, social, and political alliances between people from a wide variety of ethnic and economic backgrounds through their act of making theater together. The series of bilingual (Spanish/English) theater workshops is focused on providing space for recent immigrants to share their stories and build community with other people who have called Brooklyn home for generations. We bring together as many perspectives as possible on what Brooklyn could be: new immigrants, people who identify as first-generation Americans, people who have lived here for generations, and people who might identify as “gentrifiers". Together, we aim to create a theater performance that explores the questions and tensions of a global capitalist system that sets us in competition and conflict with each other. Instead, making theater together has the possibility of uniting us in a shared poetic process. Ultimately, we hope that our theatrical collaboration with a diversity of community members will lead to new ideas of what a “sanctuary city” can really mean, especially considering how the problems of income inequality, gentrification, forced migration, and climate change will most likely intensify in coming years.