I have been a performer the vast majority of my life. Some of my earliest memories involve song or dance; I picked up my first instrument the second my school gave me the opportunity. By high school, I was in so many different fine arts groups that I didn’t bother with a lunch period – I just scarfed my food during the first ten minutes of choir. I did manage to calm the theater kid energy at least a little by the time I hit college, but I still sang, directed, acted, arranged. Even during law and grad school, the most chaotic and academically rigorous time of my life, I performed. It was part of me. It was who I was.
Yet as I moved deeper and deeper into activism in response to the 2016 election, my creative life grew sparser and sparser. After a staged reading and a children’s concert in January 2017, I stopped performing in public. Eventually, after my last collaborative album was released in January 2020, I stopped performing entirely. I was an advocate; a writer; a fighter. Creative art of all kinds became a thing I did for myself, in spare moments as I found them, and not a thing I shared with my communities. I told myself that for me, creative art was a form of self-care, akin to meditating or exercise. I told myself it was enough.
‘Sharpened Pencil Next to Sheet Paper’, created by the Thomaseagle,
available by Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
We talk a lot, these days, about the importance of joy in activism. We talk about the importance of community a lot as well–the need for solidarity in liberation; the value of mutual aid. I have even seen performances support mutual aid to great effect, through efforts like Theatre@First’s annual Giving@First festival. But somehow, I didn’t see a way to fit in performance arts alongside my own work. I didn’t know how to juggle creativity I loved with advocacy my communities needed.
Truthfully, I still don’t, but in the past year I have begun performing again anyway. I sang Hearthfire at a Bardic circle this summer; I sang the same song and several others at my first concert in nine years earlier today. Both times, I thought: I love this. I thought: This makes me feel human and connected.
Ultimately, what is performance? Performance creates a platform and it organically creates messaging, but it is more than that; it’s a way for people to share connection. An audience watches because something happening before them resonates; the audience and the performer form a temporary interpersonal relationship. Fandom, in turn, can create a longer-term community. But perhaps more uniquely, there is shared joy in creative performance. There is social power in creative performance. Show me a person who connects with an audience, and I will show you a person who creates agency of expression in a socially meaningful way. And frankly, they probably love what they are doing as they do it.
Unnamed image by Omtay and released to public domain
When we say community and joy are necessary to movements–creative art and performance should be part of that, even for those of us who do this work full-time. (Perhaps especially for those of us who do this work full-time.) I shouldn’t be juggling social change and performance in the first place, because they are already linked. They enhance each other.
Instead, the questions to be asking are how to bring out social change themes in performance, and how to bring performance overtly into advocacy. Many of my colleagues–especially Black colleagues–already excel at this. To give recent examples, the AATCLC has been hosting spoken word poetry sessions about tobacco use since 2023; Brass Solidarity has been bringing marching bands to community action events since the George Floyd protests in 2021. But this tradition goes back more than fifty years, and Larry Neal famously described the Black Arts Movement as the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of Black Power” in 1968. Pairing art and activism, these efforts build something sustainable and important.
Image created by KeithTyler; clenched fist motif itself is in the public domain
It’s not healthy activism to deny a part of oneself; that much I already knew. (I hope you, Dear Reader, already know it too.) But the idea I internalized today is that it does my work a disservice to even try. I still feel daunted by next steps, but I also feel energized. This is a form of community and joy that I can understand–that I believe many of us can understand. And I look forward to bringing these things to my work more in the coming year.
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