We gestate a human-centered value system expressed through creativity.

We have talents, issues, histories, skills, idiosyncrasies, gifts, neuroses, geniuses.

We have short hair, nappy hair, black, brown, and blonde hair, dreadlocks, long hair, curls, conks, braids, dyed hair, Mohawks, and ponytails.

We are black, pink, brown, red, white, yellow.

We are Gold.

 

We speak lots of languages, code switching is our mother tongue.

We are complex, diverse, and for us identity is a verb.

 

Every show starts with The Circle.

The Circle sends a message to the psyche that sacred space is being created, a place to tell our individual and collective stories.

The Circle is the sun and moon and the earth, the big round cycles of cosmic time.

We replicate whole, integrated human beings when we form a circle: our chests are open, our breath expands, our hearts are exposed.

The Circle is where we are at the same level. We stand eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder.

The Circle symbolizes Home, we are reassured that we belong.

The Circle is unbreakable and unbroken.

 

 


About the Author

For over three decades Judyie Al-Bilali has been an innovator in the fields of performing arts, arts education and applied theatre. An actor, director and playwright, she has worked off-Broadway and in regional theatre across the US. She taught at NYU's Educational Theatre Program, the MA in Applied Theatre Program at CUNY, Amherst College, Hampshire College, the University of Virginia's Semester at Sea program, and is now an Assistant Professor in Performance and Theater for Social Change at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Currently a Fulbright Senior Specialist in Theatre, Judyie was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa where she created Brown Paper Studio, an applied theatre company. Her memoir, For the Feeling: Love & Transformation from New York to Cape Town (2012), chronicles her creative work and process in South Africa.