Art and Anti-Racism with Stephanie Ybarra
Stephanie Ybarra
Artist, activist, artistic director Baltimore Center Stage, co-founder of the Artists’ Anti-Racism Coalition
Your future self picks up a newspaper and sees a headline touting the success of the Artists' Anti-Racism Coalition you co-founded. What’s the headline?
“Racism Has Been Eradicated From U.S.”Artists Focus Coalition Efforts On All the Other ‘isms
Do you have a favorite play and if so, what is it?
It’s a tie between The Brothers Size by Tarell Alvin McCraney and Our Town by Thornton Wilder.
When's the last time you were surprised by anything?
My going away party when I left The Public Theater in New York—the compilation video my friends put together featured my parents and my pitbull, Lucy.
A Cast Can Catalyze
I don’t ever remember not loving theater, even though my parents weren’t theatergoers. They were (still are) musicians, and I spent my childhood in rehearsal halls for orchestras and big bands. But for some reason, I was always more attracted to the theater. It was like a gravitational pull and I don’t remember a time when I was without it. As musicians my parents didn’t understand it, but that didn’t stop them from being fully supportive of my school plays and living room performances. I was also really lucky to have nonstop arts education in school, which only fueled my love of theater.
Art in all its forms holds a mirror up to society, helping us to understand ourselves and our world more deeply. At the moment, however, I’m most excited about the ways art has the capacity to show us what’s possible in society. It has the power to activate our imaginations along with our better angels; it can conjure entire worlds—all in service of showing us what could be.
In her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Shaping Worlds, Adrienne Maree Brown says, “Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice.” Our theaters help shape our culture, define and redefine narratives, and collectively employ thousands of people each year. Every production is an opportunity to close the wage gap, challenge a harmful paradigm, and offer a vision for a more just and humane society. The art form itself has a long legacy of helping social justice movements. My favorite modern example is during the Farm Workers’ Movement in the 60s. Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta worked alongside El Teatro Campesino to take a series of short plays on flatbed pickup trucks directly into the fields to educate workers on their rights. To this day, it’s a shining example of what theater can do.
The Artists' Anti-Racism Coalition began when I worked in the Off-Broadway theater community in New York alongside a few friends/colleagues—all of us people of color. We were inspired by our experience with the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) at their Anti-Racism and Community Organizing training, and wanted to catalyze change within our field. Today, this decentralized coalition of artists, agents, producers and administrators (all of whom have also completed the PISAB training) come together regularly to learn with and from each other, and organize to implement anti-racist practices in their organizations. Even as I type this, they are talking about how to best support our Black artists and community members.
One of the major barriers to getting more stories by and about people of color on stage is the idea that “nobody” will come to see them. So, the answer to how an individual theater-goer can ensure more diversity in the stories on our stages is to simply show up. Buy a ticket. Every ticket you buy for a play written by an artist of color is a demonstration of support; an affirmation. And I would encourage people to reject the “good or bad” binary. Practice finding elements to appreciate about the show—whether it’s the design, the acting, a moment or a line, or even the ideas within the show. Say them out loud.
I can tell you there isn’t a theater in the country that isn’t hurting right now. People are losing their jobs, our buildings are closed and our ability to sell tickets has disappeared for the moment. So we’re all relying on donations of any size. If you also believe in this crucial artform, reach out to a local theater—ideally a smaller organization (even better if it’s culturally specific)—and give anything you can.
