Arts

The Theater Offensive Announces Liberatory Aesthetics Framework

by Submitted by TTO
Friday Feb 26, 2021

This article is from the February 25, 2021 issue of South End News.


The Theater Offensive (TTO) has released a groundbreaking set of aesthetic values and principles that illuminate the cultural contributions of queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) to all forms of art-making. These values and ideas will inform the 32-year-old organization's programming going forward, in a new model called Queer (Re)Public. Details about the aesthetics and programming will be released on The Theater Offensive's website, www.ttoboston.org in February.
In 2019 TTO became a QTPOC organization by mission after 30 years of serving LGBTQ communities more broadly. Today, TTO is a social change organization focused on QTPOC and their allies that uses theater and the creative process as a cultural organizing tool. The new aesthetics work will be advanced through workshops, residency programs, and by commissioning and developing performance art by, for, and about QTPOC. TTO's future programming will honor the unique themes and qualities of QTPOC art and culture in Boston and around the world.
The new aesthetic is the result of an extensive, 15-month process. TTO worked with cultural strategists Sage Crump and María Cherry Rangel and groups of local and national artists to develop an aesthetic rooted in Boston's LGBTQ communities of color, incorporating regional, national, and international perspectives. The artists involved identified as Black, Latinx, South Asian, and Asian/Pacific Islander; included trans and non-binary artists; and were located in Boston, Chicago, Durham, New Orleans, New York, Oakland, San Francisco, and San Juan. This cohort of artists examined prevalent aesthetic concepts associated with whiteness, masculinity, and normative beauty and moved TTO towards imagining a QTPOC liberatory aesthetic that is disruptive, multifaceted, and life-affirming.
"Aesthetics are resistance and disruption—a rejection of the white supremacist cis hetero capitalist patriarchy," state Crump and Rangel. "QTPOC aesthetics are how we claim all of ourselves in a white and narrow world that tells us we are too much. Aesthetics reflect the fullness of our genders and spirits and lives. QTPOC aesthetics, adornment, and cultural memory in this moment of uprising and pandemic as relevant to claiming beauty, worth, story, remembering and claiming our whole selves, and whole histories is more important than ever."
"Aesthetics is defined as one's set of principles or worldview as expressed through behavior, or actions," explains TTO Executive Director and Cultural Strategist Harold Steward. "TTO is looking to reclaim this word and practice for our new path. As a theorist, I believe that identity reclamation is the process in which oppressed people reclaim agency over their identity through cultural production. So for us, this type of reclamation is about both process and outcomes."
Working with Crump and Rangel, artists and community members developed seven core aesthetic concepts or pillars on which to base TTO's future programming: Wholeness + Emotional Tenderness, Innovation + Unrealities, Space + Segregation , Medicinal + Healing , Lineage + Time Travel, Queer Questioning, and (Be)longing . Their work also addresses the concept of the disappearing city—the effects of gentrification and displacement of places for QTPOC communities to gather and to make and perform art. TTO's new Queer (Re)Public programming will connect people, place, practice, power, and publics, and will draw from the variety of ways that queer and trans people of color have created or claimed space, using public spaces, conventional and unconventional performance spaces as well as virtual space.
In February, TTO will release the full text of the QTPOC Liberatory Aesthetics on its website as well as details on upcoming programming created from the aesthetics. This programming will include:
• Queer (Re)public Residency Program — 18 months of discovery, investigation, research, and play for mid-career to experienced national QTPOC artists.
• Queer (Re)public Commissioning — TTO will regularly commision multi-discipline, performance-based art to produce with and present to our communities in Boston and beyond, in partnership with national and regional organizations.
• Queer (Re)public Workshops —
A community based activity series that includes artistic development and community learning exchanges that invite participants to be well & whole.