Episode 61: Rad Pereira - Healing Justice Rising

RAD PEREIRA

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In my book this episode’s guest, Rad Pereira, qualifies as an old soul. Rad is a young theater artist, writer, educator, and community activist who, despite their youth and the uncertain times we live in, has both accomplished a lot, and has an amazingly clear sense of purpose and direction —- a clarity that is defined by questions like: How can we imagine, and manifest alternate futures together? Was my body conditioned to survive in a world that was not made for me? and Can the natural world function as a moral compass?

Hi there my name is Bill Cleveland and in this episode of Change the Story/ Change the World, we'll explore these and many other provocative questions related to Rad Pereira’s extraordinary life’s journey.

Part One: Just Sharing Stories

I'm talking from what is called Colonially New York State.

[: 00:01:23

I tell stories as a performer in theater and TV and film. I also tell stories as a director in TV, film, and theater. And then I also bring people together to tell stories. Not just, professional storytellers, actors, also day-to-day people. And I really love the liberation that comes from sharing stories and creating spaces where people feel cared for enough, where they can feel safe enough to be in a place of imagining. Cuz to me that's what I call healing justice. Healing justice is a environment where we feel safe and cared for enough to heal and to imagine healing centered stories, not just trauma centered stories.

I really love stories that invite us to imagine ways we hadn't considered before. Whether that's through alternate realities where that Afro-futurism has taught us where it's like alternate timelines to the reality that we know, that we get to imagine. And black folks specifically get to imagine themselves in different storylines where a reality might have looked, felt differently.

I love those kinds of stories. I love stories that invite us into liberation, which to me means taking away the conditioning of the place we live in today and break our minds open. So I like those stories that crack our perceived notions of reality and what's possible.

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[00:04:30] RP: I was born in Pindorama which is currently called Brazil. And both sides of my family were, are in diaspora, so they were, disconnected, removed from their homelands. And on my dad's side, that's Eastern European Jews. Most of our family on that side was killed in the Holocaust. And on my mom's side, that's enslaved Africans and their descendants and indigenous peoples of Abya Yala, Pindorama Brazil. And then a huge part is my mom is a really radical LGBQT, immigrants, refugees rights and labor rights organizer.

So I think that not necessarily belonging and growing up in, in a specific cultural tradition really made me crave that connection. And from a really young age, I wanted to tell stories and I would make everyone sit and watch me.

Fantabulize and try to create mythology. And I would create these like magical realism tales of our histories and really trying to uncover what was, covered or what was erased, or what was suppressed. And, and for survival, both sides of my family did a lot of suppression and repression of their own histories and of what it took to get to where they were.

And both sides, did a lot of assimilation into like capitalist, somewhat white supremacist ways of being to survive. And I think that my need for connection came as a disruption to that process. And I think on both sides of my family, I was questioning like, why are we here?

What are we doing? Who are we to each other and what are our stories? And it took me a while to figure that out, to put words to that. And in my years leading up to being able to articulate it this way, I did some awesome children's theater in South Florida where we migrated from Brazil, my mom asked the local librarian, my kid wants to do theater, where do we go?

And they recommended the Fort Lauderdale Children's Theater, which was super diverse, and really creative, and a spectrum of theatrical traditions, which was, I think amazing. So, I was at that children's theater from when I was seven till when I was 14

BC: Needless to say, During this This stretch of time the theater became a central part of Rads life. It also gave them access to new ways of thinking about how culture influences how people experience and think about how the world works and their place in it.

RP: When I was 12. I started working with Anthony Hubert, my first black acting teacher that really kind of introduced me to liberation work and how my body might have been conditioned to survive in a system that wasn't made for me. And so he helped me do a lot of excavating what is my true body? What is my true self? And like getting back in touch with my wildness. And he was helping me uncover, all these layers of conditioning I had been trying to wear the costume of this like first world young person who was gonna, succeed in theater as I saw it shown to me, which was Broadway.

[: 00:08:03

(From an Interlochen Center for the Arts documentary)

Its places like Interlochen that say “art is integral to being a human being.

To be on a journey to understand what this crazy world is all about.

The best part of Interlochen to me is this amazing community

building confidence

it kind of motivates you to do the best you can

you feel so inspired

experiencing a challenge

[: 00:08:30

And I was really committed to being this performance workhorse, I wanted to be like the, I saw in the YouTube videos, I was like, that's what I want to do, It's the only channel I was shown to get to what I thought was the only option.

And then at Interlochen Summer Arts Camp, I was invited to audition for the yearlong boarding school and I applied, I got a big scholarship to go there, and so I spent three years there. Getting even more and more rigorous Like Stanislavsky, Grotowski, there was some experimental work which I really loved and started to crave more and more of. And that was like the small gateway into what would later become my huge love of experimental and devised work. But that was where I first saw a light into that. And then I went to college in New York City for musical theater. And that was very interesting.

BC: Part Two: Alice in Wonderland

When Rad came to New York City she was following what appeared to be the only option available to someone who wanted to make a life in musical theater. But, the turmoil and uncertainty that rose up with the onset of the Great Recession not only gave her pause but provided an unanticipated opportunity to discover another path.

I would say by my sophomore year, I realized that I no longer wanted to be on Broadway and that I no longer wanted to just do musical theater. It was during Occupy Wall Street and my school was right down the block and that's when I started seeing political performance art. Which I'd seen in Brazil when I would go visit my family. There's a lot of street clowns, a lot of like street theater and I would see it, but I lacked a political context in Brazil cuz I was away.

So seeing it here, like where I understood like the sociopolitical context. I was able to put it on its stage, and understand the setting that it was on and what it was commenting on.

(From Democracy Now coverage of Occupy Wall Street.)

Our occupation is a form of creative resistance. Occupy public space we claim democracy. Enjoy the show. We are all the show. You, me, us now! You, me, us, now!

Song: Solidarity forever, and the union makes us strong. Solidarity forever, solidarity forever….

RP: And from then, I'd say, I spent, I was about like 20 and then I'd say I'd spent about eight years from then doing really weird performances and basements and on stoops and in backyards and all types of downtown places, like art galleries, little black box theaters. And I just got to really experience the gamut of experimental performance which to me ranged from like performance art, devised theater. Yeah. that's when I like, really understood my calling, and I was like, “Oh, I wanna combine my love for collectivity and community as I was discovering then with these experimental forms.”

But then there was still a piece missing, I wasn't into these descendants of bourgeois theater, which was there's granting and funding at the top and it gets trickled down to the artists. And it, it just didn't, it didn't feel good to me. it didn't feel right.

BC: Rad's continuing journey through the community arts labyrinth was a combination of passion, persistence and serendipity. But, one of the unfortunate aspects of life in what some consider the margins of the American arts world, is that there are so many isolated bubbles and silos's filled with potential allies, and fellow travelers who never seem to connect with each other. But, once again, Rad seemed to be at the right place at the right time when they crossed path with someone who was very well suited to introduce them to field's rich history.

RP: And then we applied for the first year of public artists and residence with the Department of Cultural Affairs in New York City to work with LGBTQ Foster Youth. And that's where I met um, my mentor Jan Cohen Cruz, who was assessing how our work was impacting the youth and how it was interacting with the government entities.

And that, that's where the thing clicked to me. I was like, this work needs to be publicly funded. It. I was like, that's it's a community service. We were working with LGBTQ foster youth in six foster homes basically doing like liberation work with them through theater and film and photography and connecting them to their creativity.

Supporting them in accessing their imaginations and helping them like articulate a longer term vision: What are their dreams? what are their goals? Like, what do they crave and desire outside of their like day to day lives? And so that's what our work was there.

es stories of her work in the: 1960

RP: meeting Jan who is such a progressive mind in the socially engaged performance and theater field. And I've learned so, so much from her about the many histories of this work, which is what, what inspired her to write the book and invite me to write it with her and what gave me like a basis for what kind of work I could do.

And so that's what's led me here today. combining all the skills I gained from my early life, and more traditional Eurocentric theater to then learning all these devising skills like creating art with all different types of people.

And so, that kind of that lens was running through everything I saw, that I saw the exploitation running through all the theater and art worlds. I like, I saw the power dynamics and I was like, I wanted something else. I really wanted to be a part of something else, which I now learn y'all in this socially engaged performance field called a long tradition.

And so I feel like I'm, I've earned my place into it by finding it. It's like not an articulated history. It's not an articulated field, and it feels like an amazing way to find it felt like Alice in Wonderland, I was like, tumbling down all these different worm holes and rabbit holes and meeting all these incredible people that don't care to be recognized, it was, it felt really good.

It felt, it feels like humbling, constantly humbling work and all constantly of service and which is, I was really at odds with the opposite of that in the commercial theater. And so it felt like a coming home and like all the belonging that I had been seeking growing up, and all the ways I was seeking to reconnect with my own ancestral cultures, it felt like a way to start to piece that together with all these different folks that seemed like also were trying to do that in many ways.

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[00:16:40] RP: I think There's a parallel, like, “Why is this kind of work obscured? Why is it so hard to find? To me, it parallels with finding home, and to me that's like a direct correlation to the giant experiment of colonization.

It's, the whole point of it is to remove everyone from their homes, their physical homes, and their spiritual, physical homes, their emotional homes within themselves. And I think that disconnection from ourselves and each other is what is exploited to make the rich richer and powerful, more powerful.

Like people become desperate and they end up coming from a place of scarcity and lack and deficit. And so they wanna fill it with these superficial short term solutions, like junk food is the perfect metaphor, it doesn't nourish you.

It feels good in, in the moment, but it's not nourishing in the long run. And to me, it's the exact parallel in our theater and in our stories. It's what gets uplifted, and what gets centered, and what gets resources are easy bites. I'm not judging the kind of work that comes from a more commercial easily accessible theater, performance media, but it follows the same track as industry.

It's it becomes a conveyor belt of the same kind of thing. And so to me it's the same uncovering, and finding the thing, and scratching at it, is so hard to be able to find it, it's the same amount of difficulty as what it takes to really be honoring the land that we're on, and really be in deep relationships with each other.

To me it's like a direct parallel. It's all hidden and it's all covered on purpose. And to get to those really nourishing, long term, seven generation long visions, it's gonna take some muscle to get there, and some deep commitment that is antithetical to what we're conditioned to want.

BC: In our training at the Center for the Study of Art and Community we ask people to commit to answering a set of hard questions about their intentions, accountability, and impact. Questions like: Who defines success? What will be different if you succeed?, and Who will the work be accountable to? Engaging these kinds of questions are part of the hard work that I think Rad is referring to —- a radical practice of inquiry and struggle born of the many questions and influences that have informed their life journey. In the introduction to the book, Meeting the Moment, that Rad co-wrote with Jan Cohen Cruz, Rad shares the many tributaries that have etched this path.

RP: My world view was radicalized as I learned more about queerness, intergenerational exchange, indigenous wisdom, dual power, de-colonial existence, healing, anti psychology, third cinema, black womanism, Third world and trans feminism, abolition, land stewardship, care and tenderness through devised theater, co-creation processes, performance art, political theater, nonviolent, direct action, immersive slash participatory performance and multimedia experiences. I started figuring out how to weave together my politics and values with my art and the way I move through the world.

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[00:20:30] RP: Most of these topics that I share started first as a feeling or as an instinct. And then, both of my parents always made sure that we had all types of friends across all kinds of economic backgrounds, cultural backgrounds. So I made sure to have that in my own friend groups as I grew older too. People from all different types of work and passions. And so, oftentimes when I would share some of these feelings or instincts I was having, I would have a friend who would connect me to a theory behind it, to a book, to different types knowledge.

And some of the biggest theoretical shaping that I had around this was my oldest lifelong friend, Annie Krassner, whose dad was one of the only other Jews in town. His company moved there from New York. When he moved there, someone was like, oh, you should meet the other Jew, Jacob. And that's my dad. And she's one of my oldest friends. And she was an urban planning major at Barnard and Columbia. And when I would share some of these instincts with her she'd be like, “Oh, check out this book, check out this essay. Check out this theory.” And it felt like I was having a minor in urban planning while I was studying theater.

I think it was a way to give me an education and these things that I was instinctually interested in that really rounded out my worldview. And that I think is what created even more opening in my mind about the kind of system that I wanted to exist in within performance making. And so, that's how I came to know so many of these things, is out of curiosity.

And I'd say at the beginning I was a little ivory tower, you know toward academia in my research. I thought the only things that were valuable were things that came from academia, and then it took me a while to start to decolonize my own understanding of what knowledges are valuable.

BC: Part Three: Finding a Moral Compass

For Rad, One of those valuable knowledge sources came from the lived wisdom rising up from family, most particularly their grandmother, who shared a perspective that Rad recognizes as a critical life turning point.

RP: My grandma Esther, my dad's mom, grew up in Soviet Union and she was one of the first woman doctors. She fled. during the war with my grandpa and had her first daughter in Kazakhstan, had my father in Israel, Palestine, and then fled to Brazil.

RP: And I remember after about six years, we won the green card lottery and I was able to go back to Brazil for the first time. I was desperate to ask her this question. I was like “Grandma Valvia used to call her Valvia. Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Jesus?

And she was like, “God, what did God ever give me? Nothing!” She's like, “But the river, and the earth and the trees and the stars, they give me everything. They give me life.” And that story just, I feel like that's my moral center. That's my moral compass. Its what I try to bring through in all of my work, and all the ways I bring people together, because I think that's also how we come home to ourselves, and come home to each other is by feeling the truth of that.

That what our relatives, the earth trees, waters, sky gives us. And that it is everything, and those are our oldest relatives that are still alive today. And placing ourselves within the tiny spec of a timeline that we're a part of, and humbling ourselves to the hugeness of our more than human relatives.

And how to bring that into our day to day interactions, and our day to day lives. Cuz I think it's so easy nowadays to like just stare at our own belly buttons, and to just feel so huge within our own lives. And I just always come back to that story, and that wisdom that she shared with me to remember how small I am and how interconnected I am.Yeah. And the future guide for the future too.

[: 00:24:54

I think Rad's grandmother's sky, earth, and the stars catechism provides a more reliable compass reading. It also reminds me of a recent Change the Story episode about a theater piece created by Serbia's Dah Teatar, in an urban forest in Belgrade called Dancing Trees. In the piece the company and audience occupy the forest and over the course of the performance, incorporate the trees not only as characters in a story about fighting deforestation and corporate greed, but also, as members of the theater company. In the process, Dah was laying claim to some of that same moral center ground that rose up for Rad in her grandmothers' response to her question about God. Those Dancing Trees provided a stark contrast between the obscuring fog of gratuitous consumption, and the clear and present moral horizon line provided by the natural world that is our home.

It is clear that a sense of a safe home place, internally and in the wider world also figures prominently in Rads quest for their own moral center. One of the places where they have found this is a New York based youth program called the Super Hero Clubhouse'. Its not surprising that the clubhouse programs bear some resemblance to some of Rad's own coming of age theatrical experiences back in Fort Lauderdale.

RP: I started working with them about six years ago, and we create theater to enact climate and environmental justice, cultivate hope, and inspire a thriving future. One of the things that I find so incredible and why I wanted to work with Superhero Clubhouse is that they have a way of making the immense feel manageable.

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Big Green Theater specifically works in New York City public schools. And we have teaching artists that teach the kids how to write plays. And we bring in all different types of knowledge keepers from like native land stewards to different kinds of scientists, healers activists to talk to the youth. And then the youth write plays based off of them. And then they're professionally produced at the end of the school year for the youth and all their families and the general public. And that's Big Green theater.

And then at Superhero Clubhouse in general, we make all different types of performances. There's a hiking play where you know you hike and you hear the play with one other person as you go. Our most recent play, Mamelephant was made over years with climate refugee from the Saha Republic, which is in, Northern Russia. And it's a sovereign territory of the indigenous folks from there.

And it was a piece they co-created with her about what is happening to her homelands and what's happened when the permafrost melts and is melting. And so I just think it's an amazing way to bring peace in climate chaos and in climate anxiety. And it helps me feel hopeful. The tangible hope is like our driving force and our driving motto and uplifting indigenous voices who have been the authority on these issues for thousands and thousands of years, and centering and uplifting their wisdom, and knowledge at just as much as we center and uplift, quote unquote scientific knowledge.

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[00:29:42] RP: Lanny and Gem have made a really incredible pedagogy and methodology for doing this. I mean, It's a pretty rigorous process and it does span the course of a year. In the big green theater room would be the two teaching artists, and 10 to 15 kids. The kids are usually middle school aged from 10 to 13 years old.

So the methodology that they build into it is like starting with, What are elements that make a play? And so they teach about characters, and character building, and setting, and where are you and what are you?

They start with small exercises. They write really tiny plays. And then they bring in the presenters to talk about some specific topics that they wanna cover that year. And then they teach the kids how to integrate what the presenters bring in, and what they're learning from the presenters into their plays. So then they just keep writing plays, and then they work on them. And then they decide together on what is gonna be the overall setting for the big play. And then, they each write short plays that build the scenes within the bigger play that they had all agreed on. And they all agreed on the topic they all agreed on what are the characters that are gonna run throughout.

And then, they each get to write specific scenes that are in their chosen genre and that they get full control and autonomy over. And then, some of them write lyrics, and we get guest composers to put them to music, and the kids approve of everything along the way.

At the beginning of the pandemic we did them as movies cuz usually they're in person. But, you know, everyone was quarantined at home. So our puppet designer made puppets out of trash, and we used all recycled everything. So, it was really amazing. It's mind blowing And so, we've done it with the Billion Oyster Project. We've done it with some Shinnecock elders about what's happening in Long Island on their lands.

And the one that sticks with me the most, is the impossible question. That's usually the basis of how we make things together. Making a really impossible question and trying to answer it together which is one of my favorite things about the genre that Superhero Clubhouse falls in, which is like magical realism. Um, and sometimes fantasy it takes you outside. What we think is possible and these paradigms of so-called reality, and it helps us crack our minds and understandings open to actually be able to dream bigger and dream beyond and come up with solutions that perhaps people in labs couldn't even dream of because they're thinking in very specific boxes and paradigms.

And so that's what excites me about these collaborations across disciplines between the kids and scientists, is that sometimes the things they think of are genius and quite brilliant. You know what I mean? And it like really cracks open thinking and It's really amazing. It's like mind blowing

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As Rad mentioned earlier in this episode, over the past few years she has been intensely involved in a writing project with her friend Jan Cohen Cruz. The book they produced together is called Meeting the Moment. Socially Engaged Performance, 1965–2020, by Those Who Lived It, was published earlier in 2022 by New Village Press. Here is how Jan described the book and her partnership with Rad in Episode 35

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BC: Joining forces with Jan, provided Rad with an intimate connection to the multi-layered, multi-generational artistic foundation of the socially engage performance field. It also introduced Rad to a dramatically expanded community of friends and colleagues.

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And at first she had just interviewed me for it. And then she invited me to co-write it, co-write it with her. And I felt so honored. And so yeah, we had the same seven questions that we asked about 70 people that ranged from who influenced them, what is the history of this field as they know it. What led them to this kind of work? How do they like to work? What values do they think are important in the work? What kind of support is needed to do this very specific community rooted work?

And I learned so much. It was incredible to hear about people's influences. One of the biggest things we learned is that there is no unified history of this work. There's multiple, many histories and many people talk about it in different ways. Socially engaged performance, socially engaged theater, political theater, social practice, civic practice, public practice. And so, it was really cool to hear about it from people coming at it from different ways.

[: 00:35:43

BC: The research and interviews Rad undertook for the book reinforced many of the lessons they had come to in their own practice over the years. They also provided new insights into the uniquely demanding alchemy of building, sustaining, and remaining accountable in very long term community arts partnerships.

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A lot of these people have been working together for decades, and are continually recommitting to each other and making an artistic home together, which I find incredible. At the beginning of the pandemic, so many theaters were like worried about losing audiences. But for most of the people we interviewed in the book, they weren't worried at all about losing audiences cuz they didn't view them as they're just their audiences. It was part of their community.

[: 00:37:01

Just all different ways people were showing up for each other. It felt like small villages. It felt like really getting to know the ways people were functioning in their small villages, And it was really also beautiful to learn about how people were making meaning, It was really amazing to see how people were drawing wisdom and were making meaning of covid and of the grief and the loss together. I learned a lot about how we hold each other through loss, and through grief, and how art is an amazing vehicle and glue.

BC: I began this episode by evoking the idea of an old soul. One of the most old soul aspects of Rad's journey is Their continuing work in New York’s Hudson River Valley with Iron Path Farms, which is a Haudenosaunee Two Spirit led food sovereignty project growing ancestral foods for indigenous people.

[: 00:38:29

So having this, land project for food sovereignty, rooted in Haudenosaunee principles and teachings, and also having space for artists to come and create in a healing way in a different way and continue building what an alternative performance and theater-making ecosystem looks like, especially rooted in solidarity economy principles. So, I, I see myself overall there. And then continuing to travel to support people in creating their own, ecosystems that are more equitable, that are healing centered, that are rooted in the intersection between indigenous sovereignty and black liberation, with queer futures in mind.

And one of my passions and goals is to be able to bring not only inner city youth, but grown folks who were raised in cities, disconnected from their cultures, specifically black, brown, and indigenous folks, and our allies to be able to reconnect with nature, cuz it's beautiful to make these plays with the kids.

But I really want them to be able to not be scared. My own mother is scared of being in nature cuz she was raised in cities. And I want to be able to bring together these beautiful theater making methodology we have on the land, and to continue building those relationships with what we're building up here and to be able to have that, that interplay.

[: 00:40:51

[00:41:20] RP: I learned a lot from Theater of the Oppressed, but which Jan told me Boal actually wanted to call Theater of the Liberated, but this publisher was like, no, “Theater of the Oppressed will sell more books.” I learned a lot about cops in the head and how oftentimes the, quote-unquote, devil or the toxicity is now within us.

And in my view, our part of our current work is the internal work, and is like, how do we flush out these toxins? How do we heal so that we can come to the work from a whole place, or from a healing place, from a place of abundance where we know it is possible, not where we're constantly questioning, is there enough? Is there enough for me? Is this actually gonna happen? Not a question of if, but changing it to a question of when and absolutely rewriting these stories in our brains, that like these little voices that keep telling us it's not possible. “Oh, this will never work because of this.” And very constantly rewriting those stories and those narratives that are coursing through our brains.

And so I think it's that, I think it's, I think it's this constant work within our own selves of practicing possibility, and like practicing, speaking with the possible in mind and with the hope and not wasting time, second guessing or doubting, but instead growing that. To figuring out what the steps might be, and utilizing each othe. Instead of thinking that we're like in these little flesh bags by ourselves, it's okay, how can we figure out these steps together? And what is our, shared goals, so many shared goals, and it's just connecting with hope to get there.

BC: Building on that sentiment, I think connecting with hope, that is, of course amplified by human creative spirit is a good way to characterize the many impulses and influences that have sparked Rad Pereira's art and social change journey. A journey that, of course is moving ahead as we speak with the urgency and deliberation that is necessary in these times.

I want to thank Rad and Jan Cohen Cruz for their incredible work and for sharing their stories. As always, many of the people, places, ideas and initiatives that have shown up in this episode will be shared in our show notes. Which will also provide a link to New Village Press and Rad and Jan’s book Meeting the Moment.

Change the Story/ Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and community. It is hosted by your's truly Bill Cleveland, our theme and soundscape sprout from the ever fertile musical imagination of the incomparable Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe, our special effects come from Freesound.org, and our inspiration is delivered daily on a toasted sesame seed roll by the mysterious UKE 235. Thanks to To all our listeners, for doing just that. Until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word.