Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware - Art, activism and solidarity.
Welcome to Only Here, an occasional podcast from Nakai Theatre in the Yukon. I'm Jacob Zimmer. In this series, we hear voices of artists, organizers, and production folks who are working on how theatre and creative communities can thrive in the current moment. In this episode, artist, organizer, and teacher, Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware.
In this episode, Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware asks, “how do we come together and learn how to be in community together, and support each other?” Syrus’ commitment to organizing with Black Lives Matter, abolition, trans justice, and disability justice, illuminates the challenges and beautiful opportunities offered by our differences, and by our scenes and movements. Syrus explores how arts and activism can learn from each other, and the importance to “trace our genealogies of resistance back to some of the origins” when creating movements today.
References & links
Panarchy loop
Transcript
Hello, my name is Dr. Syrus Marcus Ware. I'm an artist, activist, and a scholar. I live in Tkaronto, or 'Tarantoo', colonially known as Toronto, but I live in the part that was underwater at the time of the Toronto purchase, the unceded territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit. I've been working and making art and also
doing activism for about 26 years, both, and really tied them together in my practice, art activism, and art. I'm also a professor at McMaster at the School of the Arts, and I teach in theatre and film and interdisciplinary arts. And I'm a parent, and a twin.
I've been part of a lot of different communities and we can call them scenes, we can call them networks, we can call them whatever we wanna describe them as, and have found a sense of belonging at home in multiple spaces, which is really lucky as a Black trans person, as a Black disabled trans person — to be able to find home in multiple places feels really lucky.
And I think that's what a lot of us are looking for is a sense of belonging. And I think the part of why we join scenes, or why we get invested in scenes is because they give us a sense of, here are people who have similar ideas or similar interests or similar overlapping areas of curiosity and intrigue that tie together to what I'm into and what I'm on about.
And we are looking for a sense of belonging and connection, and we can sometimes find that with like-minded folks. Not all scenes are full of like-minded folks. However, I'm an activist. I'm an organizer. I've been organizing in the movement for Black Lives for 26 years. I've also been organizing around prison abolition and disability justice, and trans justice, and certainly just because you all agree that police budgets need to be cut and reinvested in the community doesn't mean that you all agree on whatever food sovereignty, or any other topic, or what bands to listen to on the way to the demo. You may not agree on all of those things. Now, a lot of it is really figuring out how do I connect with people and find that sense of belonging at home, even if we have some differences.
And so that's been really exciting as an activist, to figure out how do we relate across difference? And Audre Lorde was encouraging us to do that. She said that was one of the strategies towards freedom and liberation was being able to relate across difference. So one of the most exciting scenes that I'm part of probably is this activist scene, which is I guess as you said, a scene within a scene, in part because it's so heterogeneous and there are so many different folks who share some ideas in common with me.
The idea around abolition being a necessity in order to get towards freedom, or that disabled people need to be able to thrive, not to survive. Or that trans people should get to live long enough to become elders, or whatever it is that we're mutually agreed upon. The differences, the other differences we get to work through together that feels important.
I'm somebody who really loves the possibility of being what they would call, I guess like a pollinator; I go from place to place and community to community, and I'm engaged in a lot of different kinds of things, and I feel very thankful for the chance to engage with folks who have a lot of similar ideas to me, where I can feel that sense of comfort, but also where I get to be working alongside people who think differently than I do, or who have just different approaches to how they would solve a problem, for example.
And then I get to learn together from being in an environment. Yeah, I feel very thankful at this moment.
The challenges, I think that you did mention challenges, and I think that the challenges are real. It can be very difficult to keep a group of people together over a long period of time. We have in university towns, a lot of activist spaces and student movement spaces where there's a lot of turnover because people graduate and they move on. In sort of non-school based community organizing, there still is a lot of change in turnover as people move cities, or change jobs, or become parents, or do other things that take them away from maybe being on the frontlines. And so there's this constant sort of influx of new people and new ideas that is constantly changing and transforming the space of the scene.
And so that's challenging. That can be very challenging because if we think about it as a panarchy loop, there are people who are gonna wanna keep doing things the way that they've always done things, and then there are gonna be people with new ideas and new ways of working, and we have to figure out how to do that together.
You mentioned this idea of when we have competing needs in order to be in a space. And that's another challenge, in disability justice communities we talk about it as competing access needs, which is when you maybe have somebody who needs to use essential oils in order to help support their anxiety and in order for them to be able to be present in a room.
And you have somebody who's scent sensitive, who can't be around any essential oils, otherwise they can't arrive at the event at all, or some other similar situations. I have a memory impairment and it's significant, and it makes it very difficult to even be able to tell a story from beginning to end and tie it together because I sometimes have forgotten by the time I've gotten to the end of the story.
So, an example of communities of people who need to be able to interrupt and tell a relatable story as a process for their listening doesn't work with my access needs, because if I get interrupted, I may as well have never been telling the story at all because I'm not gonna remember what I was just saying. So, how do we come together?
How does the person who needs to be able to tell a relatable story, and me who needs to be able to tell one story from start to finish? How do we come together and learn how to be in community together and support each other? And there are strategies and we're getting there. We're learning how to do this together.
But these are some of the challenges about being in a scene, a particularly a hetero, heterogeneous, or hetero, yeah, scene. Not heterosexual, but heterogeneous. We all are these multifaceted, multi-dimensional beings, and we get to ideally bring our full selves to our work. And that means that we're not having to cut off parts of ourselves in order to come to that engagement or into that scene or into that space.
And the only way that we get to sort of bring our full selves into the work is if we get to acknowledge that we're different and we get to see that there are benefits to the fact that we are all different and then we get to learn how to relate across difference, as Audre Lorde recommended. And there are strategies that the Combahee River Collective was saying, if we work together to try to make the world safer for those who are most marginalized, we're necessarily making the world safer for everyone else. And so we can start to do that when we come together to relate across difference and say, who most needs to be centred in terms of safety in this environment and how will that benefit all of the rest of us? And thinking through some of those ideas seems very important in this moment, we're living in these Octavia Butler and post-apocalyptic or apocalyptic times where change is everywhere and, where the activism is everywhere and where there's so much that needs to happen in a short amount of time in order for us all to make it.
This idea of building scenes that are thriving, that allow us to get to this next step together seems important. Yeah, I think that certainly, first of all, I'll say activists have, not everyone, but in general there is a real skillset that gets built through organizing of how to bring people together and how to bring people together quickly.
How to make people believe in something together and work together towards a common goal. There are these strategies that we have that allow us to be able to do big things, like shutting down the Allen Expressway, which is only possible because of people literally going on the ground, knocking door to door, talking to their community members, talking to their neighbours, engaging within building a network, building a community together. So we can learn a lot from that in the yards where we're so focused on these metrics of trying to assess whether we're doing a good job. And a lot of times that's done through an assessment of bums in seats, and bums in seats doesn't just happen.
You have to build a community and a network that's gonna be excited about your next project that's gonna build, so that marketing isn't just constantly throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks, but actually building on a community sort of project. So there's a lot that the arts could learn about building these sustained networks that are able to withstand even high pressure situations. In activism, I think we could learn a lot from the arts. Particularly, in relation to solutions to problem solving. In the arts, we're often using very creative strategies to answer big questions, and artists are certainly doing that. They're writing poetic operas about futuristic story timelines, and I'm thinking of Toshi Reagon's operatic version of Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.
People are writing rap songs. They're doing plays and performances about very complex social issues, and being able to distill it down and help make it really accessible to an audience and to a community. In activism, there can be a sense of mysteriousness where if you're not in the club, or if you're not in the group, it can be hard to understand why and how and what is happening and what and how the decisions get made.
It can be very mysterious and I think that we could learn a lot from the arts in terms of how to make things more visible, how to make processes more visible, how to, in a safe way, so that activists are still safe and protected. How to bring community members, and then again, this idea of problem solving.
Talk about big issues in a way that is really accessible, that's not just a report or an inquest or something, but is in a medium that people can really, access like a song or a performance.
We have this expression standing on the shoulders of giants where we actually really try to trace our genealogies of resistance back to some of the origins or some of the roots, recognizing that these are not new ideas. This idea of abolition is a long term project. It's literally called abolition because it's literally the continuation of the project to abolish slavery, which is an incomplete project. So we're drawing our histories back to our ancestors, to Harriet Tubman, to Nat Turner, to Toussaint L’Ouverture, to these folks who are fighting for abolition. Then, as much as we are fighting for abolition now, we think about our ancestors and about what they have taught us, and laid the groundwork and planted seeds that have allowed us to germinate something in 2023 that may be getting us a step further to closer to freedom, and so we name, we call names, and we say Marsha P. Johnson, and we say Sylvia Rivera, and we say 'Storm Delecarpe'. We say the names of these people who have brought us to where we are today.
There's this concept in West Africa and Ghana, and from the Asante people from the Adinkra language of Sankofa, which is this idea of a goose walking forward, but when its head turned backwards towards its tail, and the direct translation of this pictorial language is that it's not wrong to go back and pick up that what you have forgotten. So the importance of knowing where you've come from in order to know where you're going, it's a big part of what is happening in my community and Black activist community.
It's very crucial. So we really draw back to our lineages of resistance and our genealogies of resistance, and we say it's important to trace these through lines to recognize that the Black Lives Matter occupation of police headquarters in 2016 was only possible because of what happened in 2002 and 1991 and '76, and so on, that these are cumulative movements. To me, that feels like a really exciting and important thing that we get to do in our organizing is that we get to name and acknowledge the incredible labour and organizing and work of those who have come before us and that we honour their labour. There's never this idea that to have a rally down the street tomorrow was completely unique and came out of the blue.
No, this comes out of genealogy of resistance and organizing. You know what I wish I saw more of? One, this is something that we're working through certainly in my work with Black Lives Matter Canada, is figuring out how to relate across difference and how to build scenes that exist out outside of borders.
We know that blackness is borderless. We know that queerness is borderless. We know that these borders are fictitious in our colonial constructs, and yet, at the same time how separated the north and south are and the communities and scenes that are happening in, say the Yukon and Toronto, how separated the communities in Halifax and Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh territories out in Vancouver are, and what it might look like to build organizing that did borders.
And so I feel like that's a big challenge and I think that certainly with Black Lives Matter Canada, that's what we've been trying to do, is figuring out how to bring Black people together across the country outside of the limitations of time zones and all of the things that make borders imprinted in our lives.
We have a long way to go, but we're getting there and I look forward to the time we can feel more connected despite our distances. Context matters, the context that you're coming into. We really try to encourage each other. We go to a new environment to really join into what work is already happening.
Rather than being like, I'm here, I wanna start this thing because I might think it's the greatest thing. That's not a great strategy. A better strategy is to tap into the work that's already happening. There is an influence of our context, the social context that we're in, the sort of environmental context, the local context that we're in matters.
And it shapes the way that we do the organizing, and the way that we do our work, and the way that we produce even our artistic processes, the timelines and the trajectories and all of that kind of stuff are based in where we're located. Even as we were just talking before the recording about the difference of performing theatre in the north and in the south during the pandemic, and how that was a contextually different experience.
So these things matter. To be able to really recognize those things and to figure out, okay, how do we build scenes that are supportive of what each other are already working on and engaging in, if we're doing a borderless engagement, so if we're bringing people together across distance, it's important that we don't always do it in Toronto, that we're not like, "Hey, everybody come to Ontario," or that we focus on strategies that are coming out of the more majority-supported context in Canada. So just really thinking about that feels important right now.
Jacob: Thanks very much for listening. You can find out more at nakaitheatre.com/podcast where there's links and transcriptions. Thanks to the Government of Canada through the Department of Heritage for funding this cycle of the podcast, in which we discuss how to be together and thrive as live performance makers.
Stay well.