Instead, they soon started leading backpacking trips, to combine theatre lessons with natural exploration-a process they’re still engaging with through Earthseed. You have a voice.”Īfter college, the Milton Hershey School hired Òsanyìn to do theatre work with a transition program designed to address the school’s abysmal graduation rates. From South African performance artist Pieter-Dirk Uys they heard a powerful message for a young American abroad, post-9/11: “Do not let the people that are in charge of your country pretend like they all they have all the power. From a teacher on board, they learned about Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Virgin Islands, describes themself as being “from everywhere and nowhere.” At age 11, Òsanyìn and their older brother were enrolled at Milton Hershey School in Hershey, Pa.-“a boarding school for poor kids” that they would attend through high school-after it became clear to their biological mother that illness would soon keep her from raising them.Ī college term with Semester at Sea expanded Òsanyìn’s worldview and theatrical vocabulary: They saw Vietnamese water puppetry and spent time in Kyoto and Shanghai. Though they grew up on the East Coast, Òsanyìn, the child of immigrants from Jamaica and St. Theatre can help us build our future, rather than just waiting for it.” –Augusto Boal “Theatre is a form of knowledge it should and can also be a means of transforming society. So, I just live a life of saying the things that are true in ways that allow someone to see it through love.” There’s nothing else you can do to me that’s going to get me to not say the important thing. “And the fact is that is not 100 percent my job, and I am willing to leave a job at a moment’s notice…because I’ve been poor and lived in my car. “I’ve always been uncompromising,” they told me later, in conversation. In a city that has a hard time having honest conversations with itself, that kind of candor matters. “I’m excited for theatres to look at business structures that are not rooted in the nonprofit industrial complex and then contribute to the theatre industrial complex, because we need something different.”ĭuring that same symposium, Òsanyìn was the only person to ask fellow participant Braden Abraham, artistic director of Seattle Repertory Theatre, a kind but pointed question about the equity practices in place at Seattle’s major regional theatre. “Nonprofits thrive because rich folks, who are deeply rooted in capitalism, get a tax benefit for giving to theatres,” they said. They’re also a ceramic artist, teacher, outdoor educator, activist, facilitator, and the founder of Earthseed, an organization “that uses theatre and wild spaces to decolonize those spaces in the bodies that pass through them.” Speaking at a recent online symposium of Seattle theatre leaders, Òsanyìn was also an evangelist for new artistic business models, like the ever-evolving model they’re building with Earthseed. “Just make a choice and we’ll roll with it. “The way that I rule my life, and I used to tell my fifth-grade students this, is beautiful failure,” Òsanyìn said with a laugh in a recent chat. Jemisin’s lesbian steampunk sci-fi story The Effluent Engine for Book-It Repertory Theatre, feels more like conducting an orchestra. Òsanyìn (they/them), who generates more warmth in the cold void of Zoom than seems humanly possible, is an all-around theatre artist, a director, playwright and actor-though, they say, one of their current projects, adapting and directing N.K. That introductory stage direction from Jéhan Òsanyìn’s autobiographical play Yankee Pickney parallels an interesting challenge for a journalist: How do you write about someone who won’t be defined by the world around them? They take the performer from their story and force them into the larger socially constructed narrative.” “Most sound cues are abrupt interruptions.
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