ABSTRACT
In this provocative essay, Dana Edell, faculty member at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, viBe Theatre Artists Leonor Duran, a Latinx teenager, and Kuenique Allicock, a Black teenager, reflect on viBe’s mission to dismantle oppression based on race, age, and gender, by writing about real life issues. Since 2002, viBe Theater Experience has been a safe haven for girls, gender expansive, and nonbinary youth of color in New York City to express themselves, foster sisterhood, and ignite community to action. Duran and Allicock offer authoritative insight into the distinctive feature of viBe’s process whereby the girls write the entire show, uncensored. The company ascribes to an anti-racism agenda. Edell, as a white woman, feels equally passionate that white people must partner with people of color when working with youth in this community and to step outside of the rehearsal process at times to respect when the girls need to have a deeper conversation that often isn’t possible under a white gaze. Allicock and Duran also recognize the importance of white partners who can be trusted to use their racial privilege for advocacy. Distinctive and formidable, viBe Theater Experience uses performance to train the next generation of arts leaders.
