THE CLARICE SMITH PERFORMING ARTS CENTER AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND
In Partnership With
JOE'S MOVEMENT EMPORIUM
Present
Rachel Grossman & Tosin Olufolabi: The Gift
The Gift is an immersive, interactive performance that invites the audience to transition from self-reflection to action and advocacy over the course of the event. Sometime in the U.S.'s future, when most illnesses have been cured, two doctors host the first clinical trial for the societally destructive infectious agent Preston-Weche-Rhys – the source of white supremacy culture – with the audience cast as the subjects.
About NextLOOK
Presented by The Clarice and Joe's Movement Emporium, NextLOOK supports the development of new music, plays, dance and other experiences by regionally-based performing artists. These artists are mentored by seasoned arts administrators from The Clarice and Joe’s Movement Emporium to construct innovative methods of deepening the audience’s involvement in their creative process. By removing logistical barriers of cost and space and providing a sounding board for artists creating new work, NextLOOK invests in the regional arts ecology and creates an accessible, exploratory environment that connects intriguing artists with adventurous audiences.
About The Program
The Gift
Written and Performed by Tosin Olufolabi & Rachel Grossman
Additional Collaborators
Reclamation Doctors: Denise Chapman, Keellia Guevara, Valerie Rucker
Dr. Michonne Landers: Bea Ngozi Udeh
Voiceover Actor (The Panel): Paige O’Malley
Voiceover Actor (Interview): Natasha M. Gallop
Anne’s Husband Paul (Text Messages Photo): Wai Yim
Consulting Dramaturg: Katherine MacHolmes
Inspiration
Dear White America
by George Yancy
What is ‘Visionary Fiction’?: An Interview with Walidah Imarisha.
Interested in the Last Version of The Gift?
Interested in Talking About Your Experience with the Creators?
Tosin Olufolabi • tosin.olufolabi@gmail.com
Rachel Grossman • iamabigeyedfish@gmail.com
A Gift of Time and Space
On Christmas Day 2015, New York Times op-ed “Dear White America” by philosopher Dr. George Yancy was published as “a gift to white America.” The article, framed as a letter, was a gift of time and space, inviting white Americans to acknowledge and confront their racism, as well as encourage white Americans to fight racism in themselves and the world around them. To engage in this activity, Yancy explains, requires white people to expose their vulnerabilities, to “un-suture” themselves; a process of labor and sacrifice.
One night in 2018, we two got into a casual discussion about Dear White America and Yancy’s book Backlash: What Happens When We Talk Honestly about Racism in America, which analyzes the responses his 2015 op-ed received. Backlash in particular led us to ask each other deep questions about the relationship of systemic racism to gifts, labor, sacrifice, reparations and, ultimately, liberation. In turn this led us to discuss wound-creation, healing processes, cell therapy, organ transplants, regenerative medicine, etc. and the complicated relationship of race and medical science. And so our devising process began.
The first version of The Gift was shared with 60-some people in an interactive, script-in-hand staged reading format in September 2019 at The Kennedy Center’s Page-to-Stage New Works Festival. After the public showing, our biggest realization was that we wanted to be more inclusive of audiences in the devising process as well as the performance event itself. We knew our experiences of systemic racism were limited to our personal lived experiences and social identities. We wanted to open up the creative process to more people and perspectives. We wanted to widen and diversify our invitations to the audience to challenge themselves during the performance. The NextLOOK residency opportunity presented itself, and so we applied.
By the time we interviewed with The Clarice and Joe’s Movement Emporium in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic was global and its impact in the United States was exposing long-standing inequities by race and ethnicity. While neither of us was ignorant of the huge disparities between races when it comes to health care access or our country’s racist, murderous past actions linked to medical research, the pandemic caused a paradigm disruption for The Gift beyond what we could have anticipated or imagined.
When we were offered a NextLOOK residency, Tosin and I were brain-deep into transitioning another play into a digital format (and not knowing what was to come, we had yet to move into our respective first painful phases of pandemic fatigue, grief and loneliness), so we were intrigued—even excited—about the prospect of doing The Gift as a digital or a combined digital and live experience. We remained curious about the lessons we could learn from our present reality, and hopeful about the future.
Then a white police officer positioned his knee on the neck of a Black man and knelt there for 8 minutes and 46 seconds. Then the uprising occurred, and calls racial equity echoed and nationwide abolition movements grew. Then the 2020 election was falsely called a fraud again and again, leading to swift moves to disenfranchise more Black and Brown voters. Then insurgents stormed the US Capitol.
Now it’s March 2021, roughly one year following our interview to participate in NextLOOK and a year and half since the first sharing of the first version of the play.
Let’s take a breath. We’ve arrived together at a second version.
The experience you’re having of The Gift with NextLOOK isn’t anything we ever expected to make, and it isn’t the final one either. (The Gift will likely take another giant pivot after tonight.)
We are creating a show that is the evolution of our ideas and experiences as best we can make sense of them in our current context and within the current spirit both of us can muster.
This is the gift we’re bringing. It’s the gift of shared time and space. It’s the gift of different. The gift of new. The gift of possibility. The gift of change. Of agency. Of friends. Of collaborators. Of two people who are creating a performance on a digital platform who would rather be sharing space with you live. Of a Black woman born in the UK and raised by Nigerian parents in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who moved to Washington, DC to learn how to create art for a living. Of a white woman, the daughter of a Philadelphia Ashkenazi Jew and a Texan of Scotch-Irish lineage, born and raised in the midwest who moved to Washington, DC and became an activist for antiracism and anti-oppression through theater.
Making The Gift has been a gift to us. The NextLOOK residency has been a gift to us. Being here with you is a gift to us.
What gift can you give yourself through it?
What gift can you give one another?
–Tosin Olufolabi & Rachel Grossman
Co-Creators and Performers of The Gift
About the Artists
Rachel Grossman
Rachel Grossman (she, her) is a director, devised theatre artist, collaborative playwright and performer working in the U.S. theatre. Her work activates audiences to discover and participate in theatrical events she creates, in order to propel people to action in their own lives and communities. In the last 20 years she has co-created and directed plays with children, teens and senior citizens, as well as artists who are Deaf and DeafBlind. In 2020, Rachel directed audience integrated productions of The Diary of Anne Frank at The Rose Theater of Omaha and She Kills Monsters at the University of Maryland, and supported engagement strategy for San Diego REP's Beachtown Live! digital performances. In addition to The Gift, Rachel is writing a series of TYA plays about how two friends experience racism in kindergarten, 4th and 7th grades.
Photo Courtesy of the Artist
Tosin Olufolabi
Tosin Olufolabi is a Nigerian, British born, American raised sound designer, deviser, facilitator and performer. Based in the Washington, D.C. area, Tosin uses multiple media to connect communities & cultures, challenge beliefs & conventions, promote action and uplift people. Some of her more notable works are Lovers’ Vows (We Happy Few), School Girls, Or, The African Mean Girls Play (Round House Theatre), Gloria (Woolly Mammoth - Helen Hayes nomination for Outstanding Sound Design) and Peepshow (dog & pony dc).
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