December 22, 2021, A message from Sulu - We’re entering the time of the year for collective reflection. Personally, it’s taking some effort to remember what season it is, so I appreciate looking back over TONYC’s calendar and reconnecting the dots between what we did at TONYC, when we did it, and how we learned along the way. I know our community may be part of one show or workshop, so I’m excited to share a glimpse of what our jokers and actors built and shared this year.

 Our spring season featured eight online Forum Theatre plays, with costumes, fancy backgrounds, and advocacy partnerships.

Visit TONYC's vimeo to catch summaries of each show!

Over the summer, our team of jokers met regularly to practice and adapt our games and rehearsal techniques to incorporate masks, social distancing and other supports that our facilitation would need, given both the pandemic and our time out of the rehearsal room. For the fall, we made plans with actors and community partners; some of our actors created scenes online, some rehearsed indoors and outside, some mixed in-person with actors attending via zoom. Their work was featured in “The People Using Role-Play to Prepare for the Future”, The Atlantic.

In partnership with organizers at Brooklyn Movement Center, we brought I Live Here Too, a play about the challenge of uniting neighbors together to defend against the symptoms of gentrification and housing neglect, to Fulton Park, Brooklyn in September.

The cast of I Live Here Too opened the show with energy and music. Check out the highlight reel!

We continued to offer training in Theatre of The Oppressed via workshops, and expanded our options beyond Forum Theatre with this fall’s Branch Out Series, focusing on the tools of game facilitation, newspaper theatre, rainbow of desire, and legislative theatre. 

Meanwhile, we worked on a number of things we haven’t shown anyone yet! In 2022, we will release a book on how to facilitate Forum Theatre. We have new plays to share. And, perhaps most exciting, we will be celebrating 10 years of TONYC!

As we prepare for the coming year, I hope you will consider making a donation to Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Individual donations represent the most flexible funding we receive - and these past years have reminded us how important that can be. Your support will help us celebrate our anniversary in our own style.

I hope you have a restorative end of year. We are beginning a break and will return on January 10th. I look forward to seeing you in 2022!

Sulu LeoNimm
Executive Director