During liminal times where we feel alienated from our bodies and disengaged from our governments and institutions, we seek safety and arrival in spaces where healing can happen. This means sourcing a home, whether it be a physical space or a community of people, in order to survive. When we return home, we are asked to reactivate our understanding of belonging. As we move into our 2022-23 season, the Asian American Theater Project embraces the idea of home and homeplace to nurture ourselves and our chosen families. Our season will ask how the return to “home” disrupts and restabilizes our identities toward collective liberation.
In doing so, we honor and remember the late Gloria Jean Watkins, commonly known by her pen name bell hooks, as we engage her concept of homeplace and Black feminist thought in striving for collective liberation through our art. As Asian Americans, we owe much of our own cultural and political consciousness to the theoretical work from Black women. Their radical understandings, though particular to Black feminism, also impart upon us a universal language of race and gender that have proven quintessential for our work and evolution as Asian Americans.
AATP activates the idea of the home as a site of resistance to fuel our own artmaking as Asian Americans.
“[Black feminist thinkers] understood intellectually and intuitively the meaning of homeplace in the midst of an oppressive and dominating social reality, of homeplace as site of resistance and liberation struggle.” —bell hooks
Over the past couple years, what have we learned as a community through our artmaking processes and global and political understandings of self that will guide us into the future? How have cross-cultural and cross-racial intuitions inspired us to be able to create our own homeplace as Asian Americans? Our productions are spaces where we can interrogate our own privilege, resist white supremacist forces that compromise our safety and belonging, and heal with others while continuously regrounding our idea of home.
“The purpose of resistance, here, is to seek the healing of yourself in order to be able to see clearly… I think that communities of resistance should be places where people can return to themselves more easily, where the conditions are such that they can heal themselves and recover their wholeness.” – Thich Nhat Hahn, quoted by bell hooks
In AATP’s 2022-23 season, we welcome the idea of homeplace and healing. As an organization dedicated to empowerment, we uphold our promise to continue uplifting marginalized artists and creating a community that welcomes individuals from all experience levels and backgrounds. With the recent revival of BlackStage, AATP is also committed to creating a collective theatrical space where BIPOC artists can co-exist and create authentic art together. We also acknowledge that this artistic statement will never feel complete in regard to exploring the nuance of bell hooks and the homeplace, but we hope that it establishes a sense of purpose that will grow with us.
OUR 22-23 SEASON SELECTIONS
Both of our season’s selections, The Headlands by Christopher Chen and next to normal by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt, take place in a house, but characters must journey to find and activate the meaning of the home once more.
The Headlands charts a path across San Francisco to unravel the mystery of a family’s history that uproots our understanding of home. A multimedia production that will blend live performance with video projections, The Headlands interrogates the concept of home through memory while reclaiming the orientalist lens of noir. How can confronting memories of family and home liberate us? What can the home we come from teach us about the ones we hope to build?
next to normal dismantles the nuclear family construct through individual consciousness and explores how embracing change and navigating disruption is foundational to the meaning of home. Our production will center an Asian American family to investigate how conversations around mental health and the healthcare system are reframed in first and second-generation households.
In all, AATP’s season centers the homeplace in its multifaceted, changing existence.
OUR COMMITMENTS
AATP believes that the integration of storytelling, history, activism, and humanistic knowledge is central to our vision.
We strive to create dialogues in the community about the dimensionality of being Asian American.
We commit to creating participatory and accessible opportunities for individuals of all backgrounds and experience levels to become involved in our organization.
We will work to guide new members toward understanding how theater and storytelling as a whole can be a platform for illuminating conversations and social change.
We commit to create theater that prioritizes the wellness and joy of our members to resist the perfectionist strictures of theater that induce burnout.
We welcome you to reimagine activations of home with us as we move forward into our new artistic season.