black lives matter

9 June 2020

VOLCANO:

What is our responsibility?

The future depends on what we do now.

In the past few weeks, we have watched as the sickening disease of racism has been exposed once again by the murders by police of Black and Indigenous people in Canada and the US. These crimes have laid bare the ethical failures of our white supremacist societies. The COVID pandemic has similarly torn the curtain away from the legion failures of capitalism, and all its white supremacist institutions that assign value to property instead of humans. The intersection of this pandemic with this systemic racism has impacted Black and Indigenous lives more than any other lives on this continent.

Enough.

Black lives matter. Indigenous lives matter. And to value Black and Indigenous lives we must value justice. We must prioritize the reorganization of our societies and economies and the dismantling of white supremacy around us and inside us.

We must transform. 

What is our responsibility at Volcano? To experience the shame of our omissions and failings as a majority white theatre company, in particular as a white artistic director and two white producers, and to use this experience not to lay us low, but to activate us on a path towards transformation. It is our responsibility to acknowledge, examine, and atone for our shortcomings – some of which we are aware, and others we are not yet - and to create a better system for the production of our work and the evolution of our company. It is our responsibility to transform without increasing trauma or work for those of our colleagues who are Black, Indigenous, and/or Artists of Colour. And It is our responsibility to continue to create rigorously-crafted art that speaks to the much-needed transformation of our societies.

The towering American thinker Cornell West was interviewed last week, and his words on the intersection of racism, climate change and catastrophic leadership apply to our entire world:

“There is the sowing of the seed of greed, hatred and corruption. And you reap the chaos… We’re at a fork in the road… We must have a spiritual, moral and democratic awakening among all the citizens who care… We are in this together. We hang together, or we hang separately… It is a global affair…”

https://www.msnbc.com/11th-hour/watch/cornel-west-the-future-of-america-depends-on-how-we-respond-84254277846

We pledge to our audiences, our volunteers, our communities, and especially to the Black and Indigenous artists with whom we work, to contribute towards a moral and democratic awakening. To self-examine. To engage in anti-racism work personally and across our organization’s culture and frameworks. To become better allies and accomplices. To aid and abet transformation that reorganizes our societies to bend towards justice.

We recognize and will champion the important societal changes that are emerging, including defunding the police and increasing funding to social and health services; establishing Universal Basic Income; criminalizing climate destruction; abolishing the idea that a society is judged by its gross domestic product and nourishing the idea that a society is judged by the well-being of its people.

The choices we make now are of existential importance.