(Why am I naming days?)
08/10/15, Day 14,341 (Mercena Day 360): The Launch of #SpeakUp
You may think you’re in the cruise business, but if your ship catches fire, everyone on board becomes a firefighter.
Over the past few weeks, this little saying has been gnawing at my brain, as it comes the closest to explaining the renewed urgency I wrote about yesterday, and not just about racial justice, but about every fire we face on Spaceship Earth: gender inequality, climate change, fundamentalist violence, and on and on. I now believe that all of us, and all of our communities and organizations, must be firefighters, regardless of how we defined ourselves before. We must be theatre-makers (and doctors and lawyers and teachers and musicians) for racial healing, for climate justice, for disability advocacy, for immigrant rights, for whichever fires burn closest to us, knowing they are all one blaze.
We need all hands on deck, for there are many ways to fight fires, and I believe that we theatre-makers must carry our bucket of water along with everyone else. That’s one reason why I’m so excited to be one of the contributors to #SpeakUp: The Street Harassment Plays, which Flux launched yesterday, and which you can read more about here.
I remain so grateful that catalyst Shaun Fauntleroy thought Flux would be the right home for her exciting project. This is the community of collaborative creators of which I’m proud to be a part.
In addition to the launch of #SpeakUp yesterday, I worked on planning for NET’s next board meeting, and had lots of joyful playtime with Mercena. And because this has been a very serious post, it seems only right to end on a gratuitously cute slow-motion video of Mercena in a jumperaroo:
Mercena Slow-Mo Jumping in her Jumparoo from August Schulenburg on Vimeo.
Corinna Schulenburg 