[Music] resilient is black resilient is being born and raised in a country that has done so much to say that i'm less than [Music] and the fact that i still get up to do this work to engage in life as well as like many other black and brown folk that's resilient as hell [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] i grew up in the south we lived next door to my grandparents cousins aunties uncles and so that experience of being around community was really fundamental to how i think about four years ago i ventured out on my own and started jack productions which is a african-american theater company based here in white river and our mission is to bring more compassion empathy and love into the world by telling stories that challenge hierarchies of race gender class and sexuality it was a way not only to like build community but it was sort of a way for me to kind of find my like confidence and who i am as an individual and so the theater was like a safe space for me [Music] i remember coming to this community starting to kind of talk about my work and i would always get this questions of like why are you doing this work here like the story of black people the story of black americans don't deserve to be told everywhere [Music] a lot of american culture was created by black people dance music song and a lot of that creativity a lot of that joy a lot of that art was created in the church particularly in the black church great is thy faithfulness oh god my father the church was the place where we could affirm our resilience we would spend our weeks being an environment where our humanity was being threatened and on sunday we were able to come together as a community to celebrate how we show up in the world [Music] this is the place where i landed in vermont after hitting a wall in new york city i didn't really know where i was coming or what the environment would be like i was struggling in new york i didn't know which direction i wanted to take my creativity my life and so i was like looking for a place to you know reset my mind and my body [Music] and so i came here it's quiet as a storyteller as a creative person you have to be able to like be still and and listen white river is a up and coming town a lot has happened over the past seven to ten years there's a lot of theater and you know music performances and we're very close to new york city two and a half hours from boston three and a half hours from montreal so it's like a midway point or a hub to get to major cities the big differences between new york city and vermont are are very clear as black folk a lot of us think that we have to end up in cities and i think that there's a beauty in like reclaiming rural spaces i remember one of the actors telling me i feel the blackest i am all year when i come up to vermont to work for jag it's a revival of black creatives black renaissance man and i think a lot of these artists like come from urban areas and didn't know life could exist in this way when i think about storytelling i think of it as a way to free people oftentimes we really do think that our experiences are just our own but storytelling helps us to connect when i hear someone's story i'm just like oh damn like that happened to me i grew up with that we're all struggling and going through sort of the same thing there's a quote by maya angela that she says i come as one but i stand as ten thousand this is like years and years and histories of black people my people the fact that we can still find joy and still create so much out of nothing that is resilience that is the epitome of resilience oftentimes marginalized communities tend to have to create work for the gatekeepers primarily white institutions i want a younger generation to know that like you can explore and be anything that you want the more marginalized voices that can be brought front and center the better we're all are that's the only way we can live in the future that we want [Music] [Music] you