Framing Whiteness in Liberation pt. 1
WHBLE founder, Ah-Keisha McCants talks with Applied Theatre Practitioner and Project Director at the CUNY Creative Arts Team (CAT) Mícheál Curtin about the surfacing the awareness of white identity, centering antiracism and history, the role of capitalism, the brilliance of arts educators, and the tensions around pedagogies and practices on the journey towards educational liberation.
Mícheál Curtin is an applied theatre practitioner from Brooklyn, New York who specializes in drama-in-education, process drama, theatre of the oppressed, and devised theatre. His work centers on creating theatre in response to communities’ needs as a way of en-livening conversation, making meaning, and developing theory.
He is currently a Project Director at the CUNY Creative Arts Team (CAT), where he directs a theatre-in-education program in six high schools around New York City. With the Literacy through Drama team at CAT, Mícheál and six multi-ethnic actor-teachers develop theatre workshops around topics such as romantic and sexual relationships, policing and racist systems, loyalty, the power of language, immigration, and isolation. The team creates curriculum in response to the young people’s interests, needs, and concerns. For this reason they sometimes focus on skill-building around communication, self-efficacy, study skills, and career & college readiness.
A speaker of Irish Gaelic, Mícheál works periodically in Ireland toward the revitalization of the language, whose speakership has declined over the centuries (from 100% to about 3% of the population) as a result of colonialism by the English. He uses drama, storytelling, and popular education methodologies in native-speaker communities as well as in learner communities to teach the language as well as generate dialogue and meaning around it. “I have found that learning my ancestral language has given me a surer footing in my work at home in the US.”
Mícheál has also done applied theatre work in Rwanda with the CUNY School of Professional Studies M.A. in Applied Theatre (2011, 12), with Latinx communities in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, with LGBTQIA+ youth at The Door (a youth center in Manhattan), and in countless public schools around New York City as a teaching artist. He proudly holds an M.A. in Applied Theatre from the CUNY School of Professional Studies.
Mícheál dreams of a world in which “everyone, myself included, is free to love, enjoy, celebrate, and create. I believe the biggest barriers to achieving this are white supremacist capitalism and neocolonialism. I believe that our ability to play, imagine, and create together are powerful assets in the struggle to dismantle these forces.”
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