Among the other events in the world this year, the Black Lives Matter movement has been one of the most prominent. Riots, protests, murders, outcries and more have stemmed from this banner as the people of the world, particularly in the United States, try to get justice for those killed by the police and end the divide between people of color and their white counterparts.
In the midst of this, Winthrop University has had its own outcry rise up in the form of the “Lights Up” Initiative. This movement is the brainchild of Winthrop alumni co-founders Erica Truesdale, Rodrick Freitas,
Riley Ketcham, Jasmine Gunter and Kevin Aoussou, and it has already garnered support from over 200 current students and alumni.
The Initiative formed in early July and has been pressing Winthrop ever since for reform in their Department of Theatre and Dance.
The group’s website states that one of their main goals is to expose “anti-blackness and racism in Winthrop University’s Department of Theatre & Dance.”
According to Gunter, a former theatre performance major,“Winthrop only produces black plays at a six percent rate. Which means that every white student who performs…on the Winthrop stage is going to be able to accurately represent themselves, but not every person of color is going to be able to represent themselves on stage and that doesn’t seem fair or equitable.”
The “Lights Up” Initiative believes that this lack of represenation of Black, Indigenous and people of color should be amended.
“It’s really to bring about awareness for the BIPOC people and the experiences that they’ve gone through and to demand change within the department,” Freitas, a former theatre education major,
said.
The movement officially formed following the outcries over the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, but the seeds were planted long before that. According to Freitas, for years following their graduation, the group had looked back and talked about the issues in the department and how “messed up” some of the things that happened were.
There were many sparks that lit the flame of the movement but the earliest occurred while the founders were still Winthrop students. Gunter said that In 2015, she, Truesdale and Ketcham “walked into the chair’s office and we asked, ‘Why don’t we do more black plays or plays written by black playwrights?’ And we were
told, ‘Now is not the right time.’”
After the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement earlier this year and a subsequent Facebook post on June 4 by Winthrop’s Department of Theatre and Dance page that simply said “BLACK
LIVES MATTER”, Truesdale and Ketcham reached out to Freitas, Gunter and Aoussou to create the core team behind the “Lights Up” Initiative.
Truesdale, a former theatre performance major, said the post “was the straw that broke the camel’s back.” She contacted the other founders the next day with the intention of holding the department “accountable to take action” against the bias present in their infrastructure through the launch of the Lights Up Initiative.
For Freitas, the apathy of this post is what made him realize something needed to change.
“It’s that apathy of ‘We’re a liberal arts college. We have the title of liberal in our name. There’s nothing that can touch us’,” Freitas said. “And it’s that sense of apathy that they have, that’s what I think made us really say, ‘Ok, what you’re doing is not enough to prove the statement that you’re making.’”
Aoussou, a former theatre performance and mass communication double major, expanded on this thought and said, “To me, if you’re not actively going to take part, especially as an institution, then just don’t speak. Unless you’re going to actively take steps to anti-racism, I don’t need your performative action because that’s what it was.”
To him, the post “felt very disingenuous” due to the lack of concern they had shown in the past.
The “Lights Up” Initiative has created a Facebook group and opened their ears to other former and current students in order to hear their testimonies.
“It really broke my heart to hear some of these experiences because it was just so sad,” Freitas said. “This university is putting on the guise of ‘this is a safe place for people of color to come and express themselves’, and yet this isn’t a safe place. They’ve been wronged and it really hurt.”
Gunter shared his sentiments and said, “Some of these stories are just, they’re harrowing and heartbreaking to even think about someone who had a love or passion for theater, and that passion has been snuffed out because of the racial inequality that happens in the department and how it deters people from their dreams.”
Seeing and reading these testimonies made the group realize that there needed to be real change in the theatre and dance department. A pattern was forming in front of their eyes from the stories of current students and alumni before them, all of whom had faced the same discrimination in the department.
With the motivation to stop this seemingly endless cycle, the group launched their website and Instagram page, @lightsup_wu, to spread awareness of their cause in early July. They
also opened a petition, which has reached over 1,300 signatures. The amount of support that they quickly received helped secure them a meeting with the Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, Jeff Bellantoni on July 13.
Truesdale said that the meeting was “extremely productive.” The group was able to express their concerns and allowed the Dean and Assistant Dean to read several testimonies made by students to show them the issues in the department. Afterwards, the HR department extended an opportunity for students to file formal complaints to allow the university to open investigations based on the claims of discrimination.
Currently, the group is waiting to see any concrete changes made by this meeting, such as plans to diversify the faculty of the department and introduce an Alumni Oversight Committee to provide more direct support for students.
As the university moves forward, the “Lights Up” Initiative plans to relentlessly continue pushing for change in the Department of Theatre and Dance.
“My biggest hope for this initiative and for the future of [the department] is that every POC student gets an opportunity to play and represent themselves on stage before they graduate,” Gunter said.
Truesdale shared this sentiment.
“I hope that the department will truly hear us and see us and…that they will consistently create better opportunities for both professors and students of color to debut their work on the Johnson main-stage and eventually the world,” Truesdale said. “Our activism plays a vital role in the grand scheme of things and our work as artists has only just begun.”
Photo by Marisa Fields-Williams
