I believe in the power of telling our stories, that memory is in fact a political act and that valuing our stories teaches us that we are necessary in this world—that what we say, dream, believe matters. I was an organizer before I was an artist. The first poem I ever read publicly was in the juvenile detention center in Austin, Texas. Over fifteen years later, this has continued to have a lasting impact on my work: prisons, both literal and metaphorical, the boxes people try to put us in, and state violence are tropes that recur in my writing and the performances I direct. I make theater, in part, as an attempt to liberate myself from confinement, conventional rules, norms, and structures, an attempt to imagine freedom.

I have never arrived anywhere in a straight line so I don’t know how to tell a story in that way. In South Texas, we dance in a circle counterclockwise. This is my earliest memory of theatre. In the back of dark bars without windows, I learned how a community takes over space, how a people move, transcend the present moment; how a people dream. I want to write and direct plays that are in a constant state of motion: music playing, voices overlapping, and bodies that can’t stop dancing, which to me is the same as dreaming.