It is the morning after two performances of Unmuting at Christ Church Cathedral Community Room on February 27, presented by CT State Capital College and JDPP.

I am pondering the moment when a performance takes on its own life and rhythm and the energy of what it is communicating takes over; when the audience and performers become one and a community of active engagement, of call and response, occurs. There is a flow that cannot be coerced to happen no matter how much preparation—it happens when it happens out of the felt energy of the moment.

The performers become larger than themselves; they become vessels for what they are expressing that also is larger than all of them. Each Unmuting performance had its own distinct identity in dialogue with its audience, but each had a power that brought the realities of incarceration and its effects to a visceral level and the stories resonated with all our stories in that room.

Performance is the heart of JDPP. Every residency culminates in a sharing with others, whether on Zoom or in person with a small group of family and friends or in a theater filled with strangers. Performance is taking one’s experience and crafting it, releasing it, and seeing it take shape as worth sharing in words, dance, visual art, and song, so that others can relate to, learn from, and be reminded of our collective humanity.

That reminder could not be more important in this fractured world. Creating community, greater understanding, and courage through performance is one way, and a powerful one, to find voice, to create change, and to ultimately do something to make this world a better place in which to live. Performance is a creationary act of hope.