adrienne maree brown: “Pleasure is a measure of freedom”
“It is our job to imagine the world that we want.” This sentence is somewhat exemplary of adrienne maree brown’s (44) extensive work, which is mostly in movement and liberation. The American writer, performer, doula and meme connoisseur also writes music and works within civil society organizations and activist movements on topics like climate justice, Black liberation, anti-capitalism, feminism, gender and sexuality and everything that has to do with changing society. brown will be bringing To Feel A Thing: A Ritual For Emergence (TFAT), her first theater based ritual, to Holland Festival on June 18. Ahead of this performance, they spoke about their work and activism with Lilith co-founder Clarice Gargard, whose documentary Remember what you forgot (2022) will be integrated in the ritual.
Like a beating heart under brown’s work lies the call to find transformation through being in touch with your emotional life. Those principles also have a central place in To Feel A Thing: A Ritual For Emergence, which she is co-creating with genre defying director Charlotte Brathwaite and composer Troy Anthony – whose work is steeped in Black queer joy. In our conversation about the performance and our collaboration, she relays how alongside the cast and crew, they wish to ‘emerge’ something in the audience at Holland Festival.
adrienne maree brown as captured by anjali pinto
What does ‘a ritual for emergence’ even mean?
brown: “A ritual for me is just a time when we really intentionally bring our attention to something. In this case, we’re bringing our attention to what it takes to actually feel in this moment, feel ourselves, the people that we’re in relationship with, our conditions. And to feel what we are called to become or to do, given those conditions, you know? Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of relatively simple interactions. It gives me a lot of hope because it means that the small interactions that we are having, if they’re done with intention, can reshape the whole world.”
‘Emergent strategies’ is how those working to create more justice and liberation can engage in small acts that change the whole system, rearrange the pattern. It refers to repeated actions over time to develop goals under changing circumstances. The definition of emergence brown uses comes from British thought leader Nick Obolensky, and is rooted in the work of American consultant and writer Margaret Wheatley, writer and visionary Octavia Butler and feminist philosopher Grace Lee Boggs. An example of an emergent strategy is transformative justice, which is about changing the justice system so that the goal isn’t the punishment of undesired or harmful behavior, but the transformation of the conditions that led to said behavior. Paraphrasing brown in her book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017): ‘What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. The micro reflects the macro and vice versa. Fibonacci patterns show up from space to cauliflower.’
Could you say that the emergent ritual you’re doing is about transforming ourselves and the world?
brown: “Yes. The conditions are being set for a transformation. It’s up to the people in the room whether that occurs in some way. Like, there’s nothing that is going to be forced on anyone, you know. We’re not trying to put on a performance for an audience to observe. We’re inviting people to bring themselves into the room. One of the wisdoms that my mentor, Grace Lee Boggs [author, activist, philosopher, -red.] offered us was that we must transform ourselves to transform the world. We cannot sit in judgment of the problems in the world as if they do not also live within us – each of us is part of oppressive systems, so each of us needs to work within and without, on ourselves and our relationships, as well as on our systems.”
What does it mean to ‘transform’?
brown: “So, one of the things that has been the most transformative in my life has been turning and facing my own coping mechanisms, recognizing all the ways that I was moving through life without really experiencing it. You know, either too much drinking or getting high, overeating, too much sex. I love all these things, but not in excess. One of the things that we keep hearing about Holland is that culturally, it’s much more tightly wound and rigid. Being that way is actually a mechanism for coping and trying to control the experience of being alive. For me, it was liberating to learn to be like: ‘wait, I’m not just living from my neck up, with my brain strategizing and creating order out of everything. My body is sending me all kinds of information about my boundaries, needs, the justice, love and pleasure that I can experience and my purpose.’”
TFAT is a performance with gospel music, written texts and visuals. But according to brown, it will not be so much about what is performed on stage. And more about what comes up in those present in the room. When brown speaks of this ritual for emergence, it almost sounds biblical. brown: “I’m seeking something larger than myself all the time. Troy [Anthony, the composer, -red.] brings this beautiful practice steeped in Black gospel and I bring this life experience of growing up in this Christian home, where we loved gospel and a lot of the stories. Jonah and the Whale, for example, one of my favorites, about running from your purpose and then being swallowed up and carried back towards it. There’s been this wall built between humans and the divine by organized religion. We want to pull that away so that you can directly experience what is holy in your own life. So actually, one of the lines in this piece is ‘take this life of mine and make it holy’. It’s not biblical, but it is definitely a sacred act.”
I also grew up in a Catholic household, and I know a lot of Black people, people of color, queer people have been traumatized by religion and these notions. How can you convey the essence of what you’re talking about when there’s so much trauma built around it?
brown: “One of the things that Troy and I have talked about a lot is that there’s this experience of feeling the joy in the music, the opening and the connectivity, which is in contrast with the homophobia, transphobia and other areas where belief systems could hurt us. When people come into the room, they’ll hopefully be able to feel that the intention of the music is liberation, not control. That’s one of the things I also thought was such a beautiful overlap with your film [Remember what you forgot (2022), -red.]. It is really understanding how almost every culture, if you reach back far enough, has ways of being in relationship to the divine and letting it move through them. And, you know, organized religion has structured things so everyone listens to one person’s translation of God. It’s so interesting to see the hypocrisy of growing up with a clear set of rules that say like ‘thou shalt not kill’, but being steeped in a culture that is obsessed with killing, the death penalty, mass shootings and police killings.”
To Feel A Thing: A Ritual For Emergence is brown’s first theatrical musical project. They started as a student organizer and worked in various non-profit organizations for 25 years, including as an executive director of the Ruckus Society, a training facility for movement builders. She also co-founded and directed the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, the League of Young Voters, and co-facilitated the US Social Forum, amongst other things. The work that brown has done in movement spaces is often about developing healthier ways of communicating and working, instead of the power abuse, drama, control and harmful behavior that often occurs. And also that which we in the charged Dutch debate call ‘cancel culture’. brown: “You’ll have to tell me if this is true for your movement building spaces in Holland as well, but what often happens here in the US is that we will be moving along a righteous path. And as people start to move into positions of leadership, we notice we don’t really know how to hold conflict with each other well. And we’re pitted against each other by philanthropy to compete for what we are constantly told are very limited resources. So there’s this scarcity and then we just eat our leaders and it makes for a very difficult environment. Does this resonate?”
It does, I think it’s everywhere because it’s human nature, but more pronounced or perhaps foreign, when you’re trying to ‘do good’. It’s something I’ve been a part of myself. For me, a lot has to do with the trauma that we carry because of injustice and life, and the unawareness of how that affects the way we show up and treat each other. It’s also not having enough capacity to imagine something other than what we know. We want better but replicate harmful systems that say there is only one ‘right’ way to be or do things.
brown: “That’s the thing, like, it astounds me that if we are not careful, we always recreate the thing that we are critiquing, the thing that we know has oppressed and harmed us. Usually my work is very focused on movement spaces. But at this moment, I’m really trying to build something that reaches beyond that, because I think there’s a lot of people who want to change the world or want to see things shift, who are not in a formal movement place. Maybe they don’t want to even come towards that because there’s so much drama and confusion. But there’s so much that people can do. And I think that every human being is a front line for changing the world, wherever you are in your life, with the choices and the decisions you make. That is a frontline for the next world. The next generation.”
adrienne maree brown as captured by anjali pinto
That sounds very idealistic. How do you talk about these things without losing sight of political realities where people don’t have time, means or knowledge?
brown: “You know, my dream for this ritual is that it’s something that can be done in a church basement or in a field or anywhere, right? I take it very seriously that it is our job to imagine the world that we want because that imagination is the first step towards moving towards it. And I find that even when people are marginalized, even when people don’t have resources, they have dreams and they have longings and they have relationships, and they are also still these fractal beings that can transform conditions. In fact, as someone who has seen a lot of social justice movement work, the most important movement work always starts with the workers. It always comes from that place.”
And how do you see bringing your performance to the Netherlands? American people who come to perform here seem to forget that while it’s similar to the US, it’s also very different.
brown: “How we bring the context is different in each place. This is part of why we are happy in partnering with others, like you. In your film there’s so much work that does a beautiful job of laying out the political realities for folks. When we did the show in New York for the first time, I was responsible for naming the mass shootings, Covid-19, the police conditions, climate. You know, we’re all living in this world. And so we all have different pieces of the puzzle and we’re all influenced by reality in different ways. What is the impact of Dutch colonialism on the diaspora? And some of these people live in Amsterdam, in Holland, but there’s a lot of people who are not necessarily there. How do we have that sort of wider perspective? You know that the US is one of the places that the Dutch brought slaves. I keep thinking about the dance between our nations and how a lot of what looks like the order and the abundance and the wealth of Holland is rooted in this act. We’re interested in giving people a portal in which they can process that reality and increase their agency.”
What happens when you increase your agency?
brown: “The community that I’m in is people who created the #MeToo-movement, helped generate Black Lives Matter, and were involved in Occupy Wall Street. When people have more agency, that’s when they come forward and they set the boundaries that they need, that’s when conditions start to change, and culture can start to shift. I’m really interested in cultural shifts because I think a lot of times we need policy shifts and so we start to move towards that first. But if you haven’t shifted the culture that’s underneath the policy, the policy doesn’t hold or it gets revoked, right? One of the things Tarana Burke [initiator of the #MeToo-movement, -red.] talks about is how the backlash [by the radical right and in the public domain, -red.] is in response to us winning, to the culture shifting. And right now, what we want to do is really make the foundations of injustice completely unstable. So that when people are like, ‘I’m used to living in a world where I can use patriarchy combined with white supremacy, colonial legacies and capitalism to keep people in place,’ we can say: ‘No, you can no longer treat us this way. You can no longer uphold this kind of imbalance of economy and of treatment.’”
These are heavy topics. Is that why joy and pleasure is so central in your work?
brown: “I trace it back to this essay from Audre Lorde [American-Grenadian author, feminist, poet, -red.] called The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power (1978) where she talks about aliveness, like really being able to feel your aliveness and how once you have come in and felt that aliveness, it becomes impossible to settle for self-negation and depression, and it becomes impossible to settle for basically what your oppressor is offering. One of the places I’ve landed is that pleasure is a measure of freedom, that being able to actually feel content and happy and satisfied in your present day moment is an indication of freedom. It’s not about escapism, it’s not about hedonism. I also feel like joy is just good medicine, you know. It’s like how we have always survived. There’s a piece in my book Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019) from a friend, Dallas Goldtooth, about how indigenous peoples have used their sense of humor as a survival technology that has kept them going through genocide. And I often think of Bobby Sands, the Irish freedom fighter, who said ‘the laughter of our children will be our revenge’.”
Do you feel like we’re on a crossroad or tipping point?
brown: “Yes. I’ve been very excited because people are reading and people are talking about stuff in these little pockets. And my hope is that people come to this ritual, find each other and connect with each other, and that we can come back and do more work, particularly in the emergent strategy realm. There’s so many books that have come out just in the past two or three years, where you can read things from writers like Mariama Kaba, Shira Hassan, Ejeris Dixon, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and all these different people that are guides to how we actually practice transformative justice. A lot of people [who read them] will probably be like: ‘oh, we’re already practicing this’. Even coming to Holland, it’s like trying to create a space where a lot of people who may already be thinking about, or interested in, or practicing these things, can find each other.”
What does it feel like for you to be doing this performance and this work?
brown: (smiles) “For me, it’s like being a student in magic class.”
This article arose from a collaboration between Lilith x Holland Festival. The performance To Feel a Thing: A Ritual For Emergence (TFAT) will be performed in the Muziekgebouw on June 18. Get your tickets here or keep an eye on our socials for our give away.