Arts as Social Justice: Stories that Transform Policy | Motus Theater
Motus Theater, located in Boulder Colorado, is an arts organization that creates performances that illuminate foundational patterns of exploitation in U.S. history, by sharing autobiographical stories that disrupt false and dehumanizing narratives used to justify inhumane and exploitative policies. Their mission is to create original theater to facilitate dialogue on critical issues of our time. They aim to use the power of art to build alliances across diverse segments of our community and country.
I had the great privilege to sit down with Founder and Artistic Director Kirsten Wilson, for an in depth look at her motivation to bring this unique organization to fruition, her creative process, and what’s on the horizon.
The work you’re doing is truly transformational. It's powerful, compelling, and so incredibly important. I understand Motus Theater was born out of your work Rocks, Karma, Arrows - tell me more about your history with this dialogue, and your personal story. What led you here?
I came out of the dance and visual arts world originally so I was in this kind of combo world as a performer, and while you can’t generally make a living in the performing arts, a few people saw my performance artwork and asked me to come work at the College of Santa Fe teaching young visual artists how to do performance art. So at 26, I started working at colleges and privately teaching a class I developed that was originally geared for visual artists called Letting the Body Speak. The idea was to tell the history of your life through the history of your body. American art is not about mimicry, it's all bout individual voice, and that's a lot of pressure on a young person; so I came in to help people find their story and their voice.
Out of that work over the decades I became a master teacher in a form called the autobiographical monologue and solo performing, and I've taught that privately at the University level for decades. Meanwhile, I also do my own kind of multimedia performance art because I have a background in photography, dance, and as an English major (that's my love). So Motus comes out of these two momentums.
In 2009 I got an Artist in Residency at ATLAS, at CU Boulder, to do a multimedia piece exploring Boulder history through the lens of race and class. I investigated how Boulder became Boulder and the stories that make up our community. That went very, very well and the feedback from a lot of leaders in the community was, we really need to have conversations around this performance. One leader in particular, Daniel Escalante head of the Latino Boys Group in Boulder County, said “If the teachers who I work with knew this history, maybe they would understand why I'm pulling their students out of class, because I need them to know their own history, I need them to feel strong.” So I said “Hi, I'm the person who created Rocks, Karma, Arrows, I'd love to talk with you,” and through interviewing social justice leaders in the community I was like, “Wow we do need to have a large scale conversation and I think a nonprofit would need to hold that.” I started to feel out different nonprofits and then I was like, “Oh shoot…I think I would need to create a nonprofit for this,” so Motus Theater was born out of real conversations in the community around this Boulder history piece and the question, how can the arts be part of the process of us understanding our history and understanding the stories that make up our community that aren't always heard.
Motus covers a wide range of social issues, immigration, incarceration, and now transgender rights. How did you choose those specific issues to focus your work on?
As I mentioned I have these two paths; I'm a multimedia performance artist, and then I'm also a master teacher in the autobiographical monologue form. I was studying the historical context of Rocks, Karma, Arrows, and Colorado history, and the more you know about history and specifically American history, the more you realize that every time the economy goes down, we go after immigrants - that's just part of how tension around economic downturn gets played out. We like to blame it on immigrants, particularly those who crossed the Southern border. Consequently, that has allowed us to have an exportable and importable workforce that can be exploited; so you import people when you need them, and you export people when you don't. And that's just part of the painful history of our country.
At the time when I was starting Motus, around 2012, there were a lot of concerns that the economy was going to take a downward turn. At that same time DACA was created, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, so I thought “Oh we really need to understand why people migrate and understand the humanity of people caught up in our immigration system.”
Regardless of what you think immigration policy is, there are beautiful lives that are being impacted by really inhumane policies; so the immigration stories with young undocumented leaders came out of the concerns around what was going to happen with immigration policy in the coming decade. Unfortunately, Motus was very prescient about what would happen. There was a lot of anti-immigrant vitriol, which led to dangerous policies, so that's why Motus started working with undocumented leaders to tell stories, and because DACA created safety, they could tell their stories. For the first time, undocumented people could be on stage without being desperately afraid that they would get exposed and be deported. It was so powerful, and it helped move policies related to immigration.
We were having so much impact with these monologues with DACAmented immigrants that we thought - maybe Motus would specialize in telling the stories of people whose lives are threatened with aggressive policies. In order to have aggressive policies, you first have to dehumanize people, so we decided we would have people who lead on the frontline of what we call state-sanctioned violence, or policy violence, tell stories to help inspire people. Again, regardless of your position on what immigration or incarceration should look like in our country, I don’t think anyone would want people they love to be hurt by these policies.
In 2019 the National Restorative Justice Council was doing a conference in Colorado and they said “We love what you're doing on immigration with law enforcement co-readers, would you do something similar with formerly incarcerated people at our conference” So that's how we started working with people who are formerly incarcerated.
Then in 2023, we started TRANSformative Stories because of the escalation of dehumanizing rhetoric that was targeting trans and non-binary people, mainly children, who already have a very high suicide rate because of all the negative images and narratives that are out there in the media and the public. Motus is always kind of overwhelmed with all the things we're doing, but it felt like we had an opportunity to be part of the conversation at a time when it's becoming increasingly dangerous to be transgendered and non-binary.
Again, with gender, people have lots of feelings about what policies should be. Every one of us has a story around gender and its complexity, but people need to know the harm created by policies that maybe they don’t understand.
So that’s how we slowly developed, and we never drop a project, it's not like the theme of the year. Once we start working with a particular group of leaders we continue to work in that area and that's how we keep expanding. It’s a beautiful, powerful work and there are so many stories that need to be told.
Tell me more about your artistic/narrative process and vision. Having public officials, leaders, and law enforcement read stories of those who are victims of these systems is an interesting and clearly very intentional choice. What guided this creative decision?
Sometimes the monologist will tell their own story, and sometimes it will be co-read. That's important because the closest distance between two people is a story, and we're only as resilient, and in a way as intelligent, as the stories we hold. Having these community leaders co-read the stories was a way of helping those who make decisions that impact our monologist to decenter their experience, and center the experience of someone who's undocumented, or formerly incarcerated, or transgender or non-binary. You see them read it on stage, but what they're really doing is reading the monologue or the story back to the person who wrote it. It's a profound exercise on civic hospitality and deep listening, which is transformative.
The audience also gets to benefit, not only from hearing the story but at a time of great division in our country, seeing a model of this idea that you don't have to agree with someone else's story in order to listen deeply to it and learn from it.
We've been able to change the way law enforcement and prosecutors move because they're more aware of the ramifications of some of the punitive systems in our country. We had a sheriff cover a story of an undocumented leader and then change his mind about the Sanctuary City policy, he said “We're gonna come out for Sanctuary City because it's important that the people who live in our community feel that their lives are valued.”
Art has always been a way to address social and political issues, but Motus confronts these issues in such a direct way. Talk to me about the intersection of art and social activism, why do you think that art is such a powerful medium for social justice?
This is really the heart of Motus. Great art is layered in complexity, it speaks to what it means to be human. In order to create a law, a few lines of reality get woven to create a policy. The antidote is understanding the impact of those policies. In bringing in art, storytelling, and movement that express the human condition, allows us to have a more complicated and nuanced understanding of what these policies mean for real people.
The radical thing we do at Motus is work with people to tell a story that gets to the bone of what it means to be a human being. Whether it's about immigration or the criminal legal system, it’s about a human being negotiating their life - the consequences of their actions, their fears, their hopes, their dreams, and what they love. Anyone who goes to a monologue performance will get something about their own humanity back; we all know what it is to be afraid, what it is to be in love, we know what it feels like when we’re backed up against a wall and think we have no options but to attack in some way..
I truly believe that the stories we need to know and listen to are all love stories. And I don't mean love in the romantic sense, I mean to know someone. When you hear someone get to the core of what it means to be human, you fall in love with them a little bit because you see yourself in them. When the stories happen to be from someone undocumented or formerly incarcerated, then you are no longer looking at political talking points, you're in the complexity of the question, “How am I as a human being trying to think well about how I relate to other human beings who have very different experiences than my own.”
I think it makes us more humble and it makes us more complex in our thinking about what the right decision is, and how people should be treated. So I think art has that opportunity to deepen the conversation at hand and return not only the person telling the story, but also the audience member, to a fuller sense of their own humanity. That's how I want people to respond. I believe people think better when they are in their hearts and not just in their heads. Our stories help people have a human-to-human conversation and think about social justice issues from their full humanity, and not from their fear.
Have there been tangible outcomes/changes on policy or an individual level because of the work you do?
Motus is having a lot of impact with our stories and in two distinct ways. First of all, when you work with someone over 30 weeks to help them tell the story of their life you're liberating them from internalized narratives that don't serve them, you're healing them at their core.
What Motus is known for though, is policy change and cultural shifts. A leader at the Native American Rights Fund said Rocks, Karma, Arrows, helped move Boulder towards creating Indigenous Peoples Day because enough people saw that performance and asked the questions, “Why are we celebrating Columbus Day and not Indigenous Peoples Day?” and so we were credited with that moment.
When the Boulder City Council was debating about making Boulder a sanctuary city, one of our performances with monologist Ana Karina Casas Ibarra was brought up. The council member said, “If you saw Ana Casas tell her story you know the pressures undocumented families are under. We need to stand up and say ‘We are with you, and we want you to be part of our community.”
During the whole debate in Colorado about whether undocumented people should have a right to a driver's license the story of Victor Galvan was mentioned. Victor actually got rear-ended and almost deported. He didn't hit anybody but he didn't have access to a license legally, and so it became a possibility that he would be deported for being injured by another driver. These stories have helped people understand that these are the impacts on people who are just trying to go to school or work.
What was one of your most challenging projects?
I think the hardest stories to move continue to be the stories of undocumented folks, and mainly for the same reasons that there are concerns right now with the people coming in from Venezuela. It’s like “Hold it, these folks are not citizens, we're having enough problems getting resources to citizens. I don't want to think about immigration, I don't want to talk about immigration, I don’t want to focus on it, I'm sorry.”
Any story we tell about immigration is never seen as an art story. The Washington Post was going to cover us, but there was this big tension around whether we would have to be covered in policy or art. Immigration is seen as so political that it's almost like you can't present it theatrically, you can't present it as a story, but all stories are political. Shakespeare was extremely political, but I think in some ways the fact that it's really hard to do anything on immigration without being seen as political versus about stories of people who happen to be undocumented, stories you're not hearing in the dominant culture media, makes it the most challenging.
If we talk about transgender or non-binary folks, people often think “Well at least those folks are citizens, and I think we're supposed to be thinking well about them,” and the same with people who are formerly incarcerated “Ok, well incarcerated individuals are US citizens they should have the right of citizens.” For some reason there's this kind of question “If someone's not a citizen, do they have human rights, do they have civil rights?” and that is a really painful question. This idea is that you have to be a citizen of the United States to have human rights in our country.
What do you want your legacy to be? What’s the mark you hope to leave on this world with the work you do?
I guess continuing to create courageous and creative spaces where people have an opportunity to listen so deeply to themselves that they recover their greatest treasure, which is the person they were always meant to be. It is such a privilege to listen to every single person, it is like this amazing, wild miracle, and they get to bloom.
I am so grateful to have the privilege of co-creating that kind of space that is so sacred in its complexity and truth that it can hold so much. To be part of this process, to watch the monologue participants give back to each other and reflect with each other the beauty that they see and experience, and see people return to themselves.
You can be a person of great privilege and have lost yourself, and you can be a person who has been attacked on all sides and still manages to know who you are at your core. This same process saved my life; I lost who I was and I got to rediscover it through art, and so to create a space for other people to do it is magical. So much beauty and strength come out of it, and that's what I want for everybody. I wish everyone could take the monologue class.
What’s on the horizon for Motus in the coming season, and what is your long-term vision for the organization?
I'm super excited to work with both criminal legal reform leaders, law enforcement, and the JustUs monologists to humanize our criminal legal system. With UndocuAmerica we're going to continue to move these stories so that people really understand that immigrants are actually huge assets to our economy and that they really are a vital part of the functioning of the United States. And sharing TRANSformative Stories is so inspiring. All of us are oppressed by gender concepts in different ways, and these transgender and nonbinary leaders are liberating for us all. I'm just super excited to move stories from undocumented, formerly incarcerated, and trans leaders so that we can have policies that protect all of our humanity and citizenship. I'll also be working on another piece that is focused on the history of whiteness in the next few years, so I'm excited about that too.
Join Motus Theater Saturday, June 1 at 6:30 PM at the Evans School in Denver for an art exhibition and monologue performance:
UNDOCUAMERICA: RECLAIMING OUR PRESENCE
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MONOLOGUES OF UNDOCUMENTED COLORADANS + ART EXHIBITION