“I love Black women and girls. I love them and I think that we need to center a lot of their stories and amplify and uplift them as much as possible,” says Sydney Chatman. Thanks to an award from the Joyce Foundation, Chatman—a longtime theatermaker, director, teacher, and mentor in Chicago—will be working with Congo Square Theatre on a new community-based project focused on healing from “intracommunal and state-sanctioned” violence. 

Says Rolle, “In the past year with Congo Square, we’ve gone through a lot of transitions as well. I actually stepped into the role just at the beginning of pandemic. So this year with COVID and with everything we’ve really done a lot of work and just a lot of re-envisioning of who Congo Square is. We’ve been an organization for 20 years. We just celebrated our 20th anniversary. Our mission and the heart of who we are hasn’t changed. I think what COVID has brought to us, especially with the uprisings of injustice—which are things that aren’t new to Congo Square or to the ensemble, to the organization, to our community and the community we seek to serve, and the artists that we seek to serve—none of it is new, but just because it’s been so much more heightened COVID has really re-anchored that [commitment] for us.”

One thing Chatman is firm about is that the final play will not be purely documentary or just a retelling of stories of surviving violence and trauma. “We are really centering the healing process of this, not the trauma. The trauma is going to come up but that’s not the work that I’m trying to present on stage,” she says. “I want to make it very clear that a lot of times, in a lot of Black plays, whether they are written by Black writers or white writers that are telling this story, or others—sometimes they focus on the trauma only. And we’re getting past that trauma porn or trauma stories that we see. We’re in the process of looking to heal. So that’s my hope and my goal for this project. I’m hoping through the trust that I build with the women and girls that they’re comfortable enough to tell their stories and we can take that and turn it into something beautiful.”  v