"Remaking Ourselves" with Tomi Tsunoda

Almanac discussed fragility, collapse, and compassionate rebuilding with Tomi Tsunoda, who assumed the role of Director of the Playwrights Horizons Theater School — her alma mater — in July 2020. 

ALMANAC What does it mean to you to be returning to your alma mater, a school where you also served as a faculty member for many years, now at its head?

TOMI TSUNODA There is a sense of homecoming about it that feels reassuring. I’ve traveled through different eras of the school from different perspectives, and that creates a strong foundation to orient myself in the project of the school. On another level, though, the school is in a really different moment than when I was a student or when I was teaching there. Playwrights Horizons and New York University are in different moments, the city is in a different moment, the country is in a different moment, the species is in a different moment, the planet is in a different moment — these all are partners in the work. So I’ve tried to meet the school and its community where they are, and bring myself to the table from the truth of where I am, and keep us all in the context of the present. While I’m able to do that with knowledge of and accountability to the school’s history, when it comes to shaping training curriculum and cultural community, it’s felt important to really stand in the now and look ahead.

It’s funny, there’s this huge, important conversation going on in the US about belonging — needing to create a deeper and more authentic sense of belonging for more people. I grew up mostly in the US but also for a couple years in Japan, and a lot of my adult life has been spent working in different cultural contexts and with people from different parts of the world. That all has instilled in me a relentless craving for experiences that throw my sense of belonging into question. When I’m pulled out of the comfort of a familiar context, in some place that is foreign to me and where I am foreign, I inevitably confront what parts of who I think I am are actually me, and what are the norms and expectations and habits that are learned, seeped into me like a tea.

So, on one hand, I’m returning to an environment that was crucial in rearing me as an artist and as a person, and because of the pandemic I’m stuck here for a good long stretch, and I worry sometimes about what unconscious ruts I might fall into. On the other hand, I’ve been away long enough that coming back feels like a disruptive adventure, which makes the stuff of myself that was created here a little more visible and strange. It’s exciting to come back to it in that way.

Playwrights Horizons and New York University are in different moments, the city is in a different moment, the country is in a different moment, the species is in a different moment, the planet is in a different moment — these all are partners in the work.

ALMANAC You’ve just spent more than half a decade in Abu Dhabi. How has your experience of that place, and specifically of the knowledge community at NYU, shaped your approach to teaching, your relationship to art, and your understanding of the world?

TOMI Wow, this is an enormous question.

The most fundamental impact of the knowledge community — and every professor out there will tell you this — is from the experience of teaching such a multinational student body. In classrooms where it’s rare for any two students to be from the same country or culture of origin, the concept of a canonized curriculum very quickly becomes absurd. Not only are each of them coming from a different background, but they are also all heading somewhere different after graduation. Some may stay in the UAE, some may return to wherever home is, or wherever they can get a work or student visa. You can’t assume any universality in what they need to prepare for a life. 

So that program steers away from teaching them what theater is or how it should be made or discussed, and instead asks them to explore what performance has the potential to be, what each of them uniquely might contribute to the contemporary global field. Their education is a lens for how they want to be in the world, rather than merely vocational training for a career in one version of the industry.

The two biggest gifts that came out of that for me were, first, how interdisciplinary and exploratory everything became. Because NYU Abu Dhabi positions itself as both a research institution and a liberal arts college, there was a really delicious focus on how to understand arts practice as a research endeavor, as a way of creating knowledge rather than just a means of expressing or reflecting feelings and ideas. This really shifted not just my relationship to teaching, but how I approach my own practice as an artist.

The second big gift was that the environment really nurtured something fundamental to what bell hooks calls anti-racist pedagogy, the ideal of de-centering the professor as the sole authority of knowledge in the classroom. As someone coming from a predominantly US cultural context, I had to acknowledge the limits of my own cultural knowledge and expertise, and invite the perspectives of the students into the learning with as much credibility and legitimacy as I did my own. The multinational community at NYU Abu Dhabi really forces that consideration, but it’s a good practice anywhere, even when the classroom seems on the surface to be more homogenous. It’s a good practice for teachers to own their limitations, and consider their classrooms places of learning for themselves as well as for the students, to conceive of a classroom as a co-learning opportunity rather than a knowledge delivery system. I think this is especially important in the journey of figuring out how to show up for a lot of different students with a lot of different interests and concerns equally well, regardless of how much of their work aligns (or doesn’t) with your own field of interest and expertise. As teachers, we have to keep learning in order to keep teaching. The more diverse the students are, the better teacher — and artist and human — I have the opportunity to become.

ALMANAC The United States is currently gripped by anger and grief — the righteous but painful responses to centuries of white supremacy, police violence, and systemic oppression. How are you thinking about the unique challenges of this moment? Where have you found solace?

TOMI I’m not sure the challenges of this moment are unique. These are the challenges that have plagued the United States for its entire history and prehistory, manifesting themselves according to the contemporary moment. I’m also hesitant to pretend I know the full texture of the contemporary moment as someone who has a lot of proximity to Whiteness and who just moved back to the US this summer.

Kathryn Yusoff’s book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, does an incredible job of articulating how the crises of climate collapse have become more visible and urgent in a mainstream way because they have begun to directly impact White, economically-secure communities, though the same crises have been felt disproportionately in Black and Brown and Indigenous communities for a very long time. I feel wary of naming the present moment as an exceptional era of crisis because the next question is: exceptional for whom?

As teachers, we have to keep learning in order to keep teaching. The more diverse the students are, the better teacher — and artist and human — I have the opportunity to become.

Over the last few years, my own work and research have been centered in questions about what it means to build practices for this historical era of collapse. We’ve been in a period of collapsing systems for quite some time, and will continue to be for some time to come — ecologically, politically, economically, socially — everything from “Glaciers are melting irreparably,” to “What is Gender?” The collapsing norms of White centralism and state violence in the United States are part of that larger whole. It doesn’t usually feel good when things that have been normalized collapse, even if they’re harmful things, because every aspect of culture, society, and identity has been built around and through their frameworks. There is and will be more incredible suffering in incredibly inequitable ways; there are and will be more people reacting predominantly out of fear, trauma, desperation. It’s hard work to honor and attend to the truth of that and still keep moving forward.

I came to questions about crisis and collapse out of fear, initially — from a “how do I prepare for the end” mindset — but the biggest thing I’ve come to understand is that collapse is not an ending. It’s a clearing. It’s a moment when something unsustainable begins to crumble, and this inevitably creates space for remaking, an opportunity to build the future in a different and more sustainable way. That’s where I find solace and also where I find my deepest sense of responsibility, accountability, imagination, and potential for healing. There are a lot of writers who have been leading in this perspective for a long time — Donna Haraway, Joanna Macy, Rebecca Solnit, adrienne maree brown, Octavia Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Anna Tsing, Martín Prechtel, many others.

This election season, I’m thinking a lot about where we, as a culture and society, look for leadership. There’s tremendous existing wisdom in marginalized communities, particularly Indigenous and Black communities, in communities of folx with disability and chronic illness, in Queer community, in communities of undocumented workers, about how to thrive despite systems that don’t account or care for you, how to build networks of mutual aid, how to build family and community and relationship when institutions and governments are working against your wellness, how to navigate crisis with dignity and compassion. I find solace in how much survival and thriving has already been possible, and how much knowledge and possibility and care is already available to us if we look for it in the right places.

There’s such temptation here to cut everything into binaries and easily containable boxes of right and wrong. I’m trying to hold onto complexity, to hold both/and instead of either/or, to unsettle things in and around me in compassionate ways.

Something that often comes up for me in teaching is how students think their job is to learn how to do something well so they can get it right, and eliminate feelings of doubt or insecurity or the stress of potential failure in their endeavors. This is actually the opposite of the goal, in my opinion. The job is to learn how to navigate the space of not knowing as well as possible, how to gain more and more tools for venturing out into the dark space of the unknown so that growth can happen, how to keep your endeavors just out of your comfortable reach, so that you have to stretch, and next time can reach farther, how to do those things with accountability and compassion and patience and grace, how to do it with care and teeth at the same time. How to know when to let go and when to hold on. How to fail well, how to fall down well, how to get back up and move forward differently. This is as important in society and community as in art and learning.

I feel wary of naming the present moment as an exceptional era of crisis because the next question is: exceptional for whom?.

I’m also thinking a lot about how to hold plenty of space for joy, for curiosity, for pleasure, for rest, for wonder, for excitement, for beauty, for humor — both within myself and within communities I feel responsible to. There is so much it's necessary to fight for, and also it’s unsustainable and debilitating to be in fight mode constantly, indefinitely. I’m interested in how acting out of (and toward) pleasure, joy, beauty, mindfulness, thriving, listening, patience — how these things are also radical and important tools for making a more sustainable, compassionate, and just world.

ALMANAC What does it mean to teach during these fragile times? 

TOMI Well — again — fragile for whom? Every time is fragile for someone. Times have been fragile for a lot of folx for a long time. More broadly, Higher Education in general is a space of fragile time. So is art making, so is collaboration. I think teaching right now means the same it always means — to meet each student where they are and help them gain the tools they need to make their way forward on their own terms, to contribute to the world and culture they’re a part of in ways only they can. It means creating opportunities for them to build confidence and agency and independence and interdependence and compassion and perspective, despite circumstances that are fragile — because circumstances can be fragile.

In the past year, getting ready to come home for this job, I’ve encountered a lot of people in US academia trying to prepare me for how fragile this generation of students is. In my experience, the opposite is true — the fragility of the moment is far more present in professors and administrators and institutions, as the norms and systems they’re accustomed to, the zones where their confidence is rooted, get interrogated and unsettled. I think what’s often read as fragility in students is actually their mistrust of the systems and leaders who are charged with shepherding them through their learning experience. They don’t want to be treated as glass; they want to be seen and respected and trusted. They want to be able to trust. This generation of students doesn’t get nearly enough credit for how resilient they are, how resilient they are expected to be. For educators to approach them as fragile, I think, does a tremendous disservice to their education because it increases the likelihood that we’ll respond to them out of fear instead of trust, that we’ll operate in ways that are self-protective instead of in service to growth. It makes us more likely to avoid complexity and difficult conversations, instead of modeling how to move through them well.

In arts education, and theater education especially, so much of what we ask of students requires tremendous vulnerability. We have to be willing to lead from our own vulnerability if we are going to expect it of them. And we can’t then criticize the nature of their vulnerabilities when they arise in ways we weren’t expecting or prepared for.

I know you’re not suggesting that the students are fragile — that this question is about teaching in fragile times — but I think it can amount to the same thing if we’re not clear about where the fragility is actually located, or if we’re afraid of fragility, of things breaking, of mess, of process, of collapse and uncertainty, of being very wrong. For me, spaces that deftly face those things, without or despite fear, are the most generative spaces to operate in.

ALMANAC What are your hopes for the school?

TOMI The faculty, staff, and I have been really united in looking at what it means to build a training program in 2020. Of course, this means a lot of different things right now. We’ve been thinking about the world and industry we’re training students for. It’s not the same world and industry that we were all reared in. We care about preparing young artists to shape the culture we’ll share for the next 50 years, instead of training them for an industry and set of systems that were established 50 years ago. Even before the pandemic, the US theater industry was precarious — the pandemic and its economic repercussions have really exposed just how precarious. Playwrights Horizons as a theater has always been focused on nurturing new voices, and the school is as well.

One of the core values that emerged across early faculty meetings was to equip the students with the tools they need to dismantle systems they’ve inherited, and to build new ones for themselves and for each other. In the midst of the pandemic and the acute reckoning with injustice happening across the country and across the industry, we are really rooting in the tools students need to move sustainably through this moment, however long it lasts — to train them to work with what they have in the present moment, whatever that looks like, rather than waiting around for things to be different or easy or for things to return to what they recognize from the past. I guess this all means that my hopes for the school are that we — teachers, students, staff — can have the courage and humility to show up for each other in a way that allows us all to navigate the present moment and catalyze the future we want to build together.

I’m interested in how acting out of (and toward) pleasure, joy, beauty, mindfulness, thriving, listening, patience — how these things are also radical and important tools for making a more sustainable, compassionate, and just world.

ALMANAC What are your hopes for the theater? What must change?

TOMI There is very little line between my hopes for theater and my hopes for the school. In an ideal world, a training program trains a rising generation to dream and manifest hopes for the future of the field. The biggest thing I keep thinking about is the difference between the future of theater as a field, an art form, a human activity, and the future of theater as an industry, as a collection of institutions. A really great conversation came up in my first class this fall, sparked by a student’s question about how to get people who don’t usually engage with theater to engage with theater. I asked a question about what counts as theater in that equation, and we discussed the fact that theater didn’t start with the Greeks — it started in ritual, ceremony, oral history, community activity. Wedding ceremonies are theater, political campaigns are theater, sermons are theater, lectures are theater, protest demonstrations are theater, presentations to a board of directors are theater, bedtime stories are theater. Theater is everywhere, and people engage with it every day. Maybe the question isn’t how to get people to the narrow slice of theater that exists in the industry, but for artists to open up wider about what theater is and can be, to look at how theater functions inherently as a part of human life beyond a fine art or form of entertainment, and to engage people there. I hope the theater community will look beyond what allows institutions to survive, embrace ways of making work that aren’t standardized, and invest in theater as a means of engaging community, not just as a means of engaging audience.

I think this is all very interconnected with questions about equity, justice, access, and representation. If there are and have been barriers to those things within the existing systems of operation, the entire ecosystem has to be allowed to break apart so it can be reimagined and reconstructed, rather than trying to gradually wedge little bits into what’s already there, or creating more and more regulations and union contracts within whatever cracks can be pried open a little further. We’re in an era of collapsing systems, which means we’re in an era of opening ground and opportunities for remaking ourselves. It would be nice to see the theater community really lead in the courage of that reimagining.