Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2023 - 53

PQ
2023
Attendees visit the
US National Exhibit
in Prague. | Photo by
Viktor Tuček, Prague
Quadrennial 2023.
I
n Spring 2021, Kevin Rigdon, artistic director for the U.S.
National (professional) and Emerging (student and those
within 5 years of graduating) Exhibits of the 2023 Prague
Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space, invited me
to volunteer as one of 10 curators and 10 associate curators
who would be responsible for crafting the direction and curatorship
of the exhibitions. Patrick Rizzotti, chair of international
activities; Tatiana Vintu, head curator; and Ian Garrett,
digital curator, would provide additional leadership, and a list
of 100+ jurors was being contemplated to select the work that
would best represent the inventive RARE work from our country,
as requested by PQ Artistic Director Markéta Fantová. Having
been involved in PQ exhibitions on and off since the 1990s, it
was thrilling to once again have the opportunity to serve.
Many challenges loomed. Typically, curation for the next PQ
would begin immediately after, if not during, the preceding exposition.
In our case, the start would have been in 2019 or 2020,
but due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was in lockdown
and it was unclear whether there would even be a PQ in 2023.
While we were living through the existential nightmare of
the pandemic, U.S. residents glued to their news sources witnessed
the horrific murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020.
When people watched the life drain out of George Floyd under
the weight of Officer Derek Chauvin's knee, anger became galvanized
into action across the world. The senseless killing of
Trayvon Martin had started the movement coined Black Lives
Matter in 2013 and with the murder of George Floyd, the movement
was reignited, resulting in demands for sweeping changes
in policing and removing barriers to racial justice.
For Black people, the police killings and pain never went
away-not before 2013 or after. Statista's August 2023 report entitled
" Number of people killed by police by ethnicity U.S. 20132023 "
notes that the rate of police shootings of Black Americans
is much higher than any other ethnicity, at 5.8 per million people
vs. 2.5 per million for Hispanics and 2.3 per million for Whites. "
The report also reports that 249-305 Black people were killed by
police annually between 2013-2020. And yet, there is evidence
these numbers are undercounted. Democracy Now declares in a
2021 news story that a " report by the Raza Database Project and
UnidosUS found that deaths of Latinos, Asian, and Indigenous
peoples have been historically undercounted. Researchers
documented the deaths of 32,542 people who have been killed
by police since 2000, 60% of whom constitute people of color,
who make up just 40% of the U.S. population " (Rodríguez and
Barrera, 2021).
BY SUSAN TSU
By June 8, 2020, theatre activists had put forward a call to
action and created a 30-page document supporting Black,
Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) called " We See You
White American Theater " (WSYWAT), demanding immediate,
radical change that would aright racial imbalances, hiring
policies, unsustainable salaries, scheduling, working conditions,
and much more. The WSYWAT document reached theatres,
schools, and organizations such as USITT, demanding a restructuring
of codes of conduct, past boards, practices, and member
FALL 2023 | THEATRE DESIGN & TECHNOLOGY | 53
Theatre Design & Technology - Fall 2023

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