Awareness of both our own and another’s pain is a way into more transformative tenderness. Conditions of claiming and care can be crafted: to claim how trauma has shaped each of us and to care about the impact of trauma on other people. This dual capacity of attunement in activism is alchemical, potent, and preserving of liberatory community. The space between—the field—is a web that is both hurt and informed by trauma.

Scrutiny of others who are in anti-oppression work with us can appear to be a beneficial element of our collective culture. Our desire to build an alternative to supremacy culture seems so naturally to lead us to vigilance. And yet, many of us have seen how our drive to hold accountability in ourselves and others can create a form of relating that is at a minimum corrosive, and at worst, a way of operating that can impact mental health, livelihoods, and remove all possibility for creating a liberatory collective.

The beauty of Social Presencing Theatre is that it offers work in the personal body that helps us metabolize and develop stamina for the difficult feelings we experience once we allow inequities within the social body into our consciousness.