Your Optimism is Not Required
How can we dream about the future when it feels so heavy?
YOUR OPTIMISM IS NOT REQUIRED takes place at an intimate, outdoor performance site encircling a campfire. Guided by two performers, the audience comes to embody characters in the lives of Daughter and Dad: a fictional biracial teenager and her white father on a camping trip confronting futures potentially shaped by environmental and societal crises.
Inspired by renowned Buddhist ecologist Joanna Macy’s work Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy, OPTIMISM is an original piece of participatory theater from Team Sunshine Performance that aims to move despair, anxiety, and hopelessness from immobilizing obstacles to animating forces of human connection.
Created by the ensemble, produced by Team Sunshine Performance
Performance History
2023. Performed at the Center for the Arts at Kayenta
2022. Co-presented by The Philadelphia Thing's Trade School Festival at The Village of Arts and Humanities
2021. Presented at Bartram’s Garden
Team
Director Alex Torra
Assistant Director Rachel Camp
Performer/Creator Jackie Soro
Performer/Creator, Benjamin Camp
Production Designer and Production Manager Makoto Hirano
Technical Direction Indi Abbott
Stage Manager (2021) Alexa Mani
Production Manager/Stage Manager (2022) Kat Larson
Stage Manager/APM (2023) Sydny Hansen
Photos by Kate Raines/Plate 3 Photography (1 and 8), Alan Holben (2-6) and Cait Sumner (7)
Support
Your Optimism Is Not Required was developed, in part, with assistance from the Orchard Project, Ari Edelson, Artistic Director. Development support for this project was provided through the 2020 Trade School residency, hosted by The Philadelphia Thing, the City of Philadelphia’s Arts in Action initiative managed by the Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, as well as Art is Essential: A Project of the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority’s Fund for Art and Civic Engagement with support from the Knight Foundation. Project support provided by the Charlotte Cushman Foundation, Puffin Foundation, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.