Sharing Power: Expanding Solidarity
Sharing Power is a podcast and performance series about distributed leadership and consent-based processes. The podcast, co-hosted by Flux Creative Partners Lori Elizabeth Parquet, Corinna Schulenburg, and Jason Tseng, invites other creators and organizers who are practicing distributed leadership/consent-based processes to discuss how they’re doing it.
Sharing Power continues with Jason, Corinna, and Lori in conversation together, with no additional guests. Why? One thing we’ve realized is that while learning from guests is important, it’s also valuable to take some time for ourselves. We’re not just lead facilitators, responders, and listeners, but in the struggle ourselves, with breakthroughs and challenges that are worth processing and sharing. That’s especially true now, as we witness some pretty significant changes in how power operates in our own country.
In Episode 2 of Season 2, we used as inspiration the following quote from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s To Save and To Destroy:
“Inclusion requires solidarity, as those who have excluded others now extend hospitality to the excluded. The excluded also need solidarity as they seek kinship with one another. But how far does solidarity extend? A limited solidarity, defining selfhood narrowly, keeping the circles of inclusion small and community identity uncontested, leads to the most acceptable politics and art in the eyes of the dominant society. An expansive solidarity, wherein kinship grows between unlikely others in an ever-widening circle, is much more dangerous, both to the dominant society and to ourselves.”
Listen on: Podbean | Apple | Spotify
“We have to be discerning when our lives are on the line. ’Cause that, for me, that is where it is right now. One must be discerning. We have to be discerning. So yes, expansiveness always with discernment.”
-Lori Elizabeth Parquet“Even though the unknown can be dangerous, it can also be wonderfully liberating—and to be able to sit with the uncertainty is actually where God lives.”
-Jason Tseng“How big can a tight knit thing like a Creative Partnership actually be before it no longer is what it is? And I think that these questions are a microcosm of a much larger question: when are boundaries healthy, and when do they become borders, which are unhealthy by definition.”
-Corinna Schulenburg
THE CO-HOSTS
Lori Elizabeth Parquet, co-host, (she/her), is a Flux Creative Partner and actor, director, and playwright from New Orleans, Louisiana with a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Cornell University. Her New York City stage credits include Macbeth, Dispatches From (A)mended America (Off-Broadway, Epic Theatre Ensemble), The Providence of Neighboring Bodies (Dutch Kills Theater/Ars Nova), The Honeycomb Trilogy: Sovereign (Gideon Productions), Medea (Phoenix Theatre Ensemble), Dog Act, Ajax in Iraq, Honey Fist, Operating Systems (Flux Theatre Ensemble), and Republic, Baal, Murder In the Cathedral (JACK/Hoi Polloi). She made her international debut performing in Pillars of Society at Teater Ibsen in Skien, Norway. She also performed in The Providence of Neighboring Bodies at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018. In 2019 she was nominated for and won the New York Innovative Theatre Award for Best Actress in a Lead Role for her performance in Operating Systems. As a director, Lori has directed Topdog/Underdog at Princeton Summer Theater and assistant directed The Public Theater’s most recent Shakespeare in the Park productions of As You Like It, and Twelfth Night. She was alsoas an acting coach on Disney’s Hercules, a Public Works production. Lori just served as Associate Director of New York City Center’s Encores: Off-center production of Maria Irene Fornes’ Promenade and has directed many readings and workshops with Public Works, Flux Theatre Ensemble, The Brooklyn Generator, and other theatre companies across New York City. As a playwright, Lori was selected as one of six featured playwrights for Season Five of The Fire This Time Festival, which produced a reading of her full-length play In Communion, and her short plays have been produced through Flux Theatre Ensemble, New York Madness, and other NYC indie theatres and festivals.
Corinna Schulenburg, co-host, (she-her), is a Flux Creative Partner. She is a trans artist and activist committed to ensemble practice and social justice.As a playwright, her work with Flux includes Riding the Bull, Rue, Other Bodies, The Lesser Seductions of History, Jacob’s House, DEINDE, Honey Fist, Salvage,The Sea Concerto, and Operating Systems. With Flux, she directed Ajax in Iraq (NYITA nomination), A Midsummer Nights Dream, and the Food:Souls Goldsboro and Volleygirls. As an actor with Flux, she has played Sam in Metra: A Climate Revolution Play with Songs; Max in World Builders, Dr. X in Hearts Like Fists, Ezekiel in 8 Little Antichrists (NYITA nomination), and the Professor in Rue.
Jason Tseng, co-host, (they/them) is a queer, non-binary Chinese-American playwright based in New York City, originally hailing from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Their plays have been presented and developed by Flux Theatre Ensemble, Judson Arts, Mission to dit(Mars), Theatre COTE, Inkubator Arts, Second Generation, Downtown Urban Arts Festival, and LA Queer New Works Festival. They are a Creative Partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble, a member of The Civilians’s 2019/2020 R&D Group, a member of Mission to dit(Mars)’s Propulsion Lab, and their plays have been honored as Semi-finalists for the New American Voices Playwrights Festiva, Bay Area Playwrights Festivall and the Eugene O’Neil National Playwrights Conference. Jason’s full-length plays include Rizing (World Premiere, Flux Theatre Ensemble), Like Father, Same Same, Ghost Money, Fear and Wonder, and The Other Side. Find more at jasontseng.com.
