Your Optimism is Not Required

THEATER

Team Sunshine Performance (Philadelphia)

Walton Commons Plaza

YOUR OPTIMISM IS NOT REQUIRED is a performance event, facilitated workshop, and communal gathering all woven into an experience that illuminates the ways we might move immobilizing despair about our world into collective hope and action.

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.

Director: Alex Torra

Associate Director: Rachel Camp

Performer/Creators: Benjamin Camp and Jackie Soro

Production Designer: Makoto Hirano