Q&A with CFA alum Katy Rubin (CFA’07)
Katy Rubin (CFA’07) will be honored with a 2018 Distinguished Alumni Award on Friday, September 21, 2018. We asked Katy to share more about her career path and her passion for theatre.
Question: Did you always know you wanted to work in theatre? Can you tell us more about what led you to where you are today?
Katy Rubin: I have been doing theatre since I was 5 or 6 years old, and I suppose I always knew I wanted to work in the theatre, but to be honest, I wasn’t always sure there was a place for me in the theatre. I was introduced to the practices of theatre for social change, and community-based theatre, by my family’s work in street theatre, circus and puppetry, which I loved, but I also loved the traditional theatre training I got at the School of Theatre at BU and the skill, rigor and discipline it required. I was always very passionate about politics and social justice, and I wasn’t sure how to combine all these passions into a career. Just a few weeks after I graduated from CFA, I stumbled upon a workshop hosted by Augusto Boal, the founder of Theatre of the Oppressed, in New York City, and those were three life-changing days. I found this work to be both wildly fun and very effective in the struggle for human rights – and I had to pursue it. That first year, I worked as a teaching artist in NYC and applied for grants to travel to Brazil and study with Boal, which I was able to do for 3 months in 2008, one year before he died. When I returned, I found that the work wasn’t happening in the US the way I experienced it in Brazil and knew it to be used in other countries – and a few years later, I started NYC’s first “popular theatre troupe.” TONYC grew organically from there. It all was pretty surprising to me – I wasn’t envisioning starting a nonprofit!
Q: You are the founder and Executive Director of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC. Can you tell us more about this organization and its mission? Why is this important to you?
KR: TONYC’s mission is to partner with communities fighting against oppression to inspire transformative action through theatre. Our goals are to build community, solidarity, and awareness; to engage New York communities as actors, “spect-actors” and activists; and to influence policy-making through participatory theatre.
Our innovative performance methodology centers relationship-building, accessibility, and participation, achieved through the cultivation of ten theatre troupes made up of actors facing injustice in the housing, health care, justice and immigration systems, based on structural racism, classism, sexism and other forms of oppression. These troupes present new work in the form of Forum Theatre, in which the audience, or spect-actors, are invited to step into the play and improvise with the actors to discover solutions to social problems. Since 2011, over 700 actors have devised and performed 70 original new plays addressing the oppressions that directly impact their lives, for more than 13,000 audience members. Furthermore, TONYC engages in rigorous facilitation training and leadership development — to date, 60% of our troupe facilitators first encountered the organization as a youth or adult actor, and have lived experience of the issues in our work.
One of our most significant accomplishments is our Legislative Theatre events, which annually bring citizens, legislators and policymakers together into creative dialogue about the policies and laws that affect communities facing oppression, and has sparked new legislation and increased civic participation. You can read more about some of these policy changes in our report: Watch, Act, Vote: The Impact of Theatre of the Oppressed NYC Legislative Theatre on New York City Policy and Civic Engagement.
Q: You have facilitated projects with activist and community artists around the world. Are there any projects that you have worked on that are particularly memorable to you? What is a typical day like in this role?
KR: The most memorable projects are the ones that go on to have a bigger life after I leave – where the project is not just about the creation of forum theatre but capacity building, so that the community can “multiply” the work themselves. I worked in Leon, Nicaragua for two consecutive years: the first year, I worked with a group of 25 women and teens to build a play about urgent issues facing the community, including labor exploitation and environmental hazards. The next year, I was asked to work with 8 women from the play, who wanted to learn to facilitate Theatre of the Oppressed themselves. They are continuing to use the tools to spark dialogue and build solidarity among different towns in the area, that are all facing similar issues. Those kinds of projects are the most exciting!
And, a typical day – that’s hard! It’s changed so much over the years, as the organization has grown. I used to be facilitating every day, in the rehearsal room. Now I do just a bit of that, and I do a lot of fundraising, relationship-building and management of a big team. We have 24 employees total at this point – 6 admin staff and 18 artist-facilitators. The most exciting days are when we have a great show and the audience includes folks directly impacted by the issue as well as “deciders” – city council members, leaders in the fields of housing or justice, who commit to implementing the changes improvised by the audience and actors. That’s when we can feel the electricity of creative, collective social change in the theatre with us.
Q: TONYC’s work has been featured in a number of magazines and news outlets. What does this incredible recognition mean to you? Is there anything that you are most proud of?
KR: The organization’s growth and the recognition we’ve gotten has been so surprising – it feels like we’ve just been running to catch up. One thing I’m really proud of is our development of Legislative Theatre – the first instance internationally of these tools being used on this scale. It’s amazing to know we’ve impacted policy – and the recognition we’ve gotten for that work in multiple outlets, from Slate to Brian Lehrer. Additionally, I’m personally proud of our years of advocacy which led to the purchase our own permanent home in Times Square for a very low price last year. We held the City of New York and some very powerful developers accountable to a deal they made years before TONYC even started. The article in CityLab at The Atlantic tells the story powerfully.
Q: Did you have any key mentors or people who deeply influenced who you are, what you believe in and what you’re committed to in your work and life?
KR: That question is always so hard, because I have so many mentors! From my teachers at BU School of Theatre (Jon Lipsky, Paula Langton, Judy Braha, Sidney Friedman, Eve Muson and more) who taught me about hard work, beauty, stamina and creativity; to Augusto Boal, my teacher in Brazil; to the incredible group of nonprofit executive director women I’ve been a part of for 4 years, the Sustainable Sisterhood. That’s just a start.
Q: What was your experience like at BU? How did your studies in the School of Theatre help shape your career path?
KR: I loved my time at the School of Theatre. I loved learning how to use my voice and body to move others to action; I loved the powerful texts we were able to experience and experiment with; I loved being part of a cohort of 20 other students for 4 years, learning how to collaborate and communicate even if we didn’t all love each other (this, particularly, was an excellent lesson for life). I feel that the Acting track at SOT was a long, sweaty, joyful and sometimes painful exercise in stamina, letting go of ego, holding oneself to high standards and figuring out how to adapt one’s strengths to rules that we didn’t get to shape ourselves. I hope that makes sense – I have leaned on those lessons so many times as an entrepreneur.
Q: The College of Fine Arts will be honoring you with a Distinguished Alumni Award at the upcoming Alumni Weekend in September. What does receiving this award mean to you? How are you hoping to engage with current CFA students?
KR: I am so honored! For one thing, oftentimes Theatre of the Oppressed is not taken very seriously by the theatre field in NYC – as opposed to the advocacy community, where we are well respected – and so it feels like an acknowledgement of this work as an important part of the fine arts and the theatre. For another, as you can tell from above, I loved my time at BU, and it’s exciting to deepen that relationship! I was a Trustee Scholar at BU, an opportunity I was so grateful for throughout those four years; and I continue to be grateful to BU. I try to support and connect with CFA students over the past 11 years as much as I can – I’ve had many coffees in NYC with recent SOT graduates, and sometimes they’ve become TONYC volunteers, audience members, interns, etc! I look forward to continuing those relationships too.
Q: What’s next for you in your work? What are you most looking forward to?
KR: To keep it short – I am looking towards developing Legislative Theatre projects in other cities around the US and internationally, to help scale and improve the tool in other contexts outside NYC. We’ll see how it develops!
Q: What advice would you give to a current college student who wishes to pursue a career in theatre?
KR: A few things helped me tremendously: to consider carefully what kind of life I wanted to lead before graduating, and be very realistic about how difficult this kind of career was. It was important for me to realize that waiting tables wasn’t going to work for me, and even though that was the stereotype of newly graduated actors, I didn’t have to do that if I knew it would make me unhappy. I needed to make money in a way that I could both survive and stay reasonably happy, or at least stable, in order to focus on my career. Secondly, in hindsight I realize that I figured out what I was good at and where those skills were needed most, instead of trying to force myself into a type or a career path that didn’t look quite possible for me. This is easier said than done, I know…but I believe it will put you in a strong position.