Two questions for you here in the twilight months of 2024:
What broke you?
and ..
What radicalized you?
Family separations broke me. “Mama, I’m Sorry” song breaks me every time. We wrote it as a lament, a sorrowful yearning for something that was taken from you, for something or someone you may never get back. It is meant to dig deep inside you and touch the too-often sorrowful tenderness inside us, the part of us that yearns for the Mother, for love and belonging.
What radicalized me springs from that too. It was paying attention to how the world worked, paying deep attention to people, systems, history - what stories play out over and over again, what is healing and what is harmful. There’s a lot of powerful people and systems that want you to stay in the Cage of Lies that they’ve built for you - the broken system that puts profits before people, makes more money from you if you feel isolated, separated, lonely, and is destroying the planet we live on. Seeing that cage of lies for what it is a radicalizing moment.
Olivia O team did what we set out to do in 2024 and that was to bring this hopeful story to the stage in its first few festival/ development productions. Now we want to do more.
We believe that now, and heading into 2025, is the time to be bold. It is a time for art and music and activism. It is a time for *more* - more love, more community and more radical hope. More powerful, hopeful, and radical new musicals.
On a personal note I spent last weekend at the deathbed of my sister-in-law, a woman younger than me and with children younger than mine. Gone too young and too soon. Life is too damn short not to do what you love, to isolate yourself or stay lonely. Love is a radical path. My deepest hope is that you stay on it - that we stay on it, together.
Olivia O team is more committed than ever to bring this story to the stage again in 2025. Will you join us?
.. Diane
P.S What radicalized you?
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