Hope Chávez Has Been Radicalized (Part 1)

The story of the rise and fall of antiracism in the American theatre is, in some ways, the story of my friend Hope Chávez. Hope, a producer and arts administrator, was one of the first people I ever heard talk about antiracism and other forms of anti-oppression, and we developed a relationship by engaging in rigorous dialogue around these issues—me, usually the skeptic; her, usually the empath. With time, our positions have evolved, in sync with the changes in roles we’ve occupied in the industry and the gains and losses of the social justice movement. In this conversation, I wanted to dig into a gigantic issue: after everything that’s happened in the American theater in the past decade, is there still a will—and a way—to keep trying to make it a better place to work? Not surprisingly, our conversation ran very long, so I split it into two parts. In this first installment, she tells us about moving away from her conservative upbringing in Texas, becoming “radicalized” by liberal values in New York, and eventually participating in a staff revolt that saw the ousting of her former boss, the then executive director of ART/New York Virginia “Ginny” Louloudes.

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The following transcript has been slightly abridged and edited for clarity; Substack auto-generates its own, which you can turn while listening, but I can’t guarantee its accuracy.

Francisco Mendoza: Hello, and welcome to Downtown Chats, the companion podcast to The Downtown Beat, where I interview fellow artists on the business and craft of making art downtown. I am your host, Francisco Mendoza, and with me today is a great friend of mine, Hope Chávez. Hope, I don’t believe in reading bios while people sit by awkwardly, so do you want to introduce yourself?

Hope Chávez: I hate it too, so my pleasure. The highlights are: born and raised in Texas, went to New York at 18, worked primarily in theater and a little bit of arts admin as well, at ART/New York. I did a lot of independent producing, working with Off-Broadway theaters, things like that. The producing side and the admin management side were always my calling. I went to Connecticut (the first time) to work at Long Wharf, then went to Oregon Shakespeare Festival after that to be an associate producer, and now I am the executive director at the Arts Council of Greater New Haven, which is a service organization for all forms of art, not just theater. And I have two cat children… and that’s where I’ll end the bio.

Francisco: So, the question I ask all the guests—and by “all the guests,” I mean the one I’ve interviewed before and you; when I was a kid, my sister and I had a rule that “two is all,” so if something has happened twice, it’s happened every time. So, the question I ask all the guests is: what makes you a downtown artist?

Hope: I have all of the wiring to do things the hard way; the cheap, hustly, call-in-a-million-favors, pull-it-all-together-in-a-hurry-if-you-have-to, and work-against-much-larger-systems-of-resources way. That is my default modality; in fact, it’s very strange for me to be in well-resourced environments. I think that’s what makes me downtown.

Francisco: In other words, the scarcity. The scarcity makes you downtown.

Hope: Oh yeah, trauma!

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Francisco: I want to start with approaching the craft as a producer: When you got involved with theater, was that your approach from the beginning? You wanted to be a producer?

Hope: I was a kid when I got introduced to theater, and it was through community theater productions… I’ll just put a little asterisk here: I was raised in a cult, which is to say that theater was a really important space of community for me. But all I knew was acting. I conceptually understood there were directors and stage managers and designers, but I had no idea what that meant at the professional level. Then, when I came to New York, I had a really incredible professor who saw me very clearly; first semester, she took me to Starbucks and said, “Hey, is acting really what you want to do?”—which was her very loving way of saying, “You’re not particularly good at it.” And I also didn’t want to do it, so when she said, “I wonder if you know what producing is,” and then told me about it, introduced me to people, and used her small nonprofit theater company as a vehicle for mentoring me and giving me my first producing jobs... I was pretty hooked. What I did know at that age was that I enjoyed helping people make theater more than I enjoyed being the theater. And I definitely didn’t want to have the life of an actor.

Francisco: Do you feel that realization has carried through for the rest of your bio?

Hope: Yes. Supporting the artists and the art-making and the process of art has become my love.

Francisco: However, the reason I wanted to have you on the podcast is that, as long as I have known you, that priority has lived side-by-side with a larger one, which is project-agnostic, having to do with—and I’m going to use a gigantic term here—the betterment of society, or the correction of historical wrongs. Would you say that has always been true? And if not, when did that social bent become part of your practice?

Hope: It was not something I always thought about explicitly. When I was growing up, I did struggle against different kinds of power, but I did not understand that there was analysis, language, strategy, or such a thing as fighting against it... I didn’t understand any of that because I was raised in a pretty tight bubble. But moving to New York at the ripe age of 18 and staying there for almost a decade, I had a very accelerated development into the person I am today. I can remember, during my second year of college at the very conservative college that I went to, hearing the definition of feminism for the first time. And I’m not kidding: I had never heard an actual definition for it. I had pictures in my head of what feminists were, but I didn’t know what it meant. [The professor] was describing it to break it down and critique it and, obviously, train us against it—in a different idea of femininity and masculinity and family values and things like that—but, to their credit, they gave a pretty robust presentation of how a more progressive person would define feminism. And when I heard “the equality of the sexes,” I felt bamboozled my whole life. I was like, “Oh, that seems like a very reasonable thing to want. I, too, would like equality for the sexes.”

Francisco: The fact, though, that the movement is not called “gender equality” but “feminism” points to an existing imbalance. That, I think, is a concept that really tilted societally to some degree around 2016/2017, with the rise of the MeToo movement, because it made explicit through, let’s call it “empirical evidence,” that there is an imbalance: “Look, here is how you quantify it.” Obviously, that’s far from the first moment feminism was discussed publicly, but it was a moment in which it seemed harder to push back and say things [were balanced before]. So, why don’t you tell me a little bit about your history with that movement? How did that hit you? How did that become a part of your practice?

Hope: So, at the time MeToo launched—the presidential campaign and the tapes and everything that was coming out... I can’t remember, was Harvey [Weinstein] at the same time or after?

Francisco: Harvey was actually a little bit before, if I’m not mistaken. [NOTE: I was mistaken, it was after.]

Hope: Yeah. So, all of that is happening when I’m very much an independent theater producer, not working inside of a theater institution or an art institution on a full-time basis. But then, in 2017, I move to work at ART/New York, which is a service organization doing advocacy and grant-making and professional development. And when I started there, the leadership at the time—the deputy director, the director of programs—were really well relationally connected and very at the forefront of some of this work. And around this time is when you get the Long Wharf story; the artistic director, Gordon Edelstein, was accused of some pretty terrible… not just sexual harassment, but I would categorize some of that as sexual assault. He was subsequently fired, and there was a big New York Times article. And then, I think at The Public, there was a story about transness, and I think—I’m probably going to get this imprecise—but I think they didn’t use trans actors for some of it, and there were allegations of there being a form of sexual harassment in the terminology being used internally at the organization and its understanding of gender and gender equity. So there started to be more theater stories.

So ART/New York says, “We’re gonna go get a bunch of money and do something about this.” We created the first sexual harassment prevention training program specific to theater in the country that I am aware of, and we hosted those trainings for all sorts of folks in New York theater. We created an ombudsman program, which took individuals who were trained to work in tandem with intimacy directors and the creative teams for shows; they were employed by ART/New York to help disrupt power dynamics, and they were literally there to receive people’s concerns anonymously and do whatever the person in that situation wanted to do—hold on to that information, help advocate with them within the institutional power, etcetera. And the final piece was some micro-grants for intimacy directors on shows.

Francisco: So, you mentioned that you entered into a team that was sort of well-versed [on these issues]. Were they the source of your knowledge as you started to work on and implement these initiatives?

Hope: That was not the only source at all. In fact, I commend them—probably because they had done work in organizing and justice spaces, they knew better than that. So, they immediately made it accessible for me; this is an incredible gift, I talk about it all the time because I want people to know that they also can ask for this. They gave me a ton of professional development: I did the New York Peace Institute’s mediation training, a restorative justice intensive with Columbia’s School of Social Work, artEquity facilitator training… I was sent to convenings and trainings all designed around how to facilitate and hold space—where my role was to basically just help everyone else get their good ideas out and work together—and also aimed at harm reduction and repair from different angles.

Francisco: How aware are you, in this sort of 2016 climate, of a systemic issue that is leading to these situations versus “there are bad apples that need to be weeded out”?

Hope: I think at this point, I was operating mainly from places of my lived experience and that of people close to me; I didn’t have a ton of language around systemic stuff. Meaning: I am a survivor, and I had only recently kind of come to terms with that sort of language; I had a lot of anger with specific men in my life, and was beginning to understand all of that better. The election of 2016 was incredibly emotional for me; I was—right before I went to ART/New York—working in a fintech firm as my day job, and it was a pretty toxic male work environment. But I think I was becoming radicalized around that time, in a sense, because I had a lot of strong instincts even from childhood about (and this language I would use now) butting up against systems of power and institutions that sought to silence those who were less powerful. I had a lot of empathy in general, my whole life, for people who were vulnerable in that way. But coming to ART/New York and working on these programs was when I think I got much more immersed in… let’s call it the slightly more academic, or pedagogical, side of understanding the systemic parts of racism, sexism, classism—all of the isms.

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Francisco: As we move forward in time, 2018, 2019, the conversation of race starts entering the picture. Not that it wasn’t there before, but... it is the first time I heard the term “anti-racism,” let alone what it meant to apply it. Was that a similar journey for you as well?

Hope: Yes, I don’t think I heard the term anti-racism as such prior to its zeitgeist in the American theater. We had a DEI cohort program-

Francisco: Define [that term], just for the readers who have been living under rocks for such a long time.

Hope: If anyone at this point doesn’t know that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion stands for... wait, did I just do that backwards? DEI stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. [laughs] Although we added a “J” to it at ART/New York: We were going, “Is it EDI or DEI?” and then it was, “Is it DEIA or EDIA?” because “A” for “Accessibility…” And then we heard one of our facilitators say she liked to do “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Justice,” and we went, “That’s the one. We’re about Justice around here.” So, we start doing that work, and now I’m immersed in it. I’m also self-educating at this point; Emergent Strategy and White Fragility came across my desk around 2017.

Francisco: Emergent Strategy is a book...

Hope: By adrienne maree brown about how we build more sustainable strategies for anything, really: organizing, leading nonprofits, community work…

Francisco: Is race a significant part of it?

Hope: Absolutely. She’s a mixed-race Black woman; she talks about class, race, gender—but she doesn’t talk about it on its nose. It’s not a book about race, it’s just a book where an analysis of how someone’s identity and lived experience and geography and all these things play into how we build sustainable movements and make change.

And White Fragility is a book by Robin DiAngelo that’s explicitly about race and the fragility of white folks in that work. It’s very much written for white people to do kind of a 101 on racism in America and the ways in which they enable it and how to take accountability for it.

Francisco: If before, you couldn’t necessarily apply a system-level analysis, the literature that you’ve mentioned does lean more towards the perspective that the system is inherently racist and will perpetuate racism if allowed to continue. It becomes less (in my vision and the way that I understood it at the time) about prevention, and becomes instead about transformation, because it’s useless to just wait for the next bad apple: we are in a rotten apple bushel, and we need to change the container—not just the people inside of it. Did that evolution take place in your own thinking as well, and your own practice?

Hope: Not consciously. But it was the water I was swimming in for... I mean, I guess I’m still swimming in it, but it felt like I jumped into that stream around 2015/2016, and the currents just got stronger. And so I may not have had that kind of logical “from here to a systems analysis,” “from prevention towards transformation”... in fact, if anything, I think transformation felt clear to me very early. I just didn’t always know my place in it, I didn’t always have my own analysis around it: What can I do? What should we do? What’s better, what’s worse?