Video: Breaking the Matrix: Liberation Arts

We are embedded in systems that we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the invisible matrices that discipline us because of the fascination of U.S. politics with carcerality. We have an opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation. We want to break free, and the arts offer us a way to imagine what freedom could look like. They serve as a moral spotlight, not only exposing current wrongs, but illuminating possible futures. Our goal was to explore the arts as an expression of a moral imagination that guide us to more just, equitable futures.

Featuring:

• Bryonn Bain, Artist, Activist, and Professor of African American Studies and World Arts & Cultures in the School of the Arts and the School of Law at UCLA
• Cristal Chanelle Truscott, Founder of Progress Theatre, Creator of SoulWork Method, and Associate Professor of Performance Studies, Graduate Acting and Directing at Northwestern University

Moderated by Hussein Rashid, Assistant Dean for Religion and Public Life.

This is the fifth event of a five-part series of online public conversations with academics, advocates, and activists to imagine the systems that liberatory thought can create and how we can invest in visions of more equitable social structures.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School. 

SPEAKER 2: Breaking the Matrix, Liberation Arts, April 21, 2025. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: I'm Hussein Rashid, assistant dean for Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School. Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people. 

Welcome, and thank you for being here. Religion in Public Life is dedicated to the service of a just world at peace. We work with a dynamic method that has religious literacy at its core, and brings in critical analysis to understand and challenge systems of inequity. Our focus on just peace building recognizes that a peace without justice is not sustainable. 

The goal of RPL programming is to bring analysis from experts, including academics and practitioners, and those living in inequitable systems, and offer some ways forward to build a more just world. The program is currently led by interim director Dean David Holland and previously by Diane L. Moore, former associate dean for RPL. 

This series, like all our programming, would not be possible without the support of our team, including Ream, Hillary, Anna, Natalie, Tammy, Hisham, Rachelle, and Elise. [INAUDIBLE] a current student who is helping with the series in various capacities. I also want to mention Becca Leviss and Elizabeth Berger, the students who conceived of this series, and have been instrumental in putting it together, and have moderated other panels in this series. Thanks to them all. 

We're embedded in systems that other people have created in which we take for granted as the way things should be. These are the invisible matrices that discipline us. Over time because of the fascination of US politics with carcerality, these systems mimic official carceral spaces. The events of the past year have highlighted how our past methods of sense and knowledge-making no longer hold. In these moments of breakage, we have the opportunity for expansive imagination and recreation. 

We invite you into the process of radical reimagining with us by bringing together academics, advocates, and activists. We will begin to imagine the systems that liberatory thought can create, and what needs to be done to get us to invest in futurist visions of more equitable social structures. These conversations will engage elements of RPL's approach to just peace-building by exposing power structures, understanding systems of violence, engaging relationally, being creative, and exploring the role of religion. 

We are pleased to be working with UCLA's prison education program and center for justice to make this series available to incarcerated people throughout the country. The mission of UCLA's prison education program and center for justice is to make higher education accessible to those incarcerated, and to bring UCLA students, staff, and faculty together to learn alongside them, and thereby challenge bias, discrimination, and injustice in a collaborative learning community. 

We want to break free, and the arts offer us a way to imagine what freedom could look like. They serve as a moral spotlight, not only exposing current wrongs, but illuminating possible futures. Our goal tonight is to explore the arts as an expression of a moral imagination that guides us to a more just equitable futures. Tonight we are joined by two amazing speakers and people I'm glad to call friends and comrades, Bryonn Bain and Cristal Chanelle Truscott. 

Brian Bain is a-- sorry. Bryonn Bain is an American poet, actor, prison activist, scholar, author, hip hop artist, and professor of African-American studies and world arts and cultures in the School of the Arts and the School of Law at the University of California at Los Angeles, UCLA. His one man show, Lyrics From Lockdown, won best solo performance from the LA Weekly and NAACP. 

Executive produced by Harry Belafonte, the show tells stories of wrongful incarceration through spoken word poetry, hip hop theater, calypso comedy, and classical music. Bain founded the prison education program at UCLA in 2015, our partners for this series. In 2019, the program and his performances at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts were featured on the debut episode of LA Stories, which won an Emmy award. Bain hosted My Two Cents, a current affairs talk show on BET for five consecutive seasons. 

Cristal Chanelle Truscott, PhD, is a cultural worker, scholar, educator, playwright, director, founder of the touring ensemble Progress Theater and creator of SoulWork, a generative method for making performance, training artists, engaging communities, and framing analytical research tools that is rooted in generations old African-American cultural practices, theories, and performance traditions. 

She is recipient of the Doris Duke Impact Artist Award, given to those influential and quote, "influential in shaping powerful creative movements in contemporary arts," end quote. As well as the 2023 United States Artists Award, the Creative Capital Award, MAP Fund, NPN Creation Fund, and NEFA National Theater Projects Grants. 

As cultural worker and artist, Dr. Truscott is director of SoulWorks studio and has led Progress Theater in using art as anti-racism to connect communities via broad deeply linked grassroots network fostered nationally and internationally. She writes acapella musicals called Neo-Spirituals that span and straddle time between histories and the present to explore identities, inheritance, legacies, and cultural movements to encourage connection, consciousness and healing. 

Thank you both for joining us today. I invite you to join me on camera. And I feel reading these bios, I don't know if you all remember the old TV sketch show In Living Color where the-- Bryonn knows where I'm going with this. The Caribbean family, where the dad or the mom would come in and be like, you're only working eight jobs. How lazy are you? And I feel like reading both your bios, I feel so humbled and impressed with what you've done and what you continue to do on so many fronts. 

And thank you for joining us for this really wonderful conversation that we're about to have. I think where I'd like to start with each of you is just to invite you to share your opening reflections and thoughts about when we talk about liberation arts, particularly in the idea of carcerality, what does that mean for you? How are you invested in this? And, Bryonn, I'll start with you, since you're first alphabetically. 

BRYONN BAIN: Well, thank you so much, Hussein. I'm so grateful to you Dean Rashid, and the entire Religion and Public Life team. It's a blessing and an honor to be with you and with Cristal as well. Really, really blessed to be with you all. I also want to express my gratitude for your land acknowledgment for the Massachusetts tribe from Boston and Cambridge. I also want to acknowledge the Tongva and Gabrielino folks, the folks here in Los Angeles where I am right now, and the Lenape and Haudenosaunee back in Brooklyn, in New York, where I was born and raised. 

And I also want to end that with not just the land acknowledgment, but a labor acknowledgment, because I want to recognize that without the labor of my ancestors, Harvard University would not exist. Specifically, the Dahomey and Yoruba folks of Benin, Nigeria and across West Africa, on whose backs whose labor throughout the Caribbean, Latin America and the American South, the universities primary investors, including the law school where I'm a graduate, none of that would exist. So I want to just acknowledge the labor of our ancestors for making this possible as well. 

To the point of liberation arts and what that means, two things come to mind, I will keep this brief. The first is one of the most important, I think, influential sisters talking about these issues of our time. Angela Davis, I had the opportunity to spend some time with her recently, and one of the things that she says that really resonates with me is that if you want to talk about liberation, you want to talk about freedom, you have to talk to people who've experienced unfreedom. 

And in essence that I think, is what my work and Cristal's work shares in common. Being in dialogue with folks who like ourselves, have experienced unfreedom. I'm from a family of five, and every one of US has been institutionalized at one point. And of the four brothers in my family, we've all from between days to close to a decade, been incarcerated for some period of time. So carcerality is part of the American experience from the original genocide and slavery that founded this country to today, but in a very specific way. 

And I'll end with this. One of the conversations I remember having with a young student who we were interviewing for a carceral education program. I remember saying, why do you want to pursue arts and education while you're incarcerated? And I'll never forget, the student responded, prison is Medusa. And if you only focus on this space, it will turn you to stone. And I need to focus my attention on something else. So this place doesn't turn me to stone. 

And I think that more than anything, embodies what I think about with liberation arts is how do we create movements? How do we create resistance? How do we survive the conditions we're living in a way that does not allow systems that are designed to dehumanize us, to do so but instead allows us to maintain our humanity. And so I think that's what I think about when I think about liberation arts. How do we maintain our humanity amidst systems and structures that were designed to strip us of our humanity? 

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you. Cristal, did you want to chime in? 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Yeah, happy to. Thanks again for having us, Hussein, and just really grateful to be here and in conversation with both of you. I want to affirm the land acknowledgment. I want to affirm the labor acknowledgment and just lift up all of those things as just such, not only appropriate for any occasion, but specifically appropriate for this conversation in terms of land and how land and labor connect to carcerality, but also to art making. 

So I've been thinking a lot about all of the ways that I define liberation and think about liberation, and then all of the ways that I think about art and define art. And so when I think about art created in the pursuit of freedom. The thing that's unique about art and creativity is that it can imagine a reality that hasn't been realized yet. And for so many people whose histories or who have the experience, Bryonn, as you were saying, as starting from a space of unfreedom, the route to freedom so often, especially historically, has been about how do I imagine a state and an existence that I haven't realized yet? I haven't seen yet, and I don't have any experiential knowledge of it. 

My work and research is in the ancestral Black American performance traditions, and the genesis of those traditions are all rooted in the pursuit of freedom as they were birthed during people surviving the system of slavery and the caste system of plantation life, and the site of the plantation as really a prototype for the carceral state that we encounter and experience now. 

And so all of that work in the pursuit was really about folks wanting to live autonomously in a state of self-determination or power. If I'm citing the Black Panther Party in that this notion of power and Black power or power in general is really about self-determination and just the right to live autonomously. And then I've been reflecting lately on Nina Simone's famous quote when she was asked what freedom is to her, and she said, no fear. And so this idea, this combination of being able to live autonomously or powerfully, if you will, and then fearlessly and to pursue that. 

And then the arts as a place where all of those pursuits are practiced, rehearsed, and then ultimately realize like that it's not just an imaginative state, but it's an imaginative state that launches a new reality. That gives people the opportunity to experiment with ways of pursuing freedom, but then also of living free in a range of ways. And I can talk about this more as we go on, but I'm just thinking about all of the layers of freedom, not just the freedom of selfhood, freedom of communication, freedom of culture, freedom in the ability to just create new futures, and futures, plural. 

The notion that going from unfree to free is a static singular state, is not really where creativity lives. Creativity lives in the fact that freedom is actually the possibility of multiple futures and states that we realize in the pursuit of freedom. So I'll pause there for now. But when I think about the pursuit of freedom is a creative act in and of itself, that it requires imagination. And so when we think about arts, it's a site of liberation, but it's also a practice of liberation. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you both for that. I really love these framings. And I'm taking that you both turned to the land acknowledgment and the labor acknowledgment. This is the first time I've heard a labor acknowledgment, Bryonn. But I think one of the things that I'm always fascinated by is we're going to enter into a conversation about arts, creativity and imagination as you both have really helped set the tone for. But I think people forget that our language is something we have control over, and when we speak, we summon a reality. Nobody is a slave. People are enslaved. And who's responsible for that enslavement? Why does that enslavement happen? 

When we say this land acknowledgment, people are like, well, but we own this land. And now the point is, possession might be 9/10 of the law, but the fact of the matter is, this land is stolen. So that land acknowledgment is our way of reimagining that history. We tend to think of imagination as forward-looking, but we can actually reimagine our present just by subtle shifts in language. And I love that I'm hearing from both of you. I've got Angela Davis on the table, I've got Nina Simone on the table, and I've got the Black Panther Party on the table. 

This is how we start. I think the other thing people forget is that we are all in academic institutions, which I think is really important to point out, but that the work that we're doing might be theoretically informed, but it doesn't deny human experience. Theory emerges from human experience. I keep making this joke. I didn't understand Karl Marx until I read Chuck D's book, Fight the Power where he talks about material needs in communities. I'm like, OK, now I get what Marx is trying to say. 

And I think that we also need to emphasize that this is a question of agency. I think, Cristal, to your last point, you were bringing that out that this is a question of agency for all of us. And so in terms of agency, you were both artists in your own rights. And I'd love to hear a little bit from each of you about your own experiences, the ones I read from your bio or any place you want to go, but Lyrics From Lockdown, the Neo-Spirituals you're working on, Cristal, or Plantation Remix, however you want to go. But I'd just love to hear about what this means for you in terms of your own artistic work and how you got there. 

BRYONN BAIN: Cristal, do you want to jump in? OK. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Go for it. 

BRYONN BAIN: I want to hear about the Plantation Remixes. But I'll get it started. I was a 14 or 15-year-old kid the first time I went into a correctional facility. And it was in New York, and it was unlike many other folks, but it was as an artist. My cousins-- I was just telling Cristal my cousins were in a hip hop group before some of y'all's time called the Fu-Schnickens out of Flatbush, Brooklyn, and they were on tour with Digital Underground, the Humpty Hump, Shock-G rest in rest in peace, rest in power. And they had a backup dancer nobody ever heard of called Tupac Shakur. 

And they were on tour and we wanted to be like our big cousins then. So they were like, well, y'all gotta do more shows. And I will never forget the sister who was organizing folks to do shows at that time was a sister named Paula Medina. And Paula Medina said, look, I'm doing a holiday show at the prison Fishkill, upstate New York. If you do the show with me, I'll take you all on and I'll manage you, get you lots of shows. So we say, yeah, no doubt we'll do it. We did it. 

We were nervous as hell because we didn't know we were getting into. We sang our four or five part harmonies. We banged on the table, we rapped, we sang holiday songs. We did some skits and some scenes. And the brothers in the facility, I mean, gave us a standing ovation. They were just so grateful that we showed up, because people in prison are some of the easiest people in the world to forget about. Even as we talk about carcerality as a larger phenomenon, we're emulating these systems that we've seen emulate the plantation in our day to day lives. So for 10 years, we went back and this is from the late '80s until the late '90s. 

And that was before I had my own experiences where I was wrongfully jailed in New York facilities as well, with my brother, with my cousin locked up in the same cell with my family. But that experience really opened my mind to so much. And that led me to really thinking about not only being an artist in these facilities, but also how could I-- how could I actually leverage activism and get folks more engaged and thinking about how so many of our communities are being devastated, either by the prisons or the policing that actually fills the prisons and the towers we see going up in our communities. 

When I was in law school, I never had trouble with the law until I went to law school, and that experience of being a student in law school and then thrown in jail for a crime I didn't commit, really did change my life. I ended up writing something called Walking While Black, which Lani Guinier had recommended. The warrior lawyer Lani Guinier asked me to submit it. It went viral before viral was a thing, and that really gave me a platform to do even more. 

And to shine a light not just on my story in my case, but on the case of folks like my brother Nanon Williams, who's been locked up for 33 years in Texas for a crime he didn't commit in Houston. I know you're in Houston right now, Cristal. He's in Rosharon 33 years for a crime Amnesty International and 7 Nobel Prize winners say he didn't commit. And so to have the privilege and the access, the opportunity to shine a light of the media on arts and culture, that made me more excited than even telling my own story. 

Now I can weave my story with Nanon's story and the stories of other folks, and find ways to actually create opportunities for folks story to get out there, to create opportunities for university programs to bring students from Columbia, from NYU, from The New School, from UCLA into prisons, to create courses. And then in California, at least because of Prop 57, to cut people's sentences down, to actually push for and get legislation passed that reduces sentences of incarcerated folks because they have access to these institutions up on the hill that for so long have been kept away from our folks in these facilities. 

And so that's a very specific way in which education and the arts is liberation, not just in a metaphoric way, but in a literal liberal way, getting people home to their families, sooner than they thought they would be. And one specific example, and I'll end with this. I will never forget we had a spoken word concert at UCLA not too long ago. And I won't forget Monica, because she played her harmonica at the concert and did some spoken word. And the warden after the performance said, I really saw you in a new light. 

I went back to debrief at the federal prison the next week, the warden had signed Monica's paperwork to be released to home confinement almost five years early. She got out of federal prison almost five years early, because the warden saw her perform poetry and music on a campus. She got out of prison for the day, and that got her out five years early. So the power of art and education to be a tool for liberation is figurative and literal. And that is the work that I believe that we're engaged in. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Yeah, powerful. And one of the things that came to mind just as you were ending and then I'll go back and start with my own creative story, was just how long-standing the practice is of people actually performing their way to freedom. In some ways, I'm thinking specifically of a historic example of Ibrahim Abdul Rahman, who was enslaved in Natchez, Mississippi, who literally went on a performance tour equipped with a set, with costumes, with all of these things to perform his story of being captured so that he could raise money to free his family. 

And if you look at historical record at the time, his performances were reviewed like plays. He's known as the Prince among slaves. There's NPR documentaries and things like that among them. But what I'm saying is that this notion of how do I perform my way? How do I create my way to freedom? That there's also historical precedent for people doing that, and for the ways in which art making and creating arts can do what you said earlier, Bryonn, which is one, sometimes that's the first window that makes it someone who isn't used to seeing someone as human or as fully human, more human. And so that it can open the door to take that step. But that's a bit of a tangent. 

So my journey, my origin story as an artist really comes from the fact that I come from a family that's 10 plus generations deep from Houston and Galveston. And on paper, oral tradition longer, I'm sure but on paper, we can trace that, that I have ancestors who were living in Galveston when Juneteenth was proclaimed. And then I'd pair that with the fact that I come from a family of-- either they were artists or they were people who really loved the arts. And so there wasn't a reality or an experience that I had that did not combine my cultural identity and my creative pursuits with my contribution to community. 

And so that was really my entry point into the way that I understood the world and saw the world in all of these ways. So I knew that I would be an artist pretty early on. And the community that I grew up in really was my first, I call it my first conservatory. Theoretically, I have a theory called cultural conservatory, but what it really connects to is this notion, especially in Black communities historically, is that artistic training was really robust in terms of its embeddedness in community life, on par with what someone might think of as a conservatory training that they might get in pursuit of a MFA, that it was that immersive and that it was that rigorous. 

So when I went to NYU my senior year, I shirked the invitation to participate in the showcase that all of the undergraduate theater majors were sort of pushed towards to get agents and movies and all these things. I mean, I had really gone head on into activism as an undergraduate student and studied with John O'Neill, who co-founded the Free Southern Theater, which was the arts branch of SNCC during the Civil Rights movement. 

And so I remember having this talk with my advisor and she said, well, what do you mean you don't want to do showcase? And I said, no, no, I want to create original theater that's really about connecting communities and fighting racism and the pursuit of freedom. And she said, well, good luck. She didn't say that. She was encouraging but couldn't help me. Couldn't help me figure out how to pursue that. 

And what I ended up doing in my senior year was writing my own piece and recruiting some small handful of other classmates to create this piece called Peaches that was really the start of me exploring what does it look like to connect social consciousness with creative impulse from the start, and to create that work and have that work move through communities and connect communities? And that launched my company, my ensemble company, Progress Theater. 

Currently, the work that I'm working on now is a piece called Plantation Remix. One of the other things that's key to my work is acappella musicals that I call Neo-Spirituals. And I call them Neo-Spirituals, really as a shout out to the Negro Spiritual in terms of that liberatory and historic function, but also because it really helps to deprioritize listening to music or to sound solely for aesthetic beauty. That it really is about listening for purpose, because that is the tradition of creating arts and this way is how are we creating art for a purpose and to reach an end. 

So Plantation Remix, the question that came to me, I was teaching at the time at Prairie View A&M University, which is a historically Black college right outside of Houston. My grandparents went to that university and met there in the Department of Music and Theater. But I was teaching there, and one day I'm thinking, wow, it's pretty amazing that I'm at this university that used to be a plantation and has burial grounds, and now it is this site for higher learning in this way. And I thought, OK, that's a pretty appropriate afterlife for a plantation. 

But then I started having these deeper questions, which was when we think about land, how inclusive would the land be if the land could speak and tell its autobiography, and tell its story. Like, what was this land before it was university? Before it was a plantation? What if we started the story there instead of in the middle? And really had to include all of the things along the way. 

And so that paired with this question of what would be an appropriate afterlife for these sites, really began for me to be this journey of trying to figure out how to remix the plantation. How to use performance to give it a purpose and a life that's beyond artifact. That it has been a site for so much erasure or lack of inclusion, and how can performance be used to not only reverse that, but to resurrect the full possibilities of that land in terms of remixing it? And so that is really just where I started in thinking about that. 

And then the last part, I'll say in terms of really what was profound about this notion coming to me at Prairie View was that so often we talk about the school to prison pipeline. And for me, when I think creatively in terms of that work, I think about this plantation to prison pipeline. That there really has been a through line since US slavery and building-- that pipeline was never broken between all of the ways and all of the systems that lead to prison or carceral state or that experience. 

BRYONN BAIN: Can I just sing your praises for a moment? I just want to acknowledge just the rich tradition that you carry on, because these institutions that were not designed for us from the earliest plantation days, we found ways to use them subversively. Whether it's the school room or the church room or whatever it was we found ways to do that. You found ways to do that in your work, starting with NYU, which I also attended. So I know there's a lot of pressure to do things a certain way, but the fact that you actually bucked the system and honored the truth that you needed to live up to I think is so important. 

It's such a powerful example of what we need to do in these spaces because the land is speaking. The land is always speaking to us. We just had all these wildfires in California because they stopped all the indigenous burns, that practice. And so before it was floods and we've seen tornadoes and all kinds of the land speaking all around us. I think we have been trained not to listen by these institutions. And so developing new ways to be in community and harmony with the land, I think, is an important part of what we're doing in challenging the carcerality that we're living under. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: I thank you, brother. I actually want to pick up on that thread, and I definitely shout out Cristal for the work you've done, but Bryonn I don't want you to undersell yourself either, because I think both of you are doing this really important work that you're tying carcerality back through history. If the plantation-- Cristal, you said, if the plantation is the prototype of the carceral state, and I fully believe it is. I mean, you don't have a settler colonial enterprise unless you have an extractive system which requires people to be incarcerated, enslaved in some capacity in order to make it function. We can clearly see that history. 

But then carcerality is a type of paralysis. Bryonn, talking about the gentleman you were speaking about who talked about the Medusa. So carcerality is a paralysis. And it's not just the actual point of being incarcerated. But if the system is carceral, how does that limit your imagination? How does that paralyze you from functioning in the world? To your point, you were just saying, Bryonn, what are we conditioned for? Because that is a type of carceral. What are we not allowed to imagine out of this? 

And then picking up on this thread, then I think of community, which is really, I think so important. Because then what I hear you both doing through your work is increasing visibility for those people we want to make invisible and giving voice to those we would rather not hear. And that feels weird because you're not giving anybody voice, but making space for a voice to be heard, that people would rather not hear, I think, is really important in the work that you're doing. 

And then expanding community to include the land. And so how do you envision? What does-- to the point that it's futures, we're not looking for consensus here. We have different understandings of this. But what does community mean and what does it look like? What are you fighting for? What is the future you're envisioning through your work or through the communities you engage? 

BRYONN BAIN: Well, Dr. Truscott invoked the Panthers, and so I feel compelled to speak to the folks who inspired the Panthers, which was Malcolm X. Because the Panthers, in many ways were the living organizational embodiment of Malcolm's lyrics. He was a spoken word artist. Malcolm's rhetoric and Malcolm's language, they embodied what he was cut down before he was able to actually realize in many ways, the party for self-defense and self-determination. 

And this is actually Malcolm's 100th birthday. So it's even more apropos. He would have been hundreds years in about three weeks from now. So that's significant for a number of reasons. One of the things that he said that makes me think about him as a leader and also as an artist, and I think in our own indigenous communities, there's no real separation between art and culture, and spirituality. That's all one. That's a European, Western construct that divides those things up. 

But Malcolm in his message to the grassroots, he talked about how when you go to the dentist, you get some novocaine in your mouth. So you can bleed all over yourself and not even feel it. You can suffer peacefully. He's like, I don't want to suffer peacefully. I think about that because novocaine is anesthesia. Novocaine is an anesthetic, and the arts should be the opposite of that. The arts is the realm of the aesthetic. 

So if art is about the realm of the aesthetic, it should do the opposite of what anesthesia does. Anesthesia makes you numb, makes you not feel. Art should enliven, should awaken your senses. Should help you see clearer. Hear you hear better. Help you taste, touch, feel, experience your humanity more fully and your connection to other human beings in ways that you have been numbed, desensitized to not feel it. And so we're living in what Bell Hooks would call this white supremacist patriarchal capitalist system around us. That's the carcerality, all those constructs. 

We're living in that matrix but we're desensitized to it. Because we've been in it so long, we've lost a sense of just how oppressive and how incarcerating and how confining it is. The artist's job should be if nothing else, to wake us up to that humanity that connects us so that we can say what? I have a problem with being complicit with folks in Gaza being killed with American tax dollars. I have a problem with being complicit in the fact that people around the world have phones, and young children are being slaughtered in the Congo for the cobalt that's in everybody's phones. 

It should wake us up to feel something, to want to do something to activate us to be engaged. And so that is what I want to be able to create with my art, with my work in education, my work in subverting these educational spaces. To bring folks back together this very Buddhist idea that our separation is an illusion and our interconnectedness is the reality that we are all connected. And COVID showed us this more than anything in our lifetime, we're breathing the same air. We're part of the same organism on this planet together. And until we actually move to that consciousness, we're going to continue to see the kinds of separation and divisiveness that we're engaged in right now. But it's that kind of consciousness that the artist should be moving us towards. And that's why I hope that these kinds of conversations will be a catalyst to push us to get to. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Absolutely. I underscore, italics, bold, underline all of what you said. Here's one of the dreams that I have for Plantation Remix. And it cites an artistic practice that I think people really underestimate. And it's really the practice of rehearsal and the practice of embodiment. And oftentimes I think when people are thinking about things like community-engaged art and having art that is accessible so that people can experience change, they're thinking about bringing art to people, as opposed to making art with people, and giving people the opportunity to rehearse the courage of their convictions, to practice it. And to use the experience of making art to see, do I have what it takes? I believe in freedom for all. I believe in all of the liberatory concepts and theories that I hear about. But do I have what it takes to stand in the courage of my convictions, and then do something in the moment? 

So that's a preface to introduce this dream that I have with Plantation Remix, which is that, so right now 70% of the piece is written-- it's written, it's scored. But the final creation of the piece, the final 30% is something that will be created in partnership with a local community ensemble that's built in relationship to each historic site, in each plantation site. So that the show itself changes depending on the city that we're in and the site that we are engaging in. 

And the generative questions for that part of the piece are really around this. What is freedom? What about living in the United States makes you feel free? What about it makes you feel afraid? And what would it mean if you could feel both free and fearless? What would that reality be? What would have to change? What would have to stay the same? And now let's rehearse that. Let's rehearse that reality and how we can create it. 

How would the plantation or how would these historic sites have to function in order to aid in that practice and that rehearsal. And so that people are involved not only in the art making, but then they get the embodied experience and the experiential knowledge of what it feels like when you are about what you say you are about, when you actually do it, and that ripples over in a different way to the way that people move through the world, and how they stand up and walk in the courage of their convictions in terms of making change on a day to day basis. 

BRYONN BAIN: I just have to echo and throw some support behind your emphasis on rehearsal and how we think about it. I think we have training in maybe different traditions in theater, but that speaks to me so powerfully. I was introduced to Theater of the Oppressed in law school in Lani Guinier classes. And then I went down to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil where that school of theater emerged, and trained in it, became certified in it, and done it in prisons in about 25 states around the country, in Europe and Africa. 

And what excited me about that is two things. One is that in Theater of the Oppressed, nobody is a spectator, everybody is a spec-actor. And in India, where thousands of people are engaged in the practice, they call themselves spec-activists to be even more engaged in the work in a meaningful way that transforms community. But the other concept was the idea that theater-- and this is what Barbara Santos and Augusto Boal, they would say. They would say theater is not the revolution. It's the rehearsal for the revolution. 

Meaning we have to get together and build community and figure out how we're going to actually make it through these situations that we're experiencing. And theater is a space, an intentional, generative space where we get together and collectively imagine transformation. One of the really important things that I think has come out-- my last book is called Rebel Speak. I was inspired by a conversation I had with Dolores Huerta, and Harry Belafonte, which really blew my mind in so many ways. And just I ended up interviewing Chuck D for the book, and Angela Davis is part of the book. And Albert Woodfox, the longest held, solitary confinement survivor from the Angola State Penitentiary, is a part of it. 

But one of the key concepts in Rebel Speak is this idea that the relationship between artists and abolitionists, whether you want to abolish prisons, abolish the police, abolish carcerality in general, one of the key connections is that we both have to do the thing that Cristal started us talking about today, which is we have to imagine something that's not there, something that you can't see. The artist has to imagine, I see a sculpture coming out of this clay. I see a poem coming onto this page. I see a scene coming onto this stage. And it's not there, but we have to see it with our mind's eye, imagine it, have the faith, the courage of our convictions, as you say, to bring it into existence. 

And this is deeply spiritual. And even when Christianity was passed onto us in the most oppressive, enslaving ways, we found ways to make liberation theology out of it. And so the idea of faith is the evidence of things unseen, the imagination. The idea that if I have the faith the size of a mustard seed, I can move a mountain. The original translation of faith in that scripture being the same word as imagination. If I can imagine it as much as a seed can imagine, I can move a mountain. So the idea that rehearsal is a space where we are cultivating imagination is such a sacred concept. 

And if anybody has not yet seen Ryan Coogler's Sinners, I will say one of the most important-- the vampires are not really my thing, but one of the most powerful, poignant pieces of that great piece of his phenomenal body of work is the way that they show the connection between the blues, the juke, the juke joints, and that space where we're creating art, which is tied to the West African griot, which is tied to the hip hop concert, which is tied to African spirituality of the Yoruba tradition, of the Orisha tradition, the Ifa tradition of Candomblé. So seeing all those things in a gumbo together is so important. And rehearsal, as one of my director said, rehears all, we rehear everything together, gives us the space for that collective imagination that is so important right now. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: I want to also just-- I want to shout out a scholar, Tanya Shields, who has a book called Bodies and Bones, and she theorizes around this idea of feminist rehearsal and how important it is, and citing Black tradition and all of the things that we're talking about here in terms of how important it is to rehearse. And I just want to lift that up. And then it's interesting because when we think about rehearsal and aspiration, it's imagination and aspiration at the same time because you're imagining something, but then through the act of rehearsal, you're actually aspiring towards it. Because you're trying to figure out how to make it possible. 

And the way that you do that is through aspiring. And so I talk about this theory of aspiration as a part of Black performance tradition, that you can find a lot of roots in what folks will call Black church and the Black church tradition. But the thing that I really often talk about in terms of the Black church is that it was really historically, certainly in plantation times, it was an interfaith site. It was not the Christian experience as we understand it today. These were people who were coming from various cultures and traditions in West Africa that included all of the spiritualities and cosmologies that you mentioned, Bryonn, and Islam. 

Some people may have been Christian when they came here to be-- when they were enslaved or brought here enslaved. But the practice of the Black church was really one of our first examples of what interfaith organizing could be. An interfaith community building and how much of a debt we owe to the fact that people used that site as a site of rehearsal to preserve themselves, to preserve their cultures, to imagine a future, and to aspire towards it in all of these ways, that, of course, gave us things like Black spirituals and all of its descendants of gospel, blues, jazz, R&B, hip hop, all of these kind of things. 

But that it also gave us the practice of rehearsing what it meant to be in community. To be in community and not be identical, to not be the same. To be in community and to have plurality. To be in community and find a solution. Maybe not one that everybody is happy with, but at the very least, people are not afraid. People are not afraid to attempt to create together and to build together and to imagine all of these new realities. 

And so this notion of faith, and I'm going to say faith instead of religion, but of faith as inclusive, faith as something that no religious lane owns, that the people have access to faith. And that when we enter with that faith, that the possibility that has for freedom as well, and for aspiration, and for rehearsal, also is a creative project. Like, what about thinking about faith as a creative practice of really thinking beyond what you have experienced and what you have seen, and using it to aspire to make something new. 

BRYONN BAIN: Completely resonates with me. And I would just extend it to the diaspora. Throughout the Caribbean, Rastafarianism is also that mix of African traditions with the local traditions, with Ethiopian traditions. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: That's right. 

BRYONN BAIN: Vodou in Haiti. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: That's right. 

BRYONN BAIN: The first successful rebellion of enslaved people. Absolutely. The Candomblé in Brazil, like the largest African population outside of Africa. And even to my mom's side-- my family is from Trinidad. Trinidad is like Indian and African, all mixed in together. My mom's side is from South India. And there's a huge tradition of Ambedkar-- B.R. Ambedkar, who led over half a million Hindus to convert out of Hinduism into Buddhism because they saw the caste system was so oppressive. 

So that way thinking about, you know what? Let's go back to a tradition, an indigenous tradition, because Buddhism is Indian, and find ways to make this liberatory. And that's what we've done. That's what we've done all throughout the diaspora. Wherever you see us, we found ways to make sure we hold on to the Sankofa. We hold on to what came before to help us to get forward. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: I love this. I want to come back to something Cristal said, but then maybe dig a little bit deeper, more into the religion element that you both are hitting on. Cristal, you talked about rehearsal, and I appreciate how both you and Bryonn picked up on the idea of rehearsal and sticking to the courage of your convictions, or understanding the courage of your convictions. But to me, crystal, what I kept thinking back was that quote from Nina Simone that you wove through, that freedom is to have no fear. 

And it strikes me that the rehearsal is also the space where for the first time, people experienced no fear. Am I free enough? Is the question we ask ourselves at this moment. Am I free enough that I don't need any more freedom? This is the condition of the matrix. Is that you're conditioned to say, I have enough. But I have fear of asking for more. And that, then is the lack of freedom in that rehearsal space. 

We're coming off a conversation on education last week. A well-crafted educational space allows you to do something and do it without fear of failure. And then when you realize you can fail without fear, you know what it is to live that fearless life and then it allows you to-- yes, imagination is the thing that is not experienced, but rehearsal allows you to create that experience and make it real. And I think that's the point I'm trying to drive. And that really struck with me is that it is also that very practical feeling that you get from rehearsal. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Absolutely. And the thing is that when you rehearse, it strengthens your belief. And so now whatever ceiling or whatever limitation that you had, because you've rehearsed it and you're like oh, actually I can do this, then there's expansion. And the more you rehearse, the more expansive your belief system is, which means that the more expansive and bold and fearless your attempt is. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: So on this question of religion, one of the things-- I think the fluidity of religious identity is so incredibly important because I think we again, we create these boundaries. If you are X, you have always been X and you can't look at anything else. And that's not the way historically we've lived. This is a very colonial, again, carceral mindset. People are in families, Hindu and Buddhist, but Bryonn, you talked about South Asia. There are sites where people go in South Asia, in the Middle East that are multi-religious sites, and people have different stories or different claims to these sites, but it's generative spaces. 

And I'm struck by how much we use-- and I'm going to stick really with Islamic stories, because that's what I know. But the familiarity, the use of the promised land in the Civil Rights movement and how that's reimagined, that it becomes a-- religion is that space of imagination, rather, where you can take these stories and give them meaning. And so the Quran has the story of Hazrat Yusuf, the Prophet Joseph, and the Quranic version is he's wrongly imprisoned. And he then becomes a vizier. He becomes the advisor to the pharaoh. 

And people focus on the fact that he's wrongly imprisoned in order to fulfill his prophetic mission. But they don't also see it as an indictment of the fact that there were power structures that could falsely imprisoned somebody. Like God was working with the systems that were there, that doesn't mean the system is blameless. It means the system is broken. And then you jump ahead, however many generations. And then you have Joseph's descendants who are enslaved because they forgot the good that he did. 

But because they never got rid of the system of bad imprisonment, of bad carcerality, it became so systematic that you had to incarcerate the whole people. You had to enslave the whole people. And so thinking about how these stories become generative spaces for freedom, by critique of carcerality. I don't know if there's a question in there, but I'm just thinking about these religious stories, lived religious stories, and think about the theological aspect to it. And I don't know if there's any hooks in there for you to jump into this. I'll go to something that might be a little bit more directed. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: A few things that popped out for me, one was just that certainly in Black tradition-- Black American tradition-- this notion of the promised land, that it was depending on how it was used contextually, because the culture and the language and the art was is so high context in terms of meaning and understanding and subversiveness of what people are saying and what they're meaning and what they are trying to code with what they're saying and how they're saying it, how they're doing it. 

But this notion of the promised land as not the hereafter, but the here and now that we will make, or the here and now that we will get to. And that in order to get to it, it requires this not forgetting-- this remembrance. Studying ancestral music and all of these things like this command and religious texts really to remember, and to read and to strive and to move towards, I think is a real common thread, which again, I think lends itself to creativity. So I was thinking of that when you talked about promised land. 

And then one of my most moving experiences when I was in Palestine in 2023, was visiting a church there that had been for many generations under the stewardship of a Muslim family. And how even in a space that we are conditioned to today of thinking of people as being so polarized and separate, and all of these things that the legacy of how people coexisted was really driven through this remembrance of faith and this interconnectivity, that this idea of the holy land, even in that sense in of a promised land, was dependent on people who were caring for each other across traditions. 

And that when we forget that, when the remembrance is not there, and then all of these artificial barriers and separations come up. So I'm also just thinking about the importance of remembrance and how in legacies of carcerality, why erasure is so important. Because when people remember these stories, like the one you told from Islamic tradition, when people remember, the remembrance is generative and then people behave differently. It's the same concept of Sankofa. When we remember, when we go back and get it, we behave differently. And that's why erasure is so important. 

And then combining erasure with sometimes spiritual or religious mandate, it makes it even more dangerous. So as people reclaim faith or try to reclaim these traditions and try to remember, it's really about also putting back what was taken away through these systems of colonization, of slavery, of all of these things that separate what we're naturally inclined to bring together, which is humanity. As a species, we're naturally inclined to come together. We're naturally inclined to include and to trust, and these systems actually, through erasure, pull us apart. So I'm also just thinking about how remembrance has to be a part of the creative project as well. 

BRYONN BAIN: Well said, well said. I'm in one accord with that. As I think about-- Hussein, you're thinking about stories. Stories are so powerful. Stories are how we see ourselves in the world and how we frame our experience and begin to imagine possibilities for the future. So stories are critical. In the context of enslaved Africans not being protected by the legal system, African people here told stories. Br'er Rabbit passed on stories through generations that actually gave us a sense of what was right and wrong, when the American legal system did not protect our humanity, did not believe in our humanity. 

And so stories in all civilizations-- I do think I was talking to my brother Pedro Noguera, a brilliant scholar of education here, another brother from Brooklyn, and he was just saying the other day to me that, I think part of what we need now, though, is not necessarily the hero, but the trickster. And so Joseph is the hero. He buys his family out of slavery. He's sold into slavery, and then he during the famine, feeds his family. Moses goes and liberates his people. I was on a flight going to Palestine myself and sitting next to a Rabbi. He didn't think it was too funny, though, when I told him, I said, I think the burning bush, the Rastas might see that as ganja. He was like, I don't know about that. But in that story, Moses is the hero. 

I think there is an important role for this, the Campbellian, Joseph Campbell's notion of the hero as it functions. But I think maybe what we need in this time is not Achilles, but Elegba, the trickster figure. And I think the appeal of Black culture around the world is that we have had to use coded language and use coded culture and practices to survive in the belly of the beast of the most powerful empire on the planet. 

And so you see that in the spiritual swing low, sweet chariot coming for to carry me home, sending messages in code on the plantation or in Calypso, beating the drums to send messages through the steel pan about slave rebellion and escape and uprising or capoeira, we're dancing to Jenga. And the slave master is like oh, these negroes, they're sipping their mint juleps and just saying oh, they're just so happy they dancing and we're dancing. Dancing? Yeah. We're dancing to Jenga and we're getting ready to whoop your ass with this dance because it's martial arts disguised as coded. So the trickster who uses code and cunning and wits and strategy. There may be a role there that I think is different from the traditional archetypal hero. 

The other thing we need to think about, and this came across in one of the questions that came up, our relationship to the land and how artists have the relationship to the land. I think one of the things we underscore, too, is that so many of the stories are about male heroes, and if we go back to all of our indigenous practices, our pre-colonial, pre-Western, pre-European practices, we see the matriarchal, the matrilineal, the matrifocal. 

Cheikh Anta Diop wrote about this extensively in civilization of barbarism and precolonial Black Africa. But the relationship to mother earth that our native brothers and sisters here in the US remind us of, that relationship to earth as mother. Not that you own the land, but if anything, the land owns us because we came from it. From the dust you came, and to the dust you shall return. So that different sense of consciousness of seeing the hero, not necessarily as the man who's coming to save all the people, but as the trickster, as the mother, as the matriarch who has wisdom that we have not been respecting. 

I mean, what's happened with Roe v Wade is just one of many examples. When the most powerful man in the world can speak about women with absolutely no respect and degrading them and making degrading women acceptable at the highest levels of power, when that can happen, we've all but abandoned our ancestors relationship to the land and to mother. 

We know that the Nile overflowed its banks every nine months, and so that relationship to that cycle was meaningful and part of our spiritual practice and tradition. So I think those are different ways to think about story that we can as artists, embrace to challenge the consciousness that we're up against. And in many ways, it's a battle of stories. We're living in a battle of imaginations. And we have to actually find ways to offer something that is more compelling than what the dominant systems and structures are feeding us. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thank you both for that response and making my statement sound intelligible and making it sound relevant and smart. So thank you for that. I want to come back. Bryonn, what you said, you said something about the coded nature of Black culture. And I think the multiple registers in which marginalized and oppressed peoples have to speak. So it's not legible to the oppressor, so communication can actually happen. 

But it also reminded me of a work a friend of mine has done. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer, Cristal, I think you know Su'ad. Su'ad Abdul Khabeer in her book Muslim Cool, one of her interlocutors, I'm going to paraphrase. I can't quite remember the quote. Cristal, if you remember, please help me out. But one of her interlocutors in her book says, where does culture come from? It comes from those who have the least, because they are the people who have to create. They're the people who have to generate and be understood when they are not-- when nobody wants to hear them. But the other thing-- And then that got me thinking. Stay with me for a second. 

But Su'ad also wrote this really great piece called representation is a trap. And I want to come back because you both talked about how we're socialized to perform in particular ways. So, Cristal, you talked about stepping away from the showcase your senior year, and that was outside the expectations of what was there. Bryonn, you and I have had many conversations about where you perform? How do you perform? What does the Kennedy Center mean and who does it mean to? 

But one of the things Su'ad says in the trap of representation is that sometimes we show up because we are the one. We go up into these places. But if we're not actually changing the structures. If we go up there and we're the one, even if we are speaking a truth, but we don't change the structures behind it, is it actually useful to be present in these spaces? And, I think that's different for a politician, it's different than a laborer, it's different than a media personality. And I'd love to hear your reflections and thoughts about that from a perspective of an artist, intellectual. 

BRYONN BAIN: I'm going to jump in with just something shared with me that has been really meaningful. I had an opportunity for the last 10 years of his life to work with Harry Belafonte. He was executive producer of Lyrics From Lockdown. His daughter Gina directed it for several years, and I had a chance to work closely with both of them. And I remember at one point somebody was saying to Harry, Mr B, you're so great, you're so great, you're so great. And he was like, no, I'm not great. My teachers were great. He said, my teachers were Paul Robeson and W.E.B Dubois. And he said their teachers were great. Their teachers were Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. 

He said, so whatever I have to share with you, it is because I come from that line and from that tradition. And so I think about that as a very humbling on the one hand, way to think about what our contribution is and what we're here to do. But also inspired by Bryan Stevenson, to be reminded that we stand on the shoulders of people who did so much more with so much less. And for those folks, I think the idea that we could be living in a point where I mean, I feel like I'm hearing constantly that folks are feeling a sense of paralysis. And that paralysis is something that was unacceptable for them. It was not even an option. 

I don't know if this is going to the heart of your question, Hussein, but I'm constantly reaching into that crate to pull for what we need in this moment, knowing that they don't have all the answers for what we're up against, but also knowing that they were drawing from a deep well that we also have access to, that we also come from that, and that we are endowed with all of that DNA, to use my man Kendrick's term. We have that DNA. And so it's we have the ability to code it, we have the ability to use it and to take it to all the struggles we have against it. So that's the first thing that comes to mind for me. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Can you restate that question, Hussein? 

HUSSEIN RASHID: Thinking about-- I'm trying to pick up on Su'ad's the idea of the trap of representation. When do we show up? How do we show up? When is it useful? And when is it a trap for us to be there to say, OK, we've been Black-washed, Brown-washed, to legitimize systems that we can't really change. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Yeah. Oftentimes I feel like I vote for all of the above category. Because everyone will have a different strength and a different contribution. And some people can do something that someone else can't do. I'm thinking about Toni Morrison. I think it was talking about how she was not inclined to be the person at the protest or to March. And I'm paraphrasing, this is not an exact rendering, but what she could do during those times was make sure that the autobiographies of the freedom fighters were published because she was an editor, and she could make sure that that happened and that those stories stayed and lived. 

I do think that there are on the spectrum occasions for discernment. And I think it really just depends on where a person is in their rehearsal. Some people are at the place in their rehearsal where they still feel invested in trying to get a seat at the table. And sometimes it might take rehearsing, trying to get that seat to then consider a different kind of rehearsal that says, well, let me build a new table, let me build a new system.

Sometimes, depending on where people are in their journey or in their rehearsal, is that it is about trying to start at the top and really model this notion of well, if the leaders are right, then the people will be right. And then sometimes in that process of rehearsal, as people do it, they say, well, actually we need to get more access to the people. That it's about that change and creativity and creation and generative possibility comes from the masses, not from the top down. 

So I don't know if we can have a human experience where everyone's ever going to be on one accord, that they're also always going to be these journeys going that can contribute. And I'm saying that in my most liberal-minded sense. If you're speaking about Cristal's predisposition, I mean, I'm someone who said, I'm not doing showcase. So if that was 18-year-old Cristal, you can imagine now where I might fall in that system or in that process of rehearsal. 

But I also think about this notion, I think this is Toni Morrison as well, about just making sure we're not distracted. Making sure we're not distracted by trying to achieve representation and inclusion in systems that are never going to be rehabilitated to the ends of freedom, or in the cause of freedom that we are seeking or that we are or that we are looking towards. So that's my current thought around what's possible and what's allowed and how to really respect journey and stay focused on invitation. 

Because I do think, in some ways the trickster can live in all of these environments, depending on what the end goal is and what the definition of freedom is. This is me speaking in draft, but maybe as we aspire toward freedom, the clearer we get about what freedom is, and some of that aspiration and generative thought towards freedom is about undoing what we've been told freedom is, and really thinking about what it could be. 

How can we radically reimagine-- and I'm citing this phrase that I often hear the Inner-City Muslim Action Network, IMAN, on the South Side of Chicago, that has really put so much life into the community through their work on the South Side of Chicago. But this idea of OK, well, if we've been told that freedom is this thing, how do we even reimagine that? That freedom is not a prescriptive state, that freedom is something that we have to discover and we have to aspire towards and really build a new each generation, and in each opportunity, each quest. 

BRYONN BAIN: That was a far more pointed response, Cristal, and I'm grateful for it, but also inspired in my mind something that I want to share as well. Just that I voted for Barack Obama twice, I probably would have voted him for a third time, although I do have issues with his drone strikes and deportations and many other things. But he also reminds us that a Black face on a white power structure is still a white power structure. It doesn't fundamentally alter the structures and systems of realities that we're up against. And I think we need to be reminded of that. 

Like, I don't think Kamala Harris was going to end Social Security, but I also don't think she was going to end the war in Gaza. So I think those are the realities that we're living under. Representation in a superficial way. Representation does matter. It's necessary but insufficient, to use the legal term. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: I think that's really, really important and I want to thank you both for both the practical impact Bryonn and Cristal reorienting us towards questions of community. Where do we play in an ecosystem? Because the trap of representation, I think what you so eloquently deconstructed was that it resides on the hero myth, on the sole hero that comes forward, rather than us being in community and needing to understand how we support and lift each other up. 

And I think that's a really important part of this conversation that you both keep coming back to. It's not about us as individuals. It's about us in community and the roles we play in community with other people that generate this. I want to thank you both really. The fact that both of you keep grounded in community, both in terms of artistic creation, but also what is possible through that, because it's not about me, it's about us, is really so powerful. 

And I think when we think about liberation, it is a systematic change that happens through people, not a person. So really grateful for the conversation. I want to thank our audience. I want to thank the team that put this together. And really just want to thank the both of you from the bottom of my heart. It is humbling and a privilege to know you both and call you both friends and mentors, and I'm deeply grateful for that. So thank you both for this wonderful conversation this evening. 

CRISTAL CHANELLE TRUSCOTT: Thank you. Thank you so much, Hussein. It's just been a privilege and an honor. And I'm so glad you all instructed us to have our mics on mute when we weren't talking, because I was just all kinds of amen corner to you, Bryonn. I was just in full Black Southern woman, mhm and yes, over here with the mics. So I'm so glad to know you and your work and to be on the receiving end of your words, which has just been reminders and affirmations and invitations. 

And just really, Hussein, you being the steward of these kinds of conversations just feels so important, because we rehearsed just now altogether. We got to rehearse and to do that creative work of making a community and a connection in this Zoom moment, that we can continue to rehearse and expand even beyond this. So thank you. Just gratitude. 

BRYONN BAIN: Thank you, Cristal, I'm so grateful to know you. Hussein, thank you, Dean Rashid. I'm really selfishly looking forward to ways we can collaborate, work together, including folks who are watching this who are now a part of the screen right now. Hussein knows Lyrics From Lockdown has been invited to Broadway. 

I've never had any ambition to be on the Great White Way, but if we can make this an opportunity to make folks in prisons around the country, as well as in Africa and Europe get access to theater being produced at the highest level, then we're going to make that happen. And so we welcome collaborations from other folks who want to be involved in that project. And thank you all so much for the opportunity to be with you all here today. It's a blessing. I'm hoping this is the appetizer before many, many entrees to come. 

HUSSEIN RASHID: From your mouth to God's ears both. Thank you. 

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor Religion and Public Life. 

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2025 the President and Fellows of Harvard College.