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Author: Danielle Aguilar, Phd Student, Education Foundations, School of Education

Maya Osterman is the Program and Partnerships Director for , an organization committed to disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline through participatory theater. Mirror Image Arts serves the Denver Metro area, including Broomfield and Longmont. Maya is a Theater of the Oppressed practitioner, which is a form of applied theater that engages audiences as both spectators and actors. Maya has over a decade of experience engaging with and implementing a Theater of the Oppressed praxis. Maya graciously agreed to serve as my Engaged Arts and Humanities Scholarship Mentor. Below is an interview to learn more about Maya and her community engagement work. Highlights of the interview include turning values into actionable items and an example of repairing harm.

Let’s begin by telling us about who you are, your background, and how you came to your current role at Mirror Image Arts.

I have been with Mirror Image Arts for 7 years. My journey in applied theater began in high school. My mom was super active in Planned Parenthood. That is kind of a maternal lineage. My grandmother was super involved in Planned Parenthood and women’s rights have always been a part of my world. While volunteering with Planned Parenthood, my mom learned about a theater company for high school students where they would become peer educators around AIDS, HIV and teen pregnancy. The theater company would perform these plays and then have small peer-to-peer talk backs. The idea was teens were going to be more comfortable talking about those issues with other teens than with adults. That was my introduction to this kind of work and I fell in love with it. 

As I transitioned to CU ��«����Ƶ as a first year student, I knew I wanted to continue theater. I became aware of applied theater. After the play ended, the characters stayed in character on stage and the audience got to ask them questions. The questions that people were asking were so wide ranging. The cast reset the play and asked people to say “stop” when they thought something in the play needed to change.Someone from the audience actually got to go up into the scene and try to make a new choice. 

During my time at CU, I got involved in Forum Theater, which comes from Theater of the Oppressed. Forum theater engages spectators as both spectators and actors, spectactors, which redistributes power and allows spectators to stop, influence, and change the performance. Theater of the Oppressed was created by Augusto Boal in Brazil in the late 50’s early 60’s to try to understand what was happening in his own country. When I joined Mirror Image Arts seven years ago they were just starting to learn about that work and it was the perfect synergy to be a facilitator that had Theatre of the Oppressed experience.

How have your social identities and experiences informed your commitment to community-engaged work?

The identity that had a deep impact on my upbringing and work I do today is being Jewish and Israeli. In Judaism there is this idea called tikkun olam, “to repair the world.” From a very young age you are taught that you are a part of something larger than yourself, there is a larger community around you that you need to be engaged with. Part of how you repair the world is mitzvah, “acts of kindness.” That set the tone in my house of how we engage in the world around us. One of the greatest holidays in Judaism is Passover. This is the story of us leaving Egypt to free ourselves from slavery. Every year at Seder we ask what happened to us then, and what does that look like now in the modern world? Who is being impacted now? From a young age, those conversations of oppression and impact of community outside of self was a part of my upbringing. Additionally, my mom was deeply involved in philanthropic work. 

During my time in Interactive Theater Project, I dug deep into what my white body identity and what that means, in terms of my privilege and the impact I have on others. How will I engage all of the complexities that come with being a white bodied woman in a field full of white bodied women? Maybe the intention is good, but the impact is extremely harmful to communities.

That constant reflection and personal work around just who I am and how I show up has been a deep part of the work. My exploration of what a true ally or advocate means and my privilege and power to step up in certain spaces and step back because it is just not my place. My title gives me certain privileges and power. And I am the one crafting how we do the work so I have to be thinking about those things on a regular basis as I engage in the work and train others on how to do this work in their role.

What values / theories / world-views guide your praxis with the communities you work with? 

When I think about how I sit into my values or world views and allow that to ensure that I do the work in a way that I can look back and feel proud of, a lot of that is connected to true embodiment of those values not just in the workplace but in how I engage in the world around me and all the relationships I have. A big part of Mirror Image Arts is that we are relational. Humans actually need other humans. We have to move away from transactional experiences and take the time to dig deeper and actually be with people. We have a lot of different kinds of sayings and concepts. We are constantly in reflection to ensure that it's not just happening outwardly with communities we work with but inwardly within our organization. For example, the idea of slowing down. How do we actually slow down and get intentional and present with each other? How do we understand that when working in places of trauma, healing centered engagement, mindfulness and taking care of self is just as important. 

First, we do the work ourselves, because we are never going to ask someone to do something we aren’t comfortable doing. At the end of the day we all have experienced trauma in different ways and we all need to work towards collective healing and resilience. Those are some of the things that are at the forefront of how I do the work and how Mirror Image Arts engages with the young people we work with. Another thing is remembering that everyone just wants to feel valued, seen and heard. How do we make sure the experience we are creating ensures everyone feels valued, seen and heard? How do you come into spaces with young people not with judgment but with curiosity? 

It begins with genuinely believing that young people’s experiences matter and they have a lot to say. If you just take the time to ask them questions and really listen, they have a lot of the answers that adults don’t want to hear or don’t think they should hear. Adults were young people too who didn’t have these experiences so I have to give them grace as well. Young people see the world differently and what I appreciate about them is they say it like they see it. Really trying to avoid tokenizing a young person, creating a space and uplifting voices in a way that again works toward collective healing is important. 

In order for us to see and do something different we have to imagine something different. We are a theater based organization, so imagination is key. That is a really big part of our work. Living into the value of joy. Joy is revolutionary. People being able to be joyful and proud to live in their bodies and take up space is political. How do we create those spaces for young people when they are developmentally in a moment of the exploration of, “Who am I and how do I fit into this world?” Those are some of the things that I make sure are brought to the forefront of our programming.

One of the other values we live into is the freedom to fail. That is where we learn and grow the most. If we acknowledge that from the beginning, a mistake is going to potentially happen so when it happens what are we going to do about that? Being upfront and transparent from the beginning is one piece.

How would you describe your philosophy when it comes to designing and implementing inclusive communities? 

One of the first things I always think about is that Mirror Image Arts are always the outsiders. We’ve purposely positioned ourselves to do that. Coming into a community with the understanding and acknowledgement and transparency, from the beginning that we are the outsiders is critical to how we do the work. It means that we’re acknowledging that we are not the experts in the space, the community members are. What we can do as outsiders is be curious to understand and learn the entire picture and be a support. Sometimes when you are in it too deep, it is just really hard to see things. That is where our name comes from, mirror image. Our objective is to have someone feel seen. We do our best to put up a mirror and ask are we seeing this correctly? Is this how you see yourself? 

We work really hard to ensure our staff are representative of the communities we work in. But also, because we are trying to disrupt oppressive systems, as an outsider you sometimes are uniquely positioned to be able to put up a mirror to the oppressive system and say, “Hey! As the outsider, this is actually what I see happening.” There is a lot of nuance in what it means to be the outsider but that is how we see our ability to disrupt a system versus dismantling. We see our role as the ones to begin to disrupt and reimagine so that those who are actually in the space or system, have their own ownership to disrupt or dismantle.

Based on the work that you have been doing, what are some of the things that you have seen as direct benefits to community-based work for the community members?

We work in schools and libraries and detention centers and each space is very different with different needs. The things that it makes me think about are the concepts that root us in this work, theater and education. Everyone's an expert in their own lives. This is influenced by Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed. Within the theater world, there are typically the performers and then there are the spectators and there is this 4th wall where spectators passively sit and take in an experience and then everyone goes their own way. What Boal created was something called the spect-actor. Which is the idea that makes total sense, everyone is an actor. We do it every day. We improvise conversations and we put on different roles based on who we are with and where we are. We all have the tools to be performers! Boal broke the 4th wall to create Forum Theater where you invite the audience into the situation. It is a rehearsal for reality, a rehearsal for their own reality. All we have to do is create the platform and let them do the work to make their own meaning of the experiences. 

When we go into communities we don’t make things up. We create theater that is directly based off of the stories they have told us. We take it very  seriously and honor being told those stories. We want to do them justice and reflect them back correctly. If we have done our jobs correctly that is the moment when a community feels seen and heard. They get to try out these different ideas even if it's our young people in our fourth grade program. We create a world which is the world they live in everyday. And then they get to explore what that is like for themselves. People are smarter than we give them credit for. 

Dorthy Headchote is an educator and she created a concept called Mantle of the Expert. It is similar to the idea of spect-actor. If you position someone in a way and say, “I actually do value and see you as an expert in own life,” then that allows them the ability to sit in that and think, “I do know some things and if I take the time to pause and really think about my world or the experiences that I had or what that has done to my community, I actually do have ideas and some thoughts about what should or shouldn’t be happening”. That is a big piece of how we live into the work.

The hardest aspect is doing that in the most oppressive systems, which is with our incarcerated young people. We are still navigating what happens when our “community” is not a neighborhood but young people in a classroom or a space within a detention center. We create a different experience for them and they have this amazing 1-2 hours a week where they can be someone different and express themselves freely. But the moment the bell rings or it is 5 o’clock, they are spit back out into a system that works differently by “putting them back in their place.” That is some of the work we are exploring now. I believe as practitioners you have to get messy. You are going to mess up. It is going to happen but if you are too nervous to do the work because you want it to be perfect then you are never going to do it. A big piece of it is knowing how you take ownership of the mistake and move forward. Those moments can be beautiful moments of restoration, transformation and healing that actually builds a stronger relationship. That is the work that takes time. There is no answer except time and intention to not just disappear.

Community-engaged work is messy. How do you build and repair relationships?

At the forefront of doing this work you have to acknowledge we are human and therefore we are going to make mistakes. We all only know what we know until we know more. From the beginning we need to set up a space so that when something happens, it isn’t explosive but it is a transformative experience. We spend a ton of work on the front end to build trust and accountability. That is a big one. Role clarity and accountability around what we are trying to do, who’s doing what, and what happens if that is not happening. If you don’t acknowledge that it will happen at some point, then you are not going to be ready for it. If and when that does happen, a big piece we think about is what is the mindset you are going into that situation with? Are you going in with shame and defensiveness and freaking out? Or because we are deeply rooted in social emotional development, do we see it as an opportunity for growth and transformation? 

One of the things we really teach our facilitators is you are going to make mistakes working with young people. You had a bad day, you are short, you yell at a young person or you don’t fully listen or you told them you were going to do something and the next week you forgot, those might seem like little things to us but they are really important in a young person’s life. It can have a deep impact around the trust that a young person has towards an adult based on previous experiences. Instead of just pushing it aside we say, “No it is important to acknowledge.” It is a perfect opportunity for you to model that adults don’t know everything and that they are learning too and they can own and acknowledge when they mess up. 

An experience that has stuck with me personally was when I worked with a young person inside a detention center for a few years. The group kept asking, “When are we going to do a real play?” Up to this point we had been devising an original play. But they wanted to perform a play that someone else wrote. I agreed and I picked this play. I started to get into the mindset of product versus process because there was a date this thing was going up and it was going to be the first time outsiders were going to be invited in. There was a lot of pressure. People are coming, if this goes well we might be able to grow our work. I had originally cast this young person in this part and then they found out that half way through that they would be paroling out and would not be there in the final performance. For anyone who has worked inside a detention center you will know nothing is ever the same and every program you have different young people than the week before and you can plan as much as you want. It is never going to go how you imagine. We were getting closer to the performance and without even realizing it, I took away their part and gave it to someone who was going to be there on the final day. They were upset and became disruptive and defiant and all the typical behaviors when a young person has been betrayed and trampled over. It took me a moment to realize it. My first reaction was like why are they doing this? What is going on? And then they said an outward comment to me in front of the group that was like, “Mmm aha, that’s it and that is a valid comment.” I had the rest of the group continue to rehearse and I asked them if they would be willing to have a conversation because I could see they were frustrated with me. And even that, the tone in how I asked if they would be willing to talk was not how the adults in their life usually react. It is usually, “Don’t be disrespectful” or “Because I said so.” Instead I was like, can we have a conversation. I started by saying, “I am so sorry that I messed up.” And they were like, “What?” I said, “I see what I have done and I’m sorry and I’m here to have a conversion to see how I can repair what I have done because this relationship is really important to me.” They said, “You always talk about that it is process over product and that it is all about our transformation and then you wouldn’t even allow me that opportunity anymore.” I let them speak and I had to be open hearted and willing to say, “Yeah you are totally right. I did that and I have to sit in that.” As adults, we are good at wanting to fix and wanting the answer and I had neither. I had some ideas but that is not what they needed at the moment. And if I came in and said, “This is what we can do,” then I am taking away their power of the experience. So instead, I have to be willing to sit in that discomfort of my mistake and then let them take ownership of the narrative moving forward. How do you want us to move forward? What would feel good to you at this moment? All of that, and they were not used to adults engaging in this way. And we were able to work through it. 

Burn out and/or wavering boundaries are common in community-based work because of our personal ties and/or passion and commitment to the community and work. Can you talk a bit about how you sustain motivation and nourish yourself while giving to others?

This is the life long journey of practitioners. The secondary trauma stored in our bodies is real. I worked with a therapist for a long time and that was super helpful to me. However, if you are in an organization that doesn’t believe in health and wellbeing, it doesn’t matter because you are on your own. There is a huge disruption that needs to happen within the non-profit industrial complex around doing whatever it takes because you are passionate. At Mirror Image Arts it is a practice that every quarter you have to take a mental health day.  We are saying, “Your mental health is so important that you have to plan for it. So every quarter you are going to pick a day to intentionally take off and use in a way that supports you.” All the personal things can only get you so far. That is why collective healing and resilience at an organization level is critical to support individual work. You need an organization to fully embody mental health and wellbeing.