(upbeat music) - Hey y'all, I'm Kiara Butler and welcome to our first episode of "Generation Rising", where we engage in difficult conversations that our community faces every day.

Today my guests are Anthony Andrade and Trent Lee from The Haus of Glitter.

Welcome, Anthony, welcome, Trent.

I'm so excited to be having this conversation with you all today, how are y'all feeling?

- Good, excited to be here.

- All right.

- Same, same.

Very happy to be here.

- Yes, so what is the Haus of Glitter all about?

- Yeah, so the Haus of Glitter is an activist dance company, performance lab and preservation society.

We were founded in Providence and we work in preserving Afro diasporic music and dance.

And we like to say that we are shifting the energetic center of the universe toward queer feminist, BIPOC liberation.

We're all about ferocity, wellness, care centered practice, performance art, and historic intervention.

- Okay and I noticed that the spelling of house is different.

Can you tell our guests more about that?

- Yeah, go ahead.

- Yeah, so, we wanna not only honor our ancestors and queer community who adopted this version of how you spell the word house, we had decided to take that and run with it.

It's also like when you grab designer brands and use them as your house names, kind of similar in that, making it kind of bougie as fancy, but also like, AM said, kind of fierce.

You can spell it the regular way as well, but everyone does it the H-A-U-S way, so gonna stick to that.

(laughs) - Yeah, I think that's really important, right?

It's something that you're bringing into your brand.

It's true to who you are.

How would you define true liberation, right?

Within the LGBTQ+ community?

- So, a proverb that we utilize throughout, you know, our practice and as a haus is that we're not gonna think our way out of racism.

We're gonna feel our way outta racism.

We want everyone to feel, you know, the same, 'cause that connection, you know, hits a spiritual circuit way harder than, you know, physical experience and feeling.

'Cause it's like we feel things all the time every day.

- Yeah.

- But it's like when you internally feel that, you know, a lot of change, excuse me, comes from that, so.

- Yeah so our work is often centered in not just entertainment, but in art, that it of course preserves legacies, but also really makes people feel deeply.

- Look, I was just about to ask you about intersectionality.

I know you talk a lot about race and class and gender within your work.

Why is intersectionality so important when attempting to shift like mindsets?

- Yeah, so we don't just focus on, you know, homophobia, transphobia or neurodiversity or class or racism.

We work to see people as whole human beings and that's something that, you know, we're not used to in our systems in society, we're socialized out of that multiplicity, right, of breaking ourselves up and whether it's the healthcare system or education.

So we're all really kind of mentally attuned to shifting into our mindset where we need to just be one thing, especially in the spaces that we walk into, especially as queer people and as people of color.

What does it look like for us to step into a multiplicity and for us to work through complicated histories and work through dance and music and sound to come to the same page of, through our intersectionalities and get to the depth of like, the spirit of just being human?

- That.

(laughs) - Yeah.

And so you talked about dance and music.

What would you say is your favorite offering that the Haus of Glitter provides?

- [Trent] Honestly, we just love to have a lot of programs and a lot of offerings for everybody versus like, I guess prioritizing the favorite, if that makes sense, but.

- Yeah.

You could have a favorite though.

- Yeah, I mean, you take care of your body throughout all these practices in some way, shape or form instead of how you, I guess, perceive it.

So, but they all have something to do with, you know, wellness for your body.

We have like dance, we have yoga, we have the record label, and we have the Heal Esek Hopkins Campaign.

So these are like some fall programs off the top of my head that we share with the community and we offer to them.

- Are these free for the community?

Would the community have to pay for those services?

How does that work?

- Yeah, so often our programming is free when we do shows, especially for our upcoming show, "The Activist Dance Opera", that we premiered last September, site specific at the home of Esek Hopkins.

We work with the reparations based ticketing system.

So we ask folks to check in with their privilege, with their positionality and buy tickets that way.

So it's really technically donation based.

We've done shows completely donation based and have made like thousands of dollars, just thanks to our community and the support that we have and with this reparations based ticketing system where we ask people to really check in with their intersectionalites and with their privilege and they pay accordingly.

So it's worked for us and it's actually really, it feels like a part of our work in a way as well, yeah.

- And so that leads me to my next question is really about this call to action.

What can people do on that individual level that will help you all, like move your mission forward?

- Yeah, so I can give a little context on our Esek Hopkins Project, we moved into the former home of Esek Hopkins through an Artist PARKIST Residency through the City of Providence and Department of Arts, Culture and Tourism.

- Congratulations.

- Thank you.

So that recently ended formally, we lived there for two, two and a half years, really there to kind of like help bring the community into like shifting into understanding the history, the complex layered histories and making art that responds to it.

Esek Hopkins had an active role in the Trans-Atlantic slavery trade and slavery is horrific on its own, but the death toll in this particular voyage was horrendous, even for that time.

He mistreated British soldiers, he was fired by George Washington and yet he still commemorated himself, right?

So there's a home, Esek Hopkins' house, Esek Hopkins Park, there's a statue on Branch Avenue, Providence, and there's also a middle school filled with brilliant black and brown youth named after Esek Hopkins, this colonizer.

And so our work right now is in response to that and uplifting the stories, the legacies that were left behind, or left out of, Ezek Hopkins legacy, uplifting the lives that were lost on that voyage.

So in our work right now, we're asking folks to sign their petition at healesekhopkins.com to bring as much national attention to this national historic site and one of the most endangered national historic sites in the country, actually right here in Providence.

And just to get privy to the role of Rhode Island in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, people don't recognize that 60 to 90% of the African Americans in this country have come through the port in Rhode Island.

And so, yeah, just being aware of the memorials that are up and checking in with what feels right for us as a community.

- I also want to piggyback on, we had a large march the street performance before and we were going through the community of Chad Brown and like was like having the people come outside and asking 'em if they know about the house.

- Yeah.

- And a lot of people would be like, I have no idea what the house was, we see it all the time, we see it on the strip, but we don't know what it was for.

We don't know what it was about.

We just know that house has stood there for a long time, so no one ever like decided to engage with it or go further deep into it unless you were like, you know, already jumping into this work or doing informational digging and you just stumbled upon this info at the library or something like that.

But yeah, it really shows how much there's so much hierarchy symbolism throughout the community and no one really knows about it at all, have no information on it, so it kind of makes it, I wouldn't say tough, but kind of builds like this barrier to like wanna know more about it.

Like, I don't know and I don't wanna know.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, yeah.

- But it's been interesting to uncover like how the, just the institution of historic preservation is all about maintaining symbols of white supremacy, right?

And we often just overlook it.

We overlook the names of our schools and the statues that are on our street corners.

But when you really look into it, you'd recognize there are missing stories and oftentimes for queer people, for BIPOC folk, there's no representation of the missing story, so that's a core piece of our work and especially in our Activist Dance Opera, "The Historic Fantasy of Esek Hopkins".

- Yeah, I think that's really important, 'cause I'm originally from Mississippi and a lot of people think like racism only exists in the south, or it only exists in the Mississippi.

And so for you all to say like, no, actually racism does exist in Rhode Island and Rhode Island did contribute to the slave trade, like that is very important and the work that you all are doing to teach the community but also empower the community is very important as well.

(audience cheers) (upbeat music) ♪ (indistinct) ♪ ♪ Welcome to my kingdom ♪ ♪ Rock and roll (indistinct) of wisdom ♪ ♪ This is my legacy, who I was meant to be ♪ ♪ Try to (indistinct) for my community ♪ ♪ It's for my people, (indistinct) ♪ ♪ It's a necessary revolution ♪ (upbeat music) (audience cheers) - Is there anything that I didn't ask you all today that you just have to let our viewers know?

- Oh, so one thing that the viewers can know is that we have a show coming up at House of Yes next month, October 16th, so y'all should come through and check out the show, 'cause it's gonna be very theatrical, you know, commemorable and informational.

So.

- And that's in New York City, in Brooklyn.

- Yeah, yep.

- Yeah.

- All right and then how can our viewers stay in touch?

- A good way to stay in touch is the Haus of Glitter, hausofglitter.org and that's H-A-U-S ofglitter.org.

And we also have, I would also say save MLK weekend in your calendar, we're staging our activist dance opera in Providence again.

So we originally did that last September at site specific at the Esek Hopkins homestead, and now we're bringing it to the stage in Providence.

It's gonna be followed by an epic party.

We also have some awesome headliners and we also have the Embodied Futures Conference.

So we have a conference to wrap around the stage performance as well.

And it's really just a way for educators and historic preservationists and anyone who's interested in our work and in the work of undoing racism and learning more about our histories and the transatlantic slave trade and intersectionality and what it means to be Rhode Islander and be aware of our history, so all folks interested in all the things, getting them to kind of be in more of an intentional care centered space for our conference as well.

So that's MLK weekend.

- Wait, so you said a lot within that one like spiel.

(laughs) Can you break down each of those events for me?

I just wanna make sure that our viewers have all the information that they need so when they show up, they're good to go.

- I've been in a space of like, I'm in like promotion space right now, so like.

- Yeah, like no, take your time.

- I'm just always spitting out the info.

- Take your time.

- Yeah, so our Activist Dance Opera is our response to this residency in the form of home of Esek Hopkins.

It's activism, it's dance, it's theater, it's its own album.

It's gonna be a coloring book.

It's gonna be.

- A coloring book?

- Yeah.

It's a curriculum and it's a mermaid fantasy extravaganza.

So we really tell the story of the woman who hanged herself on the first voyage of the slavery ship Sally, actually, and how she turns into a mermaid and creates the Haus of Glitter Mermaid Empire.

- How do you all feel about the mermaid controversy happening right now with there being a black mermaid in connection to what you, can you go in depth about that?

- So, I actually wanted to say something about this, 'cause I've been seeing it a lot.

So excluding "The Little Mermaid" for a second, the movie where they have the black mermaid.

It's like someone said it in the comments on black mermaids on something and it was like, y'all threw all these brown bodies off the ships into the water - Yep.

- and expect not for mermaids to be black?

And I was like, that actually kind of makes sense.

- [Kiara] Yeah.

- But yeah, like, and it's funny, 'cause our, the story that we built around the Esek Hopkins story has something to do with mermaids and how this woman who gets thrown off the ship turns into a mermaid, her and her baby.

And it's just like, yeah, it kind of like falls into that like how all the brown bodies that was thrown in the water has morphed and shift to meet that environment under the sea to live again and be reborn.

So all this talk about brown mermaids or black mermaids, I'm like, yeah, I mean, not far off, I mean, it makes sense if you see one, that's probably someone who was in the water, got thrown in the water and morphed to live in the water.

It's not too far off from the fantasy story, but I'm like, if you see it then, you know.

- Yeah.

- Seeing is believing.

- Yeah and we, we like to say too, like history is a fantasy.

What we read in our history books, what we're taught in school, - Yep.

- they're fantasies, so like we've created our own fantasy and we're centering this one black woman who was named in Esek Hopkins' log book as an individual, of course as an item next to bottles of rum and medicine, woman who hanged herself between the decks.

So she really stood out to us, she came to us through our dreams and so we wrote this story to commemorate her as a mermaid.

And yeah, just coming back to like the name of the Haus of Glitter, we bring people deep into deep feeling and we share stories that are maybe hard to hear, but on top of that, the surface is the glitter, the entertainment piece, the fierce piece that like really brings people in.

And then we kind of take you deep to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and to explore the Haus of Glitter and Mermaid Empire, yeah.

- I don't really like to use this too much, but we have 'em at the tip of the iceberg and bring 'em lower and lower and lower, if that makes sense.

But some people don't really like that phrase of the iceberg, so I'm like, but it's kind of what it is, so.

- [Kiara] Yeah.

And so I cut you off mid-spiel about the events.

- Yeah.

- Do you wanna go more in depth about any of the other ones?

- So yeah, that's the activist dance opera and then wrapping around that event, that's gonna be a show and then kind of turn into a party, and this will be at the Water Fire Arts Center and the location to be determined will be hosting the Embodied Features Conference, a conference all about just how do we feel liberated and how do we do that in an anti-racist way?

So we have kind of ton of programming within that.

It's gonna be super exciting, I'm super excited about it.

We're still working on it right now and just like getting the gears turning, but it's gonna be epic, so I'm super thrilled.

- So wait, who's responsible for putting on all of these events?

Is it just the two of you?

- So the two of us are co-directors along with three others, Assi Coulibaly, Matt Garza, and Steven Choummalaithong.

- Okay.

- So we're five co-directors of the Haus of Glitter.

And then kind of broader from that is the Haus of Glitter Performance Lab, which includes 60 plus artists from our community that kind of support our work - Wow.

- and artists, elders, folks who have been doing this work in lineage before us.

- Yeah.

So like the performers part of Haus of Glitter is the five of us, but the Haus of Glitter as a whole collective, it's a lot of us.

(laughs) - And you mentioned, I heard you say five co-directors.

Is that intentional that you're all co-directors?

Does that align with the true liberation that you all speak and talk about?

- Yeah, so like, oh, like AM said earlier from your previous question that the five of us used to dance together before the haus became a thing.

So we was like, all right, well, you know, if we're always gonna be dance together, let's create something that, you know, takes us even further.

And, you know, we don't really like move up anywhere without the say of everyone in the group, us five.

So if something doesn't feel right, if one of us isn't feeling right with, or if something doesn't sit right with one of us, we'll all like try to work with that or work with that person where they're at and see how we can make it beneficial for all of us.

So collective decisions happen, we're all on the same page.

If one of us ain't on the same page then we gotta go back to the drawing board, if that makes sense.

- Yeah, it kind of comes back to the ballroom queer culture as well.

Like what it means to be a haus and a chosen family.

- Yeah.

- Like shifting from that into an organization.

We don't see organizations today work with that structure.

And so we always ask what does it look like for us to step out of the symptom of white supremacy?

- Yeah.

- The individualism is a symptom that we all, you know, we've all been socialized to think of ourselves just as individuals and we need to climb the ladder and get to where we have to go to be a leader.

But that you know, it comes from indigenous practice, it comes from our ancient practices and the legacies that we carry on to think collectively, to be collective, to act collectively, to make decisions collectively, so yeah, it is very intentional.

- Yeah.

- [Trent] We know the saying, alone, your powerless, but together, strong, we know that, we know that.

It's like we can't preach about it if we're not living it, you know?

- Right.

- Yes, 100%.

I founded an organization and we have an unrestricted work day, we have unlimited vacation days, but we still have an hierarchy.

So for any viewers that are maybe CEOs or thinking to start an organization, I know you say you don't have a hierarchy, but how do you eliminate that when we've been colonized and like indoctrined to believe that we have to have a leader or that type of thing?

- That's a good question.

We check in often.

We think about ourselves as a chosen family.

So when you think about a family structure and about like who's making decisions for the whole group, what feels good, what doesn't?

And also being really intentional around like how we center our care for ourselves and for each other.

So for example, we have family meetings rather than just calling it like a meeting might feel separate, like business wise - I like that.

- to have a meeting, we'll separately have a family meeting to check in with each other emotionally, spiritually.

And we also like, you know, have studied deeply in like anti-racist principles and the ways to undo symptoms of white supremacy like individualism to step into more of a collective mindset.

So without that constant reminder, without calling each other in on things like toxic masculinity for example, which we work through of course as a chosen family, most of us cisgendered men living together.

You know, just being really aware of what those pieces are that those toxic pieces of the ways that we're socialized, being aware of them, continuing to talk about them and call each other in on them.

And just having those regular spaces for us to check in, I think has been like the center of that for us.

- And also doing our part by on our own time decolonizing our way of being or letting go of practices that, you know, we end up adopting from our, you know, bio family or people that we've met through our lives or through system structures that taught us in how to be this way, decolonizing our ourselves and not serving practices that's not really serving us.

And that kind of, you know, highlights that, 'cause when we come back together, you know, we're doing the work on our own.

So when we do come together collectively, it's not like, oh, I'm just here for this and not really doing the work on my, you know what I mean?

So just being mindful of that and always growing in that aspect.

So we can always come back to the table and be like, yep, you know, we're all on the same page still so, glad for that.

- Yeah, y'all dropped in so many gyms.

So changing the names of meetings from like just the regular meeting or an all staff meeting to family meetings, so those small things, but also calling each other out when we're living or thriving or whatever we wanna say in white supremacy, right?

Because there is a benefit to feeding into that system, but really making sure that you're not feeding into that system.

You all said something else that I wanted to pull back for our viewers and I just lost it.

- Can I make a a quick note?

- Yeah.

- You said call each other out, we love to use the language of call each other in.

- Call in.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I go back and forth sometimes, you know, you gotta do the out, though.

- Sometimes, you're right, yeah.

- sometimes, yeah, so I go back and forth on that language, but yes, I do love the language of calling each other in.

And so just to wrap us up and I wanna make sure that people can stay in touch.

So remind us one more time, how do we stay in touch?

Whether it's social media, your address to where you're located, any of the events, remind us one more time.

- You can find us at hausofglitter.org, H-A-U-S. And if you wanna sign our petition or learn more about our campaign, you can go to healesekhopkins.com.

- All right.

- You can find us on other forms of social media such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter.

- What are the handles for those?

- Oh and those handles are Haus of Glitter on some of them.

I don't know which, I think TikTok is also glitter.

- (indistinct), yeah.

- Okay.

- So Instagram is Haus of Glitter Dance Co, Twitter is The Haus OG, and Facebook is just the Haus of Glitter Dance Company and Performance Lab.

You can also just Google the Haus of Glitter Performance Lab.

- Oh, y'all that fancy that we could just Google you huh?

- If you Google us on your maps, instead of the Esek Hopkins Homestead popup, Haus of Glitter pops up.

- It is now, yes.

It's now the Haus of Glitter.

- Oh yeah, that's legit.

So make sure y'all Google them, okay?

I wanna thank you all so much, much for joining us.

We have run out of time and so thank you Anthony Andrade and Trent Lee.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

- And to our viewers tuning in, you can watch past episodes anytime on watch.ripbs.org and be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for your latest updates, thank you.

- Thank you.

- Thank you.

I don't know if I'm supposed to clap, but.

(laughs) (claps) (soft music)