Listening Sessions

Target Margin’s Listening Sessions began with the idea that perhaps the best way to get to know our new Sunset Park community is to just listen.

With an Audience Revolution grant from Theatre Communications Group (TCG), we conducted small informal conversations from July to December 2019 with five diverse community groups:

At each of the Listening Sessions, we asked questions to generate a conversation about participants’ relationship / experience / interest in theater, and what they want it to be in Sunset Park. As an incentive, participants received an honorarium and a catered dinner from a local restaurant. For the WEC and AMPHS Listening Sessions, we also engaged childcare from a local co-op run by Latinx moms and translators to facilitate conversation in Arabic (WEC) and Chinese (AMPHS).

We spoke with a total of 85 people, most of whom were of Latinx (28%), Asian (34%), and Middle-Eastern (20%) descent. With this initial series of Listening Sessions, we plan on creating community guidelines and a program that would bridge our community of artists with our Sunset Park community.

Then the pandemic hit NYC. Like many organizations during the Pause, we worried about the impact of the closures — both within our NYC theater and arts community which is facing indefinite suspension – and within Sunset Park which is largely comprised of low-income people of color who can’t afford to quarantine.

We decided to continue the Listening Sessions to check in with everyone and see if there was anything we could do. We spoke to the companies we presented this season. We spoke to artists who were supposed to have shows that were postponed. We spoke with people we’ve worked with for years. We spoke with community leaders in Sunset Park. We spoke with our Institute Fellows and our Resident Artists. In total, from March to May, we held 14 Listening Sessions with 60 people. They were inspiring, thought-provoking, and incredibly prescient, foretelling the eruption of Black Lives Matter protests that happened just a few weeks later.

Now we are thinking to continue the Listening Sessions because there are always new questions and we never want to stop listening.

Photo by Victoria Linchong