FPP’s Commitment to Anti-Racism
For more than 25 years, Forbidden Planet Productions has provided a community for students in theatre at GW, but that community has not truly been accessible to all students. White supremacy and anti-Blackness have pervaded our organization, and action to combat this racism is long overdue. So, FPP is making a commitment to prioritize anti-racism and to be more intentional in the community we serve.
Our long term goal is to create an environment that invites BIPOC to join our company, find a community within our membership, and feel empowered to lead -- and not in tokenized roles or to fill diversity quotas. We hope to ultimately produce more shows written by BIPOC, directed by BIPOC, and that celebrate BIPOC, and we know that it is our responsibility to create this reality.
To meet these goals, we must address the ongoing ways in which we uphold white supremacy at every level within our org. To start that process, we have outlined preliminary actions that we can take at the institutional level, the production level, and the casting and recruitment level to combat white supremacy.
At the institutional level, we will:
Our long term goal is to create an environment that invites BIPOC to join our company, find a community within our membership, and feel empowered to lead -- and not in tokenized roles or to fill diversity quotas. We hope to ultimately produce more shows written by BIPOC, directed by BIPOC, and that celebrate BIPOC, and we know that it is our responsibility to create this reality.
To meet these goals, we must address the ongoing ways in which we uphold white supremacy at every level within our org. To start that process, we have outlined preliminary actions that we can take at the institutional level, the production level, and the casting and recruitment level to combat white supremacy.
At the institutional level, we will:
- Create an anonymous feedback form to allow members of color to freely express concerns about FPP policies and practices so that our board can restructure and resolve these issues promptly.
- Hold regular office hours with the Diversity and Inclusion Director to provide another forum for members to present their concerns or to seek out resources to bring justice for harms committed against them.
- Ensure all auditions, proposals, and board applications are included in the MSSC list-serv to make sure we are reaching out to all GW students and not just white students.
- Forge relationships with cultural performance orgs on campus by promoting their events, encouraging company bonding at their performances, and passing along pertinent audition and proposal information to their boards.
- Never produce a show with harmful stereotypes and publicly disclose any plans to alter a show to avoid promoting stereotypes.
- Require board to complete a D&I report during the show-picking process to act as a check against implicit biases and as a reminder to consciously consider how race will influence these shows so that all potential directors and shows are given thorough consideration.
- Include questions about diversity and inclusion in the proposal application so that it is on the forefront of directors minds, not an afterthought.
- Make the proposal process more transparent by offering application workshops so that directing is not only reserved for our predominantly white members who have inside knowledge about the process.
- Require production teams to complete a D&I report during the casting process to again act as a check against biases and ensure the casting process is race-conscious.
- Change the language in character descriptions so that they don’t assume white as default so as not to deter members of color from auditioning.
