Christopher Rivas is a playwright, author, podcaster and actor.
He’s also the current artist in residence at ASU Gammage, where he’s been working on a theater piece called “How To Get Free.” It’s billed as a three-part “immersive performance ritual [that] tackles the human condition head-on, revealing how contemporary life bears striking parallels to the enduring curses of Sisyphus, Tantalus and Narcissus.”
Rivas also described it as a sort of therapy session for America. It picks up on some themes Rivas has explored previously in his book and podcast series “Brown Enough.”
On June 27, there will be a free sneak peak of the still-in-progress “How To Get Free” at the Media and Immersive eXperience (MIX) Center in Tempe.
They Show spoke with Rivas earlier this year. He mentioned that he sees art as something that can “wake us up” and inspire people to use their voices.
SAM DINGMAN: Tell me a little bit about What you mean by art galvanizing people on a grander scale? Like, what do you envision when you think about that?
CHRISTOPHER RIVAS: Oh, liberation. What do I envision? I envision big things. I know what my book has done. I know what my plays have done. I know what even the podcast has done. To heal people in a small ways. Like when I get a message that someone says, "I used to let people call me Angela, but my real name is blank." You know, "I've stopped straightening my hair because I listened to this. I broke up with my partner because of this."
That's real, too, that's changed, that's powerful. I get a ton of messages of people, you know, taking the steps to enact change. For their own healing, their own joy, their own freedom. And so when I imagine on a larger collective scale, if someone in Arizona comes to see "How To Get Free" in November, I imagine a room full of people. Leaving the space different than when they came in. With a little more spaciousness inside them to see their actual place in the world and to see other people. And maybe they care for other people more.
And I do believe if you care for someone else a little bit more, if you let someone else into your life a little bit more, that has a ripple effect.
DINGMAN: Thank you for sharing that. I feel like that is such a lovely specific example that doesn't get talked about enough when we talk about the potential for art to create change. ... I think skeptics of that sometimes look at that as, "Oh, what? Somebody's gonna go see a play or listen to a protest song or something — and then what? Call their congressperson?" And sure, maybe they'll do that. But it seems to me it's so much more about what you're describing, that someone has a very personal reaction to something that they see in art. And all of a sudden, they make a fundamental change.
RIVAS: And art is so cool because if you go to therapy, cause you want to be happier, you have to be prepared to do the work. There's a lot of people listening to this right now who go to therapy. and they know what they're gonna talk about. If you know what you're gonna talk about already, you're not really, like, allowing the work to happen, you know. You've came with the script.
In a relationship, you kind of can be taken by surprise. And that's like the beauty of relationships. Like a person can really see you if you let them. But art? Man, you can walk into a museum, be bored out of your mind, look at a painting and start crying. You don't know why. Right?
You can go to a play and you're like, "I don't even wanna be here right now." And then all of a sudden you wanna, you wanna call this person and change your life. You wanna go travel. You wanna quit your job. You wanna care about somebody.
Art can can find the cracks in you in between the armor that you didn't know existed and make them wider.
DINGMAN: Right. It like plucks a string you didn't even know was —
RIVAS: 100%.
