Power: From the Mouths of the Occupied 1 Favorite 

Statistics are easy to remove ourselves from. A story, you are implicated in, and you have to choose what side you are going to be on.

Patrisse developed Power: From the Mouths of the Occupied in 2015 while she was an Artist in Residence at Kalamazoo College. She was thinking about the impact that Mike Brown’s murder had on Black people in this country, and thought about how no one really talks about state violence and the criminalization Black people face on an everyday basis. Often what hits the media is death, but what about all the Black people who are living? How do we tell the survivor stories? So Power is Black people’s survivor stories of criminalization and state violence. Patrisse has produced and directed shows in Kalamazoo, her hometown of Los Angeles, Seattle, and most recently in Granville, Ohio.

Patrisse brings stories of Black folks directly impacted by state violence to the stage. The multi-media production of POWER utilizes theatre, live instrumentation, and local artists to draw audiences into an experiential narration of the 1951 We Charge Genocide document submitted to United Nations for crimes against Black people in America. The piece asks audiences to unpack the question of how current police state practices across the country reflect genocidal practices named and still relevant in the document. An intergenerational group of Black people perform short monologues based off their personal experience with state violence.