Regional and national presenters of Team Sunshine include FringeArts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Asian American Theater Festival, Ko Festival, and The Barnes Foundation, with works commissioned by the Rosenbach Museum and Library and by PECO/Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. Funding and production support has been provided by The William Penn Foundation, Knight Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Samuel S. Fels Fund, NALAC, The Orchard Project, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Charlotte Cushman Foundation, National Performance Network, Network of Ensemble Theaters, National Endowment for the Arts, and New England Foundation for the Arts.

Team Sunshine Performance is a Network of Ensemble Theaters member, and a 501c3 not-for-profit organization.

OUR VALUES

We talk a lot about our company values, aiming to build our work together in values-based creative, administrative, and educational practices. And what does that mean? For us, it’s meant an ongoing process of articulating, sharpening, and operationalizing our values into each aspect of Team Sunshine's work. We enthusiastically invite every new collaborator to engage in this practice.

Four Team Sunshine values that we attempt to infuse into all our work spaces are Authenticity, Collaboration, Experimentation, and Respect.

Here are some ways we think about these values:

• AUTHENTICITY - We believe that art thrives on the unique abilities, perspectives, and experiences of the people making it. Communicating about the human needs of our collaborators (and ourselves) helps us build healthy, nourishing spaces for all parties to show up in a full-bodied, full-hearted way. Everyone’s got superpowers, and we want them in the room. 

• COLLABORATION - Team Sunshine’s work is deeply rooted in ensemble practice. This means we devise original performances with groups of artists who each have agency to impact the space and the work as it gets built. This ethos extends to our administrative and producing processes – we make all our biggest decisions in collaboration. 

• EXPERIMENTATION - We honor evolution over efficiency. We often reinvent our creative and administrative processes to influence the relevance and impact of our work, which leads to a lot of experiments, both tiny and large in scope. Rather than sticking to the same way of doing things, this commitment to adaptation helps us take updated care of our relationships to the art and to each other.

• RESPECT - The business of art making can often feel callous - our goal is to bring as much humanity into Team Sunshine processes as possible. We acknowledge and value the time and energy of our collaborators. We lean into gratitude, and we try to uphold our responsibilities to our audiences, to our partners, and to each other with integrity. ​

If you’d like to learn about our values and how we practice, keep scrolling!

MISSION (FULL)

Team Sunshine Performance is dedicated to serving as a hub for the creative investigation of contemporary American culture and what it means to be a participant in it. Utilizing the tools of theater, we build original projects and events focused on ways in which artists, audiences, and communities can engage with the pleasures and difficulties of living in our world today. 

The projects we create are primarily focused on urgent social matters and on how we relate to these matters through our identities/experiences as people of color, as queer folks, as children of immigrants, as urban citizens, as people who need to feel deeply connected to a community [1] to thrive. But of course sometimes, we feel STUCK – stuck in our relationships to our identities, stuck in the way we relate to each other as a culture/society, stuck in our understanding of our responsibilities within a community, and stuck about what to do in response to the political and racial and social crises that impact us, that take a toll on our psyches, that create obstacles for us all to live as fully as we can. And so we work to find artistic, creative ways to travel collectively through time and space and see if we can move from STUCK to UNSTUCK. 

And as people who desire more from our art and from performance in general, we are committed to EXPERIMENTATION, guided by the belief that creating new kinds of performance can help shape and mold powerful visions for the future [2] and imagine healthy and nourishing [3] pathways to get there. As cultural workers and leaders we ask What can we do now that might help build the world we want to see – not just next year or in 5 years, but in 25, 50, 100 years? Long after we are gone? Inspired by activists and cultural organizers who think in timeframes beyond our own lifetimes, we are starting to ask BIGGER and more expaaansive [4] questions and work towards holding complexity in the face of a world and media that can tend to flatten the important nuances of life. We do all of this because we want our art to matter, deeply. Because it has to.

Since the company’s founding in 2010, Team Sunshine has created various works of different shapes and scales (ensemble casts from 2 to 100, outdoor spectacles, intimate audio pieces, dance and theater hybrid performances, projects that last from 10 mins to multiple decades). We make things we call “theater,” sure, sometimes spelled “theatre,” yes, but it’s really not what you might think. You see, we aren’t all that interested in telling stories in the conventional-theater way, with exposition and conflict and resolution and a narrative arc. We strive to release assumptions about what a “theater” experience should look like and ask ourselves, “what’s a different way? what’s a better, more sophisticated approach?” When we make work, we love clarity, and we also like to activate the parts of our brains that wander and imagine and get curious, and so we will intentionally oscillate between hyper clarity and visual/kinesthetic collages that speak to the subconscious and the intuitive. We think that words are an important element in the tool kit, but the complete story can’t be told without activating the bodies on stage. And when we think about our relationship to audiences, we have committed to the idea that by making the threshold between performer and audience thin, an exchange can occur. We don’t always want the audience to sit quietly in the dark. Because we want that exchange to matter, deeply. 

Over time, all of this thinking and doing has forced us to reimagine our creative process over and over and over. And because we never repeat the same thing, all of our projects end up looking and feeling different from one another. This is great! And also we’ve learned this can be a bit challenging for the conventional ‘theater-goer.’ However, we consider it all a feature and not a bug. 

Ok – you have questions? Maybe these will suffice as answers.

Why “team”? 

We do everything collectively, and the thing we make together is better than the thing any of us could make alone.

Why “sunshine”? 

Great question. This is probably the most difficult part of our company name for us. If we had to explain it, Sunshine is energy. Sunshine clears the cobwebs. Sunshine warms and loosens the muscles. Sunshine can be powerful. Sunshine is internal.

Why “performance”? 

We all experienced a kind of freedom when we got into the arts. Freedom in our imagination, freedom in our bodies, freedom in our joy and play, freedom to find a purpose and execute it. And we now see that theater has tools that are intrinsically about connection and collective processing and action. We can see how powerful it is because we experienced its power, and now we’re looking to find the ways that we can harness its power for good.

If you still have questions, we may not have the answers but we encourage you to come through to one of our events and check us out. THANKS FOR HANGING OUT THIS LONG. WE ARE TEAM SUNSHINE, AND WE ARE GRATEFUL YOU ARE HERE BECAUSE WE LITERALLY COULDN’T DO IT WITHOUT YOU.

[1] Us and our people – with every project, we build community – and when we say community, what we mean is a group of people that are bonded by a common cause. Be it imagining a future without gun violence, or making visible the challenges of a marginalized experience, or building collective care as we try to combat climate change. And when we build this community, we seek to create it with real intention and love. We become SO CLOSE to the people we are connected to through a project – they become our friends and compatriots. We are a people that LOVE special, connected, authentic relationships. And so, for every project, we gather people, we bond through a common cause, and we build rich, authentic relationships along the way. That’s how we do it. Not because we should or it's the right way to build community, it's because WE are built that way.

[2] Future visioning – embedded in all of our work is a relationship to time. There is a fascination in our company with the notion that time has a power unto itself – it marches on, or it lands on us, and that impact can be painful or hard. How things change, how some things don’t, how little power we have in truly determining our fates. And yet, we cannot sit idly by. Is there a way for us to huddle together, to lean on each other, as we reflect on the passage of time? Is there a way in which we can take hold of our fates? Can we make even the smallest of impacts during our short stint on this earth with our tiny piece of art? Change only happens in small ways, and as people invested in young people’s futures, we feel like we NEED to try. And to then commiserate when we fail or when it all feels like too much. We can be weak and strong at the same time because we contain multitudes.

[3] On the concept of nourishing: for those of us that work in the performing arts, we know that our fields are under-resourced. There is never enough money to do things the way we truly want to do them (I mean, sometimes there is, but what a rare and beautiful thing that is). And we know that this lack of money sometimes means a lack of time, and then humans get squashed in the machinery of product-making and scarcity. We don’t want to do that. We don’t know what to do with our lives other than make this art. It's the way we process the world and live in community with people. And yet, so many performance-making models we’ve been taught feel so harmful. We’re after something different. It’s not enough for the work to be not harmful… What if the process for making work was actually nourishing? What if it fed us, spiritually, more than it extracted from us? What if we can imagine a better version of all of this and could take steps toward manifesting that future? These What if’s are enough for us to try.

[4] Intentional typo.