A Letter from the Director

The Sincerity Project didn't used to be this way.

When we started working on it in 2012, it was supposed to be a one-off show that explored truth, lies, and what it meant to be 'authentic' on stage. We put together 70-mins of material that ended up being a lot about our lives, performed a work-in-progress showing, and then put it away. When we came back to it eight months later to prepare for the official premiere in December 2014, a funny thing happened. This show about our lives, which had felt so vital, so current, so alive, was dead. In less than a year, the show felt out of date, not reflective of where and who we were. As we updated the show, we began to joke and dream: what if we did this over and over again? Wouldn't it be crazy to see the same people in twenty years doing the same things? To see them more wrinkled, more gravity-afflicted. Maybe we'd all make it, maybe we wouldn't.

These dreams and jokes vibrated, felt like a dare we couldn't pass up. So we didn't. In 2014 we staked our claim. We would come together every two years to make a performance, in which we perform ourselves and mine the material of our lives for the show. No one seemed to believe that we were really serious. Many people asked, after seeing the performance, if that was true or just part of the play around authenticity and sincerity.

When we came back together in 2016, the mood was...different. Not somber, certainly, but in that rehearsal room we began to grapple with the enormity of what we'd set out to do. Again, so much had changed. In two short years some of the pronouncements we'd made in the first show, the knowledge we were positive of, all of these felt so simple. We made a show about labor, and about care, care for others and care for ourselves. In the wake of the 2016 show, we began to define this project as a practice.

Every two years, we return to each other, to check in, to hold, to support, and to measure the distance we've traveled, the transformations we've undergone, and the things we've gained and lost. We began to see how this practice, in a way, is building an archive: each performance is a weigh station on a 24-year journey we've committed to undertaking together. Some people may stick around, some may not. Each performance contains parts of us that may persist or pass away by the time the next iteration happens. As we continue, the project accumulates information, knowledge, and evidence. This evidence connects each of us to a specific moment in time, and that moment includes you.

​Thank you for joining us here at year 4 of 24. See you next time.