2020 You Would Probably Like A Word With Future You. Team Sunshine Is Here To Help.
A production still from Team Sunshine’s The Sincerity Project (#3), 2019.
For a decade now, Team Sunshine has been bending what it means to be a theatre company with enough purpose to prove something pretty cool, over and again: If you do it right, it not only will refuse to break, it might even expand. This notion has been present throughout their works — which as a rule blend in dance and movement, break open the fourth wall like it’s a can of LaCroix, and even turn the writing process itself into community activity.
Nowhere has all of this been on deck more than in The Sincerity Project — what we’ll call a system of plays examining Team Sunshine’s own individual personal lives, spanning 24 years, each set to appear every two years. Or at least it was supposed to be every two years. Like all other traditional IRL theatre, The Sincerity Project too has been interrupted by the pandemic.
But not really. True to Team Sunshine’s style, they’ve pulled The Sincerity Project into not just the digital realm but also in the future-tangible realm. (A realm so obscure, we just named it!) As a spinoff of The Sincerity Project, they’ve introduced something called #DearFutureSelf: To write to your future self, whereupon they will hold onto said letter, to be released back to you at a future date, as we all say now, when it will be safe to do so.
As they explained in an email last week:
In this strange season, time has both compressed and expanded, and our beloved ways of gathering in person, gatherings that nurture and sustain us, have become temporarily inadvisable. As a collective, before the Pandemic, Team Sunshine was already experimenting with ways of thinking ourselves into the future. When we began The Sincerity Project, in 2014, we committed to a practice that would carry us through 24 years. Building on what we’ve learned, we want to invite you, our community and friends, into our practice.
So this is an invitation from Team Sunshine. An invitation to optimism, to embrace the difficulties we’re in and to send a missive to the future--to your future. Take this as an opportunity to document your experience and/or set an intention for what comes next. We’d like to be the time capsule. Team Sunshine will collect letters to your future self and we’ll keep them safe until we can gather again. In the future. As we like to say, maybe it will be beautiful.
Maybe it will be beautiful! Not a bad mantra right about now.
To find out more about Team Sunshine’s #DearFutureSelf, click here.
