Barbara Sellers-Young’s “Oregon’s Sanctuary Stage: Giving Voice to the Voiceless” belongs to a significant later phase of her work in which the arts are understood less as objects of interpretation than as procedures for reorganizing civic life. The article is brief, but its implications are larger than its length might suggest. It asks what theatre becomes when it is not primarily a site for the transmission of dramatic literature, nor even simply a forum for political messaging, but a carefully structured environment in which communities can come to voice. In this account, the stage is neither neutral platform nor symbolic public square in the abstract. It is made, through process, into a sanctuary: a place of emotional and physical safety, a setting for self-discovery, and a threshold across which a group’s internal speech becomes publicly consequential.
The essay opens by locating Sanctuary Stage within a broad cultural transition from what the James Irvine Foundation called a “sit-back-and-be-told culture” toward a “making-and-doing-culture.” Sellers-Young does not cite this shift merely to celebrate participation as a contemporary virtue. Rather, she uses it to clarify a structural change in the arts: authority is moving away from a model in which meaning is produced by artists and consumed by audiences, toward one in which cultural production itself becomes shared social labor. This is where Sanctuary Stage enters. Sellers-Young presents it as a form of community-engaged theatre that inherits something from Brecht and Boal—especially the breaking of the fourth wall and the conversion of audiences into active participants—yet she is careful not to collapse it into older models of political theatre. Its work is less agitational than relational. It seeks not simply to expose social contradictions, but to create the conditions under which a “micro-community” can narrate itself in its own terms and bring that narrative into dialogue with a larger public.
The term “micro-community” does substantial conceptual work. Stone and Ivey use it to describe a minority or affinity group sharing some common location within social life—“ethnic origin, religious practice, gender identity, sexual preference, employment, etc.”—without imagining that such a group exists outside the broader civic body. Sellers-Young emphasizes that one can belong to a town and to a more specific collectivity at the same time. This matters because Sanctuary Stage is not inward-looking identity affirmation. Its distinctive function lies in making a bridge. The micro-community first convenes in relative safety, in story circles and workshops, where participants can speak without fear of judgment; then the resulting production is staged for mixed audiences, extending that protected interior work into public recognition. The theatre event thus has two linked sanctuaries: an internal one of trust-building and a public one of performance and discussion.
This expansion of the idea of sanctuary is among the article’s most telling interventions. Sellers-Young begins with the historical meanings of the word—sacred refuge, asylum, protection—and then notes its contemporary political charge in the United States, especially around immigration and so-called sanctuary cities or states. But Sanctuary Stage is not reducible to legal shelter. It is a cultural practice that translates sanctuary from jurisdiction into process. Sanctuary is no longer only “an escape from”; it becomes, in one of the article’s crucial formulations, “entering into an act of self-discovery and self-understanding in relationship to other members of a local community and its environment.” This sentence is characteristic of Sellers-Young’s later thinking. The self is not prior to relation; identity is clarified in embodied exchange. Protection is valuable not as withdrawal from the social, but as the condition for re-entering it differently.
That emphasis on process rather than product is wholly consistent with Sellers-Young’s larger intellectual commitments. Across her scholarship, technique is never merely instrumental: it shapes consciousness, perception, and social possibility. Here the relevant “technique” is not a dance form or actor-training method but a communal dramaturgy composed of long-term listening, facilitated conversation, improvisation, collaborative scripting, and post-performance dialogue. The article repeatedly stresses duration and patience. Projects emerge through “months of story circles” in which participants develop mutual support and respect. Trust is not an atmosphere accidentally surrounding the work; it is the work’s primary medium. Only then can a script evolve that does not impose representation from outside but grows from what participants have actually said and how they have responded to one another.
For that reason Sellers-Young distinguishes Sanctuary Stage from conventional community theatre. The difference is not simply that one uses amateurs and the other does something more politically worthy. Rather, community theatre in the familiar sense tends to provide local people with opportunities to perform preexisting plays. Sanctuary Stage begins elsewhere. Its goal is “not to stage a play based on the imagination of a playwright,” but to generate a theatrical event from the lived realities of a particular collectivity. This is a significant distinction in theatre studies terms. It shifts the value of performance away from interpretation of a fixed text and toward the co-production of public speech. Representation is not something done to a community by artists, however sympathetically; it is something a community helps construct.
Sellers-Young’s account of Dan Stone and Tinamarie Ivey’s development gives this method a genealogy. Their route runs through experimental theatre, Commedia dell’arte, Michael Chekhov training, and, crucially, Cornerstone Theater Company’s community-based practice. This mixed background matters because Sanctuary Stage is not simply social work dressed as art. Its enabling forms come from a serious theatrical craft history: improvisation, ensemble-making, devised performance, and the selection of frames capable of holding varied community materials. The article’s discussion of the 2009 Logger Project in northern California is especially revealing as a precursor. In that project, mediated conversations among loggers and environmentalists created an emotionally safe setting in which stereotypes could loosen. “Tree huggers” discovered that some loggers were poets and sculptors who revered trees “for the spirit that lived within them.” The point is not sentimental reconciliation. It is the possibility that structured listening can reveal unsuspected common ground without erasing conflict. Sanctuary theatre, in this formulation, is a technology for altering how antagonistic or estranged groups become legible to one another.
When Stone and Ivey bring this practice to Oregon’s Willamette Valley, Sellers-Young presents the move not only biographically but geographically. Her writing here is alert to place. The mountains, orchards, fields, small towns, and regional theatre ecology matter because Sanctuary Stage is rooted in a particular social landscape rather than abstractly in “community” as a generic category. This is consonant with Sellers-Young’s broader place-based arts thinking, in which local environment is not backdrop but constitutive context. Sanctuary Stage becomes a cultural outreach program at Linn-Benton Community College, but the college is important less as institution than as platform enabling work with surrounding towns and constituencies. The projects are pedagogical, civic, and artistic at once.
The major example, Un Carol de Independence, allows Sellers-Young to show how the sanctuary model operates at full scale. The project originated in a request from Independence’s mayor for a play about “the lives, experiences, and challenges of Latino families.” Sellers-Young is careful to place that request against a longer history, resisting the common tendency to treat Latinos in Oregon as recent arrivals or marginal outsiders. She sketches a historical arc from Spanish coastal exploration through Mexican independence, nineteenth-century labor and military support work, and twentieth-century agricultural and railroad labor, to the present in which approximately half a million Latinos live in Oregon and more than a third of Independence’s residents are Latino. This historical framing is not ornamental background. It corrects public memory. The production’s task is not merely to express a minority voice but to restore a constitutive presence to civic consciousness.
The article then links this local initiative to Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state. Sellers-Young recounts the 1977 Hi Ho Restaurant incident in Independence, where Latino men were publicly interrogated by police about citizenship, and the later class-action suit that contributed to the state’s 1987 sanctuary law. The legal history sharpens the essay’s central metaphor. “Sanctuary” in Oregon has a specific political genealogy tied to immigration enforcement and racialized humiliation; Sanctuary Stage deepens that meaning by shifting from protection against unlawful scrutiny to the affirmative public recognition of a community’s history and dignity. Sellers-Young is notable here for refusing a simple partisan idiom. She says the work proceeds “without advocating a specific political stance,” yet the article makes clear that the project has unmistakable political effects. Its politics lie not in slogan or platform, but in the redistribution of who may speak, where, and with what civic authority.
The choice to structure Un Carol de Independence through Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one of the most interesting moments in Sellers-Young’s account. Stone and Ivey describe the challenge of form: should they create something wholly original, or adapt an existing narrative vehicle? The community’s desire to show “the past, present and future” of Latino life in Independence made Dickens’s temporal scaffold newly useful. Sellers-Young does not linger over adaptation theory as such, but her summary makes plain why this matters. The borrowed frame is not a capitulation to familiarity. It is a dramaturgical solution that allows multiple historical layers and family memories to become theatrically legible. The familiar structure holds local specificity rather than replacing it.
Within that frame, the figure of Isabella becomes the hinge between inherited history and contemporary rage. Brought home by a police officer after a fight at the mall, she articulates the daily abrasions of stereotyping: “Every time I go somewhere people think I’m going to steal something,” and “How long are you in town for? Are you here till the end of the season?” The sting of these lines lies in their exposure of how a settled local subject is continually misrecognized as temporary labor, suspect body, outsider. Isabella insists, “my family has lived in Independence for over fifty years.” Sellers-Young lets this insistence resonate beyond plot. It names the article’s broader concern with belonging: the violence of being rendered socially present yet civically unseen.
The nocturnal visitations that follow are described by Sellers-Young with an eye to what they accomplish culturally. The spirits do not simply reconcile Isabella to family authority. They place her within a history of labor migration, sacrifice, kinship, and art. One ghost returns her to the wartime labor agreements that brought Mexican workers to Oregon fields, and to her grandparents’ courtship in a blueberry field; another reconnects her with folkloric dance and reveals her stepfather’s tenderness; the final apparition, her father Antonio, reminds her that “Your ancestors made a lot of sacrifices for you to be where you are.” The concluding image—Isabella transformed, “attired in a traditional Jalisco dress” and ready to dance at the fiesta—could easily be read as assimilation into heritage sentiment. Sellers-Young avoids making that reduction. In the context of her career-long attention to embodied practice, the return to dance signifies not merely ethnic display but re-entry into an intergenerational vocabulary of identity. Performance here is both subject and means: the play stages a young woman’s movement toward affiliation, and the actual production enacts that movement through community participation.
This is one point at which the essay quietly intersects with Sellers-Young’s long-standing concern with embodiment. Although the article is about theatre rather than dance, it is deeply interested in the transformation of private feeling into shared, public form. Story circles, rehearsals, scenic and musical collaboration, bilingual performance, and post-show discussion all require participants to inhabit their histories bodily and relationally. Sanctuary is not conceptual abstraction; it is organized through presence, listening, voice, and the management of vulnerability in space. The play’s final turn to folkloric dance is especially suggestive in this regard, because it condenses one of Sellers-Young’s recurring insights: cultural identity is not sustained by declaration alone, but by embodied practice through which memory and belonging become sensible.
The article is equally attentive to where the performance happened. Staging Un Carol de Independence in the Elks Lodge on the town’s main street placed Latino history “in center of city’s cultural life.” Such phrasing is not incidental. Sellers-Young consistently understands performance spatially and institutionally. Who is visible, and where, matters. The intimate venue, seating about one hundred, made possible a mixed audience of Latino and non-Latino residents gathered not around an abstract issue but around a local story told locally. In this sense, the production did more than represent diversity; it rearranged civic space. A town without its own theatre company became, however temporarily, a site where a group often misrecognized could appear as author of communal history.
The shorter discussions of Tango Mike and Peace Be Upon You show that this is not a one-off model tied only to Latino experience or to sanctuary in the immigration sense. Veterans with PTSD and local Muslim communities become other “micro-communities” whose stories are difficult to bring into ordinary public discourse. In Tango Mike, the family consequences of war continue long after formal service ends; in Peace Be Upon You, Muslim and non-Muslim students encounter one another through the familiar frame of college roommate life, allowing stereotype to be engaged at the level of everyday negotiation rather than ideological abstraction. Sellers-Young’s interest in these examples lies in their portability. Sanctuary theatre can address war trauma, religious difference, or ethnic marginalization because its real medium is the conversion of lived experience into dialogic form.
What emerges across the essay is an enlarged claim about the civic function of art. Sellers-Young contrasts Sanctuary Stage with Oregon’s most famous theatrical institution, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, not to diminish the latter but to mark a difference of purpose. Canonical repertory theatre, however excellent, does not primarily allow local communities to generate performance from their own histories and concerns. Sanctuary Stage therefore performs a different cultural labor. It is not outreach appended to an existing theatre economy; it is another theatrical ecology altogether. This distinction is central to the article’s intervention in arts discourse. It resists the assumption that community-based performance is a lesser, ancillary, or pedagogical supplement to “real” theatre. Instead, it suggests that such work fulfills a civic task that mainstream institutions often cannot.
The key term in Sellers-Young’s final paragraph is “sustainability.” The stage becomes “a sanctuary for the sustainability of individual and community identity.” Here sustainability does not mean only durability over time; it means the maintenance of conditions under which persons and groups can recognize themselves, be recognized by others, and continue to participate in shaping shared life. This anticipates and aligns with Sellers-Young’s later writings on art, community, and ecological-cultural sustainability in Oregon. In those works, artistic practice matters because it changes how communities perceive their histories, environments, and possibilities for relation. “Oregon’s Sanctuary Stage” applies that logic to social identity: theatre sustains a community not by preserving it unchanged, but by giving it procedures through which memory, conflict, and hope can be publicly negotiated.
The essay is strongly affirmative, and its limitations are visible partly through what it leaves implicit. The article does not dwell on breakdowns in trust, conflicts over representation within the micro-community, or the long-term durability of the understanding produced. Nor does it fully probe the tension between saying that Sanctuary Stage avoids “a specific political stance” and demonstrating that its work operates unmistakably within social justice debates. Yet these are less oversights than signs of the article’s orientation. Sellers-Young’s purpose is to clarify the model and its stakes, not to dismantle it. Even so, the conditions of success she describes are demanding: months of listening, community partnerships, local institutional support, artistic flexibility, and a willingness to let form emerge from collective material rather than preexisting repertoire. Sanctuary, in other words, cannot be improvised as branding. It must be built.
Within Sellers-Young’s broader career, the article marks a persuasive extension of concerns that have animated her for decades. Early work on ritual and communal performance asked how embodied events manage tension, produce concord, and register social change. Later work on intercultural transmission and somatics argued that technique forms subjectivity and that performance can alter how people perceive themselves and one another. Here those commitments reappear in civic key. Community-based theatre becomes a social technology for making difficult experience speakable, for transforming private memory into public encounter, and for creating temporary but meaningful forms of recognition across difference. The stage is sanctuary not because it withdraws from politics, but because it creates the relational safety in which politics may become humanly intelligible.
The article finally suggests something fundamental about voice. To “give voice to the voiceless,” as the subtitle puts it, is always a dangerous phrase if it implies that certain groups lack voice until benevolent artists supply it. Sellers-Young’s best insight is that Sanctuary Stage avoids this paternalism precisely because it understands voice as already present but structurally unheard. The work of theatre is therefore not vocal donation but the making of conditions under which speech can be trusted, shaped, embodied, and received. In that sense the stage does not rescue community from silence; it reorganizes the public so that community can hear itself and be heard by others. That is a modest claim only if one underestimates how rarely cultural institutions achieve it.
Reflect with VABS