Struggle, Surrender, and Salvation

And why is it our duty? Troy's project centers around the true history of Juneteenth and the importance of struggle, surrender, and salvation. Through his spoken word presentation, one that he refers to as a sermon, Troy urges a return to the original significance of Juneteenth, which you will hear him explain in our conversation. I wanted to share our entire half hour conversation in commemoration of Juneteenth to let you

hear his passion and insight into this historic remembrance. As Juneteenth becomes a federal holiday, one that has rapidly become commodified by corporations, I hope you will listen closely to Troy's words and become part of the revival. After all, it is our duty Troy. You refer to this as

not a performance but as a service. So let's start there, Because when I think about a revival, I keep talking about the time that we are living in right now as an opportunity to reimagine this country, this world, that oftentimes when we're at a space where things are breaking open, that it is an opportunity for us to create new space. And so talk to us about what the revival means and why that title. Yes, so I'm from the South.

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and I grew up going to these kind of revival services, sometimes actually intense

in the middle of my neighborhood. And when I was looking for something that met this moment, I was trying to remember about like times or spaces that I've been in that helped me move from you know, point A to point B point A being like if I was in a place of like deep pain, something that moved me to joy, or if I was in a place of like not being able to see the way forward, that moved me to you know, seeing a clearer path.

And Church has always been that for me. And also like the Christian context that I grew up in does not necessarily feed my spirit in the same way. So I aim to dissect, like what is a revival service? How what is the what is the technology that's being used in that service that gets us from point A to point B? And I found that like all that it really is are these songs that are helping us

like hold space for our own journey. And so when I titled it the Revival, it's about coming back to ourselves. It's about finding a path to salvation, and salvation being about collective liberation. So there are three parts to a revival. There's it's usually about struggle, about surrender and salvation. Those are the themes. And so I've said, okay, well, we're

going to honor our struggle. We've been through so much in the past year and a half and beyond and beyond and beyond, you know, so we're going to honor that. And how do we honor that? That's been a big question for me. And then it's like what does it mean to be in this moment where we're trying to come back, where we are trying to take all the lessons that we've learned and apply them somehow to our lives, Like what does it mean to honor this moment? What

does it mean to surrender to this moment? And then how do we find a path to salvation through collective liberation. That's what the revival aims to do. And I also think I harp on this thing that it's not a performance, because so much about theater and art has turned into like this thing that we consume, yes, other than the thing that we like sit with or that helps us process. And so I'm just asking people to engage with the

essentially the concert in a in a different way. You know, that's interesting because I think you know to your point and understanding your background, having grown up in the South and having grown up in the church, is the idea that you know, when you go to service, it is not a passive experience. You're not just sitting there and allowing the preacher and the choir to just wash over you. It is a spiritual engagement. It's an entanglement of sorts right about how you open up or a close to

the experience and that you're having. I want to go back to the three parts that you laid out, the struggle, the surrender, and the salvation. You know, it was funny because when you said the surrender piece, like my neurons kind of lit up, because every day I post some type of like quote on my Instagram, and yesterday was about surrender and it was about surrender being not a giving in but a letting go. Yes, and you know, and I posted it and folks are just like, yes, Amen,

that's it, this is what we're talking about. And so you know, walk me through for you with this piece what it means to surrender, because we understand the struggle part all too well, right, we understand the generational struggle, We understand what the struggle of the past year of twenty twenty into twenty twenty one for black people has been in terms of struggle. But talk to us about the piece about surrender and what that means and what

comes up for you. Yeah. So there's a big part of the piece where I take people through how I processed the murder of George Floyd and more specifically, actually how I processed Brianna Taylor's death. Brianna Taylor is from Louisville, Kentucky. She still has not seen justice, and I've been really sitting with her as i've been writing this, and so there's a part of surrender that is about like, I have been through what I've been through, I've seen what

I've seen. I have control of what I have control over, and this kind of like letting go and like and letting whatever happens happens. Is that surrender moment and getting there actually takes a lot of work. Yes, it's like so hard to let go, right, and then when you think about all the things that you need to allow to happen. One of the things that I had to do in this pandemic was I had to allow myself to sit in rage. That's not an emotion that I

allow myself to sit in. But as soon as I let myself just be mad, right, as soon as I gave myself space to do that, I could continue my grieving process. You know, I had to surrender to like, oh I have there are some things about myself that I don't love, you know, and I just had to sit with them and go, Okay, these things are here, Like what can I do about them? Or I'm like wait, like I've actually been holding onto all this shame, Like

why am I holding onto that? Like, let me surrender and just let go of that, Like what am I holding onto it for? So I think for me, this pandemic has taught me a lot about how much I'm not in control of, how much I actually don't have agency over, and when I allowed that to exist next to all the other things that I actually can do right, when I surrender, that allows me actually to move forward to something and to say what tools do I have?

So the Revival Service kind of asks us to sit with that and also kind of provides us some tools through music to kind of move us forward in that way. You know, I have been talking so often on woke app about well, one unlike you, my natural state is rage, and so you know there are some people that might No, I don't think anyone would actually say that about me. My natural state is rage, and I have, you know, through the pandemic, have been learning how to let go right.

That part of the process of trying to break things open, and for my work, it is through politics, right, and through letting people understand their power and responsibilities citizens of

this country right to be active and activate themselves. And the part of doing that is, like James Baldwin had said, is that the more conscious that you become about this country the more enraged you are, right, particularly as black people, and so, you know, do you feel as an artist that in some essence there needs to be some struggle and strife and that there is something productive about moving

through trauma to create something new. Somebody had shared that thought on social media earlier this week, and I've been sitting with it as a content creator, not as an artist, but thinking to myself, can you create without there being some type of conflict? I think, you know, conflict drives a lot of art, you know, even in music, like the way that I compose, like it's all about conflict

and resolution, tension and resolve. So that just exists, right, and it doesn't for me like conflict doesn't have like a bad thing, Like yes, sometimes the conflict is the catalyst right for us to move through. I think the thing that I have been sitting with is, you know a lot of art that deals with trauma, especially black trauma. It's like if it's a play, it's like you go through the whole play. By the end of the play

you realize that, like, oh, trauma exists. For me, it's about starting with the trauma and saying like, Okay, this exists, and now I'm going to spend an hour and a half on the path to healing, Like, how do we work through this? It's the moving through that I'm interested in right now, and I feel like we don't do

that enough. And then just what you said, when you start to move through, then you can start to dream and hope and build, you know, And it's like sitting with trauma at the same time as being able to activate our imagination about Okay, what will happen after I burn it all down? Right, Like, those two things hand in hand is actually what leads to our liberation. And it's not one or the other. You have to have

them both. So I guess the short answer to your question is yes, I think that conflict is a major part of the equation. You know, I love what you just said about being able to activate that kind of dream space through the action of burning it all down because you know, you realize and what I am starting to understand is that when everything is in such complete disarray, right when we're looking at we're living through a global health pandemic, we are living through racial uprisings, there's like

a return and a resurgence of white nationalism. There is you know, this continuation of black trauma that is played over and over again like horrible porn on cable news on a regular basis. When you see all of this happening, there is like this pit that arrives and you see all of the destruction that is happening. But through that same time, it's just like, well, what happens if it does all burn down? Like then what right? Like then what right? Because through the mud comes the lotus flower,

through the ashes comes the phoenix. It's like, you can imagine so much more, I think, in a place of devastation because everything that you did know is no longer right, everything that we kind of trusted, And I think the thing about the pandemic, and you tell me if you felt this way as well, is that we were living in this false sense of security, right that something's a catastrophic global event couldn't possibly ever happen. That's something that

we see in sci fi. It's something that we read in books, or something that happened to Central Ago, right with the Spanish flu. So there's something that is very unsettling now about collective trauma, Like it's not just black trauma. Yes, our community experienced it differently and more so. But there's something about the collection of this trauma. How do you think that we use that community space to build right to move through? Like you're saying, this isn't a play,

and it isn't a performance. This is all of our lives. But there is still a moving through that needs to happen from this collective struggle. How do you imagine that to come forth? Or does it? You know? I think there is something about everyone having to grapple with the thing, you know, whether we were talking about racism or police brutality or name and name and name, But there is something about like, Okay, this is in front of all of us and we all see it now, like what

are we going to do about it? And I think there is something that has happened in this pandemic that has and I'm not going to say an equalized year, because I don't like it when people say that, but there is something that kind of like allowed us to name everything that we see on the table and agree that all of these things are on the table right so that now now we can work through together because we have a common you know, we we see the same thing, you know. Um so I and I think

that that that is a step, you know. And I think now, because this is a collective problem, as you said, everyone has a stake, and I think now we're at the point we're trying to figure out, like, Okay, what's my role? What what role do I play? And you know, I worked at a place called Dreamyard, Um the dream Yard Project in the Bronx. Actually just had my last day a few weeks ago, but we do art and

social justice education. And when I first got there, the first thing that we did as a learning community, as a full staff was talk about the civil rights movement

and like how it worked. And one of the things that really jumped out at me was I had this narrative in my head that like all the black people came together and had like one agenda and then that one agenda was pushed through like with all the might, and I'm like, no, actually, there was a lot of discourse, Like there were a lot of different ways of going forward, which which is actually pretty obvious, Like there was a

lot of disagreement, but everybody did there. Everyone had a common goal, even if they had different paths to getting there, and it actually took everybody. There is no Martin without Malcolm, you know, like, and so I am interested in how is everyone using their tactic toward this common goal to tackle this thing that we all see on the table. And I think we'll find our way there. That's just

my theory. You know, I wonder too. You know, the ending right is about salvation, right, But everybody's idea of salvation doesn't look the same. So when so even when you know, I listen to you saying, well, we have this common goal, and I think that within the black community, the common goal is to get free, right, But everybody's idea of how we get free and what that freedom means, right, it's different, right, And so I wonder for you with

this piece, what does salvation mean for you? The goal of this piece is for people to go on a personal journey in a collective space. Right. So I talk a lot about the choir. Why is choir a lot? And acquire your training to honor your individual voice and also make this beautiful thing for it with everybody else around you. And in the revival, we go through a series of songs that really are about like what have I gone through? How did I get here? What do

I need to let go of? But the end goal is that you are able to see literally see how everyone else is moving through their stuff. And my hope also is that the takeaway from the revival is I can't get free unless you are free, and you can't get free unless I'm free. And so if our definitions whatever, whatever I think it means for me to be free, if it does not include you being free, that's not freedom, period.

And so it's trying to get people to say, oh oh oh, like to move from a personal journey, right, which is necessary, like we have to do work on ourselves, but to move from what do I need to what do we need? And specifically like you might need more than I do, you might need something different, um, and so how can I honor what you need? And and think about what what can I do? And sometimes that means what can What do I need to give up? Right? What do I need to give up in order to

make sure you have what you need? Do you know? So? I do I think that the Revival is going to like solve all the problems? No, it's not. Its purpose. The purpose is to to shift our our viewpoint, to shift how we are showing up, how we are continuing that you don't leave the same way that you came. That you're able to do even a little bit of work in that space with a bunch of other people that hopefully radiates and radiates and radiates and radiates out

side of whatever happens in that twenty minutes. I love it, your service. The revival will take place on Juneteenth. Yes, so talk to us. I know the significance, but the significance for you, the significance for why this Juneteenth. And also I have another question, but I'll let you. I'll let you answer this one first. It's about Juneteenth twenty twenty and what we saw. What we saw? Yes, yes, so I have actually like Juneteenth has been one of those things that I it was like I kind of

understood it, like growing up. It wasn't something that like my family like got together. Like when I think of Juneteenth, I think of Texas, like I specifically think of black people in Texas who really do the thing. But and I did not grow up with like that kind of

history of Juneteenth. But especially last year when suddenly everybody wanted to celebrate Juneteenth, it was just like we've always done this, right, Oh yeah, Nike, you know everybody coming up with the okay oh, okay um, but I actually really focused, I really focused on it. I have a really wonderful friend. Her name is Ava Um. She is the director of education at BAM and also was like my work wife at dream Yard for a period of time, and she's joining me as a drama turk on this

piece she gave. She gives this Juneteenth presentation that like literally shifted my everything because at the center of it, she questioned all of the narratives that I grew up with about Juneteenth about how it was about like, oh, we learned of our freedom late, like everybody learned at

different times. It's like, no, actually, what Juneteenth is actually about is how my ancestors lived rated themselves, how they used you know, Lincoln's call to join the army to say, okay, great, I'm really gonna go and I'm really gonna take over Richmond and then I'm gonna go to the outskirts and I'm gonna get my kids and my and my wife or like like and we and that history and lineage of like, oh, like our country like needed to free

enslaved people because rebellions were real and like people were scared, like our ancestors weren't just sitting around waiting for people to free them, right, and books tell it that. His

books tell it yes. And I'm sermonizing. I literally give a sermon in this piece, and this is what my sermon is about, about how our ancestors are actually our wildest dreams, Like if we've been looking for like in a like people that really showed up for themselves, that really figured out what collective liberation was, like what it meant to really free yourself, like our ancestors did that, and like we can also do that. We don't need

to wait around for someone to hand us anything. You know, we have all of the agency, and I'm just giving away the whole people. No, I know, you're making everybody want to go show up, because that's what I'm sitting here,

and I'm saying to myself. You know, I have that T shirt that says I am my ancestors wildest dreams, and now you just like totally flipped it on its head, and I'm thinking to myself, Wow, you know when you think about the narrative that we have been given, that has been force fed to us about our lack right, and I think about a people who created their own liberation, their own rich rolls, their own everything, moving through bondage,

physical bondage, but allowing them like being spiritually free. And that's the place that we're actually trying to get back to. Now you just you twisted, you twisted my mind. Well, I have to give credit where credit is due. A lot of the things that I don't create anything by myself. I like to really tell everybody that I try to run away from this whole like the singular genius artists

like to me, that is ridiculous. And so that all came out of intense conversation with Eva, and she was like, this has been on my mind, you know, like how our ancestors are wildest dreams. I was like, say that again. I'm like, please pause, what did you just say? You know? Um, So every this whole piece has borne out of community

around my conversations with people. That's why I was like, I need as many people involved in this as possible, Like I need, I need, I need a choir of people, Like everybody needs to bring their experience to this thing. It's not about even like it's not even about like just the shed presenting it. It's about like you know, who are all the many people that came together to make this thing happen, um, even though the shed is giving it a beautiful home. UM. So yes, I think

collective liberation, our ability to free ourselves. Like that's that's where we're going, That's what we're touching on. I really, I mean I I you know, one, I'm excited about your performance kind and I am I'm totally going to combine in every single one of you amazing open call artists. I'm it's like I'm coming. I'm just gonna live at the shed, live at the shed and wait for everybody's from here. But there is just something you know, you

can get caught. And I think from you know, for myself in particular, because of the nature of the work that is politics that has become so dark that I entered it as a very hopeful bride eyed, you know, wanting to believe that I could be this change maker to now being like I hate all of this and I don't want to go like end to my plans at like like just you know, listen to Gospel House.

But you know, I think about you know, the beauty of art is to allow us to be able to experience our trauma, be able to see it but then also find joy and beauty in all of it. And so I appreciate you so much. I appreciate this body of work that you are bringing to people at a time. And I know that it was delayed, right, it was delayed because of the pandemic. Do you want to know the truth. Yeah, The truth is that this was not

the original show that I pitched the Shed. I pitched a different show called Antioch Mass that it was about Peter and Jesus and their relationship and all the stuff, and it was delayed actually kind of twice. So the first time I was supposed to present in twenty nineteen, but they were like, actually, we've programmed too many. Do you want to go to twenty twenty eight? I was like sure, we all know what happened in twenty twenty.

And I was also supposed to have the commission in the theater, which is like this enclosed you know space, and the place where we're presenting is is huge Blaza. I was like, I can't do that intimate piece in there. And so this piece was born out of what has happened. And I'm grateful to the Shed for allowing me that flexibility because I was like, I can't, I can't do that piece right now. I have to do something else.

And I also want to say Danielle that I hope your inner change maker, that that light that you started with it's still there. It is still there, obviously because you're still talking. I know exactly so. And it's like, we are the crazy. We're the crazy people that believe change is possible. And I think that that is everything. I think that's actually the thing. It is the thing, because you know, if you're not crazy enough or hopeful enough to believe that something can happen, then what then

that you can affect something? Then why would you get out of bed? Right? I mean at least for at least for me, I need to get out of bed on purpose each and every day. And so, you know, I feel that you are a kindred spirit. So Troy, I could talk to you literally for the remainder of the day. Your peace is the revival. It is our duty. Tell people how they can follow you, how they can see the performance on June nineteenth. Yes, the best way to get information about the performance is to go to

the Shed's website. Um, there's a beautiful Open Call section. You can read about all the open call artists that are being presented, and also about my piece, the Revival It Is Our Duty. It's all free, which I love. It's like very accessible, really love free love, We love free Love, free ninety nine Yes um. And to follow me,

go to my Instagram at Try Anthony Music. I get yelled at a lot because I have a very minimal digital presence, but Instagram is the place that I feel comfortable and happy and you'll get the most of me there. You can stream Troy Anthony's live presentation of the revival It Is Our Duty the evening of June nineteenth at the Shed dot org slash Open Dash Call Dash live stream. If you're in or near New York, there's still time to head downtown and see him live at the Shed

for free. This week brings our Open Calls showcase series to a close, but I've got plenty of other exciting interviews live now on Patreon, with even more to come to hear more conversations from folks like Ibram X, Kendy Transportation Secretary, Pete Buddhadege and more. Support wokef daily at patreon dot com. Slash woke AF join the Woke f Nation and become part of the conversation. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.