Sonoma County-wide ‘Voices’ project calls for personal stories of 2020

The joint “Voices” project from the Raven Theater and the Corazon Bilingual Resource Center is really just getting started.

But its history goes back a year.

The two Healdsburg-based organizations have put out a countywide call for first-person video, audio or visual art that tells how the lives of local people have been shaped during the pandemic, from political upheaval and public outcries for racial justice to the effects of the pandemic itself. The results will be shown in an online presentation.

“’Voices,’ is an opportunity that allows us to share our collective stories and personal perspectives,” said Angie Sanchez, head of programs for Corazon Healdsburg. “There are no barriers for participation. We welcome all, regardless of race, age or religion. Individuals may even submit anonymous stories as well as in their native language.”

Entrants can record themselves or even get help with recording from the Raven Theater company. To register and get information on how to submit videos, go to bit.ly/vocescos

“This is wide-open. People can say anything they want to say,” said Steven Martin, artistic director of the Raven Players, the Healdsburg theater’s resident drama company. “We want to have the recordings by June 15 and post them by June 30, but there’s no official deadline.”

The aim is to discover how local people see their lives at this moment in history, but it initially had a much more specific focus.

The roots of the project reach back to last year and the demands for racial justice sparked by the death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by a Minnesota police officer on May 25, 2020.

“The origin of the project came last summer, when two young former Healdsburg students put in an art installation on the Healdsburg Plaza,” Martin said.

The installation collected first-person stories in response to the notion that racial injustice “doesn’t happen here.”

“There was artwork on the sidewalk, and written stories hung on the gazebo,” Martin said.

Some of the art and writings revealed disturbing details about racist encounters, ranging from insults to slurs and more, experienced by local people of color.

“A lot of people were expressing their voices, relating things that had happened to them,” Martin said. “It really does happen in Healdsburg.”

In March this year, the Raven Players and Corazon teamed up on the first version of the “Voices” project, aiming to turn local people’s stories into scripted pieces performed by local actors.

“It was a challenge for the Raven, when we have a county population that is 30% Latino that we’d never made an effective outreach,” Martin said. “A lot of people in the community had never set foot in our theater.”

Soon, Martin said, organizers began to consider another approach, to have “first-person videos that people do themselves, rather than have actors do it.

“We wanted to go beyond race to politics and society, to get a sense of how our identities have been shaped and more specifically, if anything has changed,” Martin said. “For many, this is the first time in a year they’ve had a chance to pause and think, ‘Who am I?’”

The project has now gone beyond Healdsburg, to embrace the whole county.

For Sanchez, the goal of the now-broader “Voices” project is still to promote inclusion and acknowledge diversity.

“We are excited to create a platform with this project to elevate voices from our diverse community to share their stories from this last year that are important to them, such as their experiences during the pandemic, racism and frustration in both our local and federal government,” she said.

“This project allows an opportunity for dialogue on these tough subjects,” Sanchez said, “but also highlights how resilient our community is.”