Shaun Leonardo: The Freedom to Move | Art21 "New York Close Up"

I come from a background in which

I never experienced any male members
of my family cry.

That inability to express any level of emotionality

was something that I started to question.

It doesn't allow for weakness nor vulnerability.

Art became a pathway for me--

a way in which I could experience these vulnerabilities

and wear them,
and share them to an immediate audience.

[Shaun Leonardo: The Freedom to Move]

[PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER]
--The quarterback scrambles out,

--throws a pass that almost gets picked off
by Shaun Leonardo.

[LEONARDO] I played football for
over ten years of my life.

[PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER]
--Leonardo, defensive back playing linebacker.

LEONARDO:
All of my work stems from that experience,

of a dual identity between artist and athlete.

I can recall as if it were yesterday,

a coach that I actually love and I have
fond memories of,

says to me, as a way to enrage me,

says, "I want to you play like they just let
you out of Riker's."

As a young man--
I'm 21 at the time--

you don't have the wherewithal or the tools

to absorb that in any healthy manner.

And so, what happens?

It works.

I actually do bring out the rage
that he was looking for.

[PLAY-BY-PLAY ANNOUNCER]
--Leonardo is able to push him inside and tackle him.

--Great play by Shaun Leonardo
with the game-saving tackle there.

LEONARDO:
I'm now 40 years old

and I'm still thinking about that moment.

When you are marked by your difference,

by your color, by your perceived identity,

you become this hyper-visible target.

It's in that hyper-visibility that actually
you become invisible,

because people see right through you.

--Are you ready!?
--Yeah!

After college,

post my football career,

I showed up in a Mexican wrestling mask

and fought an invisible opponent.

[FIGHT BELL RINGS]

[AUDIENCE CHEERING]

["El Conquistador Vs. The Invisible Man," 2006]

With each match, it was important that

the audience was left with Shaun Leonardo--

that the character was stripped

and that you were left with the person
that felt the need

to go through this struggle

in order to see himself.

Can you imagine,
there's no one in front of me.

And so, even if something as little as a punch,

you could register it just like this.

Or if you're in the audience, what's actually
going to be legible?

I have to be able to...

[SOUND OF FIST HITTING OPEN PALM]

I have to be able to really dramatize it
in such a way

that you foresee it coming

and then you see it follow through.

I was offering the spectacle of violence

and that identity of hyper-masculinity
and aggression

that is so often anticipated
from a Black body.

And this notion that,
as a Black and Brown body,

we move through the world and serve as a mirror

for White people's projections.

[AUDIENCE CHEERS]

--One!

--Two!

--Three!

[AUDIENCE CHEERS]

["Self-Portrait," 2010]

And then discovering and learning
and finding ways to distort that image,

to portray and feel deeply a fuller self

that is not contained within these projections
or these stereotypes.

That has been my mandate.

That has been the very thing that I want
to offer to the world.

--Can anyone describe what was happening in
their bodies?

[MAN]
--Very, very uncomfortable for me.

--Like I feel my body getting hot.

I wanted to pull more and more people
into that exploration

so that it would not be contained
to my own narrative.

It was through this strategy of physical embodiment
that I could pull people into it.

I wanted people to feel it
and to allow their bodies

to say what the piece needed to be.

["Primitive Games," 2018]

[AUDIENCE APPLAUSE]

--Participants!

--Ready!

--Bring it!

[DRUMMING ECHOES THROUGHOUT ROTUNDA]

--Left, yes; right, no.

--Do you feel American?

I really wanted to see if,

by dialing into our experiences of confrontation,
of conflict,

we could sense some sort of truth
in another person's body,

and therefore question our perceptions of
how we initially read

an other.

[BRASS BAND PLAYS A FUNERAL MARCH]

["The Eulogy," 2017]

--What are you waiting for me to tell you?

--His name was Trayvon Martin
[BAND STRIKES]

--and he was unarmed.

When I saw the image of Trayvon Martin
on the news,

so much of my own experience of fear,

and the ways that I was being perceived out
in the world,

all came rushing to the surface--

things that I clearly had buried.

As a young Brown kid growing up in Queens,

I also started thinking about all the young
brothers that I'd left behind.

Then asking, "Well, why me?"

Why was I the one that was able
to make it out?

To go to a good school,

to pursue an MFA,

to live according to my passion.

It's taken me a long time to understand

that I simply want more people in the world
that look like me

to be able to move through the world
with that kind of

freedom.

--Okay, what we're going to do is just walk.

--Walk naturally.

--Take up as much space as possible.

--Walk your walk.

[In 2017, Shaun co-founded "Assembly," a criminal justice
diversion program at the arts non-profit Recess.]

[Youth charged with misdemeanor offenses and criminal
possession of a weapon participate as alternative sentencing.]

We move through what I started to describe
as a visual storytelling curriculum.

What we do is sculpt the scene of that story

or of that memory.

So the storyteller is allowed to look at their
story through a very different set of eyes.

They start to gather more meaning as to how
that narrative is of an individual

and not some preconceived notion of criminality.

[MAN]
--If he runs, we all got to run.

I've had to really deal with
the philosophical crisis

of what it means to be enacting
an art space program

that I believe has freedom as its central
value and goal,

and yet,

still operating in something that is really
a criminal justice space.

["Mirror/Echo/Tilt," 2019
Collaboration with Melanie Crean and Sable Elyse Smith]

The only thing that I've arrived at,

which keeps me in the work,

is the personal change that I can sense
in these individuals--

in these young people that are
the young people I grew up with.

I always return to the same thing:

the art is the very thing that has power
in this space

because it is unfixed.

It cannot be defined.

By being able to really exist
in your own body

and understand that you do not need to be
defined by an experience--

in this case, arrest and incarceration--

it allows you to move forward with
a little more sense of joy;

what Ta-Nehisi Coates describes as
"the beautiful struggle."

It's by being in your full self

and attempting to live,

that can never be taken away.

To get anyone to start imagining possibilities
for themselves again,

that is what we all should be after.