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.