LOOKING back on the 5 in 5 from 2023

When we started the 5 in 5 in 2019, several political factors were sounding an alarm to artists around the world. Since his inauguration in 2017, former President Trump’s executive order banned travel from several Muslim countries, multiple protections for trans people were rolled back including a ban on transgender military service, and ongoing discussion over immigration and the proposed wall between US and Mexico created an environment of dire calamity.

I was one year out of grad school and ready to make an audacious proposal: rev up my new works game with an impossible goal to create five new works in five years. To do this, I’d double down on my commitment to collaboration in order to stimulate the creation of theater works partnering with and centering underrepresented voices.

We couldn’t have known then how the global pandemic and the civil rights uprising of 2020 would alter the course of this intention. True to the initial goal, these projects have spanned the multiple genres we set out to explore: dance theater, devised work, plays with music, adaptation, and musical theater. And the original intention toward amplifying underrepresented stories became even more specific: elevate visibility for artists of color.

The pandemic didn’t allow us to deliver finished mainstage productions, but rather custom-created offerings shaped by each moment in time. Our projects sprouted into different forms, including video, small-scale workshops for invited audiences, and even an unplanned community class designed to help us recover and make sense of the pandemic in our physical and social bodies.

Read below for the key collaborators we teamed up with along the way. We manifested the 5 in 5 with the support of our generous and stalwart subscribers, our funders, and our community.

The 5 in 5 helped Many Hats become a necessary generator of new work for our community, focus our intentional practice behind programming, and set the stage for The Hatchery.