“Our city is not a postcard.”

So begins “Bustin’ Loose: DC Unmuted,” the Sidwell Friends Black Student Union’s 2021 Production. Like the typical production, putting together the annual celebration of Black culture took months. Unlike the typical production, everything moved online. In fact, last year’s show was one of the final in-person events on campus before the School moved to distance learning for the rest of the 2019/20 academic year. That meant this year’s preparation involved meeting and rehearsing on Zoom, distributing microphones, shuttling footage via hard drive up and down the Eastern Seaboard for editing, and roping moms, dads, and siblings into becoming camera operators. Sidwell Friends faculty, staff, and alumni all stepped up to help, too.

“We knew early on it would have to be virtual,” says Black Student Union (BSU) advisor and Upper School English teacher Hayes Davis. “Probably by September, we already had a sense it would be because, even if we were back on campus, where does the production take place? In the theater. How many people can you fit in a theater? How do you have 50 kids backstage, or 75 kids onstage? It was apparent very quickly that we were going to have to pivot.”

Like many things during the pandemic, that pivot led to opportunity. “Bustin’ Loose” allowed BSU members to shoot footage of themselves dancing, reciting poetry, and explaining the history behind some of the most important—and sometimes unknown—monuments to DC’s Black history.

“Places like the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum or the Frederick Douglass House or Malcolm X Park—these places that were pivotal to the Civil Rights Movement, that were pivotal to the storytelling and the gathering of people who came together to fight racism,” says Raphael Peacock, a New York–based actor, director, and interim Upper School theatre arts teacher who directed the production. “We asked people to explore areas that they weren’t familiar with, but we also asked them to find places that they wanted to make sure other people knew about.” So, in addition to landmarks, students showcased their own streets, neighborhood haunts, and living rooms.

“It’s the notion of sharing the DC that the Sidwell Friends community might not know by virtue of living in areas that don’t have touchpoints with Ben’s Chili Bowl,” Hayes says. “Ben’s a really well-known location in the city, but there are also places like the MetroPCS store on the corner of Georgia and Florida Avenues—unless you read local news, that’s not somewhere you know about. These places that have been for Black Americans from DC are part of the landscape, are part of their everyday conception of what the city is, what the city has been, and what it’s becoming.”

While the show celebrates DC’s Black history, the future of the city is an overarching theme in “Bustin’ Loose.” Students report on DC’s rapid gentrification; the displacement of incarcerated people (DC turns residents convicted of felonies over to the federal Bureau of Prisons, which sends them to facilities across the country); and the risk of losing out on a broader culture that makes DC unique. It’s a worry that is very real to the students who participated in the show, Hayes says, and this format allowed them to bring that concern to the larger Sidwell Friends community in a way that may not have been possible through a typical production.

“In equity, justice, and community work, we talk about students being able to bring their full selves to the School every day,” he says. “This production really helped students to do that—to bring their full selves, to bring their knowledge of DC and of the way DC is gentrifying. There’s a sense of a loss of culture, because the people who are transforming the city are coming to live here without always being aware or respectful of what the city was and how it’s changing.”

The production was dedicated to Brittany Chase and Brian Stark, BSU advisors who both passed away within the last year.

“I had the opportunity to meet Ms. Chase at the beginning of the year and spend time with her, and she was an incredible gift and gave such Light to me as I was heading toward this journey,” Peacock says. “She’s been in my heart and on my shoulder this entire time. When I think of theater, I always say that it truly is about community, and this whole project has been community-based. It’s taken everyone coming together to make it happen.”