“TO BE THUS

IS NOTHING,

BUT TO BE

SAFELY

THUS.”

Safely Thus: Hope and Healing through Shakespeare, is a program designed to improve participants’ self-confidence, relationships, and futures through empowering the body and voice with Shakespeare’s words. Based on our theory of Theatre of Joy in the Traumatized Body, the course incorporates breath work, play, group discussion, and living Shakespeare’s words.

Theatre of Joy in the Traumatized Body is theatre that sees those that have been traumatized not as victims, but as full humans capable and deserving of immense and revolutionary joy. We define trauma as any experience, big or small, that convinces a person they need to shrink or lessen themselves to be safe and accepted.

This program is built specifically for incarcerated individuals. We work to build social emotional skills like distress tolerance, conflict resolution, self-worth, and community building, all while bringing joy to incarcerated individuals. We provide four fifty-minute classes taught by one of our accredited teaching artists. Over the course of these classes, participants will begin to regain confidence in their own bodies and voices through speaking Shakespeare’s words, building intentional community, discussing trauma and joy, and engaging in self-regulating and self-empowering breath work.

An offshoot of this work also lives in Safely Thus: Speak the Speech, which presents a modified version of this program to elder care facilities, focused more on play, voice, and engaging the imagination.

Brick by Brick Players creates communal art from classical texts. We create art that heals the self by embracing connection with the other, and that reaches out an invitation to the disenfranchised in our community, saying “you matter, we hear you.” We refuse to engage in alienation and separation, and instead turn our time and attention towards the radical act of intentional, messy togetherness.