We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yalini Dream. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yalini below.
Yalini, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Can you open up about a risk you’ve taken – what it was like taking that risk, why you took the risk and how it turned out?
Choosing to follow my calling to be an artist was a huge risk. It was the 90’s. There wasn’t anyone on TV films, or mainstream theater that looked like me. The economy for darker brown skinned femme performers was rife with racism, colorism, and gender oppression, A clear path to a career as Tamil performer was not clear. My family is a socially conservative Ilankai (Sri Lankan) Tamil family. Many of my family members migrated as refugees. I was raised within the trinity legacy of colonization, casteism, and war. The legacy of European and British colonization conditions many post-colonial peoples into an unconscious servitude and assimilation. Many Tamils my age were conditioned into believing the most honorable, educated, and financially secure service to the global economy was to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer. The artist caste within South Asian societies is subjugated and exploited in a manner that distorts, erases, co-opts, and shames the powerful histories of Tamil dance, music, and theater. The legacy of war and violence puts enormous pressure on the diaspora to help and support our peoples. If you have the opportunity and ability to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer, you must do so in order to better support our communities. As someone who was seen as school smart with the enormous privilege of living in the US, it was an incredible shock to my family and community that I would choose the artist path. It was seen as impractical and selfish.
The feeling within my heart was simultaneously undeniable and inexplicable. I knew that to unearth an artistic gift, to experience the power and joy I embodied as a performer was special. But from the outside I wasn’t recognized as exceptional. I wasn’t the best dancer. I wasn’t getting cast in starring roles. No one was speaking about what an incredible artist I was. It was a feeling I experienced deeply, but wasn’t being affirmed by the world. It seemed like an absurd dream.
Yet, following my desire and calling led me to a life beyond my imagination. It has taken me around the world and opened up ways of serving our communities in potent ways. What I am most grateful for is that choosing a life as an artist has led me to deeper spiritual understandings and harmony. It has not always been an easy path, but it has been a transformative path. Taking the risk of living my life as an artist has blessed me with the gift of living my life as my full self in service and commitment to love and an intergenerational journey to freedom.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
In 1986 Bernice Johnson Reagon wrote “cultural workers have an element of transformation in all their work. Their role was to resolve conflict, and to maintain, sometimes create, an identity that was independent of a ‘society organized for the exploitation of natural resources, people, and land.’” From insights within my own Ilankai (Sri Lankan) Tamil community, a cultural worker is understood as a facilitator between earth and sky supporting the prosperity of future generations. We transmit information from the past, our ancestors, nature, and the cosmos in order to pass on ancient wisdoms, transform what is harmful, and build the people power needed to bring forth liberatory futures. Cultural workers often embody and weave multiple roles: artist, healer, teacher, peacewager, organizer, spiritual counselor, archivist, historian, geneaologist, and futurist.
In the current economy, the integrated roles cultural workers occupy are fragmented into disparate fields. Thus, I occupy many fields as a performing artist, organizer, somatics practitioner, educator, coach, and consultant. I reshape reality and transform culture, seeking peace through justice in lands of earth, psyche, body, and dream.
Practically what does this look like!? I have a body of work “Wounds Unkissed” that I tour at universities and theaters throughout the US and the world. This performance serves as a catalyst for dialogue and exchange. I also collaborate with incredible artists on their projects. Most recently I performed at Brown University and directed a play at the Downtown Urban Arts Festival.
I coach organizers and leaders throughout the country, supporting them in aligning intention, word, and action through wellness and creative practices. I also support socially missioned organizations in solving their problems. While the range of problems an organization encounters is vast, my expertise lies with strategic visioning, conflict navigation, alignment, and innovation. I’ve had the honor to support organizations such as supported organizations such as Borealis Philanthropy, Center for Constitutional Rights, Ember Charter Schools, Equality Labs, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Marsha P. Johnson Institute, La Cima, National Lawyers Guild, New York Foundation, New Era Colorado, North Star Fund, Queer Tamil Collective, Uncommon Schools, Transgender Law Center, The National Network for Abortion Funds, and more.
I teach a graduate course at University of San Francisco for Masters and PhD students on Social Justice Pedagogy and the Arts. I’m digging deeper into my writing practice and currently co-writing two projects– History of the Kiss, a Decolonial Feminst Epic with Colleen Thompson and You Keep Hiring Racists (and other reasons DEI doesn’t work) with J Mase III.
All of my projects are assessed to understand how they both address immediate conditions while moving in the direction of longer-term prosperity and freedom. I work upfront and center as a performer and from behind the scenes as an organizer and consultant. I have the blessing of weaving different skills into different spaces in ways that cultivate my own creativity whiling being in deep service to communities I love.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
We need investment in new economies centering creativity, nourishment, healing, and prosperity for all. Cultural workers’ roles are fragmented into disparate fields often dominated by exploitative, supremacist forces. These dynamics are particularly challenging for Black, Brown, and Indigenous cultural workers. What is needed to train, navigate, and succeed in each disparate field can often be in opposition to the needs and aspirations of communities cultural workers are dedicated to. Thus, cultural strategy and interventions often divides into two realms—> that of
*the under-resourced independent Black, Brown or Indigenous cultural worker accountable to their communities and
*that of the Black, Brown or Indigenous cultural worker seeking greater resources– while intervening in dominant industries or institutions through “representation.”
What does it mean to have greater representation in an industry serving as the cultural arm of white supremacist patriarchy or western imperialism throughout the world? At the same time, how can we expect our creative geniuses to not pursue the needed resources to actualize their brilliant visions? How can we create a path to garner essential resources for cultural workers committed to justice and bringing forth more prosperous, liberatory futures? How can we increase the capacity and potency of our visionaries?
A strategic philanthropic and funding shift is absolutely necessary. Policy and laws that protect the labor rights of independent artists will provide a baseline (while other countries have these, the US does not). However, we also need an investment strategy towards the vision of building a new artistic economy.
Within the current conditions, merely offering capital and technical assistance to select cultural workers, productions, or arts organizations can replicate similar problems and power dynamics. The investment strategy must think about how capital and technical assistance can cultivate an economic system that grows opportunities for all cultural workers, especially those who are Black, Brown, and Indigenous. I want to emphasize the concept of cultural worker that I spoke to earlier. I’m not speaking merely to inclusion and representation of Black, Brown, or Indigenous performers or artists. To stop there can lead to tokenizing those who best assimilate to roles provided by white dominant industries. I’m talking about a fundamental paradigm shift that will also address rampant problems within industry as well.
Even within mainstream white-dominated industries such as Broadway (which contributes significantly to the New York Economy impacting other sectors such as restaurants and taxis), most shows operate at a loss and the performers in those shows often face economic struggles and lack financial stability. The Broadway adage “You can’t make a living, but you can make a killing” is one that must be flipped. When the 25% of shows do actually make a profit, those who make a killing are usually producers and investors– the actual performers may experience a temporary wage increase, but when the show is done, they are left vulnerable again to an exploitative and daunting economy.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist and cultural worker is the spiritual transformations it offers me. My journey has blessed me with such connection, dignity, wisdom, resilience, generosity, empathy, and capacity. Performing opens me as a conduit for divine energy that nourishes, cleanses and aligns on a soul and cell level. I was born into a time and context that deemed my existence as abnormal and therefore inferior. I was taught through, TV, movies, peers, school, religion that lighter skin was more beautiful, western civilization more enlightened, rich was better than poor, and that to be Queer or Trans was sinful. I was taught that there was a specific way of being that was normal and good. But the ways my mind, heart and body flowed was so very different from that norm. I internalized my own inferiority–tried as much as I could to assimilate to white, western, gendered, classed normality. This internalization and assimilation poisoned and disconnected me. Through storytelling and performance, I expressed my spirit, claimed my truths, and made space for myself in a society denying my existence. Through this healing, cosmic energy flows with greater ease through, with and amid me.
As I’ve deepened my spiritual practice, I am called to ancestral legacies of dancing and singing in praise to the divine as the conduit for poetry, storytelling, and analysis. Through devotional dance, cosmic energy unlocks memory, story, wisdom embedded in the body. This practice recovers histories and forges futures that persist in muscle, blood, bone and dream even as libraries burn, and sages are killed. The racism, homophobia, and other oppressive forces, I continue to navigate have less impact on me as I am fortified and replenished by creativity. When contending with multiple forces of violence, creativity offers me wisdom, harmony, possibility, connection, and hope. It is what keeps me from spiraling into despair and jumping out of danger in the direction of thriving.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.yalinidream.com
- Instagram: @yalinidream
- Facebook: Yalini Dream
- Twitter: @yalinidream
- Youtube: yalinidream
- Other: [email protected]
Image Credits
Photo by Ren Hsieh, Collage by Opie Snow (1st photo with text, collage) Photo by Bill Bain (mic) Photo by Addy Balajadia (leg extension on roof in red) Photo by Caroline White (mermaid) Photo by Katharina Kienboeck (jump, wings, sea) Photo by Hanna Thiem (white, with hoodie in heals)