Overview: Reconnecting Twin Cities Communities Through Shared Experience
Contributing Writer Ella Stern explores how Mixed Blood Theatre is creating intentional spaces for listening and laughter, giving residents a way to process recent struggles while building long-term community care.
During the peak of Operation Metro Surge, while Minnesotans turned out to support their neighbors, Mixed Blood Theatre considered how to sustain that energy in whatever would come next.
“At some point, hopefully, this moment will end, and we’ll need to be prepared to support what happens then,” said Tolu Ekisola, Mixed Blood’s manager of community organizing and engagement.
The theatre’s team landed on story circles, community events that invite participants to share a personal experience in response to a prompt. Each storyteller gets a set amount of time to speak without interruption. Afterward, participants discuss the stories they heard and their experiences telling them.
“The end goal of story circles is community building, listening to each other, hearing each other’s stories and feeling less alone in our struggles and in our concerns about the future,” Ekisola said.
Mixed Blood staff held several story circle training sessions in early June. Around Juneteenth, Ekisola and the facilitators she trained hosted story circles across the Twin Cities and surrounding suburbs to help communities heal from Operation Metro Surge and move forward together.
Libin Hashi attended the story circle event at Mixed Blood because she was looking for community and an exchange of stories.
“[I wanted] to give my experience to people that might not have the same lived experience as I did so that they know how ICE has impacted our communities, whether that’s mentally, physically or even socially,” Hashi said.
She also hoped to bring the stories she heard at the event back to her community. Telling them, for example, about allies fighting for immigration and human rights.
Hashi said that now that it is summer, she and other Somali people are trying to heal from Operation Metro Surge. For her, the story circle was part of that process.
“Healing requires storytelling and humor,” Hashi said. “Being a Somali, one of our core things that we turn to during dark times is humor. Storytelling can have so many ways of sharing humor, which sometimes brings light. It allows you to step away from the sad parts. You joke and you connect through just laughing. Laughter is an act of resilience and resistance in itself because you’re not allowing oppressive regimes to take down your happiness or your joy.”
To Ekisola, the role of story circles in the aftermath of this winter is helping people recommit to community.
Since the peak of Operation Metro Surge, “it’s been hard to pull people back in and pull the groups back together, especially because … it was emotionally and physically taxing for a lot of people,” Ekisola said. “I want those groups to come back together with a sense of healing and a sense of community care [and] community building.”
Story circles are not unique to Mixed Blood; they have a long history in Indigenous practices. Mixed Blood’s model comes from the Free Southern Theatre, the theatrical arm of the Civil Rights Movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. When SNCC members returned from direct actions, they would sit in a circle and share stories in response to a prompt.
“It was found to be a very helpful tool, not only for processing, but for mapping out what’s next,” Ekisola said.
Story circles are also grounded in a human need to share stories.
“Outside of the political sphere, we are human beings, and we have this long history of storytelling,” Ekisola said. “We would sit around the fire and tell stories, and that was a practice that made us human.”
Although recent local story circle events have focused on Operation Metro Surge, the gatherings aren’t limited to urgent, heavy matters. People could gather to share stories about their happiest childhood memories, Ekisola said.
“That’s the day that I look forward to: when we’re engaging in story circles regularly, formal and informal, communing as a group of individuals from a variety of backgrounds, and coming together specifically just to get to know one another,” Ekisola said. “That’s the community care that I look for: continuing to show up.”
Ekisola said she hopes to host another story circle day later this summer or in the fall.
For more information on story circle training sessions, visit https://mixedblood.com/product/story-circle-training/.
Ella Stern is a contributing writer for the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder. She welcomes reader responses at erstern10@gmail.com.