10 years ago, Philadelphia’s Team Sunshine Performance dared themselves to do something no theater company has done before: create a show lasting 24 years. Every 2-3 years the company makes a new installment of The Sincerity Project in response to the shifts in our lives and in the world. Now in its fifth installment, this ambitious and audacious multi-decade theater piece serves as a stopping point, a pause, a moment for us to sincerely engage with the harrowing, beautiful, and complex realities of time’s passing. Team Sunshine Performance is back for their 10 year anniversary, bringing the 5th installation of The Sincerity Project back at FringeArts Tuesday December 10th-15th!

Dig deeper with ensemble member Iris McCloughan reflecting on this moment in the project’s trajectory – the shifts, discoveries, and expansion made possible by 10 years of returning to The Sincerity Project.

Image of Iris McCloughan

Ten years into The Sincerity Project, what feel like the biggest changes? 

Ten years in, I think the project has become both clearer and freer in its aims. I really love thinking about the long-term formal arc of this work. The first iteration introduced and established the ambitious gesture of a long-term durational work. The second iteration was tricky, because it had to expand/update that gesture while still being directly in dialogue with the first. But when we started making the third iteration, I realized that we were entering a period of extreme freedom. In effect, nothing had to happen other than some performance taking place; we could do literally anything so long as we fulfilled the main criteria of the project, which is making a show. The realization of this freedom fed directly into the fourth iteration, which expanded both the community and the formal palette of the project. 

Now we’re continuing to work in this kind of open field, trusting that by responding to the needs of the ensemble in this moment, we’re honoring the ultimate goal of the project, which is to document our lives and foment community around the project itself. Ultimately, this feels like the biggest change, moving from thinking about the project as having to be any one specific thing to thinking about it as a practice of self-witness, response, and documentation which results, every 2-3 years, in a public event.

What is the project doing with this installment?

I think this installment is continuing a trajectory of expansion, both in terms of the community of performers but also in terms of the time it is trying to make visible. When the project began, Ben’s daughter was in utero. Now, she’s nine, and appearing in this iteration. Pippa, who appeared in Sincerity #4, is in this one too. The presence of these young people makes a new kind of time visible within the container of the project: generational time. By asking questions about parenthood, family, and community and inviting a younger generation to take part, the piece is zooming out further from its initial seed as a show about the original cast members towards a more expansive, perhaps cosmic view of time and its relationship to the scale of a single human life. 

What are some of your favorite memories for the last decade?

A moment from a recent rehearsal comes to mind. A few of us were working on sketching out the first section of this newest iteration. We laid out the elements that we’re working with this time around and jumped in, and in about an hour had made almost 20 minutes of material that felt very close to performance ready. For those unfamiliar with the process of making devised performance, this is almost unheard of. But at the end of that rehearsal, I was struck by how it was a reflection of our commitment to this project and therefore to each other. We’ve been working on this since 2011. Through coming back together over and over, through listening to and observing each other closely, through the work of making the project, we’ve developed a theatrical language that we all understand on a deeply intuitive level. I cherish the moments when I can see and feel the results of our commitment to each other and the joy I feel when that sense of connection and shared language becomes tangible. 

What if I’ve never been to Sincerity Project show? 

We’re very conscious that we want the piece to be welcoming to all, Sincerity diehards and newcomers alike. This sense of hospitality can hopefully enact an expansion on our audience. Just as the piece seems to be expanding outward with each iteration, we hope the sense of who the project gets to meet expands. 

Team Sunshine is dedicated to serving as a hub for the imaginative consideration of contemporary American culture and what it means to be a participant in it. Founded by dance and physical theater artists, Team Sunshine has produced dozens of ensemble-created performance works and interactive-gathering events. Spanning a wide range of aesthetic styles, a critical throughline of all of the work has been an intentional inquiry into community participation and creating opportunities for empathy-building and care.

Each new work builds on Team Sunshine’s rigorous approach to cultivating genre-defying, investigative performance works and events that balance joy with deep investigation, contend with urgent social issues, facilitate critical discourse, and pose creative solutions.

Regional and national presenters of Team Sunshine include FringeArts, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Asian American Theater Festival, Ko Festival, and The Barnes Foundation, with works commissioned by the Rosenbach Museum and Library and by PECO/Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority. Funding and production support has been provided by Knight Foundation, Wyncote Foundation, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, Samuel S. Fels Fund, NALAC, The Orchard Project, SPACE at Ryder Farm, Charlotte Cushman Foundation, National Performance Network, Network of Ensemble Theaters, National Endowment for the Arts, and New England Foundation for the Arts. Team Sunshine Performance is a Network of Ensemble Theaters member, and a 501c3 not-for-profit organization.

Visit TeamSunshinePerformance.com for more information!