WHERE WE BELONG Will Stream From WAM Theatre Next Month

WAM Theatre will present a special limited run of Madeline Sayet's solo show, WHERE WE BELONG, directed by Mei Ann Teo. This Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company film adaptation, produced in partnership with Folger Shakespeare Library, is filming now at Woolly Mammoth in Washington, D.C., and will be available for digital streaming through WAM Theatre June 24-27, 2021 only. This limited engagement for WAM audiences will be a benefit, with proceeds dedicated to furthering and deepening WAM's accountability work.

In 2015, Mohegan theatre-maker Madeline Sayet travels to England to pursue a PhD in Shakespeare. Madeline finds a country that refuses to acknowledge its ongoing role in colonialism, just as the Brexit vote threatens to further disengage the UK from the wider world. In this intimate and exhilarating solo piece, Madeline echoes a journey to England braved by Native ancestors in the 1700s following treatise betrayals - and forces us to consider what it means to belong in an increasingly globalized world.

"Madeline Sayet's WHERE WE BELONG blew me away when I first encountered it. Her openness to sharing her journey across the sea, into the sky, and back home to Mohegan is a deep, insightful, and often very funny, revelation." says Maria Manuela Goyanes, Artistic Director of Woolly Mammoth. "WAM is an ideal partner for this broader visibility because their mission aligns with Woolly's - we both try to create space for stories that have yet to be heard, especially those from women of color. It's so exciting to be able to share this show with their audiences, who may never have seen it in D.C. otherwise."

"All of us at WAM are honored to partner with Woolly Mammoth Theatre in D.C., a theatre whose work we've long admired. Madeline Sayet's beautiful solo piece reckons with our past, while honoring the many different stories of the Indigenous cultures surrounding the place we live and work. We are excited to share this limited run with our WAM audiences. " Kristen Van Ginhoven, Producing Artistic Director, WAM Theatre.

Writer/performer Madeline Sayet is someone who understands this power of stories, she says: "For my people, the Mohegans, the ways the stories are passed down is sort of an act of resistance. I grew up knowing the stories were special, because they come from the land we stand on. Both my great-aunt, Gladys Tantaquidgeon, and my mother [Melissa Tantaquidgeon Zobel] have been medicine women. I was raised with this consciousness of story medicine and the idea that stories aren't neutral: They can heal people and they can damage people. A lot of my own work is about the transformative capacity of stories. What stories do we need to bring us together; what stories do we need to imagine a way forward and create hope? What are the stories that enable us to create our best possible futures?"

WHERE WE BELONG features Madeline Sayet and premiered at Shakespeare's Globe in London in 2019 as part of Border Crossings' ORIGINS Festival, the UK's only large-scale multidisciplinary festival of Indigenous arts and culture. While at Woolly Mammoth, Madeline has been adapting the original piece for the digital realm with Director Mei Ann Teo.

Tickets will go on sale at WAMTheatre.com on Tuesday, June 1st.