Our mission is “to be a theatre company that creates an environment in which both the performers and the audience can participate and recognize truth. We want to re-examine our world in order to increase empathy and grow together. Through these connections, we are able to realize the application to the relationships through which we impact our world.”

When Kerri and I started discussing what we wanted our mission statement to be for Yellow Rose Productions and what we wanted to focus our work on, we kept coming back to a few main ideas. That of “participation,” which I wrote about in my last post, “truth,” and “recognition.”  When we first started working on Princess Cut, these things helped guide our storytelling.

Initially, Princess Cut seems to tell a story that many of us feel very far removed from. Sex trafficking is something that often gets put in a category of something that only happens in other countries or movies, like Taken. One of our goals is to combat this distance people feel from trafficking and reveal how very close to home these stories are.

There is an undeniable need to face the “truth” in issues surrounding trafficking and how women are viewed worldwide. We see this in so many events worldwide, from the kidnapping of Nigerian school girls, the rants we heard from Elliot Rodger, to the #YesAllWomen responses that came forward via social media.

Through the story we tell with Princess Cut, we hope to begin a conversation centered around sex trafficking and domestic abuse, in addition to how we see women, talk about women, and treat women. Each of us can “recognize” ourselves or someone we love in these stories of abuse and suffering. These issues are much closer than a lot of us care to think, and it is our hope, as Yellow Rose Productions, that we bring together people who are passionate about finding a way to end these atrocities.

-Danielle