We Outside
The catalog is becoming theater.
Theater was in the songs all along.
We Outside is a BIPOC theatrical experience built from the Common People catalog — storytelling songs given their fullest context: the stage.
For nine years, Common People has gathered songs through writing camps, commissions, collaborations, performances, and relationships with artists, poets, producers, justice leaders, organizers, and community voices across the country.
Those songs carry grief, joy, resistance, memory, protest, prayer, and the full weight of being human in this moment.
Now they are becoming theater.
Original songs. Original script. Original voice.
THE SHAPE
Song after song. Each one a chapter. Each one staged and lit. Building a portrait of the world.
We Outside brings together music, spoken word, hip hop, movement, theatrical staging, and a narrator’s journal — a witness at the edge of the stage helping the songs speak to the moment.
The catalog includes songs about institutional racism, sexual abuse, reparations, immigration, missing Black women, natural calamity, gun violence, grief, memory, resistance, and hope.
Then the songs arrive.
THE NAME
“We outside” is living Black vernacular.
We are present. We have arrived. We are not hiding.
The songs came from the margins.
Now we are taking them outside.
DEVELOPMENT PATH
We Outside is in active development.
The first phase will focus on workshop performances, community response, and shaping the theatrical language of the piece. We are exploring the right institutional, community, and producing partners — spaces where the music, history, and audience can meet with integrity.
The long horizon is Broadway and beyond.
BIPOC-led. Community-rooted. Made from songs that have been carrying this moment for years.
WHY THIS MATTERS
There is a genuine theatrical and cultural story here: original songs shaped by protest, justice, grief, joy, memory, hip hop, soul, public witness, and the ongoing sound of resistance and hope.
We Outside gives that story a stage.
FOR PRODUCERS AND PRESENTERS
For producing conversations, presenting interest, workshop partnerships, press, funding, and development inquiries: hello@commonpeople.cc