Roger Wareham: Politically one of our slogans or mantras is that "culture is a weapon." For every struggle for liberation one of the most important components, if not the most important component, is culture. And that takes many forms. I always remember a lecture that Amilcar Cabral, who led the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau gave in the Cape Verde islands; he started off the discussion talking about Goebbels, and how whenever the Nazis had a discussion and the issue of culture came up, Goebbels took out his gun and put it on the table because he was really clear that if you were going to suppress a people, to conquer them you had to destroy their culture. So we always saw culture as a key component for our struggle for liberation. So the theme of  Sistas Place is "culture is a weapon." 

We opened up on September 23, 1995 on  John Coltrane's birthday; we start our season around then and we've always had artists who reflect some degree of consciousness of the nature of our struggle. So we've never separated the art from the culture. It's been mainly music, but we also have poetry —  Louis Reyes Rivera conducts poetry workshops and we've had different people putting on plays. But we've never separated and we don't want those who enjoy the culture to separate culture from the history and the struggle that created it, it's a part of it and it also feeds and energizes it.