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Community Performance Inc.

June 23, 2008

Dialogue has simply been part of this project, because the subject matter demanded it. Thirty-six years ago a black man died in a fusillade of bullets. Even now, after performing the story of the resulting march, neither Jules nor I know many details. People have told us much, but not those details. The matter, like the mule, had been paved over, but not forgotten. The pain of that time when guns and fear defined black and white remains.

The Philosopharmer, a character in Hard Times, says that if you unearth mule bones you can be sure a civilization once thrived, just as surely as if you found a hoe--that digging can yield evidence of a good life. But our excavation through story and performance has been different. It isn't only what is found that is good, but the digging, too. As a group aged four to ninety-one, different races, towns, and backgrounds, we dug into and examined pieces of our American past, and we're the better for it.

This is a good thing, not a perfect thing, but a good thing. Two generations after the march we told one version of the story and the events preceding it. Jules listened, wrote a version, was challenged by the community in the first reading to write a deeper version, wrote that, then began testing its mettle in the forge of production. Was the story important enough that it would bring blacks and whites to the cast? Was it reckless or too raw, would it keep folks away? We only learned bits and pieces, and different bits from different people. We listened to several versions that seemed so full of bias that to tell them would create ill will. Some versions were fearful, dark with threatening presences waiting in the wings. From a skein of narratives we wove ours. And then unraveled what we wove, to try a truer color, or a stronger thread. And as we (all of us) wove, we became a single thing, a company, a community, as threads become a single cloth. The two black teens who told the story received what became their final script on Monday before the VIP performance on Wednesday. Varying the analogy, from all the different strands we wove our first rope, threw that across the gulf, then pulled across more lines (counter narratives) and gradually suspended the bridge between past, and each other. The act was our courage to claim our version of the story.

What relation does that good thing have to art? Even some younger cast members felt that just ahead, in darkness we could not quite penetrate, lay the edge. To go over would lose everything we had worked for. So fear held us back. But fearful pleasure pushed us forward. Daring, we became charged with our cause. We were only telling stories to that point. But once we engaged with our daring, our wooden swords became steel. People came on time, and early, because we were about something important. Humans are at our best when daring, and so is art.

Barbara's History Lesson

We had a history lesson, taught by Barbara Clark mostly for the young black narrators who needed to know for what they dared. These two, Bobby and Lynetta, stood for the young Barbara; they had to under-stand why they marched. In the far back of the photograph, behind Barbara you can make out the woman who accompanied Barbara to the meeting, the daughter of the man whose death brought about the march.

On several occasions during rehearsals, for reasons artistic and civil, we had to stop and talk. We were representing points of view that would not be reconciled, presented by individuals whose opinions differed. Yet it is possible, through art and dialogue to create a stage representation that holds the ambiguity, that is enriched by it. Each person on the stage was encouraged to make individual decisions within the scope of the scene. The young people narrating the story were probably the most closely directed. "Not sad, Lynetta, she is angry," Jules would say. "She is angry about what has been done to the community. She may also feel grief, immobilizes her, anger makes her march." For the men at the table of power, I suggested some of the competing emotions they must have felt, and then left them to it. Jim immediately got up and with a pen and paper started writing down the names of the marchers. For the white people passed by, the decision was to face the marchers, turn their backs, or join. Few initially wanted to turn their backs. That's understandable. They would be turning backs on their rehearsal partners, but more, they didn't want to perform white racism. As I wrote two weeks or more ago, Heather, the composer, hadn't intended to represent dissenting voices in her song, and she was upset by the back turning moment in Iega's choreography. After a few rehearsals with all backs turned, we offered the actors a choice, to turn or not. And I talked about the courage it took to represent the unpopular position then...and now. In 1972 for whites it was unpopular to side with blacks. Today, in our rehearsal, it was unpopular not to. When César Chávez was organizing the grape pickers in California, young Luis Valdez would go before him into the communities and create performances about the unfair conditions. Everyone was eager to play the angry strikers, no one wanted to play the grape owners. That person had to be talked into taking the role. After creating performances in several communities, Valdez noticed something. The person who played the grape owner almost always became a leader among the pickers. To perform the person who turns his/her back is an act of courage, and a contribution to the power of our play, I said. When the moment of back turning came, we looked down on a small sea of upturned faces, each in the moment of decision. Some remained steadfast, some turned away, some startled and stayed, then turned away. Some turned away and turned back. Some climbed up onto the crescent and joined the march. As I think back on it, the only face I did not see represented was the face of the true hater. You can see that face in many photographs from those days. In the fall, I'll ask for that face, too.

The March in the Rain.

I would so much like to know why the mayor came back twice (the first weekend) and Margaret Ayers, the historical mayor's widow, saw four of the first five performances. I saw some black people at the show, too, I hope more come.

When we begin the story of the march, the character Jane says, "We've seen this story before." And she's right. The first act ends with the displacement of white people by Urban Renewal. The wounds of this time run deep. Whites lived in the mill village, derogatorily, the "mill hill." The children of the mill hill are about my age, fifties and up, one man refused to tell his story for this year. He agreed to tell it only to one person, a project leader, and a mill village child herself. Only she would understand, his wife told me.

We told some stories that forced us to dialogue or we couldn't have gotten them to the stage. This is the only way I've seen civic dialogue work. We tackled something, an arts based community development project. The path took us through disputed territory, so we were forced to negotiate passage. We had to open ourselves to conversations the outcome of which wasn't a foregone conclusion. A substantial number of us put aside the familiar posture of indifference (do it however you want), and the equally familiar posture of a driving agenda (we'll do it this way!) that removes the possibility of real change. "Communicative Agency," my colleague Ron Pate calls it, it is the capacity through story sharing for de-familiarization to take place for each as person as a teller, and for de-familiarization--change-making insight--to happen for each person as listener. This, says Ron, is the meaning of the Christian Trinity, a relational godhead, a holy community, that is ours to ponder, participate with, and re-create. To Ron and me, this is heaven on earth.

I've been in dialogue with this community. The enacted story "Richard directing" is in front of everyone. Communicative Agency is the middle way between "You're the expert, you tell us what to do," and "I get how this works and we sure don't need you anymore." It's also the middle way between the community members feeling themselves and their stories to be foolish and inadequate, and scapegoating CPI for pushing them or their stories too far. For the practitioner and community, Communicative Agency is a vital third way possible only through deep and authentic story sharing.

Another thing I've learned is that good community leaders have certain attributes that I'm coming to recognize. Judy always spoke her mind immediately and without pulled punches. Genny never lost her composure, was a bottomless well of help and cheer. Both were firm and clear when it was called for. And both backed us all the way--despite bumps in the road. They were truly committed to the integration of the project geographically, racially, and in terms of ability. It is easy for project leaders to lose heart and courage in the heat of production. Jules and I were gratified to embrace Tug and Art from the Union, SC project, leaders with whom we'd parted badly some years ago. They spoke of the changes that the project has brought about to Union County, and remembered with fondness good many times together. We were all grateful for the healing. "There was a lot of emotion," they told us. Yes, there was. Stories at the Edge bring up dark forces in opposition. I remember snorkeling off Vomo Leilei, a little island beside Vomo where I was vacationing in Fiji. On the landward side of Vomo Leilei, the water was shallow and warm and the lovely fish bright in the golden waters. But on the far side of the island, at the seaward edge of the archipelago, the island dropped away into the abyssal depths. I would hover beside the coral heads looking down into that endless blue-black. Now and then something would swim up, a huge grouper or a shark. But it wasn't the fish that made me shiver. Facing those depths emotions rise, all on their own. This time we tried harder than ever to warn people of that period that begins about two weeks out from opening. Jules even had the exact location, "Remember dinner at Leland's barbecue," she asked? "We were all (the core team) sitting at the table, and I said, 'The day will come when you'll wonder why you ever started this, and why you ever hired us. It will be about two weeks before we open.'" When fear began to replace courage, Jules could point to that conversation and it would buoy us all. A little. Story has it that a young apprentice had a walk on in some history play. All he had to do was run on and shout, "Hark, I hear the cannon's roar." He rehearsed right along, timing his line to the stage manager's shout of "Boom," until opening night when they used the real cannon. On stage he ran, kaboom!!! went the cannon, "What the f**k was that??!!" shouted the apprentice. The story illustrates the difference between the anticipated size of the negative reaction when we were sitting around in Leland's place, and the actual size when that blast went off for real. You can hear the warning all day long and still not be prepared for "what the f**k" actually happens, exactly how hard the real experience really is. So we made the warning really explicit this time, and followed it with, "But we'll live through it and the play will succeed IF we live through it." And we did. And this last weekend Jules tells me that the mayor of Lavonia has pronounced Land of Spirit the best thing ever to come to Franklin County. And from the pulpit of Heather and Kit's church, the bump in the road became the lesson of the sermon. Rev. Robert Spencer, whose wife, Mary Spencer's story is in the play, said that it's one thing to talk and its another thing to go through this intense action together, and emerge as one people. "When this play is over," Robert told us, "Franklin County will be a different place." And the city manager has come five times, and did I say that the mayor says its the best thing that has ever happened in Franklin County? And on the third weekend they were oversold and had to lay out chairs on the floor. And at a funeral of a woman of 96 years, the minister expressed a deeper appreciation of her life--the coming of the roads, the depression, rural electrification, telephones--because he had seen it in The Last Hard Times.

And they asked us to come back and do it with them again, in a brand new play, next year.

   

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