The Artmaker as Active Agent: Six Portraits

By Susan Monagan

CHAPTER 3: MARTHA BOWERS

Figure 3.1. “The Dream Life of Bricks.”

Background

Martha Bowers began her professional dance career in the mid-1970’s intent on following the proscribed road to success. As she says, then as now, “There’s a certain kind of model: you get a company, you get to tour, you get performance spaces.” During the same period, however, she began working as part of the national CETA program.

during the economic downturn of the late 1970’s, the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) also placed unemployed artists in public service positions with government and community based agencies. As a result, many artists found themselves with full-time jobs making art in hospitals, prisons, public housing, senior centers and the like. So many, in fact, that by the end of 1979 CETA had become the largest Federal arts program in history.

CETA introduced a generation of artists to the notion that good art, public service and community development are not mutually exclusive. For thousands of artists and arts administrators, the program also expanded the dictionary of American culture beyond the realms of decoration, entertainment and investment. It showed that artists and communities could partner to serve the public good and, most importantly, that the arts could be a powerful agent of personal, institutional and community change. CETA also laid the foundation for the distinctive mix of intentions and outcomes (Artists & Communities, 2005, Para. 8-9).

The experience of working with non-professionals through CETA caused Bowers to question the relevance of the dominant model of success she was following. Also, creating dances in Ireland with non-professional and professionally-trained dancers gave Bowers new insight into the segregation of art in the United States and the outsider position of the artist-as-expert. In Ireland, she worked with “the butcher … the organic grocer, the bank teller” and found that the culture of daily life in that country included public artistic expression. Returning to the U.S. she noted the contrast and acknowledged her sense of powerlessness in the face of the dominant model.

I just didn’t like the whole framework. It was very hierarchical the way decisions were made and careers were arbitrated by a handful of people who were the gatekeepers to venues and critical attention. I really wanted to try to merge the concepts of community-based art-making and aesthetic exploration as I continued to develop as a choreographer. One solution was to move my work outside of the conventional downtown New York venues that were home to emerging dance artists, … so I moved out of theaters.

Other dance and performance companies were moving out of the studio and into the streets as well. For example, Liz Lerman’s company, the “Dance Exchange combined performance with workshops and professional training, helping to pioneer the community residency as a model for touring engagements by dance companies.” (Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, 2005, Para. 7).

The community residency, which both Lerman and Bowers employ, reflects a commitment to using artistic form in its bridging, communicative function and expanding notions of beauty, expertise and usefulness. The residency may involve members of the professional company or just the lead choreographer, working with members of a community in advance of a public dance performance. This advance work may take months or it may involve an intense, single week of preparation culminating with the performance. Typically, the choreographer works with the community to develop the content of the work, creating movements that embody local stories that can then be formed into a new “site specific” piece or integrated into a flexible, existing piece. The community dancers, then, typically rehearse this piece with the professional company and perform it for their neighbors and friends.

The Work

Though Bowers has followed this residency model, traveling to communities, creating dances and going home, it is in her own “back yard” that she created her signature piece and broadened her engagement beyond that of her role as an artist. Bowers is a resident of Brooklyn and Red Hook is a neighborhood on the South Brooklyn waterfront. Dominated by high-rise low-income housing projects, Red Hook has been isolated by its natural geography as a narrow peninsula and ill-served by city services such as public transportation. As the role of shipping in international trade has waned, the neighborhood’s function as an important transfer site within the port of New York has diminished. In the early 1990’s, Red Hook’s waterfront was quiet and warehouses stood empty or underused. Bowers saw an opportunity to learn more about a neighborhood in transition and perhaps use her skills as an artist to give local residents voice in determining the fate of their community.

I met the man who bought up most of the Red Hook waterfront when it was abandoned. The shipping industry moved out and … he was in the middle of redeveloping all these warehouses and beautiful waterfront and I said, “Oh my gosh I’d really like to do a performance down here!” And he said “Okay, go ahead.”

I very clearly wanted people to come and see past all the hype and media exposure about how dangerous Red Hook was and what a failure it was as a community -- the problems of drugs, related crime and poverty-- see past that mask and see a place of extraordinary beauty, meet some of the people who had been down there for years and were working to better the community.

In 1993, Bowers created “On the Waterfront,” a multi-media outdoor performance piece that walked audience members through the community to visit staged vignettes that told some of the community’s stories, in some cases, from the residents themselves. In the words of the Village Voice, “On the Waterfront” is “arte povera, made of the simplest materials, using the heroic scale and architecture of the empty industrial spaces to shelter visions of the past and articulate the present.” (Dance Theatre Etcetra, 2005, Para. 5). Bowers did the hard work of community organizing in order to collect and assemble the stories and performers -- connecting with local institutions, articulating her vision and gaining the trust and compliance of potential participants.

Working in Red Hook for me was always about offering an opportunity, a vehicle, for the community to present the public with an alternative point of view. Also, I saw my work as an opportunity to reconnect the community with the waterfront which represented its economic future. We worked very closely with all sorts of people from education to social services, people in the public housing projects, to developers, to businesses to see how the arts could become an integral part of an overall urban renewal agenda. Often, planning meetings occurred between political or business interests, I hoped that we could bring more community representation to the table. The performance projects were very much informed by what the people who live there want. So it’s allowing people to tell their own story.

Though “On the Waterfront” may have reached its goal of presenting the outside viewer with an alternative view of Red Hook, the piece had an important internal function of showing residents that they could collaboratively create an entertaining and coherent work that had meaning and resonance in their community. The piece’s beauty and coherence could symbolically mirror the community and present the possibility of future successful collaboration. Suzanne Lacy writes, “It is possible that process-oriented public art is at its most powerful when, as with most visual art forms, it operates as a symbol.” (Lacy, 1995, p. 184) In fact, Bowers’ “On the Waterfront,”

was a catalyst for the creation of the Red Hook Partners, a group of cultural, educational, social service organizations, community leaders, developers and artists who meet on a regular basis to plan and implement cultural programs as part of an overall plan for urban renewal in Red Hook. (Dance Theatre Etcetera, 2005, Para. 14).

Bowers has stayed connected to Red Hook and, in 2000, created a second piece on the waterfront focusing on immigration. In addition, her company, Dance Theatre Etcetera produces an annual festival in Red Hook, raising money, recruiting and coordinating volunteers, publicizing and marketing the event and bringing resources and performers from both inside and outside the neighborhood to celebrate the unique character of this community.

In 2002, Bowers was asked by staff of Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MoCA) to create a piece with community residents about the transformation of the area from an industrial to a creative economy. Mass MoCA turned a massive complex of industrial buildings in North Adams, Massachusetts (North West) into a site for monumental sculpture. The conversion has been widely touted as a success, as defined by the measurable economic impact of a substantial intervention into a depressed semi-rural area. The care with which the Mass MoCA site has been developed reflects a respect for the region and its history; North Adams has not been seen as a tabula rasa by developers but a dynamic community with a unique identity. Bowers and other artists have been commissioned by Mass MoCA to facilitate a process of reflection and expression with that community.

In North Adams, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation Multi Arts Production Fund through its Culture and Creativity division, Bowers initially performed a community organizing function, going into community centers and other gathering sites, explaining her dance project to people and asking them to participate. She ended up with a core group of older women all of whom, as long-time residents of the town, had a direct connection with the Mass MoCA site in its previous incarnations as an electronics factory and a fabric printing factory. Bowers encouraged the women to begin to tell stories about the site and slowly was able to get them up on their feet and putting movement to the stories they were telling. Bowers knitted the fragments of personal story and movement into a comprehensive whole entitled, “The Dream Life of Bricks” which explored the emotional and psychological symbolism associated with the Sprague Electronics complex (Mass MoCA) and the deepest impact of economic change. She then brought the professional dancers of Dance Theatre Etcetera to North Adams and taught them this “dance-in-progress.” The professional dancers and community dancers together then rehearsed and performed this piece for the residents of North Adams and patrons of Mass MoCA. The stage for the piece became the complex itself as the piece moved the audience through the buildings and alleyways of the former factory. The audience would pause at specific sites and watch a staged representation of relationships remembered and relived in images evoked by that site. The audience’s movement through the space then becomes another dimension of the overall choreography of the piece and another level of “non-expert,” community participation through movement and engagement.

The Meaning

Bowers is part of a learning community of community-based artists, educators and activists that meets regularly in a salon format to discuss issues and concerns, share successes and frustrations and develop a working theory about this work.

when I started doing this work I had no theory, I had no real models. They existed but I wasn’t connected to them. And the internet over the course of my career has changed that so that all of us who do this kind of work are much more connected and read each other and we’re developing a body of written literature or criticism that actually gives us language to describe what’s going on.

A member of this group is New York University theatre professor, Jan Cohen-Cruz, who regularly invites these practitioners to review and critique her academic papers, pursuing greater reliability and relevance within her scholarship. Bowers said the following in response to my question about how she and other community-based artists interpret their expertise, forming a bridge between the professional and non-professional.

We’re searching for the language to describe what it is we do, which is the ability to utilize art as a means of community engagement: bring people with no particular experience in an art form - but who do have the authority of lived experience - together with professional artists. And how you merge: how you create roles, create movement, create a process that allows that experience -- the authority that they know from living their lives to become the content of the work. How you create a frame, create a script that comes from them?

Interaction

Figure 3.2

For Bowers, bridging the gap between expert and non-expert is the activism. By presenting evidence of collaboration in a public way, she symbolizes power-sharing in her work, and allows participants and audience to imagine a more “just” community. This work fits into her personal, broader, social change agenda.

long ago I stopped identifying myself as just a choreographer or rather, I began to think of choreography in a much broader sense – social choreography. I think there are many little ponds of people who are exploring this work and I think it has to do with not just individual lives and where they lead you but moments in history and how they coincide and influence each other. So I think I’m feeling more and more of a push to use the expertise I’ve gained for social change…, this is a very scary time historically, socially. I think there is a need to do this type of participatory work to get people to stop feeling so disempowered that they can’t effect change-- their vote doesn’t matter, their actions don’t matter, “some lobbyist is gonna change the vote not me.” I think of the broader implications for this work.

In an article Bowers wrote for the Community Arts Network about the experience of co-creating and staging “The Dream Life of Bricks” at MassMoCA, she reflected further on this topic.

Theater is active, it is collaborative; it creates a sense of community and demands participation. I am most hopeful when engaged in projects such as “Dream Life.” The skills of analytical thinking, reflection, engagement, risk taking are the meat and potatoes of the artistic process. These skills are valuable, essential to reinvigorating public participation in both local and national public-policy making in America. I’d like to think that this country will soon go through its own reawakening and that artists will play a significant role in the process. (Bowers, 2002, para. 13).

It is important for the artist to establish which role she is playing at any given point in the process of creating artwork with communities. Bowers comments on fellow community-based artist John Malpede’s work in Eastern Kentucky and brings up distinctions between the “activist” and “reporter” roles, for example.

with John’s project: were the goals to change the conditions, or just to draw attention to them? You know those are two completely different sets of goals. And now if you draw attention to (the conditions) maybe somebody else will come along and change them.

Audience

Figure 3.3

As Bowers described to me the process of eliciting stories from the non-professional participants in the pieces, I asked if the process of choosing and shaping the material was collaborative also.

It’s something I’m rethinking all the time. I would like it to be more collaborative? Generally, that’s the part, that’s the role I play, lending the concept or super-structure to the project: which section goes where, how we paste the thing together, selecting the overarching image that I think is a rich metaphor.

As the lead choreographer and organizer, Bowers appears to disperse and gather power throughout the process as conditions and tasks demand. But how does she gain the trust and cooperation of co-creators so that they pick up the momentum of her idea?

there is no substitute for the time it takes to have people go through a set of experiences that inform and educate, develop trust and familiarity. For the community members or professional creative collaborators on the project and for me, perhaps most of all, it’s a process. It’s a trust process. So there’s a period where you’re just gaining trust, you’re introducing people to working in an arts-based form and what that means. You’re actually teaching skills using theater games or script writing or movement exercises to tell personal or communal stories.

In their book Naturalistic Inquiry, Yvonna Lincoln and Egon Guba describe the development of this trust between researcher and researched:

[Trust] is a developmental process to be engaged in daily: to demonstrate to the respondents that their confidences will not be used against them; that pledges of anonymity will be honored; that hidden agendas, whether those of the investigator or of other local figures to whom the investigator may be beholden, are not being served; that the interests of the respondents will be honored as much as those of the investigator; and that the respondents will have input into, and actually influence, the inquiry process. Building trust is a time-consuming process…(Lincoln & Guba, p. 303)

The emphasis on trust points to the centrality of the building of relationship in community-based work. Bowers backs up Lacy’s assertion that “the relationship is the artwork,” (Lacy, 1995, p. 35) in the following passage from the Community Arts Network piece.

This is the most interesting part of this kind of collaborative community-based work, the relationship between the “outside artists” and community members. As is true in most of our projects, there is the actual choreography of the work, and then there is what I call the essential, invisible dance. This is the dance of unlikely encounters that takes place as artists and community members work together, become friends, develop relationships, compare life stories. It is this dialogue that informs the piece. (Bowers, 2002, para. 9).

Bowers feels that this emphasis on building relationships ripples out to the “immediate audience,” (Lacy, 1995, p. 178) and that the relationship transcends even the centrality of the narrative story.

Yeah I think they feel this. You feel it from the cast. There’s something in the performance of it. Something that happened in the process comes out in the performance.

There is kind of a private nature to it …. First of all you hope that the work has an entry point that is beyond just local issues and politics that there are universal things about people’s lives changing. Issues that are more local access you’re hoping the performative aspect of the work the use of art will transcend. I mean you’re not just dramatizing a town hall meeting - which could be interesting! - but you’re going beyond that to try some more universal language for a multifaceted way of looking at poetry, language, music, movement

Analyzing Bowers’ work in terms of audience exposes the fiction of the anonymous audience member. Nearly everyone arrives for a theatrical tour through Red Hook or MassMoCA with some sort of pre-existing relationship to the piece. The audience arrives with prejudices and expectations based on relationships with cast members, place, publicity or art context. Individual audience members become a figure, moving through space, in the overarching design of the piece and change the dynamic of the piece with her participation. In turn, when she leaves the performance, the influence of the piece ripples outward where it can either build momentum or dissipate.

Patricia Phillips, in her article “Dynamic Exchange: Public Art At This Time,” describes the interplay of audience expectations in public art more generally:

Any consideration of public art must first acknowledge that art is an active agent rather than an amenity or diversion, that its circumstances and context are inevitably complex and often deeply conflicted, and that viewers’ experiences of it are always influenced by both personal and socially constructed preconceptions. (Phillips, 1999, para. 7).

Intention

Bowers and others must create “problem statements” and project “intended outcomes” to conform to the reporting guidelines of the funders of their work. As unfamiliar as this exercise might be to an artist trained in the formal requirements of her discipline, over time it may become a way to focus and organize work.

you have certain goals for a project at the outset of it and then you measure your effectiveness against whether you’ve achieved these goals or not. Some of them may be aesthetic some of them might be in terms of amount and quality of engagement some of them might be more [about the] long term purposes of a project: does it effect policy, does it effect communities overall, economic development, community development.

Bowers may establish the agenda for a project, as she did in Red Hook: committing to directing a process that would reveal unheard voices and tell especially positive stories about the current lives and vitality of the Red Hook neighborhood. She might develop a set of intentions prior to beginning a process that can then be evaluated and changed as the process is underway. Understanding intention becomes critical with work that finds much of its value in process.

How do you assess whether your project was successful or not? And I think it has to do with this whole discussion we have been having about value. Because it’s this endless discussion of “is it the process or the product?” Well, it’s both. And what is the value of the product? … It’s very different. The real value of the project might not be as evident in the final product which is the performance. So how you construct a way of measuring the success is determined by the initial goals and the accomplishment of those goals at various stages of the project. So, you might give a ten to the community engagement process and five for the performance but overall what were the goals? We have very few critics with an interest in and an appropriately new language to talk about this work.

Sometimes the agenda for the piece is set out by the funder. Using the “audience” ring model, the idea for the piece, then, may originate with a curator or an arts administrator, or as some in these positions call themselves, “animators.” Bowers is brought on board as an interpretor of that initial idea and assumes the “inner ring” of the concentric circle. Nonetheless, she must design her piece and her interaction with the community according to the initial intentions. MassMoCA’s intention in commissioning the piece that became “The Dream Life of Bricks,” for example, was to engage local residents in articulating the transition underway in the town that the arts institution was hastening. Part public relations, part community planning, this project could symbolize a connection between the town’s economic past and present. Bowers included and deepened these institutional intentions by creating her own set of intentions that focused on revealing the symbolic, psychological and subconscious impacts of economic change.

Effectiveness

Bowers must constantly struggle to balance the aesthetic and social goals and demands of this work. What solutions are asked of the work? Bowers describes a project of unrealistic and perhaps unrealizable expectations that, though artistically may have been a disaster, had the unexpected outcome of being effective in meeting one of its essential intentions.

I did a project in Pennsylvania. The presenter who hired me had a very specific agenda. She wanted to bring together the two different racial/cultural groups through the process. This was not happening in any organic way in their community. So, you know, lesson number one, these projects are not going to solve social ills without a huge paradigm change through the whole community the whole government structure, the whole … I mean you can’t put a nice community arts project band aid on a deeply divisive racial issue. It won’t work without an in-depth effort to look at all the contributing factors and a lot of community partners coming together in earnest to address them. So here was a racially mixed cast that were like oil and water. We would spend so much time dealing with that issue and how we were going to be able to work together given our different attitudes toward everything.

The final product was, from an artistic point of view, terrible. From a project point of view I think we all learned a lot. I think we all learned a tremendous amount about what was going on in and what was wrong with that community and for that group of people. They came away with a much better understanding of these other points of view.

So how can appropriate measures of effectiveness be developed and employed in an atmosphere wherein claims and expectations may be outsized and any acknowledgement of change is purely subjective and subject to cultural mores? Bowers describes a project in Nebraska involving cultural splits very similar to those of the aforementioned Pennsylvania project. In these communities, the mere act of working together, becomes more important symbolically to the community than any resultant artistic product. Bowers followed up her work in Nebraska with a reflective video piece, wherein she interviewed participants one year after the community performance and asked them to describe how they had changed as a result of their participation in the piece. One of the two groups brought together was Native American. Bowers paraphrases and contextualizes the reflection of the Native American advisor on the impact of the project.

it was important because it recognized our voice in the community and allowed us to tell our own story – not have it mediated by … Hollywood versions of what happened to the Indians. You know this was really an opportunity for them to shape the content of the piece…that’s how I work.

The information acquired by Bowers through the video follow-up project is valuable and yet it is not part of her typical artistic process. The reflective work of community-based artists is voluntary, not necessarily required by funders, and is episodic and idiosyncratic, fitting into the style of the individual artist. Bowers’ use of the videotaped interview as an information gathering tool to measure impact reflects the emergence of an arts-research hybrid methodology. For example, social scientists use video as a primary data-gathering method and artists use interview for its revelation of the expressive and interpretive qualities of character. In order for the field of community-based artistic practice to develop, there needs to be shared understanding of what constitutes an appropriate evaluative process and provisions made for building evaluation of project goals into the artistic process which typically ends prematurely with the performance or display of an artistic product. Bowers borrows experience working with peer evaluators in education in imagining an appropriate evaluative methodology.

It’s similar to some assessment methods in education. We have people who are paid assessors to come in and look at arts in education programs: coming in at the outset, coming in at the middle, coming in at the end. “These were your goals, this is where you are now. What are the problems, what are the issues, what are the successes?” And then “okay, got to this point let’s evaluate again along the way.” So it’s kind of critique, evaluation, assessment. … I wish I had someone like that.

Figure 3.4. Martha Bowers

Next: Chapter 4 - Marty Pottenger
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