Interview with Bill Rauch, artistic director

By Ferdinand Lewis

[Interviewer’s note: Bill Rauch is a founding member of Cornerstone, and is its artistic director. In the following, note the "tricks of the trade" that Rauch shares, such as the necessity of identifying one person in the community who is willing to "make that leap of faith" of advocating for the project. These can mean success or failure for a community-based project. These notes pick up in the middle of a number of conversations that Rauch and I had on a variety of subjects. —F.L.]

Ferdinand Lewis: What did you set out to do 15 years ago?

Bill Rauch: We set out to do plays for people who don't normally go to theater, because we were frustrated with professional theater. We were afraid that when we reached the end of our careers we might not have been able to reach the majority of our fellow citizens. The notion of performing for people turned into performing with people. The [idea for the] company evolved over three years, and then there was a good intense nine months of putting it together. The idea that we would set plays in the communities and collaborate with communities evolved over the first three years.

FL: What are the different types of community projects?

BR: "Commissioned collaborations" are when another organization foots the bill, and a "collaboration" is when the host doesn't foot the bill, but instead shares resources. We also commission new plays, which is an important part of what we do.

FL: How so?

BR: Our profile was that we did these adaptations of classics, and didn't generate new plays, but as we began to work more and more with playwrights, we discovered that we are somewhat unique in that other theaters commit to "new work," but they don't commission it, whereas we do. Or else other companies commission readings only, but we're fairly unique in that 99% of what we do is in existence because we've paid an artist to create it.

FL: How are your community projects initiated?

BR: It's varied over the years. It could start from ensemble members talking about an issue they have a hunger to work with, or someone from a community approaching us, or else we could just start with an idea and find the market for it. Usually, it's about one person in a community making the leap of faith and becoming an advocate for the project. Over the years we've had a lot of projects die because they couldn't find that advocate. That's true in every project, finding that person.

FL: What is the average turnaround time for an out-of-town residency?

BR: The current project we're doing in Fresno will have a one-and-a-half-year turnaround, the New Haven project almost three years, and the project at the Arena Stage 12 months. We have to make sure that there's time to listen.

FL: Once you've found that one community advocate, what's the next step to get a project going?

BR: We build a community advisory committee from the community, and sometimes they're active and sometimes they aren't. They usually have various levels of input. But this committee provides guidance. For auditioning, for instance, we ask what are the places we must audition. We present to them how we build a project and they tell us how to best do that most respectfully for that community.

FL: How interesting that you would use the word "respect" there. You seem to make respect integral to the process, and not just a needlepoint motto.

BR: The advisory committee helps to translate for you, literally and metaphorically, in terms of issues and code words in the community and whether you're pushing a button without even realizing it. For instance: When we did a collaboration with the Chinatown community here in L.A., we wanted the word "drag" in the posters for the project, but the word, it turned out, had all these different connotations in Chinatown. So, this becomes a dialogue with the advisory committee.

The committee is also important for the legacy of the project. What will be the ongoing impact after the project is over? The advisory committee has plenty of thoughts on that. For instance, the Watts Village Theatre Company started out of the project we did in Watts, and Cornerstone's managing director is a board member of Watts Village. During the "road years," [before the company settled in Los Angeles] we would donate money [through the advisory committee] for the community to start a theater. Recently, by the way, one of them sent a $500 check to say thank you. In Los Angeles, we measure a broader range of impact, rather than just helping to leave a theater company behind us. People call us for help with college applications, or to borrow sound equipment. Often, community members stay active with the company long after the project ends. The advisory committee almost invariably is active until the project starts, then becomes inactive during the project, because the artists and the project takes over, then sometimes they become active after.

FL: At what point does the actual creative process start?

BR: Throughout the whole setting-up process, we're working on the artistic content and identifying a writer. In the first five years [of the company], it was always an adaptation of a classic text "by Cornerstone Theatre and the Community." Now, there are more writers, and we have embraced the role of the playwright. There was one time we set out to create something without a playwright, and it was a disaster. Alison Carey had always been a major engine behind the adaptations. Arriving in Los Angeles, we were in a city of playwrights, and had many that we could commission.

FL: What are the writer's sources for research?

BR: Focus groups within the community, and oral histories, informally and formally. Doing writing and acting exercises that Allison has developed and collected to generate material and research. The writer distills the research into the script. They are putting things up in front of the community as they go along, to influence the ongoing draft.

FL: Where do you look for the piece's form?

BR: That's with the director and writer ultimately, although the ensemble plays a role and the community plays a role. Traditional roles are respected in that the director directs and writer writes, etc. This was always the case, except the role of the playwright was more undefined. Today, they don’t have actors [in the ensemble] who just act, they do many things.

FL: How do you keep the process open to the community?

BR: In Bethlehem, Pa., [for the production "Steelbound"] the script was distributed in bars and restaurants and people would scribble things in the margins, also there were meetings at the union [meeting hall]. The company's aesthetic is to include the community's dialogue with itself in the script, which calls for opposing voices and layers of meaning and a vital richness. Multiplicity of viewpoints: It's essential to our mission.

FL: Including a multiplicity of voices in the work — "performing with the community, instead of for them" — came out of the natural inclinations of Cornerstone's founders. But there's no question that it can be viewed as a kind of community outreach, which is coincidentally pleasing to funders. That must create a fine line between your mission and the mission of the funders. Are there traps to avoid?

BR: I think a lot of people stop at the "multiplicity of voices" thing, and interpret it as "Can't we all get along?" – a kind of superficial multiculturalism. But including the voice of the oppressor along with the voice of the oppressed is a very strong political stance.

FL: Does it weaken the political stance when your mission is viewed more as social work instead of as art?

BR: The social-service aspect is often overstressed. In fact we have deliberately stopped emphasizing that. The majority of communities that we work with are lower income and don't have access to professional theater, that's true, but the work is just as much about what we are learning as artists: It's a mutual exchange.

FL: That's a fine line.

BR: Even colleagues can misunderstand, thinking that we do this just for the social service, but the fact is, we do it to create the best art that we know how to create.

FL: Then why work with communities?

BR: Community performers help to make the art that we love to make. Here are people who are bringing themselves together in combination with professional actors, transforming themselves into this very dynamic combination. There's something aesthetic about the variety of ages and body types and life experience, a diversity that is part of the fabric of the work, and that's what makes it powerful. At the same time there are certain muscles that we can only exercise with ensemble members.

FL: You're referring to the "ensemble shows," the shows that you do that don't involve a community collaboration?

BR: Right.

FL: Cornerstone is unique among theater ensembles in that you separate the two types of production: "community collaborations" and "ensemble shows."

BR: We do a lot of soul-searching about how the ensemble work serves the community work, and vice versa. The ensemble is the least understood part of the work by the outside world. We don't get grants for it, but we've realized that that's a problem that starts at home: We don't do long-range planning for ensemble work. It's a feature of the long-range plan that we will do some serious investigation into the ensemble work. Part of the importance of it is that ensemble shows keep the ensemble fresh.

We're a little less hyper about the distinctions now. Being in one city rather than travelling all the time, we're able to blur the lines. Los Angeles audiences have taught us how much the two types of shows are a continuum. Many L.A. theater-goers don't always understand the distinction between our community shows and the ensemble shows, and so the distinctions vanish, between whether it's community performers or not, or multiracial or not. As an example, we had a Museum of Contemporary Art commission to be part of a show about artists who look at public space. We made a piece about what happens on a bus. There were five performers in the piece, which sounds like an ensemble show [because of its small size], and three of the five were ensemble actors [two were community members], but it was a collaboration with community, a real bus driver was playing the bus driver, and there was a performer from Watts that we had worked with before [on a community show]. The crews for the show were all kids from Watts. What was this? Ensemble or community collaboration?

We're always looking for ways to measure impact, because it's so anecdotal, and having more quantifiable measurement is important.

FL: How do funders measure your impact?

BR: How many butts are in the seats, who those people are and their demographics, which we used to assess informally, but in the past two years we do written evaluation with audience members, and in the coming years we're going to add oral surveys. Who is willing to fill out a survey is skewed by certain cultures, so we're adding a focus group after performances. We're also looking at surveying audiences six months after a project.

Anecdotal evidence has a power for the funders, but they also want things that are quantifiable, so we struggle with it.

FL: How would you respond to the assertion that "art changes nothing?"

BR: You cannot predict what art changes. You're naïve if you think you know how you're going to change the world with the art you create. It's equally naïve and irresponsible even to acknowledge that art changes the world.

FL: Extending that thought: Art changes nothing, but people change, usually slowly, and sometimes in response to art. What would you say?

BR: Absolutely. The artist is creating an image of the world, and that shapes how people see the world. It's a very important job.

FL: Ensemble theaters tend to fall apart when the core ensemble loses its cohesion. Your ensemble is at the center of all the company's activities, which means the members must have to work pretty hard. How does the ensemble rejuvenate itself?

BR: Keeping the ensemble healthy is important. I have to say I'm a passionate advocate of the ensemble, but it's difficult to be a member of the ensemble and artistic director at the same time. Those jobs are in conflict, because at times [as artistic director] I just want to go away and make decisions, because the ensemble is an extraordinarily time-consuming process. But I can cite many examples of making decisions made collectively with the ensemble that would have been less good decisions if I had made them myself. As artistic director, I'm constantly reminded that we're stronger together than we are individually. Often when I'm most exasperated is when we're on the point of a breakthrough. One of the ways the ensemble reinvented itself was when we went from lifetime contracts to shorter contracts. That decision was about the need to reaffirm our desire to work together each time a contract comes up for renewal. Had we not adopted something more flexible like that, I don't know if I could have continued to work in the ensemble structure.

FL: You evaluate each other, but you also do "self-evaluations." How do the self-evaluations work?

BR: The ensemble just finished a round-robin evaluation where everybody reviews everybody, and now the next phase is self-evaluation, where you tell the group where you are personally and where you want to go. This [current set of evaluations] is the most sophisticated that we've done, and it's been the most successful. And that idea came out of the group, and their complaints about what hasn't worked in the past.

FL: The company has relationships with lots of young artists, people you've met in the communities in which you've worked. Do you mentor them?

BR: We've always looked to work with people of all ages, but in recent years we've become much more thoughtful of our relationship to young people. We now have a fellowship program to finance three early-career theater workers to intern with the company. We're also starting a Youth Participation Initiative, to bring more young people in, formalizing our relationship to youth. We're also starting an Institute as part of the long-range plan, to make a tuition-based program to learn Cornerstone's brand of community-based work.

FL: You're just completed a long-range planning process, that looks like it was fairly difficult.

BR: Our long-range planning process was led by the consultant. It was challenging for her [the consultant] because we wanted to do it "the Cornerstone way" — collectively or with the ensemble totally involved. We have some institutional skepticism about consultants, but we wouldn't have a long-range plan with out them. It was only possible because a consultant held us accountable. It was not an easy process. We've grown, but it's still about survival and the project at hand, or whatever the crisis of the moment is, and we have to force ourselves to think long-term.

Ferdinand Lewis is a founding member of The Ghost Road Company, an educator, writer and theater artist. He is currently at work on two books: "Ensemble Theater: An Anthology" and "Ensemble Theater: Traditions, Approaches, Strategies." He lives in Los Angeles.

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