Interview/Statement Summaries

By Linda Frye Burnham

Interviews were by Michael Fields between January 22 and 25, 2001, in Whitesburg, Kentucky, and by Ann Kilkelly on August 7, 2001, in Whitesburg, Kentucky; Big Stone Gap and Buchannon County, Virginia. All have been edited for length by CAN. The full, unedited transcripts are available on request.

Interview with Joy Briggs, project participant and retired director of Family Crisis Support Services at Hope House, and Tamara Coffey, company member

This interview expands on many of the points raised about "Voices from the Battlefront" in the Janie Funk interview. Joy Briggs was an initial supporter of the project at Hope House because of her own experience in theater. " I think you have to be involved in the arts yourself before you can understand. I mean, art is life," she says. She details the initial reluctance of staff to "tell what they felt," but that was not the response of women clients who were victims of assault and abuse. "They were much more eager to tell what they felt. But the staff felt this was really stupid" until they saw it performed.

Briggs says the piece included composite stories, as well as older, traditional stories and songs about the subject. "It showed that this is not a new problem." In story circles following the performances, more men spoke than women, and Briggs says they told stories about their own lives (especially about their own mothers) that they had not realized until now were connected to domestic violence and assault. "The men were just seeing this in a whole different light." Actors and juvenile-justice officers both broke down emotionally in the story circles. The women discuss the potential for danger from abusers for the performers and the community following the performances, and the therapeutic effects for the abused in hearing their own stories presented in the frame of art and "getting to know that people valued their stories."

To read entire (edited) interview with Joy Briggs, click here

Interview with Dudley Cocke, Donna Porterfield, Ron Short and Tamara Coffey, core artist/manager group

Porterfield, Short and Coffey talk at length about what theater and Roadside mean to them and other people who came from, as Porterfield puts it, their working-class background and rural sensibility, because "it’s their own stories." Says Coffey, "To me, that’s what grassroots theater is. It’s so connected to where we are and what we know as individuals, separate from theater, even. Most people [at home], when they come to see us, don’t think of it as theater." Short identifies grassroots theater as the voice of "the hidden world of America that most people never see," one not driven by popular culture and the market economy that controls the national "story." He sees grassroots theater as "a place where common people, everyday people, can get up and speak their mind and have other people listen to them. That process of dialogue with the audience enters into the collective consciousness of that community and helps shape that community." Coffey identifies Roadside’s work as stressing the "importance of cultural identity," which strengthens the Appalachian community to fight against "100 years of economic and political oppression."

Cocke defines grassroots theater as one that "has its roots in a particular place" and is "accessible to everyone in the community." He says Roadside is committed "to the responsibility to make that heritage new, to reinvent it." The fact that "form, content, audience and place were linked at the inception of the theater," he says, "has allowed us to be an experimental theater because it has given us a firm foundation upon which to make new work." He also points out that the audience "is always, in Roadside’s work, part of the show. There’s no fourth wall."

Porterfield discusses the process through which Roadside decided to conduct longer community residencies when doing the touring that is essential to their economic survival as an ensemble. They created the story-circle method to "get people talking to each other and telling stories again" and help the company "figure out how we could make arts participants rather than arts spectators out of the audience." Other methodologies emerged "that we all agreed on," as well as a practice of "writing it down." They describe their "Residency Goal Sheet" for each project, tracking what was intended and what actually happened.

Cocke describes Roadside’s residency process as "points on a circle," many of which can occur at the same time: 1. Showing the work to the partner community, with explanation of how it came to be, to "create transparency so the audience person can look through the actor and the story, the set and the direction to become in touch with their own story." 2. ‘'Help the community to hear its own voice … through particular methodologies like music and story circles," culminating with "public performances of community stories and songs for the community." 3. Helping the community (if asked) "make some sort of more formal play or performance … to have their own plays and to have their own voice." 4. Helping that group of people get "a toehold in the community, to have a nascent theater" and "welcome them into the kind of national network of people trying to do this work," which might include making collaborative plays together or having them come to Whitesburg and show their new work.

There is also an extended discussion of the crucial importance of using the details of untold personal stories to construct theater that everyone can understand, yet with a complexity that resists the dehumanizing simplicity of popular culture. Also, they talk about the importance of documentation and preservation of the theater’s history for the next generation of artmakers.

To read entire (edited) interview with Cocke, Porterfield, Short and Coffey, click here

 Interview with Tamara Coffey, company member, administrator

Coffey talks with interviewer Ann Kilkelly about the value of obtaining evaluations of a Roadside project, "especially if it’s positive. Hearing the folks talk about how far they’ve gone from where they started with us says what I believe to be true – as long as someone in the community believes in the work, and is connected to it, and dedicated to it, then it can go on and have a huge effect on a number of people." They discuss the element of "faith and belief" it takes to continue to work and the difficulty of quantifying the effects of a community arts project when using measures required by funders. The interview ends with Coffey describing the process of doing research for a new piece by Ron Short based on a family song.

To read entire (edited) interview with Tamara Coffey, click here

Statements by Tamara Coffey, company member, administrator

Coffey is a native of Whitesburg who works as an administrator for Roadside at Appalshop, where she oversees access to the Roadside records, publications and videos and works on the Roadside Web site. She describes how and when budgets and future plans are considered by the company. The current plan reflects the company’s transition from extensive touring to more, "community-building projects and residencies and documenting the company’s practice and methodologies." They still play extensively in the Appalachian region and find it helpful to return to sites again and again.

Coffey says of Roadside’s mission, "In this place, folks are taught they have no value, no culture. A lot of our work is figuring out how to counteract that whole myth and build a net to support and connect the culture of this region and others who find their culture marginalized or threatened with extinction."

To read complete statements by Tamara Coffey, click here

Statements by Janie Funk, staff, Family Crisis Support Center, Hope House, Norton, Va.

Janie Funk reports the process of creating "Voices from the Battlefront," a theater piece with Roadside, based on stories of domestic violence experienced by women clients of Hope House. Some women hesitated to take part, but agreed after a process with Roadside artists that included interviews and story circles with both staff and clients and a performance of stories and songs by the Roadside company to provide an artistic context for the work.

Following that process, says Funk, the women said they couldn’t tell their stories, but Roadside could. The women’s stories, both taped and written down, were combined with some of Roadside’s traditional mountain stories. The resulting presentation did include two women telling their own stories, followed by the play, a food break and a story circle with the audience. Funk reports that participants were surprised that anyone was interested in their stories, and saw them in a new light, as did a Virginia court judge, who had previously thought such stories trivial.

The play was performed to strong response for a range of audiences, including a conference of judges, family councilors, police and welfare-department workers. Roadside is being called upon more and more to work with social-service agencies and nonarts groups, but full funding for such work is a struggle.

To read complete statements by Janie Funk, click here

Interview with Evelyn Knight, coordinator of program development at Appalshop

Knight describes how Appalshop collaborates with Roadside to use story and theater as a community-organizing tool. She gives the example of their cancer programs, for which Roadside trained Appalshop’s community facilitators. It was piloted in three counties and two counties carried it forward; in Wise County, for example, the project produced a play. "Essentially the theme is that cancer is an equal-opportunity disease. Sort of the notion that it strikes anyone, we are all at risk, and therefore the lines in the community need to soften up because we are all together in this," says Knight. She sees these "little plays" from local stories as vehicles for "getting dialogue going around it," for "community organizing and discussion." They "left the door wide open as to what kind of artistic product was going to come out of that." One county did a quilt, greeting cards and a book with the stories.

To read entire (edited) interview by Evelyn Knight, click here

Interview with Laura Lyons, Marilyn Maxwell, Nancy Smith and Zelma Michael, "Life’s Circle" project participants; and Tamara Coffey, company member

The women meet at Mountain Laurel Cancer Research and Support Center (MLC) to talk about their experience in "Life’s Circle," a readers-theater piece based in personal stories about cancer. Some of the women work at MLC as staff and researchers. Smith and Maxwell are clear about the outcome of the project for the community. Says Smith: "The ‘Life’s Circle’ story ends with a telling of the points of concern that came out of this whole process as it relates to the community addressing cancer needs." And Maxwell states: "It was empowering. The people had told the stories. It was woven into the community story, and ends with a list. This is what we want. This is what we need. This is what we are going to do." On a personal level they found it therapeutic because they had never told their stories before, they felt less isolated, and in telling them in this setting, "You felt like you were doing it in a way that was not only about you. It was about the community you lived in. It was bigger than yourself. That was good," says Maxwell.

The group discusses the function of theater in such a project. "I think that storytelling and theater is of critical importance to our vision and dream for this Mountain Laurel Cancer Research and Support Center," says Maxwell. She speaks of the funding for other functions of the center: "The soul of the whole thing – and if we’ve lost it we have lost our soul – is the theater and storytelling component. We think that is what grounds us in the community. That is what makes us human. That is what makes us reach out and try and be inclusive. It is that tool of the theater." They also talk about the artists’ roles in the process. Roadside’s Ron Short trained the facilitators for the story-gathering circles, and Kim Neal acted as writer and director, "the one who wove all this together. Without those things that they [the artists] have, we wouldn’t be talking about ‘Life’s Circle’ here today," says Maxwell. "I think we would have had some really good things that would have gone on in people’s homes, but it would have stopped there."

To read entire (edited) interview with Lyons, Maxwell, Smith, Michael and Coffey, click here

Interview with David Raines, elementary school teacher and residency participant; Crystal Raines, student residency participant; and Tamara Coffey, company member

David Raines is a public-school teacher in Buchannon County, Va. He and Crystal Raines (unrelated) talk about the four-year project he initiated with Roadside at Harmon School, an elementary/middle school with a population of 300. He was a gym teacher at the time, working on a research project toward a master’s degree in education from Virginia Tech. He combined his interest in storytelling in classroom situations and his familiarity with Roadside’s work to generate, with the help of a sympathetic principal, a storytelling project at Harmon. Roadside’s Artist in Education residency program was funded through a Teacher Incentive Program and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. The students interviewed family and acquaintances in their communities, brought the stories to the Roadside artists and developed them into small performance pieces.

"I felt," says David Raines, "like the great strengths of the work we accomplished at Harmon were in helping students learn about their family histories, their community history and history of the region. It helped students with their self-esteem. Being from the Appalachian region, I felt like that was an extremely important part of the child’s education. To help them get over some of the stigma of being from Appalachia. Self-confidence." The program was most beneficial, he says, for students from poor backgrounds who don’t write or express themselves well. Some of those children went on to high school and college, and at a reunion said the experience helped them with speech and theater classes.

The project generated other activity, including a book collaboration with author Lee Smith, collaborations with other schools and a two-day, whole-school Appalachian Fair at Harmon, including classroom art projects, a quilt by kindergartners and their parents, a photography and display project about old family tools, cooking events and study of native plants. Raines himself got engaged with playing music again, and the teachers created a curriculum guide for Appalachian studies in the classroom. He described the beneficial effect of the project in these terms: "What is really important to everyone is where they are and how they experience their life where they are. So many of us are missing out on some of the most enjoyable, exciting, interesting facets of life by looking too far away for our entertainment and our education. We need to start looking closer to home." He says the work ended because of lack of funding and the fact that Harmon is closing and local schools are consolidating into one with a student body of 1200, too large to accomplish such a community-building project, in his view.

To read entire (edited) interview with Raines, Raines and Coffey, click here

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