Taking Action: Teaching Participatory Community-based Theater – Sharon Green

Sharon Green

Sharon Green taught Community Based Theatre for Social Change in Spring 2001 at Davidson College in North Carolina.

Sharon Green: Here I provide some commentary on some of what did and didn't work in the course; what I would do differently next time I teach it, but not necessarily how I would do it. I hope this, in conjunction with the syllabus, is useful!

I. Organization and Practicalities

This class met once a week for three hours. For one week (approximately mid-semester), in lieu of a regular class meeting, we (the class) did a one-week intensive workshop along with the students in a course entitled Disability and Literature (taught by my colleague in the English dept, Ann Fox), facilitated by guest artist, Joan Lipkin. The culmination of the week's work was an open performance demo and discussion entitled, "The Disability Project: Exploring Issues of Disability Through Theatre" (see below for more on this residency).

After the first two weeks, I tried to break each class session into two parts: One half would include discussion of the week's reading and the other would be some practical work that engaged with the sorts of techniques about which we were reading. At times, the halves were not quite so discrete and would bleed into one another. Each week, students were responsible for presentations of some sort. At times, that meant they had to browse a Web site and report back to the rest of the class, at other times it meant that they had to come to class with several discussion questions, other times it meant they had to facilitate an exercise or game about which they had read.

The final few weeks of the course were devoted to presentations of student work.

II. Readings & Assignments

Because the material I wanted students to read came from so many disparate places, and because I didn't want to overwhelm them with book purchases, I suggested they purchase the following books:

Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed

Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors

Michael Rohd, Theatre for Community, Conflict and Dialogue

Baz Kershaw, The Politics of Performance: Radical Theatre as Cultural Intervention

I created a course packet with the remainder of the readings in it. The convenience of this was that it let me mold the course to the class's interests, i.e., I told students that if they were particularly interested in a certain topic, geographic region, etc., we could alter readings to accommodate them. In the future, I will do this somewhat differently, although I am not exactly sure yet how.

Written Assignments

1. Response Papers. Students were required to hand in four response papers over the course of the semester. These were meant to be short discussions of the readings for a given week, focusing either on one specific article, or on a theme/theoretical issue raised in several. I asked that response papers not be summaries of articles, but rather thoughtful reactions to them that engaged with the most important ideas, theoretical positions and findings in each, or made connections to issues, theoretical positions (etc.) already raised in class. This assignment (including the number of papers required) was constructed with the students. I allowed them to decide how many papers should be done, the length, due dates, etc. For some students this worked well. Others waited until the last minute and weren't able to complete the required number of papers. In the future, I would allow them input, but also include more structure.

2. Final Papers. Students had 3 deadlines connected with their final paper. Mid-semester they had to submit a brief final-paper proposal to me and the rest of the class. Students read each others' proposals and we spent class time discussing each. I asked other class members to give one another feedback on what seemed most interesting and most problematic about each proposal. This worked extremely well. Students were actually quite helpful for one another. Three weeks before papers were due, each student was required to give a 10 minute presentation on their research thusfar, indicating problems they were having, what they had already found out, what they planned to find out, etc. Again, other students gave feedback, suggesting what might be interesting to explore further, and offering advice. Again, this worked quite well, although in the future, I would do this one week earlier, and I would require students to submit tentative bibliographies at this point to prevent them from leaving all of the substantive research to the last minute.

At the last class meeting, students presented final versions of their findings (I asked them not to read their papers, but to present to the class the most interesting aspect of both their findings and their research process.) Students then had one week before papers were due.

3. Community project proposal. Again, this was done in two shifts. Several weeks before the assignment was due, students presented ideas for their projects and got feedback from me and the class. Students then did oral project presentations, and submitted written project proposals. I found this to be the most important assignment for the course. In the design of their projects students needed to incorporate both the theoretical and practical aspects involved in creating Community-Based Theatre. It was truly amazing to see how well (of course, some more than others) they were able to concretize the issues of the course in the design of their projects (and in the rationale for each choice of that design). If I teach this class again, I will definitely include this component and may even think of some way to expand it.

III. Artist Residency

Having Joan Lipkin on campus for a week was wonderful, although quite hectic. Students had three three-hour meetings with Joan (Sunday, Monday and Wednesday), and then a final performance (Friday). I think they needed more time. Dr. Fox and I, when planning the residency, were concerned about overworking the students and asking them to commit more than 12 hours in one week for the project. In the future, I would plan the residency to include two long sessions over a weekend and then only one other session during the week. While many of the students did indeed seem overwhelmed by the time commitment, we (Dr. Fox and I) could have made things easier if we had done some more logistical planning, such as hiring a stage manager. In all other regards, the residency was an extremely important part of the experience of this course, and in many ways, provided a reference point for many issues we had already discussed, and other issues that would come up later in the semester. This is another component of the course I would definitely want to include in the future (although securing the funding for it was not at all easy).

I suspect that every year I teach this class it will be quite different. I attempted, this year, for the course to be both intellectual and practical; for students to both identify and discuss the ethical and practical difficulties involved in CBT work, and then to be directly confronted with these same issues in the creation of a piece of work. I have been thinking that, in the future, I may want to structure it somewhat differently. Ideally, this should be taught as a two-semester class, with the first semester laying foundations and the second semester devoted to the creation of a meaningful project/performance.

I have much more to say on all of this and also look forward to listening to others experiences, insight and wisdom!

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Original CAN/API publication: September 2001