Shards, Circles, Jails, Journeys and Cootie Shots: Four New Books

If you need to catch up with what’s happening in community art, now’s a good time to read about it. This year we are gifted with four extremely valuable books by and about artists working in, for and with the communities around us. They are about performing acupuncture on the injured Earth, play-making between Zuni Indians and Appalachian mountain people, bringing women out of jail and onto the stage, and giving schoolkids inoculations against bigotry. Each one opens a door on that magic: community art in process from the soul to the public arena. Spend a week with these four books and you will know where real art is going in the 21st century. And who’s going with it.

"Shards and Circles" by Daniel Dancer (Trafford Publishing, 1990, 258 pp.)

It is sunrise on a beach in the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve of Mexico’s Yucatan. A wheel made of anchor rope lies in the sand, divided with coconuts into four sections. In the manner of the sacred medicine wheels of the plains Indians, the quarters of the wheel bear significant colors: the north quadrant is white, the south yellow, the east red, the west black. But the objects in the wheel casting these colors are not holy. They are discarded styrofoam, six-pack rings, nylon netting, light bulbs, hypodermic syringes, detergent and oil containers, old toys, garbage bags — all washed up by the strong Caribbean currents. Facing west at the circle’s edge is a starfish full of bullet holes. Facing the ocean and morning sun is a dolphin’s skull beneath two red flags on a bamboo pole, with a weatherworn, one-eyed baby-doll’s head smiling from its top.

If we had been there in January 1990, we would have seen this mandala made from the world’s detritus by Daniel Dancer, who had come to Mexico as an aerial photographer to document one of the largest biospheres in Latin America. Finding the beaches choking in trash, his first reaction was to leave quickly, but instead he looked again and decided to stay and make art. "As a way to process and transform feelings of environmental despair, and in a budding belief that art and ceremony can make a difference," he says in his new book "Shards and Circles," "I decided to build a healing sculpture on the beach. I thought that a creative gifting of myself might enable passage to the wild, sacred heart of this place — an opening that perhaps would normally be denied." He used "an Aikido tactic: Take the blow and redirect the energy."

"Shards and Circles" documents ten of Dancer’s healing art installations in endangered ecosystems from the Arctic Circle to the Kansas Tallgrass Prairie. Dancer lives in Rowena Wilds, a model environmental community he founded on the Columbia River in Oregon, he where he inhabits an earth-sheltered home made from recycled materials. His photographs pairing environmental beauty and destruction have been widely published. Beautiful photos of his projects are available on his Web site, and a book of photos is forthcoming, but "Shards and Circles" offers only his drawings and deeply philosophical writing about this work.

Here Dancer reveals himself as a scholar who can reference Gary Snyder, Paula Gunn Allen, Mircea Eliade, Thich Nhat Hanh, James Lovelock and many others in his multiple fields. But it is through his reflections on his own experience that he reveals his deep faith in the power of art as a kind of "personal and practical acupuncture … a deep way to give thanks for the beauty that surrounds us and to help activate a protective response from our culture." Each "eco-mandala" made of the combined shards of nature and industrial culture and installed on a polluted beach, clear-cut forest, plowed prairie or open-pit mine represents an act of courage. "The pain we carry for our imperiled world," he says, "is only dysfunctional when we refuse to own it." It takes courage, he believes, to "stop pretending, to face despair and resist the urge to give in sleepily to the seduction and superficial comforts of modern society. …." His books and Web site represent his hope "to charge the rewilding of each place by sharing my work with others in story and photograph." Excerpts from the book are available on his ZeroCircles Web site.

"Journeys Home: Revealing a Zuni-Appalachian Collaboration," edited by Dudley Cocke, Donna Porterfield and Edward Wemytewa (Zuni A:shiwi Publishing, 2002, 106 pp., includes CD)

This book is the story of a 16-year artistic collaboration between the Zuni people of the American southwest and the mountain people of the Cumberland Plateau in Central Appalachia. Two of the products of the collaboration are a new theater and a new theatrical tradition in Zuni, contributing to the preservation of the Zuni language and culture. "Journeys Home" opens the collaborative experience of the two theater companies, Roadside Theater and Idiwanan an Chawe, in a moving document that includes essays and diaries about valuing and relearning one's own culture, crossing cultural boundaries and making something new. It features the entire script of the musical play the artists made together in 1995-6, "Corn Mountain, Pine Mountain: Following the Seasons," in both English and Zuni, along with a CD showcasing some of the stories and songs. Much of the book focuses on language and its importance in a whole range of concerns surrounding this project.

As educator Gregory Cajete, of the Institute of American Indian Arts, says in his introduction to this seductive work, Zuni and Appalachia, as different as they are, have a lot in common: Both places are rural, off the beaten track; "where people still tell stories to one another." Storytelling is at the heart of their common experience. Myths, legends and folk tales are the cornerstones of teaching in these and all cultures, shaping our lives and integrating our experience, he says.

Roadside Theater started up in 1975, when, say the editors, Appalachia had no regional habit of attending or making theater. Roadside is part of Appalshop, a media organization operated by the people of Whitesburg, Kent., who began in 1969 telling their own Appalachian story to the region and nation "from inside-out," in the face of 200 years of cultural denigration and exploitation of their natural resources. Eventually, Roadside started collaborating with other communities who wanted to tell their own stories. Edward Wemytewa, of Zuni's theater, Idiwanan an Chawe (Children of the Middle Place, another name for the Zuni people), credits Roadside's visits to Zuni with his inspiration to combine theater with his efforts to preserve and increase practice of the Zuni language. Drawing on their storytelling traditions, the theater now makes new plays in the Zuni language, often confronting such issues as U.S. government violations of Zuni sovereignty rights and the spiritual and physical care of Zuni Salt Lake.

We are so lucky this unique experience has been recorded in this friendly, accessible and thorough way. The design of the book by Kentuckian Jan Hillhouse, art director of Storytelling Magazine, allows the reader in on a conversation among the artists. Each page of the historical documentation of the process has three columns: a chronology of events (including tidbits like: "Roadside learns about Zuni time."); a central column of personal remarks by the Indian artists and a third by the Roadside artists. In this way, each company's joy and struggle is experienced intimately, and important issues are examined from both sides. Finally, the gift of the gorgeous CD sampler from the play offers the actual voices of the performers. Most precious to me is a cut combining the Zuni "Kumanchi Marching Song" with Ron Short and Kim Neal singing "Wings To Fly." No text could convey the quality of this marriage as beautifully as these voices raised together in song.

"Journeys Home" is available for $19.95 from the University of New Mexico Press 1-800-249-7737, www.unmpress.com.

"Imagining Medea: Rhodessa Jones and Theater for Incarcerated Women" by Rena Fraden (University of North Carolina Press, 2001, 248 pp.)

Rena Fraden opens her book on performance artist Rhodessa Jones’ Medea Project with the image of a long line of stamping, kicking, dancing women moving down the aisles of San Francisco’s Lorraine Hansberry Theater and up onto the stage. Their boisterous entrance heralds, she says, the key act of the Medea Project: "to make visible what has been kept repressed or oppressed … in a way that is impossible to ignore."

The ten-year-old Medea Project brings incarcerated women out of jail and into a theatrical presentation that Jones calls a religious experience, a place of communion for the performers and the audience. "Jones has said she means her art to build bridges in order to make even the most protected and privileged of spectators feel their connections with those who are not," says the author. Each project begins with workshops in hospitals, jails and halfway houses and plays to sold-out houses of diverse audiences: jail representatives, sheriffs, funders, social workers, family members, artists, Angela Davis. The actors — black, white, Filipina — sport attitude and swagger through monologues, cabaret, ballads and hop-hop. It’s Greek myth in black street language. The inmates’ scenes and stories described here are confrontational, raw, sickening, poignant, thrilling — and audience-interactive. Rhodessa Jones describes the project: "It’s about women saving their own lives through the creative process."

Fraden, a professor of English at Pomona College and author of "Blueprints for a Black Federal Theater, 1935-1939," bores directly into the question of whether Jones’ claims actually stand up. She promises to move beyond the usual inquiries about the efficacy of this kind of interdisciplinary, multicultural, hybridized project. She rejects the standard questions — whether it’s art, whether prisoners are better off, or have been saved – because those questions miss the project’s interaction and intermingling of art and social work. "It is precisely the ways in which the project collapses such distinction that marks its vitality and seems worth paying attention to," says Fraden

She situates the project in three "overlapping fields of practice that frame the sorts of participation that occur": autobiography, critical thinking and reimagining community. She highlights cultural intersections; personal stories and classical myths; "scenes of dramatic instruction, refused and taken"; prison statistics and prisoner voices; institutional constraints and communal imaginative hopes. She goes into Jones’ background and working methods, including her use of Paulo Friere’s pedagogical techniques for theater of liberation. Fraden explores the history and polemics surrounding prisons in the U.S. through the voices of five once incarcerated women who have worked in the Medea Project, speaking about themselves "before and after." And she moves among the communities surrounding the project: law enforcement, foundations, halfway houses, San Francisco itself. It’s a solid work of scholarship, new thinking around community arts and a riveting read.

"Cootie Shots: Theatrical Inoculations Against Bigotry for Kids, Parents and Teachers," edited by Norma Bowles with Mark E. Rosenthal (TCG Books, 2001, 162 pp.)

The first time I met Norma Bowles, she was looking for a place on the stage at Highways, the performance space I founded with Tim Miller in Santa Monica, Calif., in the early 1990s. She had with her a most unusual theater company: homeless bisexual, lesbian, gay and transsexual teenagers from Hollywood Boulevard. One of the actors was a boy who identified as a girl attracted to lesbians. It was complicated. It was some of the bravest work I have ever seen in performance, anywhere.

Around the same time, Bowles began to organize Fringe Benefits, a nonprofit educational theater company/gang of the most outrageous and exciting performance artists in Los Angeles, to do diversity work in the schools, in partnership with teachers, parents and kids. Fringe Benefits brings to public education people like John Fleck, Tony Kushner, Luis Alfaro, Michael Kearns and Kate Bornstein. I am so scared of that. Now, almost ten years later, she and Mark Rosenthal have processed all this madness into "Cootie Shots," a manual for doing the work. The publisher, Theatre Communications Group, calls it "a fun and constructive way to promote tolerance and celebrate diversity by presenting role models of many different races, cultures, classes, genders, abilities, sexual orientations, religions, ages and appearances." That makes it sound like something from Junior Scholastic Magazine. I don’t think so. This audacious book is so hip diversitywise, it could only have come out of Los Angeles in the 21st Century.

To say "Cootie Shots" is a collection of plays, songs and poems for young audiences from kindergarten through sixth grade is such an understatement. This is at least a feast, a circus, an alternative art theme park, a night with The Simpsons and a stroll through West Hollywood. Absolutely bursting with color and illustrations on every page, your choices hip-hop from a double-page spread of poems by kids about their families ("My dad is not part of my family/My dad is dark black/And looks like a car/And walks and sounds like a killer elephant") to photos of Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez, Rosa Parks and Harvey Milk to a play called "What Color Is Your Mama?" to a reproduction of Norman Rockwell’s "The Golden Rule" to the musical scores for five songs, including "In Mommy’s High Heels" by Paul Selig ("Let them say I’m like a girl!/What’s wrong with being like a girl?!/And let them jump and jeer and whirl/They are the swine, I am the pearl.").

In their introduction, the editors call it a book about words, "powerful words that can both hurt and heal." They acknowledge that the issues presented in the book may be difficult to discuss, even taboo, but unavoidable. "Studies show that the effects of discrimination begin to negatively affect children as early as the first grade. … Children who are the subject of name-calling and the object of alienation are at a higher risk than others for drug abuse, running away, dropping out, family violence and suicide." They explain the way many pieces in the book were developed: "born of a group of people in a room, collaborating to turn painful stories into theater that heals that pain, or, better still, prevents future injuries." The User’s Guide at the back of the book suggests themes and pieces for use in the classroom or at home as a springboard for discussion or other interactive exercises (available in companion publications for teachers and parents from GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian, Straight Educational Network of L.A.). It also offers help with performing and directing the plays.

For me, this book represents the essence of artistic spirit. It could only have come from these artists, in this time. It is a daring adventure and it exists purely because of the unique, obsessed, driving spirits of Bowles and Rosenthal, doing their very best, relentlessly, to make the world a better place. It is an American art trophy.

Original CAN/API publication: April 2002