Dancing From the Heart: Urban-based Community Arts

Shim was always leading us to the Promised Land. Along the way he gave people a reason to communicate, turned strangers into storytellers, gave us something to think about and got us dancing together. What Shim the scarecrow did is what urban community-based arts organizations like Scrap Mettle SOUL are doing in cities across the country.

Scrap Mettle SOUL (SMS) is an urban community play, one of about a dozen projects founded on the community performance model that I developed with the people of Colquitt, Ga., for Swamp Gravy. Community performance is theater of, by and for a community. Stories from the lives of community members are turned into a play with music that is facilitated by professionals and performed by100-person casts for an audience of their neighbors. The process lifts up the wisdom of the community, empowers participants and creates all kinds of new, vital relationships as it makes art, and more.

SMS is but one flavor of the urban community-based arts process. Cornerstone Theater in Los Angeles is similar to SMS, as it builds theater out of community stories, is professionally facilitated, and performed by large diverse casts. Unlike SMS, Cornerstone utilizes an ensemble of professional actors who work alongside community performers. Cornerstone Theater was begun in the ’80s by a group of Harvard grads looking for necessary theater. Led by its founders, director Bill Rauch and playwright Alison Carey, the ensemble typically would locate in a small town and, while working subsistence jobs, they and the community would decide on and adapt a classic that seemed to speak to community issues. Thus they created a "Tartuffe" in Norcatur, Kan., adapted to deal with a disintegrating farm family; a "Romeo and Juliet" in Port Gibson, Miss., with a black Romeo and a white Juliet; and, more recently, a version of "Prometheus Bound" in an ailing steel town. Since 1992, Cornerstone has been in residence in Los Angeles, where they adapt classics, make plays from community stories, and assist other theaters to do the same--their work with Touchstone Theater on "Steelbound" in Bethlehem, Pa., for example.

Many urban community-based arts organizations utilize local stories to create theater. Most, like Meade Palidofsky's Music Theater Workshop here in Chicago, work with one or two populations. Music Theater Workshop makes musical theater of, by and for incarcerated youth. Similarly, David Spangler's Lovewell Institute of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., brings community youth together for three-week professionally facilitated intensives that culminate in full-length musicals written, composed, designed and performed by the teens. These are projects like the one that Scrap Mettle SOUL will assist this summer in Pullman, a Chicago neighborhood, making theater out of the stories of teens and seniors. A recent production here at Chicago's Live Bait Theater, "Out of the Blue," featured cops and teens improvising from audience suggestions. Live Bait, like SMS and Cornerstone, located this production at a juncture of difference and made theater out of the energy of that difference.

Sometimes a community's need is so great that from a single program an entire industry springs up. In its very challenged North Philadelphia neighborhood, The Village of Arts and Humanities has become a multidisciplinary arts factory that turns out changed lives, a variety of art including sculpture and theater, and programs that utilize the arts to teach health, economic development and housing construction. The Village began as a mosaic sculpture project for neighborhood children by artist Lily Yeh in 1986. Here in Chicago, Gallery 37 has scores of projects around a variety of art forms and involves thousands of children each year. Project Row Houses grew up around a particular resource, a group of historically black-occupied row houses in Houston’s Third Ward. The architectural importance of these buildings and the vision of the organization has resulted in a project that provides a place for the creation of art work that both engages the community in the creative process and celebrates African-American history and culture.

SMS began in response to Edgewater and Uptown's need to know itself, to experience itself with compassion, to learn from and care about its many peoples. One of the local Zip Codes is renowned as the most diverse in the country, 60640. The neighboring communities are situated at the north end of Lakeshore Drive. Well-to-do folks live in penthouses atop high rises or in homes on cul-de-sacs and tree-lined streets. Due to a preponderance of single-room dwellings in larger buildings, Edgewater and Uptown are also attractive to folks with limited budgets; it's a gateway community for immigrants, a first home for young people starting out and (with its many social-service organizations) a refuge for the poor. Against this trend is the influx of upwardly mobile folks looking for nice housing at reasonable prices. The pattern is well known: Developers buy rundown buildings, evict tenants, remodel and sell condos for a profit. People who have suffered eviction, like SMS artists April and Patricio Gabler, find themselves competing with other people on limited budgets for a shrinking pool of affordable housing.

SMS began in 1994, with SOUL: Stories Of Urban Life, a teen-focused intergenerational project supported by the Chicago Park District. The next year it expanded to include Lakefront SRO. Lakefront SRO is lead by the visionary Jean Butzen. LSRO provides decent single-room housing and social services to previously homeless people throughout Chicago. In Uptown, Jean saw the performance of tenant stories as a way of humanizing her previously homeless tenants and mainstreaming them in the wider community. The tenants called themselves Scrap Mettle. Overlapping casts, it took only about six months before the two companies became one, Scrap Mettle SOUL. At an early combined rehearsal, the Sahara Foundation's Kristin Patton dropped in for a site visit and stayed for three years as our board president to lead us from disorganization to become a relatively smooth functioning not-for-profit. Today, SMS is shepherded by a remarkable artist and leader, company manager Barbara Michelotti, who has experienced firsthand being poor and marginalized in Uptown. Barbara brings hard-won wisdom and compassion to her work for SMS. As artistic director, I am concerned with the development of the next play and its relationship to the development of the project and the community, but project growth and direction are left more to Barbara and the board. This affords me time to help other communities begin new projects, direct several new community performances each year, and encourage the growth of community performance nationally. 

Each year, SMS mounts a new spring show at Margate Park with John Davidson and his staff. In the fall SMS tours a stripped-down version of the show to local organizations. SMS spends the rest of the year gathering stories, building community relationships, offering performances and workshops to organizations and, increasingly, to other communities interested in the process.

The company comprises African and European Americans, Latinos, Asians and a spectrum of people from rich to homeless, all ages up to 93-year-old Ida. A number of our members are people with mental or physical challenges. Recently, we've begun to attract young Chicago actors who, like the professionals at Cornerstone, are drawn to the authenticity that the work offers. SMS is radically diverse by any theatrical standard.

Diversity goes hand-in-hand with insularity. More than half of homes in Edgewater and Uptown are single-person households. This isn't a community where extended families live in the neighboring homes that their parents grew up in. It isn't like rural Colquitt, Ga., where I founded the first community performance project, Swamp Gravy. I remember a picture, dated 1908, of four girlfriends on a porch--different women, but from those same four families, were the friends who helped to found Swamp Gravy in 1991. Intergenerational networks among neighbors brought Swamp Gravy a stream of committed people and wonderful stories. In a networked community, you can locate the good storytellers in about 15 minutes. In 15 more, you can find scores of people to perform the roles. The sort of longitudinal stability that makes that possible doesn't exist in Edgewater and Uptown. As much of a challenge as it is to bring blacks and whites together in rural Southern projects, it is more difficult to bring together all the groups in Edgewater and Uptown. Reasons may be cultural (in the small African community it may be more important to preserve traditions than to meet one’s diverse neighbors) or political (classes and organizations jousting for dominance keep contention alive), but, whatever the reason, urban networks reach only a tiny percentage of the population.

Diverse and insular communities breed fundamentally different types of urban arts organizations. In Colquitt, Swamp Gravy partnered with a few organizations and involved a few leading citizens and then acted as a heart, pumping energy and enthusiasm into these existing networks. In Edgewater and Uptown where networks are numerous but very limited in their reach, SMS was forced to become both heart and circulation system. This takes time and is very resource-intensive.

In rural communities, the hot button issue is race, religion or both. Pushing the hot button just enough is how, without being destructive, community performance projects become vital and challenging to their communities. In Edgewater and Uptown the hot button is politics: who shall live where, and how shall the money be spent. For several seasons now, we’ve dealt with this hot-button issue by trying to speak each point of view, by making SMS a place where people encounter their neighbor’s issues. What we’ve learned is symbolized by Shim in this year’s production.

Shim showed us that it takes not brains but heart to weave community; it isn’t a matter of solving, but of transcending. When PC Gooden-Smiley stuck a scarecrow in the garden of Buttercup Park and dressed it in Halloween clothing, she didn't anticipate the consequence of her action. I doubt that the people who over the next months dressed Shim in different outfits–for Christmas, Black History Month, St. Patrick’s Day, Gay Pride–were thinking about what they were enacting. The scarecrow that never had a brain gave them a chance to create together, to be each other's audience and appreciate each other as they dressed and redressed the image to accord with all the different people in the neighborhood.

Playwright Jules Corriere brought Shim into this year’s production because, after working with SMS for several years, she saw in Shim the opportunity to express a deeper truth. From earliest days, SMS attracted folks to come out and play, to dress up, to experience together, to risk and trust and to come away with a sense of security and belonging, even in a radically different community. Shim got his name because neighbors dressed him every month in a different costume and often a different gender. Shim is She-Him. Shim’s slippery identity allows everyone to see him/herself in the project. But it’s more than that. SMS hadn’t been able to find the same commanding purpose in its community that Peaks and Passages immediately found in rural Oak Creek, Colo. In the rural projects, community performance quickly crystallizes an enhanced community identity. In Newport News, Va., Pieced Together brought schismatic congregations of Mennonites together and defined their 100 years of shared history on the Warwick River. In Glades, Fla., Potluck in the Muck allowed the African, European and Caribbean residents to mourn and celebrate as one people. Peaks and Passages lifted up and dusted off an identity for the tiny ranching communities in South Routt County that had for 40 years languished in the shadow of the Steamboat Springs ski area. SMS couldn't define an identity because identity for the entire community was actively contested. But year after year, play after play, an identity of sorts began to emerge. We didn't think up this identity, we just kept playing and it came to us. 

Almost a year after PC brought him/her to life in Buttercup Park Shim was beheaded. PC sadly toted Shim’s remains off to the trash. The next day, Shim was found still headless but halfway back to the garden, as if s/he were crawling home. Back to the dumpster for Shim, but next day s/he'd managed to throw a leg over the lip. Clearly Shim's work wasn't done.

In the play, headless Shim goes everywhere, and everywhere s/he goes s/he fits right in--because s/he hasn't got a brain. In the play's climax, Shim attends a contentious community meeting where many sides are engaged in a shouting match typical of our neighborhood. They’re fighting for turf and money and the future of this place. It’s an important argument, but argument is all this place has been hearing for decades. In the middle of it all, Shim begins to dance. At first s/he is an interruption, an unwanted hindrance to an already difficult situation, but s/he persists and someone laughs and someone else begins a little to dance, and pretty soon everyone joins in singing, shouting and laughing together.

Once upon a time, on one of these dozen projects, a trusted friend betrayed me. Because of the betrayal I was shamed and humiliated in front of a town. But the project kept going and this person and I both stayed with it. Though neither ever felt completely safe with the other again, we continued to work together. For the sake of the project? Not entirely. I think it was because the project brought meaning to our lives.

That's what urban community-based arts are showing us. Yes, our communities are unbelievably complex. Yes, we can never all agree, and yes, we can still be connected. The power of the arts in urban communities is this deep process that says "yes" and "yes" and "yes" again, that trusts the capacity of the human heart to be broken and torn open and thereafter to hold more.

When Shim causes the community to dance together in transcendence of its difference, he is symbolizing the best work that arts organizations can do. It is the creation of meaningful community ritual. That’s the power of the candlelit remembrances at the end of Swamp Gravy, the cascade of flowers in Pieced Together, the waltz at the close of City Bridges, the rows of empty clothing after the hurricane in Pot Luck. Community ritual. That’s what was happening when the real Shim dressed for each season in the persona of another community group, and when the stage Shim–headless, shape-shifter, always all heart–taught us to dance arm-in-arm. Shim, SMS and urban arts organizations are finding ritual together, and creating the Promised Land in each particular place.

Richard Owen Geer is a director of community performance who has worked with more than a dozen communities across the U.S. He is president of Community Performance Inc. He holds a Ph.D. in performance studies from Northwestern University. He can be reached at richgeer@aol.com.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2002