Writing Deeply: A Discussion with Three Writers

The following article developed as an Internet discussion on the CAN Conversations area from December 28, 2001 through January 24, 2002.

INTRODUCTION

This is a conversation among three people who are committed to writing about community-based art. It actually began last August when Jan Cohen-Cruz and I met in Saxapahaw and started talking about problems around critical writing in this field. We both do this kind of writing because we want the world to know about community-based art and we want to present the artists with a considered response to their work. We are not alone. We feel that there is a good deal of excellent writing going on, but that writing and the field itself are not being recognized by the mainstream. We want to start a Community Arts Network National Writers Group, eventually engaging writers from every state in the U.S. who are committed to writing well about this work. This conversation is our first step in this effort.

I have published an essay on writing about community-based art, attempting to explore some of the ways in which it is different from other arts writing. If you'd like to catch up with those preliminary ideas, that essay "The Critical Discourse," is online at <http://www.communityarts.net/concal/discourseessay.php>

When Jan and I cooked this up, we thought it would be interesting to focus on a particular kind of writing -- writing deeply about one artist or company. When you attempt this kind of "thick description," you delve into all the aspects of the work, not just the finished product. It has long been my view that everything counts in community-based art -- from the hatching of an idea to the lasting legacy in the community long after the final exhibition of the work.

We three come to our task with a wide variety of backgrounds and experiences and approaches. Let's begin by introducing ourselves. Jan?

I joined the NYC Street Theatre/ Jonah Project in 1970. Performing for a range of people in inner cities, rural communities, reservations, prisons, etc., I rediscovered the sense of exchange that had drawn me to theatre as a child but had been dormant in more mainstream theatrical experiences. Co-facilitating a theatre workshop in Trenton State Prison so challenged what I had been taught about people and their circumstances that I became dedicated to a broader kind of theatre as concerns sites and constituents. My next cba milestone was discovering the work of Augusto Boal in the early 1980s. I brought Boal to the US, studied with him, and co-edited Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism (Routledge 1994) with Mady Schutzman. In 1998, I edited Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology, also for Routledge. I also write articles about cba.
Having begun teaching comm-based art to nyu tisch school of the arts students in the late 1980s, in the 1990s I co-created an AmeriCorps Project through which students did arts-based community projects meant to reduce violence. This led to the co-creation with other Tisch faculty and Dean Mary Schmidt Campbell of the Center for Art and Public Policy, where I frequently teach and facilitate community-based arts internships. I am also an Associate Professor, Director of Theatre Studies, and Co-ordinator of the Minor in Applied Theatre in the NYU Drama Dept. I am currently writing a book on the interplay between utopia and the everyday world in comm-based perf.

I have worn many hats in the art world, but I identify myself as a writer. (My major formal training is neither academic nor journalistic; I have an MFA in Creative Writing.) I have written hundreds of pieces in newspapers and books and art magazines, particularly in High Performance, which I founded in 1978. Now I write on the Internet. Since about 1985, I have focused on community-based art because I think it embodies the most compelling questions of our time: What is the place of artists in society? Can an artist cause social change? Is the absence of personal creativity the source of our social ills?

I am completely committed to documenting this work and using my 30 years of experience in the arts to write critically about it. In addition to many other kinds of writing in this field, I have written "deeply" about John Malpede and the Los Angeles Poverty Department, a performance-art company of homeless and formerly homeless people. I have also written deeply about Community Performance Inc., a company that helps communities create and perform their own plays (their first was "Swamp Gravy" -- by, of and for Colquitt, Georgia).

Right now I am following "Hallelujah," a three-year, nationwide initiative of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange of Takoma Park, Md. They are creating about 17 different dance-theater works with communities all over America -- almost simultaneously. Each one is amde collaboratively with peoplefrom all walks of life in the community and each one puts 80-100 of these local people on stage. I have written about the Los Angeles, Burlington (Vt.), Minneapolis and southern Michigan pieces and will do probably three more before the end of 2002. These articles (each about 13,000 words) are posted on the CAN site. I have proposed an overview article for The Drama Review in 2003, drawing together all the threads of these articles.

My day job is co-director of Art in the Public Interest, based in Saxapahaw, N.C., and the Community Arts Network, API's major project with Virginia Tech. I write APInews monthly, work on CAN's Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project and help to plan and administer CAN's activities along with my co-conspirators Steve Durland, Bob Leonard, Ann Kilkelly and Erica Yerkey. I have never enjoyed life so much as I do now. I live in the country, where life is cheap and quiet, I work on the Internet and I travel (literally and virtually) all over keeping up with things. It's perfect but tenuous.

Over the past ten years I've been developing, witnessing, and writing about community-based performance, even before I had a name for the work. I was drawn to a certain kind of theater that didn't seem to be happening on either the main stage at my college, or in regional theaters (despite working on or in both for several years). At college in the mid-1980s during the height of student protests (tampons bloodied in Kool Aid thrown at spectators at a football rally, students living in simulated shanties) that prompted more engaged audience response than most campus plays. While using the signs of theater--fake bloodied props and constructed shanty sets--the real bodies of protesters asserting emotionally committed dialogue seemed to more effectively "awaken" and provoke the audience. I discovered Boal, grew excited, worked in regional theater, suffered disillusionment, returned to school and stumbled into collective performance creation with a group of women. I found that the more exciting experiences, the leaning-forward-in-your-seat experiences, tended to emerge from what I've come to call community-based performance.

The writing tracked alongside performance. I wrote a dissertation and am finishing a book on Cornerstone Theater Company, an ensemble that has been developing innovative productions with communities, variously defined, in small town America, urban Los Angeles, and with regional theaters. Typical productions include a Wild West musical Hamlet in Marmarth, North Dakota, an original production with Arab Americans in Los Angeles, an adaptation of the Faust myth in Watts with African Americans and Latino/a residents, and an adaptation of Cadide with civil servants--Candude. Through Cornerstone I also started developing productions with youth in former Yugoslavia. Writing has always been a way for me to keep thinking about something I have done, seen, or tried to imagine. Victor Turner talks about performance as shaping or ex-pressing a community, and I see the same possibilities in writing. I like moving between the more open multi-sensory, non-linear medium of performance and the logic and lyricism of writing, which encourages setting down as well as opening up.

I tend to deal less with a review style criticism of community-based performance than with how this site of me/not-me (to paraphrase Richard Schechner) extends a conversation on identity. How do individuals relate themselves to groups? How do groups define and redefine the boundaries of their identity? What does it mean to be "Bosnian" in 1995? In 2001? How do you define community—by place, interest, job, birthday? By storytelling, historical memory, imaginary constructions of group bonds? I view performance as a site of communal expression. But I am equally fascinated by fragmentation, dissonance, and the flexibility of boundaries. How does identity shift from "Yugoslav" to "Bosnian" to "Bosnian Serb"? How do attitudes of African American and Latino/as in Watts towards each other transform during a performance process? How does "African America" and "Latino/a" become more focused and break down as a category of identity through performance-making? What are the ethics of defining community through performance?

Maybe because I'm also a practitioner, I revel in the gooey details of the rehearsal process. I'm far more at home writing about the nuances of what language gets spoken at the dinner table among Balkan teenagers in Germany, than about whether a particular piece offers a transcendent aesthetic experience.

I'm currently wrestling with the writer/artist relationship, how to move between appreciation, documentation, evaluation, and theoretical musings. I've also been thinking about how to write different histories of community-based practices. I'm trying out a mercenary approach to past practices (what feeds my particular interests?) as a way to avoid progressive narratives (everything comes together with Cornerstone). I've been working with what ethnographer Elaine Lawless terms "reflexive ethnography," sharing writing with the subject, incorporating their interpretations of what I say about them back into the writing. It's a challenging, messy, process, which most of the time I love.

Q: I would like to hear more about what we find most interesting in our deep writing at the moment. Sonja has mentioned the artist/writer relationship -- can we hear more about that? And Jan, you have mentioned context in your writing about O'Neal.

Yes, context. I like that writing about community arts engages me with the world, is always about more than the production on the stage. (Even though that makes it wildly difficult to do well.) So for example, right now I'm looking at O'Neal's trajectory, beginning with co-founding the Free Southern Theater as a cultural wing of the Civil Rights Movement in 1963. I am struck by the role that John's sense of history has played in setting priorities for his theatrical endeavors. When supporting the Civil Rights Movement was most important, he, Gilbert Moses, and Doris Denby co-created an integrated company that toured the deep south, playing mostly to African-American audiences. By the late 1960s, they perceived that the civil rights era was dead and the Black Power Movement was necessary. (O'Neal later held a jazz funeral for the FST in its New Orleans home base.) The white members quit in support of the need for a space in which African American artists could explore their own aesthetics. This was perhaps the most orthodox "community-based" phase, with African American poor and working class people, especially in the theatre's immediate New Orleans' neighborhood, as their main constituents. In 1978, the FST ceased operations.

Soon thereafter, O'Neal created a one-man, story-based show, Junebug Jabba Jones. Then O'Neal re-established a not-for-profit theatre base, Junebug Productions. In 1982, Junebug was ready to connect with other companies who shared major principles. Roadside Theater out of Appalachia, for example, which has always been deeply grounded in its home place, addressed its work to poor and working class people, embraced a politically progressive agenda, was equally interested in exchange. Both companies were committed to breaking sterotypes about their respective groups in the other's region. This they did.

I'm planning to ask John for details about the relationship between the historical context and the choices he makes as artistic director of Junebug. I want to know how the aesthetics changed in each of the three incarnations of the company; when storytelling became central; where the storytelling principles he uses come from; what he believes needs to be done now (again, taking context as a motivating force). I am also eager to record his views on criticism for community-based art, on identity politics, on the limits to political change a theatre company can facilitate, on the partnership models for social change that he ascribes to at this point in his life.

Thanks, Jan. Those questions are important to this work. I have heard many people talking about how the aesthetics of a given theater OR a given piece changes when context changes -- say, a different audience, a different topic, a different year. We are exploring that with CAN's Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research project, asking how the theaters' aesthetics are related to (or arise from) the community in which each theater is based (Cornerstone, Dell'Arte, Pregones, Jump-Start, WagonBurner, Carpetbag, Roadside and LAPD).

I am at the moment so interested in including in my writing the post-project response to "Hallelujah," both from the participants and the performance's audience. This was particularly aided by two projects that followed the Michigan piece and are perhaps still going on. (My story was posted this month in the CAN Reading Room.)

John Borstel of the Dance Exchange had a meeting with participants after the residency was over and asked them key questions:
1. What did we like?
2. What have we learned / what will we take with us?
3. Questions for the company.

Answers were thrilling/funny/surprising. For only one example: "Confirmation that really simple gesture is very poetic & that all of us can create poetic work."

There's a great program at U Michigan Ann Arbor called The Arts of Citizenship that did an audience survey with a range of questions, and the responses were deep and profound, post 9/11, expecially this one about the dance Lerman created WITH the audience: "The 26th day -- finally a meaningful way to respond to Sept. 11, weeping with our hands, writing a letter, feeling the breath of God, clapping, clapping, clapping." And, more simply: "Could I still be a dancer?"

The important character in Lerman's work (for me) is the collaboration with so many community people, 100 each time, and the expectation that something will have changed in the community as a result of the residency. Immediate response is a key element of the project, and a part of the artist's ongoing process, especially for Liz Lerman, who never lets anything go unnoticed. Cornerstone has been good about keeping track of LONG-TERM changes in the communities they have worked with, and I'm sure Sonja has great tales to tell about that.

I hope I can be coherent about my thoughts at the moment, which are firing away in all kinds of directions. It's 6pm on New Year's Eve, and in the last 24 hours I have received e-mail messages from several Cornerstone ensemble members and a former regional theater collaborator, all responding to my writing about past events. The intricacies of writing about the work continue to astound me. Nuances of word choice challenge me to be ever more reflective and vigilant about how I relate events from the past. I am made aware of how much more subtle and fascinating a discussion about "professional" and "community-based" practices can be when the differences between the two are not reduced to a simple binary. The results, I hope, will be far more informed by conversation, dialogue, a back-and-forth that occurs prior to final publication, reminding me of both the value and tenuousness of the written word. A stable "history" of Cornerstone keeps slipping from my grasp.

At the same time, I recognize the relation of the company and its work to its historical moment. Jan has written about John O'Neal's sense of history, the larger scale cultural context defining the development and final burial of Free Southern Theater. Cornerstone too responded to elements of its historical moment (particularly interest in "multi-culturalism"), to the long-term changes in communities, and the very nature of community.

To cite one example, following the company's move to Los Angeles in 1992, the ensemble felt compelled to rethink both themselves (as an initially all-white company) and their notion of "community" (as geographically based). So, the company's first three urban residencies defined community according to age (Angelus Plaza Senior Center), culture and ethnicity (Arab Americans citywide) and geography (Pacoima). The company also hoped to follow through with lengthier relationships and to encourage bridge-building among communities, so participants from each of these three groups were brought together for a bridge show.

I'd like to think more about these long-term relationships. For the moment, though I want to respond to the relationship between performance and audience commentary that Linda brought up in reference to Liz Lerman's work. Founding Cornerstone members were also interested in engaging audiences more directly in the theater-making process. They batted around ideas of performing for people, getting feedback, going back into rehearsal, performing again, getting more comments, etc . . . The idea of performing –with- community members emerged as a way to get more direct and ongoing feedback about the production. A few members of the current ensemble just met with some Liz Lerman members to think about how to engage audience feedback more directly. So there's an interesting loop and re-connection happening.

I find my writing working both within and outside of this loop. My responses tend to be more about larger-scale cultural relations, some of which feed back into company policy. Sometimes this writing is informed by the other loop—that between audience and performance. Cornerstone's latest production, Zones, concluded with the audience in a circle, offering a question that had emerged for them in watching the show. My favorite response came from a woman from Watts, who had acted in several Cornerstone productions and bridge shows. Her question was, "How can I get in the next show?" That comment illustrated for me both the connections that are made with individuals over several years, and the yearning for ongoing involvement. That desire for community is as interesting to me as the ambiguity and complexity of the term.

I so enjoyed both of your recent posts, Sonja and Linda. Let me pick up on a thread from each. Linda, you cite John Borstel's questions to people after the Lerman residency. The design of such questions seems really important to me. Because of the years I've spent teaching, I've realized how the questions I pose to the class utterly shape the degree of focus and potential enlightenment of the ensuing discussion. Thinking through the wording of the questions is as important as the lecture component of my class prep. Whereas I've been to any number of post-performance discussions at which I felt that the artist thought the fact of the session was enough. For what, I'm not always sure. So spectators can become more conscious about what they experienced, and share other people's perceptions? So the artists can have a clearer idea of what got communicated? There are any number of good reasons to have a post-perf event but there are also good reasons NOT to have them. Talking about an experience too quickly can end it prematurely, end that rich afterglow with which one sometimes blessedly leaves a performance. And sometimes one needs to reflect before having anything terribly useful to say. If one chooses to have the conversation immediately after the performance for the convenience or whatever other reason, I really appreciate when the questions/ prompts are as carefully thought out as any other aspect of the performance experience.

Sonja, I loved your remark about how elusive "the history" of Cornerstone Theatre is! In my current writing on US comm-based perf history, I think of what I am doing as "a" history, not "the" history. I taught a course on the subject this past fall as much for what it would teach me as for the students. I organized the first half of the semester by paradigm, i.e. models from any time in history that strike me as pre-cursors of cbt, like carnival. The second half of the semester was periodization, i.e. a chronology of 20th century US cbt. But that suggested a causality that i dont buy so I think it was a misleading organization. Now I'm trying to follow historical threads of the expression of different understandings of community -- geographic, ethnicity, ideological, and class-based. We'll see where this leads...

Yes, the care with which we ask questions is so important! I think this holds true for post-show (or in-process) response sessions, teaching, and critical writing. When I was studying psychology in college, I was struck by studies showing that experimenters can unconsciously seek evidence that fits their hypotheses. This adds weight to our responsibility as writers to not only ask precise, provocative questions, but to make sure we are able to listen to a variety of responses that may overturn some of our assumptions.

One of the challenges in writing critically about community-based performance is finding the balance between keeping open and saying something. I like to quote Stuart Hall to my students (and myself) about this. "In order to say anything at all, you do have to stop speaking." I really like how Jan suggests a possible resolution to this dilemma through focus on the question. Here are a few on writing the (many) histories of community-based performance.

Do we need to know our audience before we begin writing, or hope that the writing will find its audience? Can (or should) that sense of audience guide our writings about John O'Neal, Liz Lerman, Cornerstone and other practitioners? And one I'd really like to sink my teeth into more, how do we write critically (maybe challenging some ideas) about performers we really like?

As I write those questions, I realize that they can easily fit a model of performance feedback, and I want to avoid situating our writing only as critical response. I know we are all interested in doing so much more. Jan's (re)thinking about history and shifting categorization (moving beyond chronology to ideology) may again help us all, practitioners and writers, to see beyond a model of production response

I was reading a book by A.S. Byatt a few weeks ago, Babel Tower, which in part looks at different ideas of education and linguistics. One of the characters, a professor, shifted my thinking about the learning of grammar. Rather than seeing this as a process of rote memorization (Freiere's banking model of education), the professor suggests thinking of grammar as the brain contemplating its own operations. How fascinating! Yet, as always, the danger of too much navel gazing brings me right back to Stuart Hall's admonitions . . .

There is so much to respond to here! I wanted to look at Sonja's question about how to write critically about artists we performers we really like. Jan and I have been chewing this over for the last few months. It's one of the reasons we wanted to start these writers' conversations.

We both feel we have so emphasized writing about the whole context of a community-based art project that we have actually veered too far away from looking critically at the product by itself. Most critics shy way from writing about cba, so it is left to those of us who really want/like to do it to take up this product focus as well as the others kinds of foci we are using.

I actually find it easier to write about the whole context. To apporach the product means having some sort of expertise in the particular arts discipline being used, and cba happens in so many. In the case of Lerman, I am deeply interested in the community aspects of this work, and in her aesthetics when using first-time artists in her pieces. But I am not well imformed in dance and I am actually trying to avoid it. I don't even like dance! So in writing about "Hallelujah," I have had to walk rather gingerly around he formal dance aspects of this initiative -- which are very important to Liz and especially to her dancers. They consider themselves experienced professional modern and postmodern dancers, and each "Hallelujah" contains some repertory works that are pure professional dance by the company. I am at a loss.

I can, however, critique the more theatrical/performance elements, and in fact have been very critical of the L.A. piece and the Minneapolis piece. There were elements that did not work for me, and I had to delve into them. I trust that the Dance Exchange wants and values this kind of feedback and that the community people in the works appreciate someone looking deeply into what they put so much effort into. I think it is my attention to the whole residency that lends me the license to do this -- as opposed to the brief, backhanded criticism they sometimes receive from local newspaper critics, which offends the community participants in such a hurtful way.

I think you have to critique not only the director's job in shaping the piece (directing and placing both professionals and first-timers) but the performance of first-timers themselves, and this takes both gentleness and balls. Liz is rather brilliant on what makes good community art, and suggests we look at first-time performers in terms of what they are willing to risk and reveal of themselves. Those who are hiding out in the piece are the ones who give community art a bad name, she says.

But, really, we must take this up. People are out there making dreadful art with impunity, knowing most critics won't even come, much less provide an informed critique. But it's a huge mandate. Read Yolanda Broyles-Gonzalez on the ten years it took her to do a complete job on Teatro Campesino and it makes you want to quit and go ito something else.

That was so refreshing to read Linda. It clarifes for me the importance of artistic criticism in recognizing bravery as well as craft. I especially love the "gentleness and balls" balance. I also like the idea of context informing response, rather than as often happens in my work, becoming the thing itself.

"People are out there making dreadful art with impunity." That is so well stated. Much as cba critics tend to pussyfoot around ideas of "good work" I think most of us recognize the innovative and powerful when it occurs, as well as the deadly. (I think we've all read Lucy Lippard and Suzanne Lacy, and have also each articulated our own critical frameworks in various articles). There are certainly Cornerstone shows I prefer, that work because they bring together imaginative fancy and the "real" bodies of community performers, opening themselves up, revealing themselves as not/more than themselves. There have also been parts of shows that work better for me than others, moments when the director voice in me kicks in and thinks "if only that moment had been held two more seconds," or "I wish the identity politics had been more deeply investigated here." But these are moments I feel like I can at some point talk about with ensemble members.

I've also seen some truly painful, bordering on dangerous, pious presentations on the Balkans, by well-intentioned if dreadfully misinformed artists. Here again, though, I find it difficult to separate my "contextual" political response from my response to artistry. Perhaps both require attention to detail as well as vulnerability and on occasion conscious ambiguity. But that could be my postmodern slip revealing itself again.

Sigh, yes, the dilemma as a writer about community art to feel one needs to be an expert in several disciplines! The people guiding the Animating Democracy Initiative, a four year project that is funding and investigating artists whose work engenders "civic dialogue," have an interesting strategy here. They are considering assigning three or four writers with different areas of expertise to a handful of their projects. This is an expense that few institutions can incur, but it brings up one of my broken records -- why aren't colleges and universities more involved with their local community artists? Why do so many students do papers that only their professors see? Why couldn't advanced students in appropriate fields include comm arts fieldwork, documentation and critique that helps their own scholarly development and a local organization?

I agree with Sonja, it's so necessary, Linda, that you remind us that this writing is not all about context. I remember some good basic advice I've heard from critics. Even Frank Rich of all people, who for many years was the main theatre critic for the NY Times -- I heard him speak about criticism and he said he always begins with his gut response and then traces back for what caused that response. he said a successful piece of writing is one in which he describes the work so well that someone reading it may not agree with his opinion and still feels a sense of the work. But he can only write from with his own response. And of course another great old tool comes from Clifford Geertz, anthropologist and performance studies icon, who stressed the importance of thick description. Interpretation. How, he playfully asked, do we know the difference between a blink and a wink?

John O'Neal told me that he thinks a good artist/ critic relationship is like a good marriage -- he can bear to hear criticism if the person shares his goals. In John's case, the critic would have to share his liberatory social agenda; looking at the artwork by itself is not in sync with John's intentions so why should he care?

Sonja mentioned: .....moments when the director voice in me kicks in and thinks "if only that moment had been held two more seconds," or "I wish the identity politics had been more deeply investigated here." But these are moments I feel like I can at some point talk about with ensemble members.

I think this is where the arts are lucky in having you two as critics because you have done this artistic work for many years and can be specific in your criticism of the product. That's why it's so important for you to write about those "director" responses, so that all artists (and critics) can read them. That's how we are going to raise the quality of this work. Easy for me to say, since among my many hats, there isn't one called "director."

This is where Sonja's point about the artist-critic relationship comes in. I wonder why she would only talk about these moments with the ensemble members and not use them in her written critical response? Is it because she feels she would lose the artists as friends, or that as a friend of the artists she would have no credibility with the reader? When I lived in L.A. there were many critics who were also artists or friends/lovers of artists. Though we were published in some art magazines, we were not allowed to write for either the L.A. Times or the L.A. Weekly because we were tainted by our friendships with artists and our opinions would carry no objective value. Newspapers, of course, tend to feel the only use of criticism is as a consumer guide. Never mind that an artist/critic might have something insightful and informed to say about the field. I never ran into this problem at Artforum, for example, or TDR.

My friendship with Liz Lerman does not preclude my tough criticism of her process or her product, but I do not know if that holds water with the readers.

Jan's point about university support for this kind of work: For God's sake, SOMEBODY has got to support criticism. I was there in 1983 when the NEA killed its critics' fellowship program. Support for arts writers went downhill from there, and for magazines as well, till now there is absolutely no profit in it whatsoever. Anybody who is a critic in the arts has to have a day job or a working spouse.

And Jan's point about her students' work: Students actually get out and see what's happening at street level. If universities are unwilling to support publications for them, they must be encouraged to start their own publications, even if they are only street zines or Internet publications. High Performance was a zine when it started, supported by a $2000 loan I took out from a credit union. The value in this is that the publication is run by students and they get to set the values and literally change the world. I would be willing to go anywhere to talk to students about this.

I am hoping this conversations area at CAN will become a place for critics, students, practitioners and audiences to talk seriously (or even frivolously) about the work they see. It has to happen somewhere. Artists need more than the satisfaction they get from their community collaborations. They need critical feedback from their peers.

Some very juicy material here ...

"This is where Sonja's point about the artist-critic relationship comes in. I wonder why she would only talk about these moments with the ensemble members and not use them in her written critical response?"

I do in fact use some of these responses in written critical work (maybe not quite so detailed as holding a certain moment longer). I've written a few reviews of Cornerstone's work, but for academic journals rather than newspapers. I've tried to make some proposals to American Theatre but they've apparently had too much written on Cornerstone lately! I also have a friend at the Minneapolis Star Tribune who has asked me to write reviews for the paper, but frankly I have to make choices, and being in academia, those publications are less prioritized. It's a frustrating situation, because this privileging of the academic journal makes it more difficult to be a public intellectual. I love reading Edward Said and Umberto Ecco and Jean Baudrillard, who all make incisive critical statements about contemporary events in public newspapers.

The notion of "tainted" criticism has also come up with Cornerstone. The company has a fascinating relationship with critics, in part due to Bill Rauch's desire to sit down and have a conversation with critics about what they write. That's led to some intriguing collaborations as one local critic, for I think Backstage West (Rob Kendt), actually appeared in a Cornerstone show as himeself! He did not write about the show in BW but did write an article for American Theater.

There is a point about some sort of critical "distance." I don't mean aesthetic distance in the Kantian sense, with the art object "over there" separate from the critic. I do mean a kind of outsider perspective that ethnographers talk about. There's value to being able to step away from process, just as there's value to be able to speak from within. I refer to this in my current writing as the in-between position. I like the way it complements Geertz's "thick description," the tacking back and forth between observation and analysis sits well with the shifts between insider and outsider.

To add to Jan's point about university support, I want to put in a good word for some folks in the University of Minnesota. There's an amazing philosophy professor that facilitates community learning based on the Highlander model of engaged pedagogy. There are a number of students in the University's English department (who focus on literacy), in Work and Family, and in Theater who are engaged in and writing about what they do for our department newsletters, for academic conferences, for each other, and occasionally, for local publications. The Star Tribune recently instituted a fellow program for critics which one of my students participated in. There are some wonderful grants for "civic engagement" that establish paradigms for pedagogy and community/university relationships. Because Minnesota is a Land Grant University, its actually required by the state to have programming that feeds directly back to the public. I know that doesn't address all the specifics of either Jan or Linda's comments, but I did feel like adding what IS happening that's fabulous and engaged!

Maybe in the community-based theater class I teach next year I'll include some components of public writing (maybe through CAN)!

Is there a way to set up some sort of inter-class conversation board for students to talk with each other?

Anybody can set up a discussion on the CAN Conversations site. Just have one of your students go to "Open Conversations" and start a thread called, perhaps "Conversation Among Students." For something private or more elaborate, email me privately.

One topic I want to make sure we get to before we open this discussion to the public is the incorporation of religion. Both Cornerstone and Lerman are including religion in their residency projects in a big way. They are collaborating directly with faith leaders and congregations of traditional, organized religions in their artworks, and they are bringing together representatives of many different faiths. Cornerstone is even carrying on a multi-year faith-based project with performance occurring inside churches, synagogues and temples in the L.A. area.

These are very serious efforts, not just flirtations. And they are not the only artists who are doing this. I think I am not stretching the truth to say this is a cutting-edge strategy. The art world is notoriously agnostic, if not atheistic. These artists want very much to be taken seriously in the art world, and it is risky to take religion seriously in their work.

On the other hand, community-based artists, if they want to engage a public outside the insulated art world, seem to be facing the fact that a vast portion of the American public goes to church. I see this in the "outreach" efforts of arts institutions too, especially the ones with well-funded projects to widen their audiences. I myself, as a presenter in the early '90s, found that to seriously engage with the African-American community, we needed to take into account that our cutting-edge performance art space was sometimes occupied by people for whom church and religion are not only the spiritual but social base for their own community engagement. This clashed mightily with some other very active communities we engaged with, like ACT UP.

In "Hallelujah," this dichotomy flared up after 9/11, when the Detroit/Ann Arbor project went to the stage at the University of Michigan only one month after the attacks. Religion loomed large as a territory of conflict across the globe. In this "Halllelujah," the Dance Exchange worked with a gospel choir and a liturgical dance company, they chose a Biblical Adam-and-Eve theme for the piece, and they opened it with an invocation by nine faith leaders. Some of the university audience walked out and one even complained to the management about this wholesale incursion of religion into the hallowed secular halls of the U. That's an art controversy.

In Lerman's case, she herself is deeply involved in her own Jewish faith, one which has a certain amount of latitude when it comes to belief. And she uses faith leaders everywhere as a convenient community organizing system to get a project under way. finally,"Hallelujah" as a word has a religious gloss. All of this makes me personally uncomfortable and after 9/11 I was really struggling with the idea of religion, and still do. It's sort of comforting to see people come together in a benign way across these faith differences, and it's truly important that the U.S. is tolerant of all religions. But I am an atheist ("fallen-away Catholic") and I am personally offended by knee-jerk genuflection to organized religion, which I consider the root of all evil, and the uncontested assumption of the existence of God. Dammit, my "people" deserve a voice too.

What do you think about all this?

I guess the real issue here is the critic's own beliefs and prejudices and whether she should acknowledge them in her writing.

I want to begin with a slightly diff slant on the problem of organized religion in the context of community arts. What cuts to the heart of much criticism OF comm-based art is the non-oppositional relationship to institutions with a history of coersion. Especially people who see comm-based art as the heir to the oppositional art of the 60s-70s are appalled at the sight of comm-based art "in bed" with large institutions that have wielded power from the top down and been guided by the $$ principle. For all its problems, Sara Brady's article (TDR fall 2000?) does make that important point in her criticism of Steelbound (1999), the Touchstone/ Cornerstone theatres' collaboration with former steelworkers and others in Bethlehem, PA, in response to the demise of the steel industry there. Brady felt that the project was compromised because of the support it got from the Bethlehem Steel corporation. Certainly Beth Steel had an agenda, which included looking good despite some very questionable choices that racked that town, notably the resulting economic insecurity incurred by Beth Steel pulling out. Nevertheless, others (including myself) felt that the people making the project were more able to accomplish their goal -- essentially mourning the end of an era and the identity shift of their whole town-- with "the Steel's" support than they could have without it. For example, performing in a former iron foundry, a place wildly evocative of that era, was central to the project's emotional impact.

In my current work on a history of comm-based art, the issue of coersion and a top down process versus inclusion and a bottoms up, grass roots approach, is central in determining what sources really belong in this genre. People uneasy with religion -- which is topdown, organized so systematized with a pre-set ideology, as exclusive as it is inclusive, and which has used its political clout vis-a-vis a wide range of stands -- these same people may be fine with the idea of spirituality, which is an individually-defined relationship to the metaphysical world or to a higher being/s. Yes, some religous institutions have been progressive, as you point out, Linda, in raising the black church as a social as well as religious base in, for example, the civil rights mvmt. Think liberation theology in Latin America. The wonderful comm-based artist Peggy Pettitt frequently goes to church with the people she is creating work with as it is a cultural center for many of them, an important way to bond and understand.

I think it's important to not have a knee jerk response to what are certainly provocative institutions for many of us. Again, the issue is context. How is the church/ religion being brought into a project? Is there room for disagreement? Does the church have a kind of institutional power vis-a-vis a comm arts project that will leave others out or co-op the project?

As we all learned in the '70s there is no such thing as clean money. Whatever funding/resources support a community-based project (and they are expensive!), it usually comes from some capitalist power source, since we have virtually no public funding for the arts anymore.

Also, what I hear from artists these days is that you can't make social change without everybody at the table, and that means the ones who are weilding the power in a stuation of oppression as well as the oppressed. (This after so many years of preaching to the converted.) So yes, the real question is, what are the terms of inclusion for everyone in the project?

I feel in the case of Liz, we are left to trust her judgment in her choice of faith leaders. But I don't believe "Hallelujah" examines religion's place in society, but instead is looking for common ground among people of all beliefs. That's important, but for me, I still think it's too easily accepting of the concept of organized religion itself, and is leaving that question fairly unexamined altogether.

I wonder how Cornerstone is dealing with this question.

There's a lot to respond to here as always. Let me try to address what I know about Cornerstone's Faith-Based Residency, which will take place over the next several years. Let me say up front that I'm not as knowledgeable about this residency as I'd like to be. Most of my "deep" writing goes only to the end of 2000 with Cornerstone's LA bridge show, For Here or To Go.

That said, I do know that issues of faith and inclusion have challenged the company prior to establishing the residency. In the early rural years, a logging town questioned the "goodness" of Brecht's Good Woman because in one version of the text she had a child out of wedlock. Participants in Marmarth, North Dakota had problems with Hamlet's blasphemy (the original and the adapted text). One incident a few years ago struck at the root of the inclusion dilemma. Someone who had worked with Cornerstone for several years, a deeply faithful Christian, admitted to a gay member that she believed he would be going to hell because of his homosexuality. Painful conversations ensued. How to make sure that her beliefs were respected by a company that includes many gay members? And that they and their actions were not rejected out of hand? The faith-based residency arose in part as a way to delve more deeply into these questions of inclusion and belief.

There's a spectrum of beliefs within the ensemble itself, which includes atheist humanist, gay Christian, and pagan spiritual beliefs. The recent Festival of Faith incorporated a number of these views and beliefs along with those of associate artists and host sites, a Buddhist Temple, Ba'Hai center, Methodist Church, New Horizon Islamic School, and Jewish Synagogue. One short piece in the festival was written by a former Nun who had left the Catholic church, and officiated at Bill and Chris's wedding. Apparently the Buddhist Nuns were fascinated. At the same time, some of the Nuns left a performance of Cornerstone's interactive ensemble show, Zones, because there was too much conflict for them. As I wrote recently in the conclusion to my book, there's that dilemma again. How can you include in the same room people who believe in expressing difference, and those who shy away from conflict?

I think the cycle will offer some fascinating takes on these questions, particularly because of the care with which it's been organized. For the past year, the company and various inter-faith leaders have hosted "Weekly Wednesdays," dialogues on faith for anyone interested.

And there will be a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People of Faith project next June (2003)!

Thank you, Jan and Sonja. Now let's open the discussion to people who are reading what we've been talking about.

I am quite fascinated by your conversations, especially as the three of you decribe writing in this context. I have always loved the phrase "thick description," and I'd like to ask more about that and what Linda, you call, "deep" writing. What is "thick" in description that crosses into interpretation? I like this idea, that suggests that you do not presume to make "judgments" of a certain kind, of a limiting, overly priviledged or power laden variety(I'm not sure exactly how). I find that my desire in community writing about community based work is to tell people/readers how important it is that they should pay attention now to this work. I have a sense of urgency about it, as if the art itself might disappear if somebody doesn't write about it. This spills over into wanting to describe, thickly, richly, metaphorically, in such a way that readers might get a flavor of the work itself. This is pretty presumptuous of me, or any critic, so I like quotation and interviews and things that let the voices of the group or artist do as much of the speaking as possible. But I don't think this is "thick" description in Goeertz's terms, is it? Why description (rather than classification, evaluation, etc)? I wish I had the OED here to tell me what that word really means. Later. Does writing in the service of the work mean that helping the work live and thrive is a value that sits next to the need for "informed" judgements that help distinguish "good" from "bad" work? Or writing and critique that would help us (anybody) make the work stronger? What is stronger? these thoughts are circulating for me as we think and write about the GETRP project.

I think the "deep" part of the writing (as opposed to the "thick" part?) has to do with paying enough attention to read the "signs" and reflect on how a work is built from a standpoint that may be sympathetic but is clearly from another standpoint than the makers', or from multiple standpoints. I think I see what Linda means about being able to write about the work critically (in the full sense of that word) even though she and Liz are friends. Is being sensitive and careful and aware of the implications of my own identities and positions and values incorporated into my thorough reading and thinking? I want to figure out this works. From my work in gender and race studies, I have become much more aware of the "location" of my speech in me, my various embodiments. I try to say something about that in this writing as well. For me, the brief history and first personal narrative style of these conversations helps that process, where a more formal venue (like a journal article or book chapter) doesn't allow me as much room to put myself in context.

In short, I am very engaged, and this is one tiny thought of many in response to the conversation.

The term "thick descripton" is usually ascribed to anthropologist Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures [1973]. The term, originally coined by Gilbert Ryle, refers to the inevitable interpretive quality of an anthropologist's thorough description of any event, or for that matter, of any person's comprehension of any event. According to Geertz , humans are animals suspended in webs of significance they themselves have spun and the job of the researcher is to achieve a thick description of those webs.

To quote Geertz:

"A good interpretation of anything--a poem, a person, a history, a ritual, an institution, a society--takes us into the heart of that of which it is the interpretation. When it does not do that, but leads us instead somewhere else--into an admiration of its own elegance, of its author's cleverness, or of the beauties of Euclidean order--it may have its intrinsic charms; but it is something else than what the task at hand ... calls for.
…
"My own position in the midst of all this has been to try to resist subjectivism on the one hand and cabbalism on the other, to try to keep the analysis of symbolic forms as closely tied as I could to concrete social events and occasions, the public world of common life, and to organize it in such a way that the connections between theoretical formulations and descriptive interpretations were unobscured by appeals to dark sciences.
….
"The danger that cultural analysis, in search of all-too-deep-lying turtles, will lose touch with the hard surfaces of life--with the political, economic, stratificatory realities within which men are everywhere contained--and with the biological and physical necessities on which those surfaces rest, is an ever-present one. The only defense against it, and against, thus, turning cultural analysis into a kind of sociological aestheticism, is to train such anal

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Writing Deeply: A Discussion with Three Writers

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