Little Epiphanies: Thoughts on Roadside Theater

In Michael Fields’ interviews and profile of the company for "Performing Communities", Roadside Theater’s veteran company members speak passionately and politically about their own long-term connections to work and the organization they have built. There is a powerful sense of mission in the interviews, and deep, often disturbing reflections on the theater, the place and the work in an ever more challenging national context. Roadside has carefully documented its considerable history. The collection of interviews and reflections here offers what Roadside’s Donna Porterfield terms "little epiphanies"— the surprising and significant emergence of individual voices within the particular imperatives of this context and geography.

Just getting to Roadside Theater and Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky, is a mythic journey through miles of curves, coalfields, kudzu, green slopes and hollers. Erica Yerkey and I made a site visit to Roadside during Appalshop’s Seedtime on the Cumberland Festival in June of 2002. We wanted to supplement Michael Field’s interviews and profiles by visiting this important festival in a geographical location close to our own in western Virginia. I subsequently made a separate visit to a few of Roadside’s community partners, whose remote locations made it difficult to schedule during Fields’ visit.

Stepping out of the car, we walked immediately into the middle of a parade in downtown Whitesburg, a phantasmagoria of huge puppets made of trash bags, fire engines and townspeople on motorcycles. In the next several hours, we sat on hay bales to hear a live radio broadcast of mountain music, visited the "Kids Bored Café," heard four different gospel groups from the region, viewed the premiere of an Appalshop documentary about musician Ralph Stanley, saw Roadside’s production of Ron Short’s "South of the Mountains, " and New York artist Marty Pottenger’s "City Water Tunnel #3." Only a few of the events were specifically produced by Roadside, most were by Appalshop; the theater sits in the heart of the larger organization’s building and complex organizational structure. The mission to preserve and develop the heritage of the region launched the theater and the organization, and this mission is still the focus of a deliberately constructed community.

Literally and otherwise, Roadside wrote the book about working in and for community; and the group profile shows dozens of performances and projects over more than 25 years. Dudley Cocke co-authored "From the Ground Up" and Roadside created "A Matrix of Community Arts Practice," both foundational texts in the field. As they themselves articulate it, Roadside is about place and new work generated in it — stories and songs of the central Appalachian Mountains and their economic realities. . Roadside has also used highly "local" knowledge and practices to create and put to good use models that work very far from their literal home; they have accordingly had an extensive influence on the field.

Mining for Ghosts

Story forms the basis of Roadside’s methodology, their processes well articulated in company materials. Roadside’s assessment of its own methods and the successful link to political change and community well-being locates the story itself as key. The story passes through visible and invisible communities in the telling — we hear the voice and the personality of the individual, so hearing and listening is a profoundly located experience. Yet, in its ability to conjure or cite the community (of the moment or of the past), the story cedes the authority of one expert individual (playwright) to empowered multiple voices. The accumulation of "little epiphanies" in songs and stories becomes the performance of the community.The point of arrival through story is also, therefore, a democratic political gesture, the telling a gesture of civic responsibility.The great Irish author James Joyce said that the short story is an "epiphany." He used the notion of journey and arrival from the Catholic Church’s Holy Day, which celebrates the arrival of the three wise men at Christ’s birthplace. Joyce saw that moment metaphorically as the arrival of a character at a new point of consciousness or awakening. The moment is also a defining point of identity, like the narrator’s in Joyce’s "Araby," or the protagonist’s in Roadside playwright Ron Short’s "Pretty Polly," one of Roadside’s signature pieces. A complex understanding of story comes through the interviews, as Roadside members talk about their own identities in the organization.

The stories told in a group interview with Roadside’s core members (Dudley Cocke, Donna Porterfield, Tamara Coffey and Ron Short) feel like surrogates for others that have been told many times and still others that may not be told in this context. Michael Fields gestures towards these ghostings in his remarks about what happens when the tape recorder is turned off.

… Road stories including: Alabama prison show pranks, Swedes and alcohol, Danes and beer; Vietnam; the fact that everyone should have to do some national service; why some folks can work in an ensemble and others can’t; musical practice – physical practice; grants and why we don’t get them (threatening), more respect and why we don’t get that (too strange and need more money); school systems; the necessity of collective action; back to road stories – Swedes and telegrams; more road stories – a beautiful Brazilian woman in red and salsa music; the need for more reflective time in our work.

The passage suggests not only layers of past epiphanies, but also an acute sense of pleasure in the telling, a quality present in many of Fields’ interviews with company members. The shared conversations reflect and often focus on Roadside’s purposeful evolution from a small group of similarly committed individuals to a highly organized arts institution. The passage above also suggests Fields’ relish, clearly also felt in Roadside company members throughout the interviews, of digging through the detritus of shared and individual cultural experiences to get at who they are, then and now. A common thread through the reflections on the past and the present moment of the interviews is a palpable and grounded sense of the value of the conversation itself, especially the conversation as it opens the space for the trading of stories, anecdotes and analytical thinking.

Roadside members practice what they preach, and they tell stories in response to questions. For example, when asked how she came to work in community arts, Donna Porterfield tells the wonderful story of her father, who, as a child, made plays for the farm animals.

When I was a little girl I lived on a farm in West Virginia. My father was raised on the same farm. He always loved any live performance. From the time he was a little boy, he would make shows with the farm animals, and make his cousins be in them and stuff like that. When he got older he wrote plays and did them with the church youth group. They weren’t religious plays but they let him do it. My mother and brother didn’t like that so much, so my father would always take me to any live performance there was anywhere. I had seen a good deal of theater when you add it up over time. Then we moved to northern Virginia, off the farm, and saw theater people usually think of: Arena Stage, Catholic University. When I was out of college, I came here to visit a roommate of mine from college. Her husband worked at Roadside Theater. We went to a Roadside Theater performance – this was about 1975 – of "Red Fox/Second Hangin’." That was the first full-length play that Roadside did. It just bowled me over because I realized that of all the theater I had seen, for the first time I was seeing theater that was from my background, from my class background, from a rural sensibility - all these things that I had never seen. I think the theater that we do here, and the theater that we work with other people to do in their communities, is that. It’s their own stories from their own background, and how you make theater out of that. That’s the kind of grassroots theater that I think of, and that’s what’s important to me. That’s the reason. A little epiphany.

Tamara Coffey follows with an animated description of her family’s impromptu and frequent music sessions; she says they kept many instruments around for people who dropped in, even a bass in the hall closet! Both Coffey and Porterfield connect their growing awareness of "theater" as something outside their home communities and experiences until they encountered Roadside. Coffey says:

I had dreams of going off to New York and working with "the real theater." And when I was in college working in college theater, it was fun, but I didn’t see it going anyplace. I didn’t see anything happening out of it, and went through a lot of different things in my life, and got an opportunity to go and see Roadside.

The first time I met Donna and Dudley and Ron, I actually came in for a show they were doing up at the elementary school at Pound and it was "Pretty Polly." It just blew me away. After I talked with Donna and Dudley the next day I realized that I had seen, "Red Fox/Second Hangin’" on the public television station in Kentucky probably three or four times and had just loved it. And never connected it with somebody from here, for some reason. It really was such a sharp thing. It was just so real, and I could see what was going on there. I just begged and pleaded until they let me come and work here.

Cocke argues that the connectedness Coffey feels and articulates is the essence of their theater.

With Roadside, I’ll just say that the theater came to be because form, content, audience and place were linked at the inception of the theater. So, that linkage of form and content, audience and place at the very beginning has allowed us to be an experimental theater because it has given us a firm foundation upon which to make new work. That is what we do. All our work is original work. Each piece is different than the piece before it. All the pieces have a root, a strong root in this heritage, this place.

Ron Short describes the growth of his own understanding of grassroots theater and its relationship to other kinds of theater and to outside economic pressures in the following passages.

Personally, I think one of the more interesting things for me, after being in this work for awhile, was going around and seeing other theater, that I never would have seen had I not been able to use this work to propel me in my travels throughout the country. One of the curious things that people ask me is, "There is no tradition of theater in the mountains that you come from. Where in the world could art come from in a place that has a long history of poverty and a long public kind of popular belief that people are backwards?" I just am amazed by that, obviously, because there is so much drama in everyday life here. Our lives are just filled with drama, by constant drama. In church, the thing that most people understand the least is the potential to see theater in some ways at its best – theater of long history, of storytelling. In my church they tell stories, so I’m amazed that other people sometimes can’t see the theater here in the ways that we see it. Naturally it amazes me that they will look elsewhere before they will look in their own place. All the speakers from this group interview talk about the difference between their approach and a mainstream idea of theater, one they learned about and saw in school or in commercial media. By definition, that theater was distant, outside local geography or experience. Then came the realization that the story embedded in the life of ordinary people was theater and had a legitimate place in what we call culture.

It is important to underscore that part of Appalshop and Roadside’s work for many years has been to undo the class and regional biases in so much mainstream culture. This recognition seems less dramatic now than it did 20 years ago, with cultural criticism only beginning to take apart the systemic structures of prejudice, yet the necessity and analysis remains extremely pertinent. Roadside presented a very early and very radical challenge to longstanding concepts of poverty and class in the region. Moreover, their programs and productions countered the canned versions of Appalachian life that too often stand in as representations of regional cultural. In these important passages, Short makes us understand that such biases are deeply embedded in theatrical forms as well as in straightforward social behavior and institutions. Roadside’s work has been central in working to expose the depth and nature of such prejudices and to create a public place for the beautiful real voices of the region.

When you live outside of those boundaries you don’t have any of that political control, that economic control, even the control of your own image. Somebody else is controlling and telling you who you are. Then the only thing that you have is your own story. That’s about the only thing that you have. It comes down to how do you use that in a public way. That’s essential to me. Theater is the last public forum for common people. We still can have access to it. You don’t have to have the huge corporation. You don’t have to have the technology of television. It is 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. As it uses the collective knowledge, it gets built together.

For me, that’s what grassroots theater is. It’s about having a voice. A public voice. One which demonstrates not only, "This is what I think and feel," but, "I’ll speak it in the public forum and then I’ll wait for a response so that we can have a dialogue about that." We can continue then to formulate our thoughts and change and grow as we need to in our own community. But it will be driven internally. It will come from within.

Fields writes that interview conversations often make reference to the men’s experience in and of the war in Viet Nam. Ron Short makes the connection of his own brutal experiences with his ongoing desire ("from within") to make theater. Short talks about casualty reports during the Viet Nam war, the numbers offered in the news to "assess" wins and losses. He, someone "in country" witnessing these reports, decries them as having little or nothing to do with the experience of the individual human. He says that if you are the one hauling away bodies or "up to your knees in a rice paddy," the abstractions of numbers, of wins and losses, cannot represent your experience, but in fact, offer a horrific counterpoint. And he says that in such urgent life situations, you interrogate reality and yourself at the deepest level. "What the hell am I doing here?" His sense of the theater as "the last public forum" connects an implicit idea of outrage and resistance to the need for story. Short implies that the voices of those who do not make war but are required to fight or who do not control economic policy but must bear the consequences of it, can be re-bodied or re-imaged on a stage or in a performance environment.

The act of imagination, bodied forth in story, therefore becomes a collective political action, originating, as Short said earlier, "from within." This telling of the individual life experience in a public, artfully and musically arranged, representation, differentiates what Short sees as his own theater work and what he criticizes as "popular culture." He uses the term to excoriate pre-digested commercial television and other mass produced forms, which have no legitimacy because they manufacture, in order to sell, a homogenized "mythos" that keeps the real stories suppressed. He says:And then I think there is a whole hidden world of America that people never see. And I do believe that community theater, or grassroots theater is that other voice. It’s that voice that never gets a chance to speak for itself or demonstrate itself in a real way.

In a way that Short himself calls "mysterious," despite the careful articulation of methodology by all members of the company, the public stories that Roadside find, create, and catalyze the unheard and unseen of past and present toward public presence and being.

What’s Reponsibility?

Donna Porterfield tells a succinct version of Roadside’s evolution into residency as the basis of their work with community and connects with the importance of story in their process. In early days, Roadside made a large per cent of their income touring, and they asked themselves how to serve the audiences that emerged who reported never having been to the theater. She says:

And so we were saying well, we’ve got these people there. This isn’t working. What’s responsibility? And how do they get integrated into these arts programs? That’s when we all talked about it, and Ron really pushed it that we need to do community residencies. We need to stay in the community longer. We didn’t exactly know what that meant right then. We had some ideas. We decided that we would go for that. Our booking partner was from Southern Arts Associates and we all thought this was economic suicide, you can never do this, it’s too expensive. Our booking partner said, "Yeah. Let’s do it. It’s important." She believed in it. That was Theresa Holden. So we did. And at that time we were able to raise money and start doing these things.

We started doing one of these residencies, and booking was a lag time, in Dickenson County Virginia where Ron grew up and where we have a really strong audience for our work. Right over here, the next county over from where we are sitting. We were doing a residency with a high-school drama class and a teacher. They were crossing over and working with a senior center and all these different things were coming about. We started talking about how can you get people talking to each other and telling stories again. It used to happen all the time, as Tamara mentioned, in these different places, and it doesn’t anymore, naturally. So, how can we come up with a way of that happening? We came up with a story circle, developed a story circle, which all the methodologies and written material have to go on. Anyway through this residency we started to figure out how we could make arts participants rather than arts spectators out of the audience. …

We got better at it. And as we got better at it we started writing it down because it started making clear sense to all of us. And we wrote it down, everyone in the company. At one time we had nine people on full-time salary, and everyone produced residencies. It didn’t matter what job you did, you were a residency producer. The methodology that we had, that we all agreed on, that was the way we were going to do it and the place we were going to go. ... We all did it in a little bit different way, but we got to the same place.

Porterfield’s passage reveals how thoroughly Roadside has come to understand the significance of residencies in communities. It is also clear that their own working methods function as grassroots development for themselves. When Cocke, therefore, makes the following brief definition of the theater, the process that got Roadside there is visible.

Those are two important characteristics of our theater, accessibility and commitment to place. By commitment to place we mean commitment to the people here, the culture here, the heritage here. And that commitment leads to the responsibility to make that heritage new, to reinvent it. That’s what the fun of theater is.

Community partners make extensive commentaries in the interviews about their valued relationships with Roadside. Most see Roadside as having led them to their own discoveries. They have come to see story as a core concern, of story, songwriting, music and public performance as important tools. Roadside partnered with the Mountain Laurel Center in a project about dealing with cancer and health issues. Director Marilyn Maxwell provides an analysis of the importance of art making for their organization. She describes its ‘place’ in the organization’s values.

I think that storytelling and theater is of critical importance to our vision and dream for this Mountain Laurel Cancer Research and Support Center. In fact, in our planning and what we’ve done, I mean, we’ve got our information and education component, and we’ve gotten that funded. We’ve got cancer help system. We’ve got the University of Virginia’s College at Wise that got a grant funded with some staff there. Then we need a planner for the center. But what we think is 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.

Maxwell’s "soul" is similar to Cocke’s notion of the "fun" or pleasure of the theater in the re-invention of culture. In a piece like "South of the Mountains," it is pretty clear that pleasure, enjoyment is there for the audience in the way that theater provides an anchor, a connection to the emotional and compassionate, to the undefined but crucial "soul." Other groups call this "glue," but it is the work of the imagination here that is sufficiently complicated and accessible to be inclusive and mysterious.

It is a mark of success that these projects, such as this one and the one about domestic violence with Hope House, are credited to Roadside and individual members, but feel completely "owned" by the community organizations. There is no sense of individual ownership, either psychologically or economically, by the artists, although their leadership and skill is not only cited but understood. This marks what I see as the fulfillment of the deepest mission of community arts work, the ability of the community group to integrate and own arts practice for themselves. In my interviews with various partners, I heard directly about health issues or sexual abuse as it came through stories, retold in this new context. The work Roadside helped perform allowed individuals and groups to talk more freely about issues long after the initial performances. This remarkable effect is a result of the time spent in articulating and practicing the practice. Art in story catalyzes more of the same — stories generate more stories. Then, stories become important means to generate discussion. Discussion and more stories create a cycle of dialogue and exchange.

Often community partners can cite long-term change and lasting vivid memories of the impact a particular piece or project has had on them. David Raines, a teacher who was engaged in a four-year school residency project with Roadside, comments extensively on the activities and the educational value of the projects. Student Crystal Raines (no relation, but serendipitously working as a waitress in the state park where we met) recalls a songwriting workshop and story circle she was involved with several years previously. They both describe a session wherein a group of boys discovers that they can make a song from the history of a coal-mining disaster in their town. She says, "I remember how it starts: ‘Way down yonder in Convict Hollow miners worked to earn a dollar. Then one day in ’23 there was a bad catastrophe.’ I can remember that!"

The familiarity of the ballad shape creates an ease and playfulness reflective of the process, when it finally started to work for the boys, who had been struggling to write anything at all, who were having trouble in school in general. As in so many mountain ballads, the incremental repetition and the singable quality of their song framed the retelling of an event that probably still has economic consequences that may not be consciously perceived. David Raines asserts the value of the residency in this way:

Students from poor backgrounds that often don’t have a lot available to them, have parents with very little education, and very often are not successful in school, for obvious reasons. Storytelling and theater-type work is geared to helping students from that background more than anything. I mean they normally struggle in writing things down. They don’t write well, they don’t have good vocabularies, they don’t express themselves well. …

We saw students that normally struggled greatly in writing and reading do well with lots of these type endeavors. I felt like it was a great thing because of that.

The creation and sharing of songs is also a core practice, completely woven into Roadside’s story telling practice. The rich history of the region’s music gives the work character and emotionality that are mythic. The songs make direct linkages with the songs and dances of other cultures, such as the Zuni people in one of Roadside’s partnerships. The ballads and the voices create a beauty that communicates history and experience beyond written language. This beauty coexists with very intentional politics. For instance, at Seedtime, Roadside produced Marty Pottenger’s "City Water Tunnel #3," Ron Short and Kim Neal’s performance, several gospel groups, some white, some black, some racially mixed, within the same 24-hour period. The sense was dizzying; sometimes the theater felt like a very traditional Christian church environment, sometimes like a performance art house, sometimes like a classroom, and sometimes like a community-center performance space or a church basement. None of this is accidental, and the profusion of events, each in itself only somewhat detached from its usual "locale," has a power to create a kind of community in which many kinds of voices can be present. Such successes are therefore always complicated, and, by design, free or affordable, marrying multiple perspectives to accessibility.

Even with the kind of success Roadside can legitimately claim come challenges, and these too are palpable in the interviews. Often gripping and funny by turns, Roadside’s personal stories sometimes seem diminished within the complex structure the organization has grown into. The passion for serving the region and creating community has not visibly dimmed, and the organization continues to generate more partnerships and projects. Yet there is a sense of impatience and exhaustion with impact of the current recession on the national arts scene.

I see a gap between the work generated by communities and the original performance work generated by the company. People remember signature pieces "Pretty Polly" and Red Fox, Second Hangin’," but such large ensemble pieces now seem less possible as discrete productions. Although present company members have been there for a long time, the number of performing artists in the company seems to have narrowed substantially. Is this a loss or a fulfillment of mission? Is a new generation of artists coming into the work? Has enough of the art-making process been transmitted or will this take care of itself as community members take on more and more projects? Such questions are not so much critiques of produced work, but concerns that face many of the ensembles in "Performing Communities," especially those, like Roadside and Carpetbag, that formed at a point in U.S. culture where political activism and critique could engender healthy debate and federal and state resources. WagonBurner’s Debbie Hicks and Roadside performers bring up the "canary in a coal mine" figure to express their sense of that the endangerment of the arts foreshadows more profound losses; indeed we have come to see them since these interviews.

Roadside has found structures that allow symbiotic relationships to prosper in their regions, despite the often cited cuts in national arts budgets and the increasing "anti-art" sentiments so many of the interviewees discuss. Cocke tersely remarks he "can’t imagine not having the struggle." Yet the "little epiphanies" set in motion in shared stories and experiences continue in audiences and because of community projects. Although Roadside has been incredibly successful in garnering foundation and grant money, their economic future and the particular structures they have built (like all middle sized arts organizations) is deeply threatened by changes an funding contexts and public organizations. Yet Roadside is a model for models — the dissemination of their methods and values seems to me assured beyond the present, in the seeding of many projects that are now growing their autonomous methods of using art and story.

Ann Kilkelly is a professor of theater arts and women's studies at Virginia Tech. She is recognized nationally as a scholar and performer of jazz-tap dancing and history, performance studies and interactive performance techniques. She has received Smithsonian Senior Fellowships and a National Endowment for the Humanities Collaborative Research Grant, and performs and gives master classes in jazz tap around the country. At Virginia Tech she served as the director of Women's Studies for six years, she teaches and directs multimedia performance concerts, and she recently created the Diversity Training Laboratory to help students and faculty use performance techniques to examine diversity issues. Kilkelly also served as a site visitor for Roadside Theater for "Performing Communities."

References

All unattributed citations are from this research project and can be found in the online interviews of "Performing Communities: The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project."

PERFORMING COMMUNITIES
Carpetbag | Cornerstone | Dell'Arte | Jump-Start
LAPD | Pregones | Roadside | WagonBurner
Commentaries

Original CAN/API publication: November 2002