Love and Respect at Work in the Creative Process: Thoughts on Cornerstone Theater Company

October 2002

Alison Carey, the resident writer in the Cornerstone Theater ensemble, says she falls in love when she makes art with a community, and I take her very, very seriously. Even in these interview transcripts, I can feel her bubbling enthusiasm, her deep knowledge of what she experiences. Carey, an artist of considerable maturity, describes what it is to make art with someone. No weekend fling here, Carey is talking about the whole big deal – total immersion, no holds barred, even-steven equality, no-pretense honesty, and in for the long haul – a fully mature affair of the heart.

Okay, great, everyone can get behind falling in love, but what does that mean, in a practical sense, in terms of making the art, in terms of making those artist/community partnerships actually creative? Is it useful for me or is this just something that Alison Carey has in her soul, a connection with the goddess, that the rest of us can only envy? Without getting into a Sunday sermon on love (or a psychoanalysis of the art-making processes), can we explore Carey’s metaphor for its values and lessons?

As a starting place, this project’s interviewer and reporter, Ferdinand Lewis, has done an excellent job of encapsulating Cornerstone’s creative development process in working with communities, from which we may gain valuable insight on certain skills.

In the early phases of this work, an enormous amount of energy must be spent in developing the participation of individuals from the community. Although early conversations with organizational partners – beginning as early as a year prior – will get word about the project out to individuals, this phase sometimes requires ensemble members to approach neighborhoods directly, canvassing for potential participants. Once scriptwriting is underway, the same sort of street-level interaction takes place. During the script-development phase, the text is not only reviewed by community members who are in the cast and crew, but also community partners and focus groups. In some cases scripts are actually put in bars, cafes and other community meeting places, where patrons can jot notes and comments in the margins. The development strategy for a community collaboration will typically include about 20 meetings with community focus groups and community leaders. Ensemble members not only meet with community members as part of the play-development process, but throughout the production process continue to meet regularly with them.

In this brief paragraph there is a boot-load of work – intense, demanding and time consuming. The research-and-development phase for a playwright in the more conventional process (one person writing a script) can, itself, be a long and laborious task. That is to say nothing of the soul-searching work of actually writing the script, a task that has often brought the individual writer to moments of anguish and doubt. Opening these creative steps to a group process makes them significantly more complicated, at the least. Beyond mere numbers of people, Cornerstone enlists a wild mix of experience, background and skill level. People with established skills in artistic processes and little-to-no knowledge of the given community work in combination with people who have little-to-no established artistic skills but have deep knowledge of the community and all its ins and outs. While the mixture of general assets and deficits in this combination implies a kind of balance, the practice of negotiating this balance, person to person, asks for vision, patience and understanding well beyond conventional practice. Alison Carey makes a clear and important statement about this. She says, "If you do this [work] for purely selfless reasons, you’re going to burn out soon." Selflessness would seem to many to be an asset, even a virtue. It is considerable experience that voices distrust of such motivations. Carey goes on,

… you can’t do [a particular project] because it’s morally appropriate. It can be true that it’s morally appropriate, but if you’re in this context and you’re not producing the art that you want to produce, you’re going to burn out. You’ve gotta really want it for you.

At the heart of Cornerstone’s process is a pragmatic conviction that is intimately connected to Carey’s imagery of falling in love. The creative process must feed everyone, artist, community member and audience alike. Carey makes the richness of this principle particularly clear when she says,

People come to this not because they have things to keep to themselves, but because they have things to share. As a writer I am a funnel, a facilitator of the process. When we start a workshop process I start by saying, "I know nothing, we need you in this process." What the hell do I know? I think that the community members take being needed in the process very seriously and they realize quickly that their role in the process is very valued.

Desire, need and satisfaction are three elements of love that are essential to both the love-making and creative processes. Being needed, being recognized and valued for one’s intrinsic assets, this is understandably elemental for healthy relationships. What calls on us for fierce discipline is that these same elements can mask unhealthy relationships – in art making as in love partnering. When the partnership is out of balance, in terms of power or dependency or ultimate worth, then an unhealthy element creeps in. For example, one cannot love in order to change someone. The negotiation does not go that way. This distinction between differing intentions seems critically important to plumb.

Cornerstone has gained considerable insight into this matter, mostly based on the ensemble’s careful understanding of the nature and intent of well-considered artistic partnerships. Bill Rauch, ensemble member and artistic director of Cornerstone, and a co-founder with Carey, speaks about the function of art with blunt clarity.

You cannot predict what art changes. You’re naïve if you think you know how you’re going to change the world with the art you create. It’s equally naïve and irresponsible even to acknowledge that art changes the world. … The artist is creating an image of the world, and that shapes how people see the world.

As important as "shaping how people see the world" may be, and Rauch thinks the act of making art is quite important, Cornerstone is becoming more and more aware that the key to their work is in their art, not in the change that may follow out of their art. Carey says,

Our primary job is to create good plays, and if we did a crappy play for a very diverse audience, we would have failed. To say you have to keep the art first would be a false dichotomy. Oxygen is first, but you can't go three days without water. Our art doesn't exist without the way our art is created and the involvement of the community, and the involvement of the community wouldn't work with bad art. We used to get questions in the beginning: "Are you art or social work?" We're not either of those things. It can look like social work on the outside, while it's actually a way of making the kind of art that's most satisfying to us. There's no way that we would have lasted this long if that weren't the case.

Cornerstone’s clarity that their success is based on making art that satisfies all partners involved in the process is one of considerable maturity. Many cultures within the U.S. openly celebrate the values of love and family as forces for cohesion and progress. Nonetheless, it is commonly understood that loving someone in order to make them different, to change them, is a recipe for disaster. The foolish youth who would cleanse the tarnished soul of another is one such story-line. Likewise, those of worldly knowledge who would lead the innocent into maturity (Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins) are always doomed. The concept of the quiet enabler in an addictive or abusive family is a grim reminder of how destructive these unbalanced relationships can get. Yet many of our institutional systems would like to dredge up justifications for support of the arts based on the very suspect criteria of how art might change society.

In his interview with the director of education at the Denver Center Theater Denver, Daniel Renner, as well in his own reflections, Lewis gives considerable thought to how pernicious this trend could become. He rightfully raises the alarm that the National Endowment for the Arts might pursue what seem to be its own intentions toward outcomes assessments.

There is a trend in art-support systems to quantify the impact of art, even in the conventional forms of plays by playwrights performed by actors in playhouses. Finding out how many people come to the show, how many "new" people, etc., would seem to be a way of evaluating the health of the arts organization, at least of its function as an income-producing mechanism. It gets confusing, though, and sometimes blatantly misleading, when it comes to evaluating the art itself. In evaluating art that is directly connected with community, art that is built out of community collaborations, there is the temptation to point to the good that comes of it. People seem to want to justify the effort according to some long-term, tangible value that returns to the community for the investment that it makes in the creative process. The trend toward quantitative evaluation really gets pumped when it comes to how art may or may not affect social change. Once the claim is made, the desire to prove it seems to come right along behind.

Through all the trends and social imperatives, Cornerstone stands as a beacon of responsible creativity. Alongside the love-affair analogy, another word surfaces in the ensemble’s thinking as critically important: respect. Bill Rauch uses respect as a core value for the work of the company, a guide for partnerships. In his interview, Rauch offers a couple of anecdotes about working with members of a community,

For auditioning, for instance, we ask what are the places we must audition. We present to them how we build a project and they tell us how to best do that, most respectfully for that community. [Lewis interjects that respect seems to be integral to the Cornerstone process, not just a needlepoint motto.] For instance, when we did a collaboration with the Chinatown community here in LA, we wanted the word "drag" in the posters for the project, but the word, it turned out, had all these different connotations in Chinatown. So this becomes a dialogue with the advisory committee.

Two major criteria held by Cornerstone as measures for success emerge out of the imagery offered in these interviews by Carey and Rauch: respectful ways and art that satisfies its many participants. It is in that context that Carey asserts that she "needs" her community partners. It is in this context that Rauch says, "The company’s aesthetic is to include the community’s dialogue with itself in the script, which calls for opposing voices and layers of meaning and a vital richness. Multiplicity of viewpoints: It’s essential to our mission." He is careful to add, "I think a lot of people stop at the ‘multiplicity of voices’ thing, and interpret it as ‘Can’t we all get along?’ – a kind of superficial multiculturalism. But including the voice of the oppressor along with the voice of the oppressed is a very strong political stance."

While a "multiplicity of voices" may offer a strong political stance within the art and in the context of the particular community, Rauch also is careful to make a distinction between thoughtful, respectful, powerful art and social service. He states,

The social-service aspect is often overstressed. In fact we have deliberately stopped emphasizing that. The majority of communities that we work with are lower income and don't have access to professional theater, that's true, but the work is just as much about what we are learning as artists: It's a mutual exchange. … Even colleagues can misunderstand, thinking that we do this just for the social service, but the fact is, we do it to create the best art that we know how to create.

With these principles of respect and mutual satisfaction held central in their work, Cornerstone has been able to reach toward an equality of partnership that is consistent and productive. It must be said unequivocally, however, this equality of partnership is elusive – as difficult to establish and maintain in the creativity of an artistic relationship as ever it may be in the amorous ones. Over the years, Cornerstone artists have learned and developed some very reliable methods and approaches for keeping the balance of equality in their partnerships.

One primary element in their work is the "advisory committee," a group of community members who are brought together at the very conceptual beginning of projects and continue throughout. Bill Rauch has some very interesting things to say about the advisory committees and the processes that surround them.

We build a community advisory committee from the community, and sometimes they're active and sometimes they aren't. They usually have various levels of input. But this committee provides guidance. … [It] helps to translate for you, literally and metaphorically, in terms of issues and code words in the community and whether you’re pushing a button without even realizing it. … The committee is also important for the legacy of the project. What will be the ongoing impact after the project is over? The advisory committee has plenty of thoughts on that.

The implied processes of selection and inclusion are many and varied. No doubt Cornerstone has had committees that don’t come together, don’t bond with the project, but over the years Cornerstone has found that the vital dialogue and dynamic energy that is released through the advisory committee are essential elements in the creative process. Sometimes an advisory committee reactivates after the completion of the show itself:

For instance, the Watts Village Theatre Company started out of the project we did in Watts, and Cornerstone's managing director is a board member of Watts Village. During the "road years," [before the company settled in Los Angeles] we would donate money [through the advisory committee] for the community to start a theater. Recently, by the way, one of them sent a $500 check to say thank you. In Los Angeles, we measure a broader range of impact, rather than just helping to leave a theater company behind us. People call us for help with college applications, or to borrow sound equipment. Often, community members stay active with the company long after the project ends.

When asked about how a project actually starts at Cornerstone, Rauch went again right to the matter of how a project is partnered within the community.

It could start from ensemble members talking about an issue they have a hunger to work with, or someone from a community approaching us, or else we could just start with an idea and find the market for it. Usually, it's about one person in a community making the leap of faith and becoming an advocate for the project. Over the years we've had a lot of projects die because they couldn't find that advocate. That's true in every project, finding that person.

Working then from a base of connection with the community through the individual advocate and the advisory committee, Cornerstone continues the cooperative collaboration in the creative processes. These artistic techniques are only as equitable as their organizational structures. Lewis notes in his field notes that Cornerstone’s attention to and competence in organizational structure is essential for the artistic processes to flourish.

Rauch and Carey both have much of value to say about Cornerstone’s artistic approaches and methodologies. They offer many exercises and procedures that allow for the generation of material from the community and the playing back of that material for the community during the development process. Variations of improvisation and creative writing exercises are common to their process. Cornerstone often uses the focus group as a methodology for starting discussion or dialogue around the subject of the project. Perhaps others might use what they call story circles for similar purposes. It might be an interesting study to compare these different methodologies that mix community members with ensemble members at the developmental level – their formats and procedures, the details of their protocols. They would all presumably identify story, opinion and experience as their ultimate point of interest.

When asked about this kind of detailed exercise and script development technique, Carey responds with wonderful specificity.

A lot of them are essentially improv stuff up on your feet, but I also focus a lot on writing and just talking. I use simple stuff like people writing down what are three smells of your community and what are three sounds of your community? As the playwright, I need to think about those things that other people take for granted; it's a way to get them to not take the community for granted. I do so many adaptations, so you're looking at the core of the play. but in the context of the community. If a moment in the play is about, say, "hiding," it's practical to find out where a person would hide specifically, but also what would make you hide. We spend time just free-writing, like giving people a starting sentence like, "I woke up this morning and I…" and then passing the papers around and everybody writes, then everybody passes their papers and then you have to respond to that story. You get these wild expressionistic stories. That just gets people talking.

This is exactly the kind of deep investigation that evens the partnership. The writer is working directly with her partners from the community in an open flow and interchange. Cornerstone, unlike some of the other companies in this project, often works with previously scripted material they adapt through their partnerships so that the material has direct and immediate presence and reference, not simply thematic relevance to the community. That is why Carey suggests that the play might be about hiding, and she is looking for how hiding in the play connects with hiding in the particular community.

When asked for other examples of how she might adapt exercises to the themes of a play Carey refers to a project called "The Good Person of New Haven." In this project Bertolt Brecht’s play, "The Good Woman of Setzuan," was adapted through a Cornerstone collaboration with specific communities in New Haven, Connecticut.

In one exercise a person would write to an imaginary grandchild why they've been a good person that day, and pass that to the person on one side of them, then write down why they were a bad person that day and pass that to the person on the other side of them. Then we can talk about what it's like to have people know you as both a good person and a bad person. You sit down in a circle with a group of people and do a writing exercise and that's a springboard, a starting point for a conversation. I always go in there with a plan of what I'm going to do and have to change it, because every group is different.

Carey explains that sometimes words from community members find their way directly into the script exactly as spoken.

It depends on if I have a lot of time with people. It’s generally not that, though, because there’s not enough time with people to get specific, but it definitely happens when someone does something and you say "that’s perfect." But I’ll tweak what someone has done. I do my best to credit people all over the place and I would write very bad plays if I didn’t have all this input. In "Steelbound" [a project adapting "Prometheus Bound" in the context of the end of the steel industry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania], there were passages that were word-for-word or moment-for-moment from what someone told me of his experience, and I talked with him about it and he was fine.

In this same project in Bethlehem, working in collaboration with Touchstone Theater Company, the script was distributed in bars and restaurants, so that people could "scribble things in margins" as a technique for interchange during the development phase of that script. It is such an audacious notion for a playwright, working within her own passionate creativity, to seek this kind of open collaboration. Rauch puts the matter into a whole picture.

Here are people who are bringing themselves together in combination with professional actors, transforming themselves into this very dynamic combination. There's something aesthetic about the variety of ages and body types and life experience, a diversity that is part of the fabric of the work, and that's what makes it powerful.

This is entirely consistent with their mission that states, "Cornerstone builds bridges between and within diverse communities." As Lewis observes in his field notes, Cornerstone not only builds such bridges as part of the processes to make their shows, they often become a bridge themselves, providing the structure for people to move, change and grow "between and within diverse communities."

Altogether then, from artistic techniques to organizational structures, Cornerstone Theater demonstrates a career-long commitment to equality in artistic partnerships with communities. This equality in the creative process is carried out with the use of many techniques, some highly unusual, some typically conventional, but always intended to release the "the best work possible." This equality is maintained and vitalized by a career-long commitment to the deceptively simple and deeply demanding values of love and respect. Values, processes and methodologies that the interviews of this project reveal are practical, pragmatic and accessible to those who would take on the discipline and rigor they demand.

[NOTE: This essay is focused on the processes and approaches for Cornerstone’s collaborations in "community shows." The project interviews conducted by Ferdinand Lewis open another, quite wonderful topic: how the Cornerstone ensemble members maintain their own health by periodically creating and producing what they call "ensemble shows." Ensemble members create shows within the ensemble as ways to "stretch muscles" not used in "community shows." Carey and Rauch have very interesting things to observe about how the ensemble uses this and other techniques to maintain and improve company health.]

Robert H. Leonard is associate professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at Virginia Tech where he teaches directing and improvisation. He brings 30 years of experience as founding artistic director of the Road Company, a nationally recognized theater ensemble (1972-1998) based in Johnson City, Tennessee, which created and produced two dozen original plays reflecting the history and issues of the Upper Tennessee Valley and Central Appalachia. Leonard served as a site visitor for WagonBurner Theater Troop for "Performing Communities," and currently serves as a member of the national board of Theatre Communications Group.

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