Performing Communities: Introduction

Several years ago, Carpetbag Theater, an African-American theater ensemble in Knoxville, Tennessee, opened a night club on the campus of Knoxville College. The theater imagined Café Noir as a performance spot for students and community members who were writing hip-hop and other forms of poetry. The club offered monthly slams, and shortly it was a favored part of the community scene. Taking the success a step further, Carpetbag invited several of Café Noir’s regular poets to join in the making of a new play. "Swopera" opened in April 2002, featuring an extraordinary mix of actors and poets performing in Carpetbag’s first-ever spoken-word opera. "Swopera" is a verse play that dances, quite literally, between a realistic story of generational changes in a Knoxville family and lyrical flights of personal, passionate visions. The new play represents the most recent breakthrough in form and style for this ensemble in its 33-year history of making new theater rooted in Knoxville’s black communities. The play is a remarkable accomplishment of collaborative interaction between ensemble actors and community poets. "Swopera" is an expression of specific Knoxville cultures, what people care about and yearn for, and it is an exciting evening of theater.

The impulse to find out more about successful ensemble work deeply rooted in communities has driven the "Performing Communities" research project from its start. The project invited eight theater ensembles working in various regions of the United States to participate as subjects of our research. It is the intention of this study to identify the specific qualities that mark each of these ensembles as highly discrete, individualized artistic efforts and to identify shared knowledge, perceptions, and practices that might lead to a deeper understanding of a vision common among these ensembles.

The project was framed by three questions:

1. What does theater rooted in community (or grassroots theater) mean to the participants? [The term "participants" includes everyone involved in the theater experience from conception through performance and subsequent community events.]
   
   
2. What tangible and intangible results happen in the community as a result of the group’s work? And, vice versa, what are the effects of the community on the group and its work?
   
   
3. What do the participants describe as successful practices?

The selection of the eight ensembles was based on the following definitions, selected by the project leadership.

"Grassroots Theater"

"A theater that comes from and serves those with the least power in the society. Over the decades this kind of theater has been described by various names and is now commonly referred to as ‘community-based.’ ‘Grassroots’ [emphasizes] the connection of this theater work to progressive political work which similarly gets its support and draws its inspiration from the bottom instead of the top, from the broadest range of people. …The defining characteristic of grassroots theater is to preserve and express the values of those without privilege." (Dudley Cocke, Harry Newman, Janet Salmons-Rue, eds. "From The Ground Up.")

"Ensemble Theater"

A group of theater artists - including but not limited to actors, dancers, musicians, composers, designers, writers, directors, choreographers, visual artists, etc. – who are committed to working together over the years. These artists look to each other to develop new work and/or a style of performance that is specific to the group regardless of the choice of dramaturgical styles of text or production form. An ensemble is distinct from a company when the artistic group is empowered to shape the artistic direction through a structure of function, collective or otherwise, which is inclusive of all members of the artistic group. (Robert H. Leonard, The Road Company)

The project selected these particular eight ensembles for their diversity of size, longevity, location and artistic focus, as well as how, each in their own way, they fell squarely within the above definitions.

The practical design of the project incorporated in-depth site visits. On the principle, established in the work of High Performance magazine, that artists are themselves resources for constructive observation and critical dialogue, the site visitors selected by the project were artists with deep personal experience in grassroots ensemble theater. Site visitors spent at least three days, and in some cases considerably more, with the ensembles, attending performances and events, collecting inventories of documentary resources, taking in as much of the group’s culture and environment as possible, and conducting interviews. They interviewed not only the artists in the eight ensembles, but also staff, board, audience and community members, funders and scholars in community art.

These interviews, other materials gathered at the site, and the site visitors’ field notes were treated as qualitative data, which was submitted to a rigorous analytical process. Several essays have come out of this analysis, reflecting on the individual theaters and their contexts. The research data in their entirety, as well as all resulting commentaries, are available on this Web site.

The eight ensembles of this study differ widely from one another. Through this research, the project leadership has learned how theatrical form and style, the ensemble’s organizational design, its creative processes, even its size, and any number of other defining characteristics are the result of choices made by artists working in highly responsive partnerships with their specific communities. These choices are made over time. They are adjusted, refined, even reconceived, as artists and community partners learn about each other. They are manifested in the history of the organization and the work it produces.

The project leadership also learned that these eight theaters share common threads and themes that describe a vision of theater as a vital part of community life. This led us to the conclusion that their commitment to the vitality of theater as a community practice places these eight (and perhaps many of the more than 100 other ensembles currently working in the United States) squarely within the central thrust of theater in this country over the last hundred years.

We entered this project thinking of these ensembles in terms of the older conventional label "alternative" and the more recent category "community-based," both suggesting work in the margins, outside the "mainstream." Considering the work of the people interviewed in this study in the context of American theater history since the early 1900s, we have realized these ensembles are located at the vanguard, the next logical expression out of the regional theater movement. This is consistent with the observation of Adams and Goldbard in their 1982 Art in America article, "Grass Roots Vanguard." The principal direction of this history has been away from the commercial constraints of New York and toward a theater expressive of the rich diversity of American culture, rooted in the specific communities that abound everywhere around the nation. These eight ensembles (and many more like them) are inheritors of that vision and are among the most current expressions of it.

We view this project as the beginning of a collection of information, field material, analyses, and commentaries. We intend for this collection to be available and accessible to people interested in the practice of grassroots ensemble theater — artists and nonartists alike. We anticipate the reader’s excitement in exploring the material on this site. We look forward to hearing the reader’s responses to this material. We also imagine and encourage the possibilities, offered by computer technology, of receiving further contributions to this growing collection of resources.

We gratefully acknowledge the personal investment of each researcher and participant in this project. Personal experience is part of the research process, as are the participants’ opinions and perspectives. This research project, from its inception through all its choices of selection, investigation, analysis and dissemination, has hoped to reflect the values of inclusion and accessibility held by these eight ensembles and the Community Arts Network.

The Research Team:

Site Visitors: Arnaldo Lopez, ensemble-theater scholar and Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York Univeristy; Keith Hennessy, interdisciplinary artist, organizer and former member of the performance companies Core and Contraband; Ferdinand Lewis, founding member of Ghost Road Company, educator, writer and theater artist; Nayo Watkins, theater artist, former member of At the Foot of the Mountain ensemble and arts and community consultant and sole proprietor of Bodacious Consulting and Organizing; Michael Fields, founding member and managing artistic director of The Dell'Arte Company; Mark McKenna, artistic director of Touchstone Theatre; and Robert H. Leonard, founding artistic director of the Road Company and co-director of the Community Arts Network. Consultants: Katherine Allen, professor of family and child development in Family Studies at Virginia Tech; Annette Markham, formerly of the Department of Communication Studies at Virginia Tech, now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Contributing writers: Jan Cohen-Cruz, author and scholar/ practitioner of activist and community-based performance; Linda Frye Burnham of the Community Arts Network.

11/10/02
Project Leaders: Bob Leonard, Ann Kilkelly,
Linda Frye Burnham, Steven Durland, Erica Yerkey

References

Adams, Don, and Arlene Goldbard, "Grass Roots Vanguard." Art in America, Volume 70, Number 4, April 1982. Brant Publications, Inc. Also in Adams, Don, and Arlene Goldbard. "CROSSROADS: Reflections on the Politics of Culture." Talmage, Ca.: DNA Press, 1990.

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