A Really Big Reason: An Interview with Marty Pottenger

To contradict the terror that I felt about performing and the fear, I needed a really big reason to be doing it.

— Marty Pottenger

Marty Pottenger

A widely known solo performance artist and director with an extensive repertoire of projects and awards, Marty Pottenger has found her "big reason." In fact, throughout her journey as a theater artist, she has encountered many big reasons. From the critically successful "What It's Like To Be a Man" to the Obie-award-winning "City Water Tunnel #3," Pottenger's work has explored issues ranging from racism to economics, the women's movement to the war in the Balkans. Intertwining different media and researching oral histories, Pottenger uses theater to encourage people to think about issues, ask questions and engage in dialogue with their communities.

"I realized very early-on the power [of performance]," she told me in a recent interview. "[At] under two years, certainly, [I] watched my mom in kind of a blue funk and, for some reason, grabbed a wastebasket and put it on my head and did a little two-step and she cracked up. And I remember thinking, damn, this stuff's powerful."

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pa., Pottenger was one of six children in a working/middle-class family. She discovered a love for the performing arts at a young age; by six, she was organizing plays in her neighborhood and charging five cents admission. Throughout her childhood, Pottenger also felt the need to speak out. Her relationship with her family was contentious at times. "My people were right-wing Republicans, so I had to, right away, speak to people I stood in opposition to. Very passionate opinions were expressed," said Pottenger in a 2001 In Motion Magazine interview.

Pottenger pursued her interests in the performing arts at Northwestern University, graduating with a degree in performance studies in 1973. She received a traditional education, studying poetry, Shakespeare, oral interpretation and short stories. Social change had not yet entered her vision. She reflects:

Most of my attention in college was actually on earning the money to be in college, so I never even tried for an outside production. I worked as a waitress through college and was a scholarship loan student. No one stepped in to offer a bigger picture. No one played the role where they asked the question "What do you want to do," or anything like that.

Upon graduating from college, Pottenger did not have a set career plan. Instead, she held a series of "unusual-for-women-to-have" working-class jobs, which included driving a school bus and driving a taxi. She also worked as a carpenter and contractor for 20 years. Her preference for working class jobs resulted from early childhood impressions of classism. According to Pottenger, in working-class jobs "you got to keep more of yourself." As one of the first women in a construction union, she became active in politics as a trades activist, trying to organize women and people of color into unions in New York City.

The performing arts never left her imagination, however, and in the early 1970s, Pottenger's involvement with the women's movement inspired new projects. In 1975, she co-founded Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics. From 1975 to 1977, she launched a series of improvisational performances. For the first time, Pottenger considered utilizing her formal education in performance art in her activist work; theater provided the medium for delving into the questions she felt were raised by the women's movement:

Were women superior to men? Were men inherently violent? What would a women only space look like? What was the inherent nature of womanness? What was the inherent nature of men? I realized art needs to be in this conversation. We need to go to some very bigger place than talking here to actually get nearer to what's true, because we're just exploring now.

But by 1977, the energy behind the women's movement was fracturing along lines of race, sexuality and ideology. In response to this infighting, Pottenger performed a particularly poignant piece at a speak-out for the rights of women in the sex industry. She and another woman took off their shirts and performed mouth-to-mouth artificial resuscitation, breathing the same air back and forth. The performance was Pottenger's way of expressing, "We're killing ourselves. We're too insulated. We're not connected enough with what's going on in the world, with other people. It's getting more and more isolated and it's killing us. It's not good oxygen anymore."

Around this time, Pottenger also had a shocking personal revelation about herself as a performer. "It felt like the people watching me were understanding me better than I understood me. That I was showing more than I understood about myself, and I found it scary." This feeling of vulnerability, combined with the splintering of the women's movement, moved her to stop performing for ten years.

Upon turning 35, however, Pottenger rekindled her relationship with performing. "I realized that the thing I was most good at was also the thing that was most important to me in my life — performing," she says. This realization sparked a prolific period of writing, directing and performing, during which she produced "What It's Like To Be a Man," a humorous collection of stories and music based on interviews with men, and "Double Happiness," stories exploring the impact on white people of being racist.

Pottenger looks for inspiration in the local, national and global communities of which she is a part. After deciding on a general idea, she begins to analyze it, formulating questions about the topic. "I always make work about things that confuse me, which makes it very confusing to make the work and then very exciting when you finally kind of have the insights that you get out of doing it."

When NATO bombed Yugoslavia in March of 1999, Pottenger felt compelled to help people understand the event. "People have usually somewhat standard responses to war," she says, " — it's good, it's bad, it's good, it's bad."

This time people who always said war was bad were saying maybe it's good. Clearly, people were very confused, and I thought, well, what do you do when people are confused? You give them information and you create a way they can actually use the information — which is maybe not reading the New York Times by themselves on the subway. That may be information, but it may not be information that they can actually use, right?

In response to the general malaise and confusion, Pottenger directed and co-produced "Winning the Peace." To produce an hour-and-a half script, she sifted through 400 pages of e-mails from people being bombed, people bombing, people fleeing and people targeted by those who were bombing. She then invited 35 community leaders — presidents of unions, rabbis, priests, professors, community organizers and neighbors — to read it in public.

"I asked New Yorkers what they thought about the war in the Balkans," Pottenger says in the documentation of this piece on her Web site. I learned that one friend had quit buying the New York Times for the last several weeks, not realizing until we spoke that it was because he couldn't face news of yet another war. He'd been telling himself that he was just too busy. My upstairs neighbor started crying when we spoke, asking me, "How can I answer my children's' questions when I can't even pronounce Milosevic's name properly or the names of the cities where this is all happening?" I realized then that we need opportunities to come together, to meet as New Yorkers, as citizens of the United States, as people who care and are also confused, isolated and scared. We need a place to simply listen to our neighbors from Yugoslavia, both in response and respect, to hear their stories and turn our minds towards war and peace — not just for this war, but for the next, and the one after that. War is a time when relationship and community can keep open the door through which we can all move forward to win real peace.

Although she usually has some message she wants to convey to her audience, she aims more to move people to think and discuss and laugh and cry together than to prescribe answers.

Theater is this powerful, communal experience where information takes on the possibility of transformation, and so I thought, let's come together as a community. Let's listen to the people who are actually experiencing this, rather than, you know, the pundits. Let's hear in their words what it's like, what has been their experience, and let's do it together as a community. So, my emphasis was much less on getting an audience… but it was completely on these 35 individuals that I had asked and had agreed to come and read publicly these e-mails. I didn't care whether they thought I was pro-bombing, anti-bombing. I just wanted people to know something could happen, that we didn't just have to be confused and kind of paralyzed by these things that obviously are having a huge effect in the world that, you know, are being done in our name.

To collect material for her performances, Pottenger has interviewed scores of individuals. Her success in gaining people's trust comes from a two-fold philosophy: "My policy is: The person is always more important than the story. And then, time. Even though someone's saying I'm unwanted or unwelcome, I still think that we would enjoy getting to know each other. And more often than not, that turns out to be true."

After conducting her interviews and gathering information, Pottenger faces the considerable task of choosing what material to use and deciding how to use it. She looks for "heart snapshots," moments in which she felt a connection with her interviewees and could understand them — their humanness, their struggles. She then experiments with various media to express these moments in the manner she finds most appropriate. At times, this experimentation has generated avant-garde performances: In "Construction Stories," she silently mixed sand, water and mortar into cement, to the accompaniment of Bach's Cello Sonata #4.

Pottenger attributes her willingness to take risks and experiment with media to society's treatment of her:

They tried to throw me out of high school, out of college. I was always getting targeted in a particular way, so at some point I think you realize you have very little to lose by just following your own mind. If society's made it clear that you're not going the way it wants you to go, it kind of frees you up to just think for yourself, so I didn't feel constrained to follow a particular set of traditions.

An underlying influence in all her work is a peer-counseling technique called Re-Evaluation Co-Counseling, or "RC." The technique involves two everyday people engaging in focused, attentive listening and helping each other heal from early painful experiences and societal oppressions. At the core of the technique are trust and connection, two factors that Pottenger believes are essential to the smooth functioning of an organization.

RC also pervades Pottenger's personal life, both in helping her manage stress and in aiding her in her community work. After the September 11 attacks, she enlisted the help of friends, neighbors and shopkeepers to write signs with various phrases — "We Want Justice, Not War," "End The Desperation That Causes Terrorism," "We Love Our Arabic and Jewish Sisters and Brothers" — in different languages. The signs, posted in New York City's Union Square, stimulated passersby to unleash their emotions and explore their feelings about the crisis. "Huge, grown men ended up crying in my arms and other people stopped talking after screaming at me for 20 minutes and just looked at me and made real contact and said, 'Thank you for listening. That was quite extraordinary,' and got up and left." According to Pottenger, listening to people and allowing them to vent encourages them to have realizations that they otherwise would not have experienced. Moreover, sharing these moments of connection with others is healing for Pottenger personally. "Every time I perform, I enjoy re-experiencing the people that are the characters that I'm doing."

Pottenger's passion for her work and identification as an artist compel her to seek means to finance her projects, despite having little money herself. When the bombing began in Kosovo in 1999, she felt obligated to visit the country and address the world around her as an artist. "I bought a video camera to go there with money I really didn't have at the time, but I said, I want this footage to be available to artists, not just the news media." In addition to dedicating her earnings as a carpenter toward productions, she began to write grants. Nevertheless, funding remained an obstacle. Although Pottenger eventually received a quarter of a million dollars for "City Water Tunnel #3," her three-year project with and about the workers on a massive water project in New York City, she had to submit a grant for the project multiple times.

Perhaps inspired by her own financial decisions, her current project, "Abundance," examines the impact of money on the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. Using material collected through nationwide interviews, Pottenger is producing a musical comedy to encourage people to engage in dialogue and to imagine economic solutions beneficial to everyone. Indeed, since her early performances in the women's movement, she has broadened the scope of her work. Still prevalent, nevertheless, is a sense of shared connection and mutual understanding among all individuals, not only among her audience but also between the performers and the audience. "My work has afforded me a look at something that very few people get to see. And that is the detailed exchange of information that is occurring between the 'silent audience members' and the performers. A communication particular enough that I can actually improvise different text during performances in direct response to who's sitting out there, having never met them." In fact, during one performance of "City Water Tunnel #3," Pottenger improvised a three-minute piece on the technical aspects of building a tunnel, after sensing that there were engineers present in the audience. "I could feel them listening. And I could identify that they were listening more keenly at that point. At the end, I often meet my audience. And sure enough, that night, without me knowing it, two of the original designers, engineers of the tunnel from the '50s were in the audience — they were men in their 70s, and they said, 'Oh, I loved that part,' and I said, 'That was for you.'"

Having embraced her roles as a theater artist and community activist, Pottenger evidently has overcome her fear of performing. Moving audiences to think, debate, laugh, and cry together and then encouraging them to share their experiences in their respective communities, she has certainly found a reason to continue her work, both in and out of the theater.

For more on Marty Pottenger, search the CAN Web site for stories about and by her, and see Pottenger's own Web site, Abundance.

Catherine Jo is a senior at Duke University with a major in public policy and a minor in economics. She wrote this story for Sheila Kerrigan's "Community-based Performance" class in Spring 2003. At the time of this writing, she was facilitating the production of "Divinest Sense," a multimedia performance by Durham, N.C., teens who have experienced depression.

Original CAN/API publication: April 2003