Nayo Watkins: Creating Art, Transforming Lives, One Community at a Time

Nayo Watkins

To say that Nayo Watkins is solely a poet, playwright and consultant barely scratches the surface of her artistic gifts and contributions. From her early teens through the present, Watkins has been actively serving communities as diverse as rural Mississippi to the North Carolina's bustling Triangle area — Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill. Her approach of strengthening communities through the creative process has been refined over the years and she has many stories that tell of her growth, and the growth of the communities she has worked with.

"When I started writing poetry," Watkins recounts, "I didn't exactly consider myself a poet or an artist. During the Civil Rights Movement, I used my poetry as activism. I was trying to get people out to vote." Her first major writing experience occurred in the 1960s while working with the Free Southern Theater. The group was considered part of the larger Black Arts Movement that redefined the dialogue among black artists and activists. In reflecting upon her experience with the group, Watkins says, "It was about the writing, but it was moreso about opening ourselves up politically." She also credits the Free Southern Theater for helping her to make the connection between community and art.

While in Jackson, Miss., Watkins worked for a small publications group and, on the side, participated in a group called the Black Women's Art Collective. Half-joking, Watkins says that while working together, this group came to the conclusion that they had several strikes against them in the world: They were black, female, artists and in Mississippi. Yet, it appears that none of these "strikes" prevented Watkins from fulfilling her goals. On the contrary, they became some of her greatest assets.

Her work experience has varied. Watkins speaks briefly about her experience selling real estate, but most of her experience has been in the arts arena. "When I got my first check, I was shocked," states Watkins. "It kind of grew on me that I was an artist, and that all of my life I had written in order to understand and unclog my head." Watkins went on to serve in various capacities as a nonprofit arts administrator. Over the years, she has served as director of the Mississippi Cultural Arts Coalition, director of a Minneapolis women's theater, At the Foot of the Mountain, and executive director of the African American Dance Ensemble in Durham, N.C. In 1990, Watkins formed Bodacious Consulting, an independent arts consulting organization. Since then, she has assisted with several major community projects.

For anyone interested in exploring the creative process associated with community work, Nayo Watkins offers a wealth of knowledge from experience. "What good is it to that community if it's Nayo's play?" she says. The primary aim, according to Watkins, is to ensure the entire process is grounded in the community and its people.

First of all, playwriting for a community begins with the community. "What I try to do is write plays in the context of a community," says Watkins. "They're not necessarily plays that you can take anywhere else because the nuances and history and language belong to that place and come out of that place." Watkins usually works directly with a host organization that has a particular goal or message for the artistic piece. From there, she conducts interviews with people in the community recommended by the host organization and reads up on the community's history. She makes an effort to read both the official records as well as the unofficial histories from sources as varied as funeral homes, churches, personal diaries, bibles, and yearbooks.

The next step to developing a community-based performance is to facilitate community ownership in the project. One exercise that Watkins regularly utilizes during the interview and creative process is the story circle. Watkins explains, "Story circles are where people [literally] sit around in a circle and tell stories." One example of a meaningful story circle took place during one of Watkins' projects in Port Gibson, Miss. "This play was to be a vehicle for telling the story of the Civil Rights Movement from an older generation to a younger generation," says Watkins.

She organized a story circle to gather ideas from the older community members and youth. The first question posed to the multigenerational group was, "What did you do for fun?" The youth and the adults both began to answer the question and were often surprised at the other's response. For example, says Watkins, the kids often found themselves saying, "Hmm, we didn't know that y'all did all that!" As the discussion progressed, the questions moved from, "What kinds of food did your mom cook?" to more revealing questions, like whether or not their families bought or had to raise their own food. The depth of the conversation revealed the lifestyle similarities and differences between the young and old.

The most revealing question, however, revolved around education: "What was your school experience like?" Watkins shared, "Older people [were] talking about having to walk to school, and having the white children's buses go by and splashing water on them while they're trying to walk." The topic fielded more stories as the participants discussed their experiences, some of which took place during segregation and others during integration. Watkins explains this as all being part of a larger process. "At that point, it's not just about them telling you the story, but it's about them hearing the stories."

Another aspect of building community ownership, according to Watkins, is to allow opportunities for in-progress readings. "My preference is that they feel that it's theirs," explains Watkins. "One of the ways that I do that is that in the writing process, I go back to them and read pieces of it." Watkins demonstrates the value of these in-progress readings in the following example. One Friday night in Port Gibson, Watkins met with a group of older men to gather information for a community project. The men were former members of the Deacons, a group during the Civil Rights Movement that set out to protect black-owned businesses and churches from becoming targets for arsonists.

From experience, she has learned that "people are bound to lie in telling a story." However, with this group she had difficulty separating the truth from lies. "There was this one story I took to be the truth and I put it in the script," Watkins said with a laugh. "Here again, the value of having those in-progress readings. I took it to the reading and people said, 'I don't know nothin' bout that. That didn't happen.'" Despite the fact that this could have been a major problem in her script, Watkins takes these moments in stride. "Much of what you hear are lies. And yet, you don't just call them lies; you find ways to bring forth truths through understanding. Then you find ways to bring these truths on a stage together."

Part of the process in working with community groups is also the willingness to confront the inherent challenges of community work. Watkins makes a distinction between the traditional mode of theater and community-based theater. Watkins describes the regular theater process as being: "Here's the script. Here's the rehearsal schedule. Here's the cast. And you rehearse the piece until it's opening night." However, she explains that this model usually does not work as smoothly for community groups — nor should it, in some respects.

The first challenge is that the mode of traditional theater inhibits the necessary process of creative development for community groups. In community-based performances, "the best scripts get revised as they go, because it's still about the process of people from that community lending to it." Watkins also mentions that it is important for the playwright to be flexible. This is extremely difficult though, if you are working with a director who is saying, "Give me this script [now]."

Another challenge in working with the community is that community members often do not understand their role in the process. The first time Watkins assisted with "Hayti Lived Before" — a performance based on the evolution of the African-American Hayti community in Durham — she had to confront this reality. The actors all had varying degrees of acting experience and came from different parts of the community. The problem was that "[many of the actors did not] understand the whole process of getting involved and contributing to the script in their own way." This lack of ownership, compounded with a tight schedule that failed to include in-progress readings, complicated the process of playwriting. At the same time, Watkins explains that these are the sort of challenges that you learn to work around in community-based performance and, when dealt with, can even enrich the process.

The final aspect of the creative process is creating an end product. Though most people view the final product to be the performance, it does not have to end there. Watkins views her art as an agent of change in the lives of individuals and communities. In 1993, Watkins worked with a community group in Itta Bena, Miss., where she was able to see her work as part of a larger community-change effort. Itta Bena's population was approximately 90 percent black, but as far as could be remembered, the town had always had a white mayor. After the community performance, which involved collaboration among different ethnic groups and generations, Watkins says the town began to experience noticeable changes. "Shortly after, they got a black mayor," states Watkins. While not saying there is a direct causal relationship, she does point out the correlation. "I always feel that those plays move people from some place to another and start a journey." For Itta Bena, it was a journey of uncovering years of history and determining where they wanted to go from there.

On a more personal level, Watkins sees her art simply as a means to "make a better world." She continues to write poetry as a means for self-expression. "Mama's Children" is one of her favorites because it required her to pull together "different poems from different places in [her] life about what black folks have gone through." Her series of poems goes through the decades of the 1960s to 2000, with a common refrain of "I feel a fire burning."

Another piece that has had a major impact upon her life is "Butterfly Child." In 1998, Watkins' 16-year old son committed suicide after years of battling dyslexia and depression. In the wake of the tragedy, Watkins realized that she needed to tell his story. "What I had felt was that he left me a mission," says Watkins. "I need to tell people about dyslexia. I need to tell people about depression." She directed and produced the performance, which, she explained, "was really wonderful. There was so much community involved [and] it was a packed house." The production also helped her to cope with the recent loss in her family. In describing the play she refers to it as "part of my healing process."

These most recent stories from Nayo Watkin's personal life add to the never-ending process of storytelling. The storyteller shares her story with the hope that others will hear and learn. Certainly, Watkins has helped many people through this process. In Port Gibson, she conducted an in-progress reading for a script centered on the stories of community members. One part of the play involved taking a woman's true story and putting her words "in the mouths" of several characters. The woman was in attendance at the reading but was unaware that she was reading her own words. It soon became obvious that she had "felt it in her heart" as she proceeded to read all of the characters aloud, even after her turn had come to an end. This moving moment and others like it, Watkins attributes to the power of storytelling and theater. She says, "It's affirming for people whose voices — what we call the seldom heard voices, the voices that have been shut down — to hear their words coming from a stage."

The work that Nayo Watkins has done may continue to move communities and effect change. The work that she accomplishes in the future — including her latest project, which involves collecting the stories of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women — may soon lead many more individuals and communities on this life-affirming journey.

Andrea Hamilton is a senior at Duke University, where she is a public-policy major. She wrote this story for Sheila Kerrigan's "Community-based Performance" class. At the time of this writing, Hamilton was part of a group of Duke students working with teens in a local community center (St. James Baptist Church) to create a performance on depression and suicide.

Original CAN/API publication: April 2003