Folklife, Meet Community Arts

By coincidence, I recently attended a business meeting including most of the more progressive New England arts presenters, followed on the successive day by a conference of Maine folklorists. I have long been an active participant in both the arts presenting/community arts field and the public folklife community, and always felt that these were complementary roles. What struck me about these two gatherings, however, was the impression of almost total separation between these domains of cultural practice. More than mere isolation from each other, or ignorance, the proceedings revealed a disturbing undertone of unease between the arts sponsors and the traditional arts advocates.

The arts-promoters meeting featured presentations about an array of innovative projects available as regional touring engagements. Not a single one of them included any form of traditional artistry, not even as an adjunct part of a larger project. There was much talk about culturally diverse artforms (as there has been now for years), but no recognition that our communities are full of tradition-bearers who represent the bedrock of cultural diversity. Many of the proposals involved artists interacting directly with communities through a range of strategies, but the content of the work was generally contemporary, avant-garde, postmodern, often political performance. The offerings brought an artist's perspective to the community, rather than engaging a perspective from within the community, or attempted to borrow a community's aesthetic or attitude as a component informing a visiting artist's vision. These projects will create a critical mass of nonprofit-arts programming in the Northeast for the next year or two, cumulatively totaling hundreds of events in large and small venues. Traditional culture is without representation in this selection, and thus will not be on public display, in any concerted sense, in regional nonprofit venues.

The folklorists' conference consisted of discussions about the various projects being undertaken in my state, including several fieldwork initiatives, an ongoing apprenticeship program for traditional artists, and small-scale museum exhibitions. However, none of these folklife programs were actually offering any substantial public services. The fieldwork has resulted in the compilation of several community cultural directories, and while it is hoped that publication of this information will result in community action, no funding is set aside to support it nor are any strategies for its development proposed. The apprenticeships are surely of importance for the mentors and their students, but there is no point of public access. Most of the content of apprenticeships remains private — it might ultimately result in public presentations, often many years downstream, but again there is no funding, nor system to facilitate this. The exhibitions are content-rich and thoughtfully conceived, but tend to appear in venues with modest attendance, generally of educated elites that are far removed from the communities depicted. Our very rich heritage lacks a vehicle that can put it in front of an audience. (There was plenty of discussion about the National Folk Festival's new presence in Bangor, and the dramatically enlarged public profile of folk arts it has brought to our state. But the National consists mostly of imported artists; beyond its three days, the festival has no appreciable impact on cultural development in our communities.)

The partisans, systems and institutional ecology supporting these two wings of public culture — the contemporary and the traditional — are so disconnected that the zones of overlap are all but nonexistent. This is a shame, because both sides of this equation have much to offer and learn from the other. Arts presenters badly need the intimate connection to community that is the pride of folklife; until they fundamentally address traditional artistry, they will continue to fail in significantly diversifying their programs. Folklife practitioners, through academic inertia and probably inclination, have never taken advantage of the systems of cultural production that the arts community uses to its substantial advantage; they need to adapt to the infrastructure if the champions of tradition are ever going to have a moment in the spotlight. Moreover, the untapped potential for synergetic collaboration between the two groups, coupled with current directions in philanthropy, offers opportunities to substantially expand the public cultural pie to the benefit of everyone.

Awareness is slowly growing among many of the more thoughtful foundations that culture and community development need each other to advance. Arts programs that do not impact the community's sense of itself are superfluous; economic and social-service initiatives that ignore cultural considerations are soulless or neutered. Collaborative ventures that link arts practitioners with community-development programs, social-service providers and faith-based institutions are the coming paradigm in funding circles. Those individuals and institutions capable of building and sustaining cross-sectoral coalitions will benefit. Building some bridges across the public cultural divide would be a good place to begin.

Avant-garde performance in America has, over the past 15 years, embraced the concept and to some extent the practice of "community arts." Contemporary performers long ago recognized that their work was often obscure to the average viewer, and that a solution to this problem lay in building a more intensive relationship with audiences than can be created in a single performance. Extended residencies, story circles, community art-making workshops, and participatory performance events have all become a part of the package that many artists now assume as a part of their work. All of that activity is intimately familiar to public folklorists, although they don't use those buzz words to describe what they do. The techniques that the avant garde has created to infuse itself into communities reflect the same mechanisms that communities employ to sustain their own heritage, only the communities do it far more effectively and organically. That's something folklorists know a lot about. The insights about community dynamics that are at the heart of folklife in action are precisely the tools that contemporary artists need to ground their best work and create a shared experience with their publics. A working alliance of contemporary performers and tradition bearers would yield results that might reinvigorate the nonprofit sector. Folklore in its messy variety is the key that today's forward-edge artists need if their talk about diversity is ever to become the walk.

Folklorists should take a page out of the art world's book, too. Contemporary artists have figured out how to use the systems of government and foundation giving and tackled the economics of viable professional touring to actually put their work before the public. The folklore field has largely failed to get its champions seen and heard. Except for a handful of high-profile festivals, traditional artistry is very nearly absent from the nonprofit sector. The systems that bring art to the public eye — all of the dedicated venues, managers and agents, presenter consortia, booking conventions and funding programs — have been largely ignored by folklife advocates. Folklorists surely possess the knowledge and skills to navigate within these institutions, but have generally viewed participation in the arts world with distaste. Traditional artists have a fundamental role to play in our nation's cultural evolution, but by failing to embrace the systems necessary for its support, our discipline effectively hobbles their ability to contribute as they could and should. We can take an enormous lesson from the heroes of contemporary art, who have, through consistent participation on every level, successfully shaped so many of our institutions to meet their needs.

Folklorists at my conference were open in expressing the scorn they feel for the arts community, which they believe has failed to embrace their work. I suggest that if the presenters have not warmed to traditional culture, it is because we are not making our case persuasively. Culture is not a zero sum game; embracing the traditional does not imply rejection of the innovative. On the contrary, it is only through tradition that the substance of artistic experimentation can be evaluated.

For its part, the arts-presenting field needs to climb out of its box and discover the enormous power that heritage-based artistry, properly conceived and presented, has to offer. This is a challenge for many presenters, who seem ossified into predictable formats and offerings, and who have little background in traditional arts. That is why a bridge between the poles of public culture is most urgently needed. The arts types need the folklife community to lead it to the amazing artistry that is missing from our stages; traditional artists need to engage with the presenting community and the entire arts infrastructure if they are to have appreciable impact. We need each other.

A galvanized and hard-working collaboration between arts professionals and folklife advocates could deliver surprising results to both. It could bring the reality of diversity onto our public stages, forming bonds between arts institutions and the local cultures that they ostensibly serve. It could integrate the arts on a grassroots level by adapting to the ethnic and religious networks that are themselves the substance of communities. It could at long last begin to bring the power and wealth of our great traditional artists before a large audience, while simultaneously creating a baseline for artistic innovation. It could jump-start two micro industries that have remained in the backwaters for too long. But doing this requires all parties to make a leap of faith, to go someplace that they cannot entirely understand. That's a good thing.

This brief polemic is a plea to my colleagues on both sides of this divide. We have an opportunity to shape our nation's culture and character, to remake our concept and practice of a public art that is genuinely diverse, respectful of its roots and supportive of its innovators. The evolving funding climate points to the necessity of forming new and innovative partnerships. Let's drop some of our prejudices, take some chances, build some relationships with people unlike ourselves, and put our best work to the test.

James Bau Graves is co-director of the Center for Cultural Exchange, in Portland, Maine. His book, "Cultural Democracy," is forthcoming in 2004 (University of Illinois Press).

Original CAN/API publication: January 2004