The "Place: Vision and Voice" Program – Power, Authenticity and Ethics

All photos: From "The River People," documentary video made by Pima Indian teens with Stephani Woodson and Megan Alrutz during 2002-3 arts residency in the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona

Since 1997, I have been concerned with how children’s mass media performs childhood for young people. As a performance scholar, I explore how adults regulate young people’s identities and actions through the symbolic and embodied performances of theater, film, music, television and other media. I began to be frustrated, however, working solely with the media texts alone, and I began to wonder how young people process and negotiate this adult-arbitrated landscape to create and re-create their own identities.

In 2000, I initiated a community-based theater/performance residency program, Place: Vision & Voice (PVV), for Arizona State University’s Department of Theatre to address this question. Working collaboratively, program participants and I devise and edit multimedia performance collages (digital storytelling pieces) incorporating: music, graphics, video, creative movement, creative writing and scripted presentation. These pieces are then brought back into the youths’ communities and used as catalysts or sparks supporting democratic dialogue, youth feedback on critical issues, and candid conversations. Currently, PVV operates two residencies: at the Ira H. Hayes Memorial Applied Learning Center on the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC), and a program for children in long-term foster care with Child Protective Services (CPS) in Metropolitan Phoenix.

I was drawn to using a hybridized form of theater and digital storytelling for several reasons. First, as educational and cultural theorist Henry Giroux points out in his 1981 book, "Ideology, Culture and the Process of Schooling," responsible and respectful adults who intend to work with young people must begin any project with an awareness of the cultural capital or the socially determined tastes, language forms, preferred identity metaphors and ways of knowing of their young partners. Young people have their own languages, symbols and metaphors through which they negotiate meaning-making and identity. In particular, many of today's youth speak in the language of multimedia. They seem to be comfortable moving at speed from music, to television, to film, to virtual environments. Not to mention that the U.S. operates as a media-saturated setting — young people are flooded with multiple stories of what it means to be young, stories that are often directly tied into marketing niches and consumer products. Thus, I also wanted to focus PVV in and on the media world. Place: Vision & Voice attempts to address the many authoritative voices telling kids what to be and how to think by acknowledging that youth are not passive recipients of educational, cultural or marketing practices. Now more than ever, young people live complicated lives. But I am not so sure that today’s educational, media or social environments help them make sense of those lives. Practically, too, since my “traditional scholarship” strongly veers towards performance studies/cultural studies and the analysis of mass media, I wanted to give kids access to the machinery of production in both material and ideological ways. Kids' lives are highly regulated in educational and civic settings positioning them most often as spectators rather than as actors in their own lives. But theater and performance have the potential to be a way of simultaneously understanding and acting on the world or what bell hooks labels in her 1994 book, "Teaching to Transgress," as education as the practice of freedom — a radical space of possibility. Fundamental to Place: Vision & Voice is my belief that the performing arts construct experiences in which participants can struggle with the contradictions and ambiguities of life. I conceive of PVV as a creative way of putting into practice my ethical beliefs and fundamental respect for the lived experience of being young.

Third, I hoped to avoid the sticky issue of theatrical skill development and instead be able to focus my attention toward providing a space solely dedicated to understanding and to representing young people’s lives. As Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard so pithily state in their 2001 Rockefeller Foundation publication, "Creative Community," “The community/quality dichotomy invites posturing and polarization. …No one sets out to make bad art.” This last point has been argued heatedly in the field of child drama for longer than 20 years. Theater companies specializing in theater for young audiences began to distance themselves from “amateurs” by focusing on technique and skill attainments. What the field calls “age-appropriate casting” is still hotly debated today, with many companies maintaining that an adult actor’s performance skills make that adult a more appropriate casting choice, in general, over any actual children. When you get right down to it, however, children as a group are marginalized in U.S. society. They do not have the rights (or the responsibilities) an adult enjoys, nor do they have the ability to represent themselves to themselves. Children are given few real choices and instead their existences (legal, familial, educational, medical, policy, etc.) are secured in and bound by “needs.” By choosing to use digital storytelling techniques, I have discovered that while I cannot avoid the debate entirely, I can short-circuit it in interesting ways. For one, youth tend to have a complex sense of the aesthetic possibilities of digital media, and the mediated nature of the performance allows the young people to perfect their pieces, editing out verbal flubs or bad-hair days as they so desire. It also allows young people from cultural groups that do not necessarily support the public performance of self (like most of the Native American tribes with whom I work) to frame their identities in such a way as to maximize their own agency in a culturally appropriate manner. And finally by using a hybrid form of theater and digital storytelling, the young people and their community have a lasting and material representation of the youths’ artistic work, their understandings of self and other, and their ability to make decisive choices within a communally created artwork.

What I find key in the practice of community-based theater/digital storytelling work with youth is how this practice fundamentally reconceptualizes both the role of receiver and maker, as well as adult and youth, destabilizing traditional patterns of art and generational dialogue. I believe that art is a way of knowing and that the extended manipulation of this language system can promote emotional and social engagement, democratic dialogue and the valuation of diversity and social justice in multiple ways.

Storytelling is at the heart of most community-based theater and performance practices — personal stories, family stories, community stories. In fact, we live inside layers of stories, stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell others, stories told to us. Stories hold great power over us. Stories show us how to structure our lives and how to solve problems; stories even provide models for how to live a good life and what it means to be bad. Ultimately, our nests of stories provide us with an architecture of how to be human. Place: Vision & Voice investigates these story layers as a series of performed (and re-formed) relationships that infuse every aspect of social and emotional life. In this I align myself with Shannon Jackson ("Lines of Activity," 2000) who believes that “At its best … performance function[s] as a vehicle for understanding the big questions. Whether conceiving performance as practice, as paradigm, or as epistemological location, it [is] … the most useful place from which to speculate upon the nature of identity, space, temporality and social interaction.” I use performance to explore the social bonds and community stories that shape childhood as both a time and a space of identity formation. Theoretically then, performance here functions as both the object/subject and the interpretive grid to explore childhood(s) and the collective and embodied practices of social memory and individual identity formation — thinking with, thinking through — both theory and practice in one. Not incidentally, performance theory also allows me a language with which to analyze and ponder what occurs in the community-based environment — like this essay, for example.

At once a turning in and a turning out, PVV’s hybrid form of digital storytelling and performance allows young people to express their stories, interests and anxieties to the adults of their communities, to outsiders and, not least of all, to themselves. Sociologists have long acknowledged that community depends as much on exclusion as inclusion. In many ways then — and perhaps most important of all — PVV works as the strategic performance of self and other. This, of course, locates both the potential and the peril of community-based performance practice. Ultimately this type of practice rests on the belief that by engaging in the arts as a language system, by mastering, communicating, exploring in and through the arts, participants bring to consciousness the deep and structural (structuring) significance of experience and culture(s). And by bringing these deep meanings to the surface, participants can become aware of their own power as cultural makers and (re)makers, putting into practice the strength of an authentic voice.

The topic of an “authentic voice” brings to the forefront, however, the necessity of directly and procedurally addressing the moral principles of both authenticity and ownership. As Suzanne Lacy reflects in the article “Seeking an American Identity: Working Inward from the Margins” on the Animating Democracy Web site: “We want to believe in the unassailability of direct experience.” Theater itself, however, is predicated on the belief that one individual can step genuinely and holistically into another’s subjectivity. Who can and should speak for whom? What stories should and should not be told? How does — how can — performance negotiate the dangerous line between validating direct experience and banning expressions of empathy — wallowing in an extreme form of identity politics that segregates by ever more exacting cultural affiliations? Performance as a field brings into question elemental understandings of identity based in biology, skin color or apparent cultural affiliations, but this makes distinctions of authenticity or validity difficult if not impossible to resolve. What does it mean to tell a "real" story? The paradox is that authentic voice remains a, if not the, hallmark of community-based arts work. This hurdle is doubly true of youth focused community-based arts centered on identity issues.

Community artists in youth work must be able to honestly negotiate the grid of difference and power with a hyperawareness that the process of community-based theater and performance almost unavoidably will reproduce the power structures and the myriad social injustices that characterize public life and civic discourse in the United States. There is no easy answer to this predicament. I personally try to answer this difficulty with a commitment to negotiating difference within the process and a focus on aesthetically reproducing multivocality, meaning that I commit aesthetically to structures that place the performance of self-identity in patchwork form in order to highlight the fluidity of individuality. In other words, I tend toward the use of collage forms — a form readily adaptable to the digital storytelling environment. I have not found this to be an entirely satisfactory solution, however. Remember that this type of process functions as the strategic performance of self, acknowledging in multiple ways the politics involved in everyday existence. From my experience, I have to tell you that that very commitment to reproducing multiple voices, perspectives and subject positions can become threatening to the community in which you work. There are no easy answers. The persistent negotiation of power and authenticity may, in fact, be the most difficult exchange of all.

To illustrate this point, let me tell you about an experience I had working on the Gila River Indian Community (GRIC). For the 2002-2003 GRIC residency (a full school year), ten Akimel O’Otham (Pima) students, my graduate student and teaching partner Megan Alrutz and I created a 40-minute video piece called “The River People.” This piece has been showcased in multiple festivals and conferences, including several juried film events. The work circles around the youths’ exploration of the term “heritage” and what that word means to each of them. Their creation is deeply honest, emotionally evocative and sometimes difficult to watch. The dominant image of the piece is that of a bridge over the dry Gila River bed. The piece begins and ends with the youth on the bridge returning repeatedly to the idea of place as both a time and a space with the youth suspended between both. We made the choice to structure the piece as a collage that circles around the question of heritage in multiple ways returning again and again to similar questions and answering them in a variety of ways. Musically, we began and ended the piece with a drumming song traditionally sung at the end of powwows and festivals — the "going home" song. We chose to use the song in both its traditional context and the unfamiliar one because we wanted to stress the circular nature of the piece and of the youths’ explorations. They were, in fact, going home through the entire process.

This choice and other artistic choices came under fire when we showcased the piece for the tribal council. While for the most part positive, a few council members made several strongly worded recommendations to change sections of the piece to reflect their political positions and subjected me to an informal legal investigation. Ultimately, we made no changes. The council members, though, were responding from their experiences as subjected people who must speak with a unified and strong voice in order to be heard by the hegemonic power structures. Our piece, while almost uniformly positive and loving, does contain some troubling moments. Community-based theater and performance can trouble essentialized notions of community — especially a practice like mine committed to multivocality — but toward what end? And is multivocality always an appropriate and/or principled choice to make?

Sonja Kuftinec comments on this issue in her marvelous 2003 book, "Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-based Theater":

The negotiation of individual identity and collective experience marks community and nation with more complexity and specificity than stabilizing definitions. Yet, community-based theater often relies on more ‘essential’ understandings of identity rooted in place, class, race, and ethnicity, as well as on disruptions of those assumptions. Gayatri Spivak refers to strategic essentialism, a conscious choice to assume a temporary unified subject position in order to further a particular end.

I do not pretend to have the answers to these questions. I’m not so sure safe answers are even possible. But I continually and recursively wrestle with questions of authenticity and ownership and my ethical responsibilities to the youth, to the school and toward the community. Ultimately, I was able to transform what could have been a frustrating experience for all into a conversation about choices and consequences in art and in life; a conversation that probably was one of the most significant discussions of the entire year’s process for the youth involved. It was not, however, a discussion I was allowed to engage in with the tribal council. And, I am left with the lurking feeling that for a small marginalized community like GRIC, my interference in their “strategic essentialism” hurts the collective whole more than it helps the individual youth involved.

What this experience crystallized for me, though, is that community-based artists must develop a reciprocal trust with both the community and the youth where they are working while remaining aware that “community” is a term that hides difference as much as it celebrate similarities. Trust is a fragile thing that ultimately is multilayered. William Cleveland’s study of successful community-based programs, “Mapping the Field: Arts-Based Community Development,” found that “… practitioners say over and over that their most important resources are relationships. Effective community-based work is about partnership.” Artists must invest the time and energy in researching and understanding the community and the community’s unique perspectives. That research must be combined, however, with an attitude of respectful difference. Knowing and understanding are not the same thing. Artists must give up the "expert" mode, allowing the individuals with whom they work to be the primary informants of their own existence.

This is particularly important in community-based performance with youth because childhood itself functions as a site of memory into which communities heavily invest. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. Complex understandings of community and authenticity are complicated by the structural importance of childhood in creating and continuing community kinship. Communities are invested socially, emotionally and psychologically in formalizing the structure of childhood and the imagined future of their children in powerful ways. And they are often resistant to rethinking those structures or imagined futures. It only takes one generation for a culture to disappear. In order to develop a reciprocal relationship of trust, resident artists must develop a sensitivity to balancing the needs of the participants, the needs of the social group and their own needs. Part of that sensitivity includes an intensive exploration of the artist’s own beliefs and frames of reference, including issues of rank, race and privilege, along with a willingness to share that thinking as both a form of modeling and as response to others’ stories. Remaining totally and emotionally open throughout the process is quite difficult, but a necessary requirement to building a relationship of trust.

As I write this, I find myself struck with the power of youth-centered community-based work; it is no wonder that the GRIC Tribal Council investigated me. I had not worked enough to balance adult and youth aspirations. And yet, I’m not sure that I ever can balance the desires of the youth with those of their tribal elders. In such a case, I believe that I must stay true to the wishes of the youth. I must protect their voices, which through my actions have been foreground and publicized. Which leads to the question, when does a community-based arts program do more harm than good? And how do we evaluate harm and benefit in our work?

These ethical and procedural concerns parallel similar discussions in other research fields including insider versus outsider status, observation or participant-observation, action research or laboratory research. Who can represent whom? And again, like in most fields, these questions remain unanswered and perhaps even unanswerable except in direct contextual practice. They cannot however be ignored. In fact, I strongly suggest that other practitioners attempt to make the difficult nature of these process negotiations transparent within the performance/event itself to greater and lesser degrees. Because, like life itself, a strong community-based practice is as much about the process as it is about the product, and that process can be messy, contradictory, frustrating, unpredictable and magnificent. We must be able to negotiate this morass effectively and with a willingness to change directions in midstream. And what is more, if we have done our job appropriately, people will question the aesthetic, the process and the final product — how frustrating and frightening and, hopefully, how glorious. In the end, community-based practice reconfigures the artist-artwork-audience equation, spinning it from monologue into dialogue. There is, though, quite a lot of inherent risk in this undertaking, when art moves off the stage and into the “place” — particularly with regard to young people — making it can become a high-stakes issue.

Stephani Etheridge Woodson is an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s Department of Theatre, where she teaches in the Theater for Youth MFA and PhD programs.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2004