It's About Building Relationships: Duke Performance Students Engage Community in Durham

This article tells the story of a community-based performance class: what happened, how it flowed from start to finish and how it affected the college students and teens who participated. I hope it provides some insight and help for others engaged in teaching community-based art making, which, as one of my students said, is all about relationships.

I believe that participating in a creative process can free teens and young adults from the oppression of inhibitions caused by peer pressure, societal pressure and stereotyping. I believe that young people who experience a collaborative creative process — a process that builds trust by setting boundaries and attending to safety — can access their deeper thoughts and feelings, and express them through art. I believe a group of young people who walk down a collaborative creative path will support each other and become an ensemble. And I believe that the walk along this path builds self-esteem, leadership skills and confidence in one’s ability to speak out. My work with young people stands on these beliefs.

I was invited to teach a course at Duke University in Durham, N.C., in the spring of 2003. I named the course, “Community-Based Performance; Where Art and Activism Intersect.” Four departments cross-listed the course: The Institute of the Arts, the Institute of Public Policy, the Dance Department and the Center for Documentary Studies. The goal was to teach students how to work with a community group to create art that effects social change.

To prepare, during the preceding fall I met with 20 people on campus and in neighborhood centers. On campus I was drumming up student interest and seeking allies among departments with outreach programs. Off-campus I was looking for community allies and teenagers who would want to create a performance with my Duke students.

Duke’s Office of Community Affairs was already working with both of the teen groups.

Public Allies comprised eight recent college graduates — two Duke alumnae and six from around the country — who had chosen to address teen depression and suicide prevention as their public-service project. They planned to solicit writing from teens about depression and suicide and do a performance based on the submissions. I met with them after they had put out a call for a director. They explained their project: They wanted to create a “small” performance to tour to high-school health classes in Durham, and two big performances to cap off the project. They wanted to use a “peer education” model and “asset-based community development.” Their target audience was middle- and high-school students and young people up to age 24. I said my Duke students and I could work with some teens to write material and perform it. Looking at their timeline, I said my group wouldn’t be ready to perform until after they had finished the small performances; so we agreed that we would work together on the final performances.

At this point I did not take time with them (and I know better) to lay out our respective visions to each other, to talk about how our respective goals aligned and diverged, to come to agreement about process and power and decision-making. Omitting this step at the beginning of our journey generated some rough patches down the road.

My Duke class consisted of seven Duke students and one continuing-education adult:

Before my students worked with a community group to create an original performance, they needed to experience the process themselves; so for the first half of the semester, they engaged in a collaborative creative process that culminated in a performance of their own. At the same time they read about group communication, facilitation, group dynamics, consensus building, collaborative creativity, story collecting, ensemble building and theater games so that they would have some theoretical and practical foundations for the work. They each chose a community-based artist to research, interview and write a paper about.[1] [Two of these were published on CAN.] And they kept reflective journals about the class process, which became the basis of their final papers.

We met once a week for two-and-a-half hours. We followed two tracks simultaneously — an artistic process for creating original work and an ensemble-building process for working in a group. In other words, while they worked to create a performance they attended to group dynamics; consensus-building; peaceful communication; uses of power; group and individual needs for safety, inclusion and control; and group communication.

What did we do? First I laid out my expectations of them — requirements, homework, grading. Then I mapped out the span of the course over the semester. Then we set guidelines for how we wanted to work together. I asked, “What behaviors do you need from the others in order to do your best work, think creatively and contribute honestly and openly?” I wrote down the answers on big paper. When we finished the list, we went down it one item at a time to see if we understood each one and if we all could agree on each one. We agreed that we would use the list as our guidelines for behavior for the semester, and that we would help each other stick to them.[2] I explained that every group has norms for behavior, and when the norms are unspoken and randomly enforced by passive aggression, a group can sour. Taking the time to clarify individual needs and group boundaries when setting out on a group project does several things:

We engaged in more trust building on our first day. For example, we did a check-in: I asked, “How are you feeling, now?” and we went around the table. The students had a variety of responses:

Checking in establishes a group norm that it is OK to have feelings and to name them. Feelings are facts; they are part of the performer’s palette. In some Northern European cultures, the expression of feelings is considered gauche or dangerous, but squelching feelings is anticreative, dismissing someone else’s feelings is uncompassionate, and not allowing someone to express feelings is oppressive. A creative group needs a safe avenue for expressing feelings.

We did some duet listening exercises that involved answering these questions to a series of listening partners: Why did you sign up for this class? What is art in your life? What do you see as the relationship between art and activism? How do you want to change the world? The listening partner then summarized the key parts of what she just heard and then switched roles: “Once this was over I felt less like a room full of strangers but more of a growing group of people working towards a similar goal.”[5] Then we reformed as a group, and listeners reported the answers that they heard. We scribed the answers on big paper; excitement built as we could see some shared convictions and goals for the class. We also talked about the experience of being heard without interruption, argument or judgment.

We wound up our first class with evaluation and affirmation. “[Affirmation] helps us see we have a place and make a contribution to the class," observed one student. "Sometimes someone may do a small action that otherwise would be overlooked but affirmations allow recognition for everything.”[6] Part of the homework assignment was to write on big sticky notes ideas for a performance that we might create and bring them in next week.

For our second class, we started with more trust-building activities. When I felt that we had garnered enough trust to start some creative work, we played some silly games to lighten up and jog our creativity. (People who have been laughing and giggling perform more creatively in controlled studies than people who haven’t been.) Then we brainstormed possible performance topics by posting our sticky-notes homework on a big roll of paper on the wall. We silently read each other’s ideas, moved similar ones together and drew lines between related ones. We checked off ideas we found interesting. We wrote our own ideas about other people’s ideas on the paper next to their sticky note, thus starting a dialogue, where ideas talk to each other. As one of my shyer students put it: “Presenting the ideas silently allows those who are shyer to still present their ideas without feeling uncomfortable.”[7]

I like this silent brainstorm technique for several reasons: It’s quick — all of us can get our ideas up at the same time. It’s physical — everyone is floating along the wall, weaving around the others to read and write on the wall. People who need silence to think are enabled to participate in the group process. It disallows judgments, like, “That won’t work.” It separates ideas from personalities, so that the ideas speak for themselves, divorced from status and power relationships in the group. (We didn’t recognize each other’s handwriting at this point.) And it gets everyone’s thinking up on a field, so that visual and verbal thinkers can start envisioning right away.

Once the silent dialoguing on the wall petered out, we did a round on the ideas.[8]

A round is a physical brainstorming technique. In a round, one person gets up at a time, enacts a brief, half-baked idea on the theme — in this case, any idea on the wall — and sits down to watch and take notes. The person next to him gets up, enacts an idea and sits, and so it goes around and around the group. If an idea requires more than one person to perform, the person with the idea grabs the people he needs and quickly describes to them what they will do, then they do it. Usually at the beginning of a round, the ideas are safe or clichéd, but, as the different ideas interact and jostle in the minds of the observers, they grow more interesting. During the round, no one comments on what they see or do. When the quality of the ideas falls off, or people run out of ideas, the round ends.

We talked about the round with these questions: What did you see that you liked? What did it remind you of? Where could it go? The discussion expanded to what our performance might become, based on the ideas we had on the wall and the ideas we had seen and discussed. By the end of this class, we had chosen a broad theme for our performance: the way we judge, compare, make assumptions about and stereotype each other, and how harmful that can be. For homework, each student was to bring in two short performances on our theme.

Over the next five sessions, every time our class met, we followed a similar structure; I dealt with the business of the class; we checked in; we discussed the reading assignment; we did some trust-building, ensemble-building and creativity-boosting games, and we worked on the performance. Each week’s homework included creative work on the performance, and each student posted a sticky note with a title on it for each new performance piece. We ended with evaluation and affirmations.

When the students returned for the third class, they showed their homework — their first performance pieces — and we got a snapshot of how far we had come toward trusting each other. Some of the pieces dealt with stereotypes in a stereotypical way; some had the air of political manifesto. But some drew on personal stories, came from deeper springs and evoked emotional responses as we watched. A participant described it in her final paper:

The pieces included a dance, a rap, a song, monologues, dialogues and mimes. After we’d seen all the pieces, we discussed them in terms of what they said, or what their statements were, as well as what we liked about them, what worked, how they affected us and what else might happen in them, or where they might go. The students generously dished out affirmations about the quality and impact of these first pieces.

Viewing each other’s work gave everyone an understanding that no matter how different we may seem, we all have shared the experience of being prejudged based on external markers like clothes, size, accent, race, skin color and context. Many of the pieces related to the students’ experiences at Duke — the roommate who insisted the Brazilio-Cuban from Miami was a Mexican; gossips who assumed the White sorority sister to be rich, shallow and snobby; the student who assumed the Korean-American majored in engineering; the African-American grappling with interracial dating on campus and at home. The class at this point began to gel by virtue of the solidarity felt around stereotyping.

From discussing the pieces we evolved to discussing what we want our performance to say and how we want to affect our audience — our statement and mission. This discussion bogged down, and we ended class without agreement, but with several possible statements and missions. Homework included writing a statement and mission on sticky notes, and bringing in a performance piece that communicates that statement.

Many of the creative assignments for this (fourth) week revealed more about their authors than the first batch, and thus deepened the trust and solidarity in the group. (Self-disclosure is one way to foster trust.)

After we saw and discussed the new pieces, we returned to the mission and statement. We began by reading all the sticky notes, and with much wrangling, we came up with a statement and mission that everyone could get behind:

This discussion took time, and brought up frustration due to haggling over the tortured language, but it was worth it, because now we understood and agreed on what we wanted to do. Knowing what we wanted to say and how we wanted to affect our audience cleared the decks for decisions about which pieces fit into the performance and what order would build toward the statement and affect the audience as intended.

There were a number of pieces that required several cast members. I appointed the author of each group piece as director of a group, and we fleshed out those pieces. The groups worked well together, and we left happy and excited, even though our performance was in two weeks, and we still had a lot to figure out.

For the fifth week, I brought in a big piece of paper with a sticky-note for each of the 24 pieces on it. I had arranged them in an order that made sense to me, and explained my thinking about it, which was based on Western ideas about dramatic structure. I asked the students for their responses, specifically around the question: How can we best communicate our statement and achieve our mission? The students made changes, including cutting pieces that didn’t contribute to the statement and combining ones that seemed redundant. The bulk of our class time we spent in groups casting, revising, blocking and rehearsing.

We scheduled one extra evening meeting before our performance to run through the whole show. At this point, leadership blossomed all over the group. Each time we encountered a hole or bump in our work, one or another student would invent a patch or ramp; every problem brought forth a student with a solution. The class was moving forward like a tank. Said one student later:

As rehearsal ended, students expressed both amazement at the quality of the work, and anxiety that it wouldn’t be good enough for Duke. The experienced performers worried that they were under-rehearsed and would look amateurish; the inexperienced ones feared that they would freeze up. Their fears were normal, I said; almost every performance I’ve ever done felt unready at show time, and this one was no different. But the power of their material and their personal connection to it would propel them through, and the shared leadership they showed during rehearsal would smooth over any jagged edges in performance.

The evening of our performance we gathered shortly before curtain to settle last-minute questions and bring our focus together. The students were excited and nervous. I told them that if they were worried about forgetting lines they should carry their scripts with them on stage. I also reminded them that every word and every movement conveyed an important message that the Duke community needed to hear and understand. I said:

About 50 people comprised the audience. We did encounter some rough spots related to limited rehearsal time. One student forgot a part of her monologue, but she improvised seamlessly. “I remember walking on stage and realizing that no one had made the phone ring. I threw a pained glance at Katie and immediately she said, ‘ring ring!’”[11] They backed each other up. They performed with a seriousness, sincerity, honesty and conviction that struck the audience like arrows. Of course, at the end the audience applauded, but, more important, they didn’t leave when the house lights came up. They stood around talking to each other and the performers about the content of the show.

When next we met, the group felt lighter and more united. They all expressed happiness with the performance and amazement at how smoothly they handled the unexpected glitches during the show. They freely affirmed each other for their contributions, improvisations, courage and cool.

An assignment was to interview an audience member about the performance. Almost every post-show interview they conducted included these responses: the topic of stereotyping is important; no one at Duke ever talks about it; it needs to be talked about; stereotyping is pervasive and deleterious, and the whole university should see this show. The students were surprised that their performance had had such a powerful impact. They had experienced the ability of performance to affect people viscerally and intellectually, to get people to talk about issues like power and oppression. My students had become community-based artist-activists, and they were jazzed. Said one:

I reminded them of their nervousness and loss of confidence the week leading up to the performance, and said our community group will also suffer a crisis of nerves before they perform. Every group I have worked with falls into this doldrums stage. They imagine the material is abysmal; it will flop; they will embarrass themselves, and they want to back out. The doldrums are integral to the creative process; they can be a spur to fix problems and ramp up the performance material. I asked my students, “What will you bring to your community group when they descend to the doldrums?”

Thus we transitioned to our community work; the students would meet with our two groups of teens for the first time this week. One half of the class would meet at St. James Baptist Church Family Life Center, and the other half would meet with teens from the Lyon Park neighborhood’s Partners for Youth. We spent some time reflecting on how we had built safety and trust, and fostered creativity among ourselves so that the students could plan how they might approach their teen groups. We talked about fears and hopes for this work. “I felt that there was no way that they would accept us," said one student, "never mind learn from and listen to us.”[13] Their fears revolved around differences in race, class, age and education. To me, they boiled down to a fear of being stereotyped as irrelevant because of difference.

With a calendar we crafted a six-week plan, starting with the performance date and working backwards, describing what we needed to accomplish each week. Then they split into their two groups and planned their first meeting. Each week after this when we met as a class, each group reported to the other what had transpired with their teens, and then they split up and planned their upcoming meeting. We also had oral reports each week based on interviews with their community-based artists, and discussion of readings.

I had met with both teen groups — once in the fall and once a few weeks before we started working with them — to tell them about the project and sign up those interested. Something I did not do and should have done is meet with their families, explain the project and enlist their support, too. The first time I met with the youth, I juggled and performed some mime for them to generate interest and then talked about this project of creating a performance about teen depression and suicide prevention.

Eight Lyon Park teens and six St. James teens signed on. One person in each group dropped out. When I returned to meet with them a second time, I reminded them about the project, updated them on it, asked again for their commitment and polled them on their interests and talents. I asked how many of them had ever experienced depression — either themselves or someone in their family — or thought about suicide or tried to commit suicide. All but one of the Lyon Park youth raised their hands, and three of the six-member St. James group did. Both of the people who dropped out did not raise their hands at this question. The dropouts confirmed my belief that, in order to gain a deep enough trust and commitment from community groups to complete a performance project, the group members must feel a personal connection with the topic. The teens in our groups wanted to help other teens and their families who were struggling with depression, and they were willing to stick to the process to achieve that end.

My students designed their first community meetings to break the ice, build trust, set guidelines and begin exploring the topic. The Lyon Park group played an icebreaker using M&Ms where for each MM you have, you say something about yourself, your favorite music, your family or other topics, and then you eat the M&M. My students and the teens were happy to discover commonalities like agreeing that rappers Nellie and 50 Cent were “fine.” When Katie, the cheerleader and art-history major, said she knew 50 Cent’s cousin — he plays football for Duke — she gained a cachet with the teens.

The Lyon Park teens were serious and shy during our first session. When we got up to play a “fun” game to loosen up and get silly, it wasn’t loose or silly. When they started a round on the topic, they hesitated to get up in front of each other. They were afraid their ideas were stupid. The Duke students coaxed and encouraged them and got up and did their own ideas and that broke a barrier — the students’ ideas were flawed — and that seemed to make it OK for the teens to get up. To conclude our first session, we checked out and gave affirmations. People affirmed many of the ideas from the round and talked about a feeling of connection and new friendships — what a surprising gift that was.

The St. James Baptist Church group differed from the Lyon Park group. As a student described it, "When I first met the St. James group, I was daunted to say the least. They were unruly, distracted and difficult to control. …Tony begged out of the games all together, preferring to draw, and Precious was more interested in her cell phone than what we had to say.”[14] Darius and Quentin competed to crack each other up to the point where one would fall screaming out of his chair. Darantay watched everyone intently, but participated as little as possible. They interrupted each other with volleys of insults, and couldn’t focus on group activities. Younger children from the Family Life Center kept coming in to “play” with us. Working with them felt like we were inside a pinball game with six balls caroming at once, trying to catch all the balls and line them up.

Three of the four Duke students had never experienced a group like this before, and they were at a loss. The one who had worked with younger children in this neighborhood, Jessi, stood up, raised her voice and respectfully took control. The young people responded to her with flickering signs of attention and respect. She held them long enough for setting guidelines together. As soon as she got agreement on the guidelines, they began breaking them. Jessi instantly and repeatedly reminded them of their agreement to abide by their guidelines.

We played some games with them, with moments of focus punctuating the seeming chaos. When we started a round on the topic, they astonished us with a variety of talents, including movement skills, characterization and improvisational wit; the fact that they didn’t stick to the topic didn’t much matter. At the close of our first session, we asked for affirmations. The teens couldn’t give an affirmation without attaching a put-down, but they did thank us for sticking with them, said they had fun, and hoped we would come back.

When our class reconvened to share reports on our two groups, the St. James half of the class had a starkly different story from Lyon Park’s. I told them that, although I am no expert, the entire St. James group seemed to me to have ADHD, with other issues underlying like a lack of boundaries, a culture where dissing is the norm, no sense of safety and little sense of self-worth. My students doubted that they would be able to “control” the group. I said that the teens would challenge us continually, but if we stick with them, good might come from our work. I reminded them of the talents we had seen. The students working with Lyon Park teens expressed pleasure that their first session had gone so well, that the teens enjoyed it, that they all participated with some encouragement, and that the teens and Duke students had uncovered commonalities. They already had come up with some good ideas for performance material.

We brainstormed about adjustments we could make with the St. James group. We noted that they paid attention when Jessi stood up and raised her voice, and also when one of us gave individual attention, either through touch or listening or just getting with them. We decided to try more active games, use more improv, work one-on-one with them, repeatedly remind them of our agreements and pull individuals aside when they disrupt. Then we split into our two groups to plan the next community session. When we stopped for affirmations, Jessi got a lot of respect from her three peers for taking on leadership with the teens.

Over the next few weeks, each group progressed. The Lyon Park group developed trust in and support for each other. On the day we held a story circle about depression and suicide, I led off with my story, which involves childhood sexual abuse, depression starting in my teens and therapy to help me deal with the adult aftermath of abuse. The teens and Duke students each told his or her story around the circle. One of the teens, the shyest in the group, said she had also suffered sexual abuse, and crawled into my lap after she spoke. When everyone had spoken, we split up to write poetry or improvise dialogue. This session and the next brought up the core of our material. This session ended with tears, handholding and hugs during the affirmations, while people expressed wonder at the closeness we had reached, gratitude that their stories had been heard, and support for each other.

When we tried a story circle with the St. James group, we cut it short because the teens couldn’t sit still long enough to listen — they kept interrupting each other with insults or jokes. We broke into duets — one Duke student with each teen — and told our stories. The pairs attained disclosure and trust. Still in pairs, we brainstormed ideas for performance material, and then came together and improvised scenes based on ideas from the brainstorms. Two scenes emerged that became the basis of the St. James group’s performance.

The weeks swept by, and both groups kept peeling down deeper layers of trust and developing more compelling material. Meanwhile, I was meeting regularly with two or three of the Public Allies to plan for the performances.

I became aware of how little time we had spent together at the outset when we had agreed to combine our two projects, and how little understanding we had of our different roles and goals. Each meeting left me surprised and off-balance. For example, after our first week with the community groups, the Public Allies asked for our scripts. When I explained that we would have a draft two weeks before the performance and a final copy the week before, they were dismayed. I surmised that they wanted the scripts five weeks early because they had set up mini-performances for high-school health classes, and they wanted to use the teens’ material. They had created a Web site and solicited writing from teens by sending emails out, but they had gotten no responses from high-school students. They got a response from an adult and one from a Duke student, so they set about creating their own pieces on depression.

There were other instances that reminded me how important it is to lay out goals, guidelines and roles at the beginning of working with a group, instead of muddling along without understanding and agreement on exactly what we are setting out to accomplish together. The biggest one seemed at first to be about the venue. The Public Allies’ mission stated that they wanted to raise awareness in “the Durham Community” about teen depression and suicide prevention. However, they focused most of their resources on a big performance space on the Duke campus that was not only inaccessible to people with disabilities, but hard to find for people from the Durham community. They claimed to have reserved another space that was accessible and familiar to the community, but they hadn’t actually done so. It was only when I insisted that we find a venue that friends and families of the teens could find and feel comfortable in that the Public Allies reserved the auditorium of the Public Library.

The question of venue morphs into larger ones: Who is our intended audience? Where are they? How do we reach them? How do we want to affect them? What is the appropriate genre for this audience? How can we most effectively communicate our message to them? The Public Allies, in their mission statement, seemed to have the answers laid out — they wanted to use teen and young adult writings to create a multimedia performance that would give teens and young adults the message that treating depression is suicide prevention, and they wanted to perform it for teens, young adults, their families and caretakers — but their actual plans for the performance revealed different goals. They seemed to be envisioning a mini-Broadway show that would showcase their sophistication and talents. Two of them were recent Duke alumnae who seemed to want to make a splash on campus that would impress current Duke students. The Public Allies’ performance material used big words, self-conscious poetics and convoluted sentence structures that, in my opinion, would alienate teen audiences. When I gave them the first drafts of the teens’ scripts, the Public Allies expressed dismay at the writing “quality.” I think they were put off by what the teens called their “ghetto” language. And yet, “ghetto” language speaks to a significant portion of our intended audience.

When I question myself about why I didn’t initiate a discussion and negotiate a contract with the Public Allies at the beginning, I uncover a puny but true answer. My natural shyness and politeness interfered with what I knew I should do, and made me reluctant to bring up what might be a difficult discussion. Sometimes my past runs me, to the detriment of my present work.

Our performance involved 31 people; there was no time when everyone could get together to rehearse the weekend before the show, so we split rehearsal in two — the St. James teens and some others said they could come Saturday but not Sunday, Lyon Park teens and others could come Sunday, and some could come both days. We rehearsed in a campus dance studio.

I picked up most of the St. James group and brought them to campus. Tony sat in the front seat of my car, cranked up the bass on my radio, and tuned into the hip-hop station. We talked about the rappers that came on. When the group entered the dance studio and encountered the Public Allies and the Duke students they hadn’t met yet, they were, for the first time, quiet. They sat through the Public Allies portion of the performance — including a recitation of an Emily Dickinson poem, a ten-minute dance solo and several long monologues — without once falling out of their chairs in hysterics. They performed their pieces with a seriousness I had not witnessed before. At the close of rehearsal, they asked if they could come back for Sunday’s rehearsal. “Sure!”

Sunday almost all our performers showed up. We spent some time on introductions, and I could sense some competition among the three groups (“Are they better than us?”). Nonetheless, the teens treated each other politely and clapped for each other’s work.

A week or two earlier, the St. James group had written raps, and Tony wrote one to his aunt who had died in the World Trade Center. Kassia wrote: “I remember literally feeling an ache in the pit of my stomach when I learned this. …The spiritual person in me said that I had met Tony for a reason.”[15] During rehearsal, Tony, after finishing his part, withdrew outside, and Kassia asked if she could go with him.

After that, Kassia wanted to meet with Tony outside the context of our class; she asked my permission and that of the director of the St. James Family Life Center; she and Tony exchanged phone numbers, and met a few more times on their own.

Both rehearsals proceeded well enough that the cast was looking forward to the upcoming performances. They also saw some flaws they wanted to fix during our last meeting with them before the performances. When we met with the Lyon Park group, they were critical of both the St. James pieces and their own. They expressed doubts about the project. Having a cheerleader in the group really helped; Katie gave them a pep talk, and they listened. They put their heads together for rewriting, which tightened up the piece and narrowed the focus of their message. They ran through it several times until they all got it.

The St. James group also made revisions when we met with them. They wanted to rehearse the revised pieces, but two of the boys kept cracking wise. One of the girls, Shantia, got so angry with them for messing up she stormed out of the room in tears. I went with her and listened to how angry she was. I told her how proud I was of her for taking the work so seriously and showing such leadership in the group. We came back into the room, got everyone to commit to focusing on the rehearsal, and they did.

On the day of the first performance, most of the cast made their way around the maze of campus to our performance space by show time. Darius’ mom got lost, and he arrived ten minutes after the show started. I had handed out maps to everyone, but the maps got lost. More contact with the families of the teens might have prevented this problem. The boys looked clean, pressed and shiny, and the girls were carefully coiffed and made up.

Before we started, the whole cast circled up and each person said why he or she was doing this performance. Then we sang “Lean on Me” together, and we all went to our places. The audience drew from the Duke community and the families and friends of performers. I was in the lighting booth, calling cues; I found myself alternately laughing and crying as the performance progressed.

I had structured the performance around the three groups — first the Public Allies, then the St. James group, then Lyon Park. There were also some poems the teens had written that we sprinkled into the mix.

The St. James group interwove two parallel stories that explored possible causes of depression — domestic abuse and teasing — and differentiated between depression that requires treatment and normal sadness and anger. The two protagonists wound up in a counselor’s office, and the counselor clarified the distinction. Two of the cast members got so nervous that for one scene they set themselves up so that the audience couldn’t see them.

The Lyon Park group threaded their pieces around the motif of “Tiffany’s Hotline.” Tiffany, who in real life was a natural leader of the group because of her ability to listen and offer common-sense advice, got phone calls from various performers who were trying to figure out if they were depressed or just having a bad day. One girl, who doesn’t call Tiffany for help when her best friend rejects her because of gossip, commits suicide. At her funeral, one of her friends asks, “I wonder what would have happened if she had gotten help for her depression.” Then they replay the pre-suicide scene, with the change that the girl calls Tiffany, who advises her to call the suicide hotline, and she and her best friend talk out their problem and make up.

The show closed with an emotional testimonial by a Duke student to her friend who committed suicide a year earlier followed by a dance the girls from Lyon Park had choreographed to NAS’ “I Know I Can.”

La Precious did a victory dance at the end. She came up to me and said, “Feel my heart. It’s beating so fast. I was so nervous.” We hosted a reception for the cast and audience. The performers seemed universally pleased with themselves, and they introduced their Duke students to their families.

When our class reconvened, we discussed the experience, and I learned of some backstage activities I missed while I was calling cues. The St. James teens were pacing and talking backstage out of nervousness. A couple of the Public Allies performers ordered the teens around in a way that raised the hackles of my Duke students — the “Sit down and be quiet!” kind of interaction that we had managed to avoid for six weeks. I regretted hearing of the disrespect the Public Allies had shown, but my Duke students’ protective responses warmed my heart.

We had one more performance at the Durham Public Library Auditorium, an accessible, but cramped space filled to the brim for the performance. One of the Lyon Park girls didn’t show up, and another said she was feeling so bad she couldn’t do the show. Wrote a student:

Tiffany, Whitney, Tania, Aurelia and Josh pulled me [and Katie] aside to tell me how upset they were with Cassie for dropping out. They felt disregarded and they were worried that it would harm the show. I let them know that I understood their frustration and that they had a right to feel that way. However, I reminded them of the ultimate goal of our work: to relay a message about the warning signs and situations that lead to depression and suicide. I reminded them that their work was bigger than any one person, even a fellow performer, and that they still had a good and meaningful performance.[16]

They swiftly recast their performance. The St. James group remembered to face the audience, and they improvised some delightful dialogue in their scenes.

I had invited two local mothers, who had both lost teenaged sons to suicide and who both worked in suicide prevention programs, to introduce the show. They gave short, heartfelt talks about their sons’ struggles with depression, their own inability to understand how to help them, and their rock-solid conviction that treating depression is suicide prevention. At the end of the performance, they thanked me for my work.

Our last meetings with our teen groups combined happy celebrations with sad partings. The St. James group arranged a surprise party for us — with decorations, balloons, food and drinks. They each thanked each of us, especially for not giving up on them. Darius said, “I know we were hard to work with and I really appreciate that you stuck by us.” We told them how proud we were of their performances. We gave them each a folder with a copy of the script and mementos from the show, and we each wrote affirmations for everyone to put in their folders. The Duke students brought cake and drinks to the last Lyon Park group meeting, and we also wrote affirmations for each other to take home.

Both teen groups wanted to keep performing the show, because they had gotten such strong positive responses from their families and peers. They had a sense that they had accomplished something difficult and by doing so had made an important contribution to their communities. They wanted other teens to get the message that teen depression must be treated. We did have one more opportunity to perform, for a teen pregnancy-prevention forum. Only a few of the cast could make it. Those who did pulled together a short performance. The audience of girls participated by singing and clapping along with the music, talking to the characters in the scene and talking with the performers afterwards. One girl, who had an infant in her lap, said she learned from the performance that when she’s feeling depressed, she can call someone for help.

Aside from not forging a contract with the Public Allies at the outset, my second major gaffe was not meeting with the families of the teens early on. I should have met with them before and during the project, to explain it, give them information about logistics and find out their needs or how they might want to get involved. I would have gotten valuable information this way. It wasn’t until I was driving the teens to and from rehearsals that I met family members of the St. James group and saw how insecure their lives were.

One of the facts of my community-based work is that it takes more time than I have to establish meaningful relationships with all the people involved. It takes hours of phone calls, emails, driving and meeting to set up a project. Even though Duke paid me a reasonable sum for teaching a course, the sum didn’t cover all that relationship-building time. Further, I was concurrently conducting artist-in-school residencies, which added up to many 12-hour workdays.

The third omission relates to the lack of follow-through. The teens and the Duke students wanted to keep working together, to continue their relationships, to continue to make a difference in their community. They all expressed dismay that our meetings were ending; the abrupt cut-off felt painful for everyone. But when exams begin, Duke students seem to drop off the end of the world, and the project cannot continue. My solution, not totally satisfactory, is to start the fundraising process over again to return to work with the same groups next spring.

For me, the strength in the work lay in the fact that my Duke students learned from experience that community-based art making for change is essentially about human relationships. My Duke students transformed from thinking the teens wouldn’t have anything to do with them to falling in love with their group. They paid attention to the individuals and tried to offer what each one needed. They pushed the teens to go deeper in their work and encouraged and cheered their efforts. They found deep commonalities — beyond their favorite rappers. They became protective; when the Public Allies treated the teens disrespectfully, the Duke students stepped forward like mother bears with cubs.

Sheila Kerrigan is a performer, director, author of "The Performer’s Guide to the Collaborative Process" and teacher who works in schools, with at-risk youth and in community settings. She is based in Chapel Hill, N.C. For more thoughts on collaboration, visit her Web site: http://www.collaborativecreativity.com/.

Augusto Boal, "Games for Actors and Non Actors" (Routledge, 1993)
C.T. Lawrence Butler & Amy Rothstein, "On Conflict and Consensus, A Handbook on Formal Consensus Decisionmaking" (Food Not Bombs Publishing, 1991)
Center for Documentary Studies, "Putting Documentary Work to Work" (Center for Documentary Studies, 2001)
Gloria J. Galanes, et al., "Communicating in Groups, Applications and Skills" (McGraw Hill, 2000)
Sheila Kerrigan, "The Performer’s Guide to the Collaborative Process" (Heinemann 2001)
Mark O’Brien & Craig Little, "Reimaging America, The Arts of Social Change" (New Society Publishers 1990)
Roadside Theater, "You and Your Community’s Story," (Roadside Theater 1995)
Michael Rohd, "Theatre for Community, Conflict and Dialogue, The Hope is Vital Training Manual" (Heinemann 1998)

[1] They chose: New Orleans' brujo poet Jose Torres-Tama, New York’s community performance artist Marty Pottenger and singer/story-teller Paula Larke, Lorenne Fey of the Atlanta-based Academy Theater, Nashville story-teller Adora Dupree and local artists Michelle Pearson of Even Exchange dance ensemble, Joe and Cynthia Henderson of the Walltown Children’s Theater, Carol Childs of Two Near the Edge dance company, and community playwright/activist Nayo Watkins

[8] I learned about rounds from Tony Montanaro, at the Celebration Barn. Tony Montanaro, with Karen Hurll Montanaro, "Mime Spoken Here, The Performer’s Portable Workshop," (Tilbury House, 1995).

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It's About Building Relationships: Duke Performance Students Engage Community in Durham

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