A Jar in Tennessee

"Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States" by Jan Cohen-Cruz (Rutgers University Press, 2005, 212 pp.)

Jan Cohen-Cruz’s book puts a history beneath us, a vision before us, identifies leading voices, provides case studies, theory, criticism and indications for future scholarship. In Wallace Stevens' poem “Anecdote of the Jar,” a jar, placed in the Tennessee wilderness, orders and ennobles its surroundings. Likewise, "Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States" defines the field in which we labor. Hers is a book we need to be who we are.

Speaking as one of the practitioners in the field, I believe it is also a book for those who wish to know us. It is a classically structured textbook with an excellent bibliography that leads the introductory student to an understanding of the field. The presence of this book will likely create classes and even programs in community-based performance. We owe Jan Cohen-Cruz a debt of thanks.

Cohen-Cruz is uniquely situated to create the first real textbook on the field. She is at home as academic, critic, practitioner, participant and audience member, and she writes knowledgeably from each position. As an academic, Cohen-Cruz is that rare someone who thinks broadly and deeply yet is able to write simply: “Community-based performance has recouped the collective grounding of folk art, combined it with a central role for the artist as in popular art, and, falling somewhere between the two, has continued to incorporate community input.”

The chapters on theory and criticism, including the storytelling chapter with its valuable discussion of story/testimony, are perhaps her best.

[T]he paradigm for conventional performance obscures perception of community-based performance. Expecting virtuosity, we miss the pleasures offered by commitment and risk. We are used to formal, distanced aesthetics and may underappreciate art driven by a personal connection to the material and a need to communicate. We have internalized some notion of the “right” way to tell a story or execute a dance step so may miss a quirkier but equally revealing approach. We look for individual genius and so may fail to recognize collective brilliance. And we have so internalized the value of “something wonderful right away” that we may be less aware of a piece of art that works on us more slowly, even after the event is over.

In these chapters Cohen-Cruz is insightful, attentive and caring. And, and, and. She understands that there is no single privileged vantage, and that criticism should vary in the same way projects do, according to the needs of the community. Still, the critical voice is necessary. “I long for critical writers to be brought into the fold. I would like community-based artists and critical writers to see themselves as partners, both helping to make a public space for art with multidimensional goals.”

Cohen-Cruz is a practitioner herself, and the book contains an extended section on her own production with New York urban gardeners, "common green/common ground." In this section, the scholar and critic writes from the inside. She has experienced first-hand the barter of expertise for expertise that is the fundamental transaction between artist and community and has things to say about it.

I am drawn to what Paul Heritage calls “impossible encounters.” Like…. Haja, who I met thirty years ago when I taught a workshop in the New Jersey state prison where he, an angry young blood, was incarcerated. Haja, who got out of prison, lived on the streets, and then fell in love with a social worker and together they started a community garden in Harlem. If I find these people so amazing, might not audiences?

She is as vulnerable as any first-time performer when she recounts dancing "all of me ... asking for forgiveness" with Liz Lerman in a synagogue on Yom Kippur. And Cohen-Cruz is able to be the audience member, touched by the simple things that touch the participants in our field. She is able to bring that vantage to the page innocently and fully, the gifted amateur.

Her documentation of Liz Lerman is Cohen-Cruz’s most empathic study. These two women share an age, a faith from which both draw sustaining power, and a friendship. Lerman is deep and fresh, both in speech and art, and Cohen-Cruz becomes even more lively in dialogue with her friend’s ideas.

One of Lerman’s major contributions to the dance world has been the broadening of the basis for who is included…. She became smitten with the older dancers’ “impact on an audience, their incredible openness to learning, the beauty of their movements, and what they had to teach me about dancing.” Incorporating older people into her work, where the thrill, as she puts it, cannot possibly be seeing how high someone’s leg is going to go, has had the salutary effect of weaning audiences from the habit of overvaluing technique. Contrary to the stereotypic conception of community-based art as an oxymoron, Lerman’s criteria for artist merit — how committed and connected a person is to the movement — expands art itself: “And if I don’t see that on stage I’m bereft.”

And, of course, much is missing from any first book in a field. This is understandable and will, I hope, stimulate other voices to fill the voids. As a practitioner working for 15 years in the field, I find that "Local Acts" is a journey that is both familiar and strange. I know personally or by reputation many of the people in the book, but others are missing. Jo Carson is not mentioned, and Carson has probably written more plays for more communities than anyone else. Missing, too, is any mention of Maryat Lee who in 1952 created a play, "Dope," performed in the streets with the people of Harlem. To my knowledge, hers was the first modern community-based performance. She worked with the stories and people of a community to create a socially active play; her friend Ossie Davis coined the phrase theater that is “of, by and for community” to describe her work. "Dope" made the pages of Life Magazine and was honored in "The Best Short Plays of 1952-53." Twenty-five years later Ms. Lee founded Ecotheater and worked there till her death making plays of, by and for the rural people of West Virginia.

"Local Acts" also leaves unexplored an important reason for doing this work. At one point in the book, Cohen Cruz asserts that community-based performance does not have the power to “build up the fourth-world economy enough so it can serve as a market.” Swamp Gravy started 15 years ago in Colquitt, Georgia, and is now the economic engine for its financially stressed region. It is an internationally recognized example of local art as economic development, and a community-based performance project to its core. Beyond issues of art, voice and justice, community-based performance can mean economic development. In my experience with a score of communities, economic concerns are the first or second reason for starting a project. Swamp Gravy generates a quarter-million dollars per year in ticket sales for its community of 2,000.

There are a number of indexing errors as well; for example, Richard Schechner and Ferdinand Lewis are each cited twice in the index, yet both are mentioned several times for which no citations exist. These omissions are a disservice to the scholars and students who will use the book. Also, the photographs throughout are of not of good quality or composition. Poor photos support the criticism of some that our field is amateurish in the worst ways — instead of the best.

But, the omissions in the book are, finally, a stimulus to us. In the communities I work with the pattern is to make a play and turn right around and start gathering stories for another. Most often the new play is guided by what we left out of the old one. The same is true here. In later editions of this work, or in new texts by other authors, issues such as theories of social efficacy, what constitutes agency in a script and the effect it has on the diversity of cast and audience, the role of the indigenous leader, and the idea of place as the main character in a script will receive more attention.

One test of a good book is that it insinuates itself into one’s life. "Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States" doesn’t stay on the shelf; it gets down in my hands, and up in my face. Its categories help me organize my own thinking and priorities. It charts and challenges all at once, like Stevens' jar in Tennessee.

Richard Owen Geer is a community-performance practitioner with 15 years in the field working with nearly a score of communities.  He and his partner Jules Corriere are the artistic directors of Swamp Gravy and are writing a book with Richard Richards about their work. Geer holds a Ph.D from Northwestern University in performance studies.

Original CAN/API publication: May 2005