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Getting Outside the Bubble: Tisch School of the Arts' Campus-Community Connection
That's how Tisch School of the Arts at New York University seduces students to delve into community arts. The Rukeyser quote is from the description of a course taught by Jan Cohen-Cruz in Tisch's Drama Department. Cohen-Cruz and her colleagues work hard to help students imagine a world where artists are deeply involved with their communities, and they provide opportunities to bring that imagined world into reality. They are currently working on establishing a major in community-based theater.
NYU, in the heart of Manhattan, is famously a wellspring of theater talent. Students step from the classroom into an environment in which art is real; it's all around them. Theater is not a dream; it's a profession in New York. Tisch, which defines itself as "an extraordinary training ground for the individual artist and scholar of the arts," offers students a liberal-arts education with intensive work in the performing arts, cinema and music. Tisch's Drama Department is (in addition to a more education-based program at the School of Education) where community-based arts education has found its niche at NYU. Drama's Bachelor of Fine Arts degree requires students to audition for admission and spend four years in conservatory studio training and academic theater studies. They are required to take a minimum of seven courses in such areas as dramatic literature, theater theory, performance studies, theater history and world drama. At the same time, they have a galaxy of professional studios in which to train, venerable institutions like the Stella Adler Conservatory and the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. In creating a community-arts curriculum at NYU, the faculty is challenged to deliver the same caliber of professional training. They not only teach the techniques and history of community-based theater, they create vehicles through which students actively engage in arts partnerships in and with the communities of New York City. Among the opportunities now available and in development at Tisch are a minor in applied theater, the Department of Art & Public Policy, the Office of Community Connections and LOCAL (the Laboratory of Community Cultural Development) – the cradle of what Cohen-Cruz hopes will be a new major in applied/ community-based theater. Minor in Applied Theatre NYU’s Drama Department defines applied theater as a practice with wide and vital applications in fields "outside the theater as traditionally conceived," including education, medicine, therapy, political activism, community work and social services. The minor requires students to take four four-point courses, three of which must be chosen from designated courses that address theatrical performance in nontheatrical contexts, and they must complete a community internship. In 2004-5, for instance, they could choose
This minor allows students with all backgrounds to explore performance as an adjunct to other professions and practices. It is open to theater specialists and nonspecialists, and the fourth course required for the minor may be chosen from any Tisch department or any other school at NYU. ("Say I have a student that's working in juvenile detention centers, and she takes a class on the Criminal Justice System," says Jan Cohen-Cruz. "That would be a good fourth course…but that’s because she’s doing the practical work in a jail.") Department of Art & Public Policy This "department" is actually an interdisciplinary initiative that includes faculty and students from the 13 academic departments of Tisch. The department, says Tisch, "embodies the School's recognition that young artists and scholars need an opportunity to incubate their ideas outside of the safe haven of the academy, in a dialectic with real-world problems." Through APP, students examine social, ethical and political issues facing contemporary artists and scholars. They also explore public-policy issues that affect their ability to make and distribute their work. The department offers challenging interdisciplinary academic courses; in 2004, for example, performance artist Karen Finley taught "Art and Law: Violations of the Law with Creative Expression" and "Female Cultural Rebels in Modern Times." The Center for Art and Public Policy is the department's "public face," offering schoolwide special events like the annual Day of Community Symposium. The topic for the 2004 election year was: "Setting the Agenda: Political Participation and Artistic Citizenship," with a keynote by Russell Simmons and a panel including Caron Atlas, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Karen Finley, Arlene Goldbard and others. The theme for 2005 is "Between Comfort and Crisis: Arts' Publics," on "the quest for security in troubled times and the urge to trouble complacency and quiescence." Office of Community Connections The OCC is where the Department of Art & Public Policy's rubber meets the urban road. Founded by Jan Cohen-Cruz, Lorie Novak (now chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch), and students, OCC engages students in community-based arts projects, including internships with local nonprofit organizations, neighborhood workshops, productions and training opportunities. For examples, see OCC's Web site, which offers a gallery of previous projects and a community-internship database linked to dozens of New York service organizations.
One of OCC's responsibilities is to arrange community internships for the Tisch Scholars, an invitational leadership program for 70 undergraduates from all the different departments of the school. Among the program's many perks is domestic and foreign travel; among its responsibilities is community service. OCC has become a partner to the Scholars program, creatively bending its theme of "leadership" to include community involvement. Now OCC facilitates the Scholars' community arts partnerships and for the past two years has arranged a domestic field trip to Appalshop, the grassroots arts and media center in the heart of the Appalachian coalfields of Kentucky. You can read some student writing about the 2004 Appalshop trip on CAN. A creative aspect of OCC's work is its special arts projects, which have included
LOCAL: The Laboratory of Community Cultural Development The Laboratory of Community Cultural Development is the first step in the journey toward a major in community-based theater at Tisch. (It is so new that, at this writing, it has no presence on the Web.) In 2005-2006, Cohen-Cruz and company will run the pilot program that she hopes will be institutionalized as an ongoing equivalent of a major, building on the Drama Department’s minor in applied theater. At this stage, LOCAL is being developed as an opportunity for a double major, in combination with other degree programs. LOCAL begins in fall 2005 with 15 students who will "go through the full cycle of creating community-informed performance whose goal is both aesthetic and social, from uncovering a topic of local concern through creating and performing a piece and initiating related activities that address it."
The one-year program will involve artistic training, research, community interaction, relationship building, policy strategizing and the creation and performance of a theater piece. Says LOCAL's description:
During the fall, "Research Toward Devising Community-based Performance" with Jan Cohen-Cruz and a co-facilitator from Urban Bush Women, as yet to be named, will help LOCAL students learn about "finding out what is on the minds and hearts of people in a particular community, and exploring the broad context of these issues." Students and teachers will work in "cultural action teams," using the surrounding neighborhoods as their lab. They will learn how artists enter a community and delve into local concerns, how they develop relationships of trust and open communication. In the spring of 2006, the program expands into an ensemble studio in which students will work in the Experimental Theatre Wing with Director Rosemary Quinn as acting teacher. (ETW is one of the eight professional studios Drama students may choose to train in.) Here they will receive grounded training in the creation of a community cultural-development performance project. Training will include movement with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, artistic director of the New York-based dance theater Urban Bush Women. Quinn and Zollar will co-direct the eventual performance. The School of Flip-Flop and Criss-Cross Jan Cohen-Cruz is the driver of the community-based movement at NYU. She has a hand in all the above projects and is the founding director of many of them. She is experienced at finding, creating and exploiting every tool she can get her hands on at the university to accomplish her goal of "trying to develop a university-community connection." In 2004, she decided it was time to press for a bachelor's degree in community-based theater at Tisch, and in the process she is employing a method she calls "flip-flop and criss-cross" — borrowing campus capital anywhere she can. Collaboration with Quinn and the Experimental Theatre Wing was a crucial step toward framing the new program as a form of legitimate theater training. Then, to make sure that she included the perspectives and skills of working community-based artists, she purposely sought planning and implementation help from outside the university by drawing in Dudley Cocke, artistic director of the community-based Roadside Theater at Appalshop in Kentucky, and Jawole Zollar of Urban Bush Women. Cohen-Cruz incorporated students and processes from her whole NYU universe. She cherry-picked dollars from various project grants to support the planning, mostly relying upon funds from the Nathan Cummings Foundation. The academic math involved in putting together the course credits toward a degree in this work is beyond anybody who isn't a university administrator, so I can't explain it here. But trust me, it's complicated and it involves a lifetime of earning the good will and trust of people all across the institutional spectrum. That seems to be the secret ingredient, mixed with a little Cohen-Cruz flip-flop and criss-cross. For example, here's one of her formulas: "My work in the minor in applied theater in a way was a part of Art and Public Policy. The Dean is very involved in certain monies that come to this school; the Dean decides how they get spent and she tends to bring the community stuff to me. One of the important things about my Art and Public Policy connection, besides my work’s obvious fit there, is that it’s the Dean’s baby, and so that kind of connects me, it gives me access to resources sometimes." Leverage in Academia: What It Takes To Do the Heavy Lifting One of the primary concerns of those who are working and teaching in community-based arts is that it be taken seriously as a field of work and study. Measuring that worth isn't easy, but one marker would have to be the credentials of its practitioners and scholars. For that reason, let's have a look at Dr. Cohen-Cruz's qualifications.
Like many theater people of her generation, Cohen-Cruz is driven, she says in the introduction to her new book, "Local Acts: Community-based Performance In The United States" (Rutgers, 2005), to be "involved in creativity, but not at the cost of separating ourselves from society or being in touch only with people from the same class and professions, not at the cost of abandoning the other things we cared about in the world." Ergo, she gets around. Jan Cohen-Cruz is well known in community-arts circles as an academic who is also a practicing artist and critic. She has spent 30 years making community-based theater in high schools, migrant centers, prisons, psychiatric centers, senior centers, housing projects, New York City gardens and postwar Yugoslavia. Most recently, she instigated both "The Garden Project" directed by Sabrina Peck, and "Youth and War" (above) co-directed by Amma Ghartey-Tagoe. She studied theater with Etienne Decroux, Lee Strasberg, Kristen Linklater, Carl Weber, Joseph Chaikin, Bread & Puppet Theater and Augusto Boal. With a B.A. from Bard College, she started at NYU as an adjunct instructor in the Drama Department and worked her way up to Associate Professor of Drama while earning an M.A. and Ph.D.
Cohen-Cruz has written/co-edited four books, several chapters and at least 25 articles on the topic of community-based performance and is a recognized authority on the topic, with subspecialties in the work of Augusto Boal, theater in development, street theater, political theater, activism, documentary performance and applied theater. She has taught courses, advised projects, conducted workshops and residencies and presented at conferences all over the world, including Zimbabwe, Nigeria, South Africa, Cuba, France, Yugoslavia, England, Canada and Poland. She has collaborated with (to barely skim the surface) Americorps, Lincoln Center, community gardeners, kids in Sarajevo, the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade, Rural Southern Voices for Peace, Routledge Press, Voices of Dissent, all of her colleagues, her own daughter, yours truly and pretty much everybody she meets. In addition to winning many fellowships and awards (including one from her students), she co-created Urban Ensemble, co-founded the Center for Art and Public Policy and founded and directs the Office of Community Connections. She has been the director of Theatre Studies in the Drama Department, and she coordinates the minor in Applied Theater. She steps into any gap she finds interesting or useful; for example, she served as interim faculty director of the Tisch Scholars program, taking the opportunity to tweak its community-service component, arrange two student trips to Appalshop and go with the Scholars to Vietnam as faculty advisor in 2005. And in her spare time she married a Nuyorican social worker, raised twins in Brooklyn, survived 9/11, got the twins into college and just moved to a glorified tenement in Manhattan. All this is carried off with an enthusiasm and an earthy grace that makes it look like fun. A Hitchhikers Guide to the JCC Universe I was able to jump on Cohen-Cruz's train in December 2004, attending several of her classes and various staff and faculty meetings that were crucial to her projects.
One rich and informative evening was spent with three Tisch Scholars who work on Cohen-Cruz's staff in the Office of Community Connections: MacKenzie Fegan, Cole Greif-Neill and Mike Misslin. We met for a great home-cooked meal at Cohen-Cruz's house with Dudley Cocke, working through the intricacies of this year's upcoming Tisch Scholars trip to Appalshop and reviewing how two of the three experienced last year's Appalshop trip. They talked about the surprises and joys of a handful of city kids being squired around the tiny mountain town of Whitesburg, Kentucky, by local miners, storytellers, musicians and documentary filmmakers. It was an extraordinary chance to spend time with the best and brightest of the Tisch students who have had exposure to the professional world of community-based arts. This was a truly eye-opening experience, one I wish everyone could have who thinks students these days are politically apathetic, academically lazy and self-absorbed. These students were smart, funny, stylish, curious, compassionate, committed and confident, and this meeting felt like a learning community where five adults were laying plans to change the world together. I also got a chance to sit in on a meeting with the team planning the new community-based theater major: Rosemary Quinn, Jawole Zollar, Cocke, Cohen-Cruz and various student assistants. Here is where I learned about the push-and-pull of academic planning (town + gown department), where everybody has a burning interest in the possibilities of working across disciplines and also a deep investment in their little piece of academic or professional turf. It didn't take me long to see what all the players had to gain and lose by taking part in this spirited negotiation. Yet there was a delightful atmosphere of play, risk and anticipation that I have seen before when professional artists get the chance to mix disciplines and build something new together. Jan Cohen-Cruz's choice of artists to bring into her mix is crucial. For example, in Zollar she has a strong African-American colleague with extensive experience in global dance and music and a passionate commitment to feminism. Urban Bush Women literally owns the issues of the African-American female experience. In addition, Urban Bush Women runs a Summer Institute that investigates "the possibilities of the arts as a vehicle for social activism and civic engagement." During the 2004 election year, for instance, it included a series of voter-education/voter-registration projects called "Are We Democracy?"
Dudley Cocke is an artist who has a relentless focus on cultural policy and sits on the boards of foundations and national organizations that have an important effect on the arts in the U.S. At the same time, he lives and works in the Appalachian coalfields and is a significant influence at Appalshop, which is a key element of the local community and its politics. Cocke freely admits he came to the arts because he wanted to make political change in the lives of poor people. His company, Roadside Theater, creates homegrown plays about Appalachia and tours them nationally, and has made important inroads into the development of a national working-class audience for theater. Jan Cohen-Cruz also makes strategic alliances with working artists through her choice of artist liaisons for student internships. One example is Martha Bowers, director of Dance/Theatre/Etcetera in Brooklyn. Bowers combines community dance with public art, creating site-specific performance with dozens of community folks at a time. She teaches all over the city, from NYU to Lincoln Center to Brooklyn International High School, and she was instrumental in creating a consortium of business, cultural, educational and social-service organizations who collaborated on urban-renewal efforts in her Brooklyn neighborhood. While I was in New York, I traveled to Brooklyn International High School for a performance by immigrant teens that was the result of an NYU student internship for which Bowers was artist liaison. Bowers has also involved NYU students in another arts project, a site-specific performance that doubled as a tour of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. Not only does Cohen-Cruz bring such people into the classroom, she takes her students into their communities to experience this work in its natural habitat. In community-based arts education, this is as real as it gets. Studying CBT at NYU A brief look at what went on in the "Community-based Theatre in the U.S." and "Global Perspectives on Applied Theatre" classes while I was there, plus a high-school visit, will provide a bit of a window into studying this work at NYU. "Community-based Theatre in the U.S.": The 25 undergraduates who took this course met in class once a week and conducted their internships in the community once a week as well. The class I attended was the last of the semester, with a team of four students – Alex Hernandez-Fumero, Ryan Baum, Aliya Ellenby and Natalie Kuhn — presenting their independent study project that uses theater techniques to explore the relationship between faith and religion. (This amounted to Aliya and Natalie creating their own community internship, with upperclassmen Alex and Ryan as artist liaisons.) They had spent time collecting interviews from religious leaders and practitioners around the city, in person and by e-mail. They knew they wanted to "uncover the secret, visceral connection that all faith shares," and they wanted to open audiences to a friendly debate, a safe environment in which to talk. At this stage, they were fusing the interviews with their own personal experiences, creating a string of monologues that transitioned into each other. Their classroom presentation made clear two points: that for their generation religion is a taboo subject, and that their preconceptions about religious people were completely blown away (example: meeting a Franciscan monk who doesn't pray to God and doesn't believe in sin). Aliya and Natalie wrote in a report on the project: "We began to realize that all religions are teaching you how to be a good person and the differences between the religions lie in the articulation of such a notion. On a larger level, religious wars and prejudices stem from disagreements among practices that essentially share the same idea." The performance was fairly stunning as student performances go. I quickly realized one of the pleasures of teaching theater at NYU: The students who make it in are no shrinking violets and they love performing. After the performance, Ryan revealed to the class that he is drawn to a Quaker ministry, after being raised a Catholic and exploring Buddhism. He said he wants to find a way to extract religion from a political context and view it through a special lens, and he hopes to use art to do that, fusing his commitment to both art and religion. The class joined in a passionate exchange, full of questions and opinions.
When Cohen-Cruz asked the student team what was useful about theater in this project, they said that it "validated" the search for dialogue, and it gave them a language in which to write about these things. They declared that they became "an ensemble" during the process and will continue to explore these questions together. "Our sense of community made it easier to get to the theater piece," said Alex. "I feel very close to these people." The discussion closed with a general agreement that "nothing you can read will explain community-based theater like the experience." The class ended with a friendly ritual in which Cohen-Cruz had them each "put a hand on the shoulder of someone you knew well, someone who surprised you or someone who taught you something." The chain of connected people quickly dissolved into animated conversations and explanations ("I thought you'd be stuck up, then you said 'Let's be friends!'"), finally melting into a warm group hug. After class, I asked Cohen-Cruz whether these students' enthusiasm for the topic of art and religion was unusual. "This was a very powerful reaction," she said.
"Global Perspectives on Applied Theatre" is a course in which students learn about different forms of applied theater and put them to use in community situations. In this class meeting, teams described methods they had been studying, discussed theories, then created simulated demonstrations based on their mini-internships, followed by questions and answers from the rest of the class. Cohen-Cruz chimed in when there was an opportunity to make a crucial educational point.
One team showed Theater in Education, with complex, well-organized examples from their work at Yung Wing School in Manhattan and a demonstration in which the university students played Chinese schoolchildren. Another team showed Theater for Development, with examples from an internship they "created from scratch" in "NoHo" (north of Houston), the gentrifying neighborhood immediately surrounding NYU, and a musical-theater piece incorporating the neighbors' opinions on how the presence of the university and the students changes atmosphere and property values. Sample lyrics:
Performance time at an internship site: Later a small pack of teachers, students and guests struggled through the blistering December cold to Brooklyn International High School for a student performance that was the result of an NYU internship with Martha Bowers. The BIHS student body is immigrant and speaks more than 100 languages. The cultural diversity is absolutely bewildering. Crammed into a small basement multipurpose room, the audience and performers mingled in a deafening cacophony of tongues, fueled by teenage hormones.
The internship team had worked with story circles and theater games to help the teens get to know each other, despite their vast differences in culture and language. It worked in spades. So many BIHS students wanted to be in the performance at the last minute that Bowers and her interns were challenged just to keep the whole circus contained and semi-coherent. The cast of dozens employed music, dance and poetry to portray their global community. Most touching was a segment where they approached the audience one at a time and gave their names and countries of origin – the latter eliciting loud cheers from countrymen and -women in the audience. The event was joyous chaos and a good time was apparently had by all, leaving the organizers looking severely wrung out. Wrote student Marisa Wallin about her experience interning at BIHS:
Talk About Community Collaborations Among the organizations and projects that hosted NYU student interns in 2004 were Action Lab at the Bronx Museum, The Bronx River Arts Center, Central Park East Elementary School, CityKids Foundation, Future Filmmakers, Generation X-Cel, Make a Better Place, the Our Legacies project at P.S. 295, Pregones Theatre, the Salk School of Science, S.E.E. Theatre, Episcopal Preschool, Taconic Collective, Village Playback Theatre and more. For many students, this experience is where the light bulb appears over their heads and they understand what community art is all about. As one of the students in Community-based Theatre class noted: "My mini-internship is the most useful class I've had at NYU in five years."
Students are encouraged to write about their internship experiences and the relationship between art and social change. A glance across a couple of their reports is a trip "outside the NYU bubble." "Crossing the BLVD: Strangers, Aliens, Neighbors in a New America" is a cross-media project that documents and portrays the largely invisible lives, images, sounds and stories of new immigrants and refugees who live in the borough of Queens, the most ethnically diverse locale in the U.S., where residents speak 138 different languages. The three-year journey of Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan (directors of EarSay) is documented in a book, audio CD, public-radio series and a Web site.
"GirlSpace" offers girls ages 11-15 free tutoring, education groups and fun activities. It's a place to meet new friends, receive support in making good choices and develop their social, educational and creative abilities. GirlSpace is part of Interfaith Neighbors, dedicated to helping at-risk children in East Harlem to succeed in school, discover their strengths and build healthy, happy lives through programs and services that support the whole child. The organization has a staff of social workers and educators.
Meanwhile, Back at the Criss-cross When I left New York, Jan Cohen-Cruz was still braiding her options, figuring out how to get graduate students involved with her programs through the Department of Art & Public Policy, figuring out what community internships have to do with leadership programs, figuring out how to multiply the outcomes for students already carrying a full load, figuring out how include more points of view, figuring out how to make a grant stretch farther, how to make her salary cover an assistant, how to make a book contract cover a crucial junket, how to make a course credit do double-duty, how to strengthen a cultural bridge from Manhattan to Kentucky, how to make the stew even richer than before. I thought on the plane to North Carolina how intensely exciting it is to be in on the opening moments of this pageant – the one where community-based arts grabs a foothold in the culture. Because that's what's happening when established, large universities begin to agree that a major is called for. It means the field is here to stay. All over the country academic programs are beginning and to watch it happen up close is to be caught in a true creative burst. The creators jump-starting these programs are people with artistic training and artistic impulses. They are artists who see the beauty in a system that really works in new ways, that goes straight to the heart of a problem, that inspires young minds and taps genius, that leaps and harmonizes. They come from dance and theater and music and visual art and writing, these pioneers, not from business and management and education. By and large, they are, like Jan Cohen-Cruz, artists who came of age in the late '60s, who have seen cultural miracles and who always knew they would marry their art to social-justice issues.
I am always waiting, as Lawrence Ferlighetti said, for a rebirth of wonder. I have seen it a few times. This time, who knew it would be in academia? Our CAN "Places To Study" database currently lists more than 50 U.S. programs offering training in community arts, but they are scattered all over the departmental map, from Architecture to Public Administration. At this point, the only Bachelor's or Master's degree programs in "Community Arts" are at the Maryland Institute College of Art and California College of the Arts, and both of them are brand new. Those are significant steps toward making this work a recognized, permanent part of the arts curriculum. It's thrilling to see breakthrough connections between students and the people in their communities, but it's another thing entirely when those connections become part of a system that can support a profession. As I look across the American academic landscape, I am beginning to hear a chorus of excited voices. I can hear students and teachers and little kids and old people and people connected to all those people finding new life and new dreams and new relationships and new paths to peace and new roads to revolution … and passing it on. I hope I am not being too dramatic, but I can't help it, that chorus of wonder always, always, always reminds me of Siegfried Sassoon:
Linda Frye Burnham is the codirector of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network. Useful links: Original CAN/API publication: May 2005 CommentsPost a comment Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
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