A Place in the Sun: Report on the 2005 Ensemble Theater Festival

This article appeared in the September 2005 issue of American Theatre magazine.

Steven Sapp, a founding member of Universes, speaks about the future of ensemble theater during the Passing the Torch panel held during the Ensemble Theater Festival. Other panelists included (from left) John O'Neal, founder of Junebug Productions; Aaron Davidman, artistic director of Traveling Jewish Theatre; Theresa Holden, co-director of Holden & Arts Associates; and Carlton Turner, co-founder of M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction). Photo: Katie O'Neill

Ensemble theatre is having a “moment” right now. That was evident at the nation’s first Ensemble Theater Festival, staged June 21-26, 2005, in Blue Lake, Calif.

The festival’s sponsoring organization, the Network of Ensemble Theaters, was organized in 1996 to provide visibility for companies who have been making art together for decades. This effort caught the attention of critics and grantmakers, who have since created a body of writing and funding programs around this work. Degrees in ensemble theatre are appearing, such as the MFA from Dell’Arte International (the festival host). These elements, along with the fact that 500 people showed up in a remote North Coast lumber town for “the first festival dedicated to the ensemble theatre movement in the U.S.,” make it apparent that a recognizable field of activity and scholarship is emerging. But what will it look like?

The festival featured 14 energetic performances and lab presentations that ran the gamut in form and content—from postmodern formalism (New York’s SITI company) to political teach-in (San Francisco Mime Troupe) to radical feminist performance art (San Francisco’s Rhodessa Jones and the Medea Project) to 21st-century community activism (Portland’s Sojourn Theatre).

But even more compelling were the artist/audience interchanges during panel discussions on training, activism, funding, writing and “passing the torch” to a new generation.

The crowd in Blue Lake was dominated by NET founders, most of whom are white baby-boomers of a particularly liberal persuasion. But NET went out of its way to achieve diversity at the festival, reaching outside the network (now 52 members strong) to invite younger companies and ensembles of color as well as writers, scholars and funders.

What made the discussions especially stimulating was the character of the dialogue. Ensemble artists are people who commit to creating together over a long period of time, and many interact with the communities where they live. It’s hard work requiring expertise in making community — perhaps a lifestyle not for everyone, as Dell’Arte’s Joan Schirle pointed out on the training panel. “It calls for both generosity and strength of ego, a desire to serve something higher than your own desire for self-expression,” she said. “We’re training the artist as citizen.” Dell’Arte graduate Stephen Beuscher said it’s “central for the actor to be engaged in the world, to see where you stand in relationship to everything around you instead of ‘what do I want from this person?’” Several mentioned ensemble-theatre training as “education of the whole person.”

Rhodessa Jones, co-artistic director of Cultural Odyssey and founder of the Medea Project, speaks during the Art, Activism and Ensemble panel held during the Ensemble Theater Festival. Credit: Katie O'Neill

Firecrackers went off during the “Art, Activism & Ensemble” panel when R.G. Davis, founder and director until 1970 of the Mime Troupe, took the podium with a thick script that turned out to be an update of his famous 1965 guerrilla-theatre article from the Drama Review. Davis said he’d been enlisted by the organizers to “shake things up,” whereupon he delivered a rapid-fire Marxist screed against artists engaging with the community in any way that would legitimize the corruption of the status quo. Without ever recommending what should be done, he pointedly referred to artists like Rhodessa Jones, also on the panel, saying her work to empower incarcerated women only represents “reform” of the system, not real change. Jones responded with outrage. She talked about her partnership with Sheriff Hennessey at the San Francisco County Jail, as well as the guards, judges and therapists who come to see the inmates perform, and what a profound impact those events have on the participants and on the whole field of corrections.

It was breathtaking moment for this crowd, which had just seen Jones’s company perform. Some in the audience who had lived through the 1960s and ’70s were remembering how rigid positions like Davis’s prevented almost any form of social leadership from emerging, leaving the Left at a dead end and plenty of space for the Right to take over. Older artists deeply committed to social change in situations of dire poverty and injustice were grinding their teeth. Younger artists who are collaborating with community leaders in schools, hospitals, businesses and city governments were open-mouthed with surprise.

When Davis rolled out his opinion that “victims can’t make change” because they are so damaged by oppression, Jones held herself up as evidence of the changes art can make: “Theatre saved my life. It’s the one place I felt free and supported.” She was drowned out by cheers of support from four Medea Project actresses sitting in the audience, all of whom had received their theatre training in county jail. Shaking their fists and puffing their chests proudly, they asserted that they are no longer victims, but professionals, making change every day in every way.

While many in the discussions spoke of doing “political theatre,” some testified about living the politics of American life these days. Meena Natarajan of Minneapolis’s Pangea World Theater told a frightful story about her husband, Pangea co-founder Dipankar Mukherjee, who was accosted by police in the Detroit airport because he was running to catch a plane. Mukherjee has long hair, a beard and dark skin. “If things have become this hard for South Asians,” she said, “imagine what it must be like for Arabs.” This fairly made the rest of the political talk pale in comparison.

During a panel on “passing the torch,” after hearing about the efforts of A Traveling Jewish Theater to pass along its values and legacy to younger artists, African-American Carlton Turner said, “The work that went on before us is the product of a society that is inherently flawed. All we can do is create a safe space for the people who are coming behind us to envision something that hasn’t been created before. It’s theatre of necessity.” Turner, from Mississippi, is a member of the ensemble M.U.G.A.B.E.E. (Men Under Guidance Acting Before Early Extinction).

Underlying everything was an energy and nervousness about the nature of the growing “field.” What do ensembles have in common? What are their values? Many pointed to group decision-making, participatory democracy and nonhierarchical structure. Gerard Stropnicky of Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble sounded a warning about the sudden burst of new funding and the possibility that it will create a “star system.” “We have to be careful about success,” he said. “A pyramid structure doesn’t work in our corner of the universe.” But Mildred Ruiz of the New York hip-hop ensemble Universes begged to differ: “In communities of color, we need those stars.” Her partner Stephen Sapp talked about how important it is that “the torch was passed to us from Nzotake Shange, the Last Poets, the Watts Poets,” and that younger performance poets can now come to Universes to ask how they achieved their success. Sapp tells them what he knows. “To pass the torch,” he said, “demystify it.”

As for NET itself, it has little value for those in the crowd whose raison d’être is community activism unless the network declares itself dedicated to making real change. Otherwise, said Roadside Theater’s Dudley Cocke to a small group at dinner, “the festival will become a showcase and it will all spiral down to nothing. I’ve seen it happen too many times before.” NET’s inclusive manifesto guards against that possibility by attaching value to those who work in community as well as those who “consciously stand apart from community in order to critique and provoke.”

For NET organizers and members, the challenge will be to creatively survive this eruption of supportive energy from foundations and professional associations, and to discover what changes might be wrought by the influx of younger companies, ensembles of color and artists who simply refuse to keep their fingers out of the political pie. What will this network of whole persons do?

Linda Frye Burnham is a writer who is co-director of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2005