Living in the Questions of Animating Democracy

“Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy” by Pam Korza, Barbara Schaffer Bacon and Andrea Assaf (Americans for The Arts, 2005, 312 pp.)

When you read a book and feel recharged; when you find pages in every chapter dog-eared, highlighted and underlined for insights and apt questions you want to revisit, as well as practical examples of concepts that before now seemed all but tangible; when you’re tempted to photocopy and fax entire sections and send them to all the naysayers with a Post-It exclaiming, “See, see!” — then you know you’ve found an important text. "Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy" is an immense volume reporting on the 35 cultural institutions from across the U.S. that were awarded grants as participants in the Animating Democracy Lab. The lab participants were provided with funding (from the Ford Foundation) and advisory support for “projects that experimented with or deepened existing approaches to arts- and humanities-based civic dialogue.” As a practitioner in the field and an admirer of this initiative from the very beginning, I will say that reading this book left me proud to be a part of this amazing art form, excited by the possibilities and inspired by the thought of taking this knowledge and applying it to my own work.

Designed much like a textbook, the findings are broken down into chapters that make the information more accessible to a wide readership of artists, educators, community organizers, leaders of cultural institutions and funders. Pam Korza, Barbara Schaffer Bacon and Andrea Assaf, who obviously worked closely with project liaisons and numerous cultural organizers and partners, were very adept at reporting the findings of the 35 cultural institutions. The works of three essayists — Patricia Romney, Suzanne Lacy and Michael Marsicano — further complimented the writing and brought great depth and breadth to the conversation. With all of these contributors, I think the book has an excellent balance between theory and practice, looking back into history as well as looking forward to newly broken ground for the ethical, the political, the practical and the artistic implications of this work.

The book opens by stating the commonly held beliefs and goals of the Animating Democracy Initiative and by page five I’ve already underlined one of many memorable passages: a quote by artist John O’Neal on the importance of storytelling.

In telling our stories, we identify what is important to us. By listening to the stories of others, we find out what is important to them; and by listening and telling together, we have the possibility of creating a clearer sense of what our community is and what our collective priorities are … we can take those stories and help craft our way to the future.

These introductory pages are followed by overviews of each of the 35 projects along with an extensive breakdown of the commonly used terms and definitions put forth in the pages to follow: dialogue, civic dialogue, arts- and humanities-based civic dialogue, etc. Up until this point, the authors have laid the groundwork; the meat of the book truly begins with an essay by Patricia Romney.

Romney’s essay, "The Art of Dialogue," offers readers a wealth of knowledge related to the theoretical underpinnings of arts-based civic dialogue. By sharing with us the ideas of Plato, Bakhtin, Hegel, Isaacs and Bohm, along with intergroup-relations theorists and others, Romney provides insights into the role of dialogue and the power and ethical considerations inherent within. We read about the danger of polar opposites, the idea that true dialogue necessitates change, the permeability between private and public, personal and civic, and the “sin of certainty” – all made accessible through the use of concrete examples. Since Romney served as a project liaison for Animating Democracy, she is easily able to translate theory into application for readers by discussing the dialogue aspects of ADI projects such as the Common Threads Project in Lima, Ohio, or Marty Pottenger’s "Abundance" project. Using these examples, she is able to make important connections and highlight the critical questions that these theorists bring to light.

The three chapters to follow are broken down into three critical categories titled "Civic Implications," "Artistic Practice" and "Institutional Practice." All three bring forth invaluable findings from the seasoned practitioners whose labor was the fruit of the Animating Democracy Initiative. The lab projects provide a rich well to draw upon, as they cover a wide range of geographic areas from Alaska to Miami, Maine to Hawaii, and encompass a wide array of producers from cultural organizations in rural and urban communities including symphonies, operas and museums as well as community centers, grassroots theaters, and everything in between. While there are many things I appreciated and gained from these chapters, I will speak specifically to two of them. One, rooting out the challenging issues and breaking them down with tangible examples, and two, the constant prompting to ask the bigger questions.

Some of the common challenges and best practices examined in these chapters seem daunting, and one cannot imagine how to begin unpacking them, but the deft authors manage to do just that. Here, I offer an example of how such notions were unpacked in the structure of the "Civic Implications" chapter and some of its subsections:

• Civic Implications
• Many Voices, Many Perspectives
• Cultural considerations in the civic dialogue practice
• Understanding fundamental cultural values
• Recognizing issues of power within and between cultures, both historical and contemporary
• Understanding the importance of cultural protocols
• Being conscious that art and dialogue practices may contain cultural assumptions and biases
• Assessing the value of the intragroup dialogue as a potentially important precursor to cross-cultural dialogue
• Considering when insiders or outsiders may be most effective as artists or facilitators
• Adapting approaches to accommodate participants rather than making them conform
• Working through “sticky moments”

Under each subsection is further discussion of how this issue came up or was addressed with the various ADI projects so that readers have concrete illustrations to make sense of it all instead of being left to wrestle with the abstract. In this fashion, the authors methodically organized some invaluable information without oversimplifying the major undertakings of each project.

Toward the close of her essay, Pat Romney states, “Living in the questions is a good place to begin,” and I believe this statement (intentional or not) really set the tone for the approach taken in ensuing the chapters of Korza, Schaffer Bacon and Assaf’s book. It acknowledges the multiplicity of voices present in humanities- and arts-based civic dialogue work. In the chapter devoted to Civic Implications, the authors discuss “ownership” of issues that the ADI projects tackled, immediately some very critical questions follow: “What is the impetus for the project? Who wants to talk about it and why? Who has the right to represent the issue? Whose stakes are higher?” When changing gears to explore aesthetics in the chapter on Artistic Practice, readers are asked, “For artists who choose to develop work that is deliberately provocative or confrontational, what are the responsibilities that go along with provocation? Could certain aesthetic choices support, or inadvertently undermine, civic dialogue?” While different approaches to answering these charged questions are discussed in the pages to follow, readers are first left to sit with the question and ponder for themselves. As a reader and a learner, I appreciated the sense of openness that this approach brought to the structure of the book.

Through this analysis of the initiative, some of the most formidable practitioners in our field share their successes and frustrations, their lessons learned and their heartfelt opinions about projects to which they devoted months or sometimes years. Who better to create a “map” for those of us to follow? That being the case, the final chapter, titled "Looking Forward: A Map for the Future," provides a truly apt metaphor for the entire book. The findings shared in "Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy" serve as a map that takes us through uncharted territories in humanities- and arts-based civic dialogue. Some journeys were long, hard and challenging, taking the participants (and now the readers) to beautiful places. Others were simply long and hard, leading to the realization a different route would have been more prudent. In every instance, though, this map lets us know that they were journeys worth taking, guiding us toward new questions, approaches and ways of seeing the world.

Kate Collins is a community-engaged theater artist based in Phoenix, Arizona. She is a graduate of the MFA Theatre for Youth program at Arizona State University, where she went on to develop a course called the Community-based Arts Collaborative as a faculty associate. Most recently, Collins was the director of education and community programs at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle.

“Civic Dialogue, Arts & Culture: Findings from Animating Democracy” was recently published by Americans for the Arts with a set of six companion volumes on art and civic dialogue. Five of the books contain ADI Lab case studies grouped under the headings "History as Catalyst for Civic Dialogue," "Museums & Civic Dialogue," "Art, Dialogue, Action, Activism," "Cultural Perspectives in Civic Dialogue" and "Dialogue in Artistic Practice." A sixth volume, titled "Critical Perspectives," edited by Pam Korza and Caron Atlas, offers the views of four different writers on each of three ADI Lab projects. For more information and to purchase the books, visit the ADI Web site.

Original CAN/API publication: January 2006