Between the Edge and the Root: Action Lab in Hunts Point

Performance of "Traffic" by Arthur Aviles Typical Theater and participants in Action Lab, an experiment in community cultural development at Hunt's Point in the Bronx, New York City.

Jan Cohen-Cruz just ended a two-year stint as "scholar-in-residence" at Action Lab, an initiative launched by the Bronx Museum and The Point Community Development Corporation in the Hunts Point neighborhood of the South Bronx in New York City This is her final report to the project's sponsors.

The theater thinker and maker Augusto Boal, who inspired Action Lab, contrasted the theater of people satisfied with the social order with the theater of people in struggle. The former “already knows what the world is like, their world, and is able to present images of this complete, finished world.” The latter “do not know yet what their world will be like; consequently their theater will be the rehearsal.” (1985: 142) In that spirit, Action Lab created arts residencies in Hunts Point that addressed “issues of importance to the residents” and involved “the participation of one or several segments of the community — students, children, seniors, professionals of the area, etc.” Inserting artists into neighborhood contexts, Action Lab valued workshops as much as final products, redefining the ecology of the artist from socially estranged to socially engaged. Importantly, most of the artists selected, particularly those in leadership positions, are known not only for significant relationships to Hunts Point but also for cutting-edge art. It’s this dual commitment to neighborhood participation and artistic innovation that is the most promising component of the two-year Action Lab paradigm.

Action Lab was created with a $200,000 Small Business Administration grant obtained by local Congressman Jose Serrano to support a mutually beneficial and potentially sustainable partnership between The Point Community Development Corporation (CDC), a center for arts, education and activism in Hunts Point, and the Bronx Museum of the Arts. The Point CDC, directed by Kellie Sepulveda, focuses on youth development and the cultural and economic revitalization of Hunts Point. The Point features after-school programs and visual, music and performance projects. The Bronx Museum of Art (BxMA) is a much larger institution with a budget many times the size of the Point’s. However at its origin in the 1970s, it, too, embraced a community-based, activist approach to which Educational Director Sergio Bessa would like to reconnect. Currently involved in major expansion, the museum will expand its commitment, hopes Bessa, not only to fine art but also to the establishment of an educational center that fosters the broad development of the arts in the borough: “In order to structure this center the Museum needed a sustained dialogue with the community; to understand its needs and to bring the several parts of the community together” (Bessa, email, 5/25/05). Action Lab provides an opportunity for the two organizations to explore, through art, what’s on their neighbors’ minds.

Bessa and Sepulveda looked to Augusto Boal, a Brazilian theater maker and thinker grounded in Paulo Freire, as a quintessential model of art in dialogue with community, and hence at the core of Action Lab’s philosophy. In the early 1990s, for example, sponsored by the governor of the Brazilian state of Rio, Boal trained 35 people who generated short shows around issues of most concern to them and their constituents, including unemployment, health, housing, sexual violence, incest, sexism, ageism and drugs. They presented the shows in public venues such as schools, and then invited spectators to improvise better endings to those that most interested them. This endeavor, Boal contends, “helped the citizens to develop their taste for political discussion (democracy) and their desire to develop their own artistic abilities (popular art)” (1998, 9). In the Bronx, Action Lab applicants were not required to know Boal’s theories and practices, but were expected to become acquainted with them if funded. They did not have to use Boal’s methods but did have to share his intentions as concerned a high level of active participation by local constituents who generally lack a say in political decisions that affect their lives.

Action Lab workshops were physically accessible, taking place at sites including schools, senior centers and a storefront they rented on Hunts Point Avenue. Nevertheless, nearly all the artists faced the challenge of getting and keeping workshop participants. The grants were modest; the artists were necessarily working on other projects at the same time, in and outside of New York, so the extensive networking necessary to arrange workshops was often fragmented. The artists’ liaisons at various community centers were also busy. Even once people were attending regularly, they were unaccustomed to and often timid about expressing their views in public. The 12 participants I observed in a workshop at a senior center, for example, only participated in exercises when they were told exactly what to do. It is no surprise that Action Lab encountered difficulty with recruitment and pro-active community engagement; both are frequent obstacles to this kind of work. It is essential, even so, that Action Lab artists sought strategies to address them.

Year #1: 2004-5

Out of over 50 applicants, eight were chosen to work in various neighborhoods, and one was incorporated into BxMA’s own education program. The aesthetic strategies that the artists selected were promising. Three projects drew on forms indigenous to the neighborhood while stretching beyond them. Nelson Rivas, working with local teens (one of whom had spent a month in jail for spraying graffiti on public property), proposed the collective creation of three graffiti murals, the first of which was painted on one of the walls of the Point. Although other graffiti murals in the neighborhood have meaningful content – there are several memorializing slain Hunts Point residents – this one was the most positive I saw there, depicting what people accomplish with their hands, and including images of them filming with cameras, holding protest signs, grasping microphones, gardening, etc. Pattydukes created the Girls Hip-Hop Project, training female emcees and using hip-hop for social commentary. This project built on the popularity of hip-hop in the Bronx even as it aspired to take the form further, by engaging young women in what has been more a young man’s and sometimes misogynist form. Kelly Di Bertolli led workshops in various Afro-Brazilian cultural forms including samba dancing, drumming and mask making.

Strategies most parallel to Boal’s were evident in four other endeavors. The one strictly Boalian workshop, taught by George Sanchez for teachers and artists, was folded into BxMA’s own budget subsequently. Christal Brown’s Becoming Project was a set of ten workshops for teenage females to become conscious of their stereotypic self-images and expand ways of expressing who they are and who they want to be. Brown is concerned with negative stereotypes surrounding young women involving early pregnancy rates, violent behavior and lack of education. The group explored these issues through text, movement, spoken word, costuming and displaying themselves at the Bronx Museum of Art to raise their consciousness about self-presentation. Transaje intended to engage both Dominicans who had migrated to the Bronx and Dominicans still on that Island about their perception of the Bronx. However, liaising with senior centers in Hunts Point, Transaje artists mostly encountered Puerto Ricans and African-Americans. They discovered that not so many Dominicans in the Bronx go to senior centers; more look to family members for support. The Puerto Rican and African-American elders Transaje worked with had interesting and important stories, changing the project but not for the worse. Like Boal, Transaje hoped to address large issues (e.g., immigration) as well as an expanded perception of who lives in Hunts Point through the personal stories of participating individuals. Alejandra Delfin’s printmaking workshop shared Boal’s emphasis on issue-driven art. However, while some of the teens made posters against police violence, the focus on issues did not go beyond artmaking. Missing was what Boal calls metaxis – the image of reality becoming the reality of the image; e.g., art bringing up issues that are then treated in one’s life. But this was an unresolved issue for everyone in Action Lab.

The inclusion of Silver-Brown Dance Company and Arthur Aviles Typical Theater, both grounded in modern dance, made the important statement that the Bronx is not defined by hip-hop exclusively. Silver-Brown both performed and worked with students at a local school. Aviles, also artistic director of Action Lab’s first year, did not seek out community partners because he himself is of the community as a Latino living and working there. He describes himself as both an insider and an outsider, a gay man in a Latino community struggling to be seen and respected. Aviles and his company created “El Yunque is in the Laundromat” and performed it in a laundromat on the neighborhood’s main artery, Hunts Point Avenue. Its central image of the Puerto Rican rain forest (El Yunque), where many local people’s ancestors would have washed their clothes, was combined with what for most people in the neighborhood was an unfamiliar array of dance, music and visual aesthetics.

In July 2005, year #1 of Action Lab culminated with the 2nd annual Fish Parade and post-parade performance of Aviles’ "Traffic." The eight projects provided the Parade’s aesthetic structure and a great many of the participants. It was a glorious moment of professional and amateur artists complementing each other, such as Kellie di Bertolli’s skillful stilt dancing and her partner’s direction of an amateur samba band enhancing without overshadowing the pleasure of the children dancing around di Bertolli and the teen musicians. Behind them marched a young guy dressed as a sea god in a marvelous cape, crown and trident, followed by two adults carrying a sign stretching the breadth of the street that read “Stop Water Pollution.” Next, children carried paper puppets on strings depicting fish and other animals they made in Parade preparatory workshops. Other children “rode” 3D papier-mâché fish the size of small ponies, cut out in the center for the children’s legs. Still more pushed a papier-mâché whale mounted on a wagon covered in waves, which they helped a local artist make in a summer program sponsored by SEBCO (South East Bronx Community Organization). Grinning kids rushed up to onlookers and gave out small gummy fish candy. Dancers from Action Lab’s Christal Brown’s company carried a large bamboo fish high up on bamboo poles. Aviles Typical Theater Company members were dressed like animals, including a fur bunny and a sea creature with cloth scales. Transaje’s Sita Frederick carried a cut-out of a person with a suitcase, resonating with a performance about migration the company had done in the neighborhood the week before. She was surrounded by young people with suitcases decorated with fish. Several rows of teenagers displayed broad banners created in Delfin’s printmaking workshop. Then a group of young dancers all in pink, from a neighborhood program, and another stilt walker, garbed like a butterfly, passed by, followed by yet more percussionists.

Aviles integrated all the Action Lab performers into "Traffic," presented after the Parade on Hunt’s Point Avenue, directly in front of Action Lab’s storefront. Aviles had taped a map of the neighborhood right onto the street, which was closed for the Fish Parade. He had spent the morning asking passersby what problems they saw in the neighborhood, marking them on the map at the locations where they take place. The music started and Aviles’ company began dancing on the map. Little by little the other Action Lab performers joined in. The overall feeling was very utopian. Artists were just coexisting, doing their own things in adjacent spaces, symbolically all over the entire neighborhood since they were performing on the map of Hunts Point. The performances encompassed a great range of aesthetics, and represented a range of gender combinations and behaviors. The interaction among them reflected them all learning from each other. Sometimes people from the audience got up and danced to the rhythm, suggesting the art was contagious in the best sense, spreading to local participants through sheer proximity.

I think of the first year of Action Lab as “dreaming in the daytime.” Aviles has a vision of art integrated in everyday life. Action Lab established a storefront space, offered free workshops to teachers so they could use theatre techniques in their classrooms, let eight artists/companies loose in Hunts Point to find community members to insert their concerns in these artist/facilitators’ artistic visions. The art produced by Action Lab was experimental in the sense of exploring art’s ability to bring people together to express what they care about, using particular constituencies within Hunts Point as the laboratory. Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard have made a case for community-based art as the contemporary avant garde, which they define as art which “seeks to change the idea and function of art itself, to posit a new relationship between the artist and the institutions of society” (1982: 2) Incorporating community-engagement with BxMA and the Point’s artists’ own work rather than keeping “outreach” separate from the aesthetic track evidences an integrated relationship between artists and society. To my mind this paradigm shift is at the heart of Action Lab. While not a new idea – indeed, Adams and Goldbard were articulating it 24 years ago, and in fact we have always had models of socially integrated artists, often in folk and traditional contexts – its power has yet to be fully embraced in the contemporary United States.

Year #2: 2005-6

Becoming artistic directors of Year #2 of Action Lab was for Mildred Ruiz and Steve Sapp a homecoming, since in 1993 they had been two of the four founders of the Point. The organization was founded on values in tune with Action Lab, emphasizing both good art and community participation. Sapp explains, “Our mission at the Point was to be on the ground, finding out what people needed and wanted, and then making great art about it. As head of the theater program, I also made the space available for wedding receptions and Sweet 16 parties. I let local people use the space for whatever they wanted, paying what they could to defray costs of cleaning up and whatnot.” (Interview with Sapp, July 1, 2006.) The goal was for locals to feel a relationship to the people and activities going on at the Point. Some would come to the art events as well, but even if they didn’t, they got something out of an art center being in their neighborhood. Ruiz and Sapp left the Point in 2000, due to differences among the founders, and as the ensemble they founded, Universes, began to draw national attention.

Ruiz and Sapp’s advice to project artists was rooted in local experience. At the gathering for the second year launch, Ruiz advised grantees, “Make the community as aware of you as possible. Introduce yourselves, buy snacks in the local grocery stores and invite local store owners to your rehearsal. They won’t come but they will be glad to have been invited… And do not ‘dumb down’ your art.” Sapp continued, “When you work in community, the level people expect is low. The art they expect is predictable, and artists unconsciously play into it. Don’t. Make the art you want to make. Some will love it, some will hate it. But this community is more artistically sophisticated than you know.”

In Year #2, half as many artists were selected in order to better fund each. Jule Jo Ramirez worked with LGBT youth of color whom she recruited from The Bronx Health Consortium's Youth Group. One of very few spaces for LGBT teens to congregate in the Bronx, her workshop also offered a range of artistic forms. She brought in specialists in poetry & journaling, photography & video, theater & improvisation, rap & spoken word, modern dance, hip-hop & freestyle dance. The youth received modest honoraria to attend; nevertheless, consistent participation was a challenge. The artistic side of the work was difficult, especially as basic tenets of discipline, necessary for any undertaking, were missing. Still, Ramirez developed a strong rapport with four youth, with whom she discussed issues, problems and challenges they faced, expressing each using art.

Teresa Kochis initiated the South Bronx Aerial Dance Series, building on another workshop she facilitates at the Point sponsored by Cirque du Soleil. Partnering with Elise Knudson, this project was about creating access to this unique art form in the South Bronx through: 1) a free aerial skills workshop for dancers and young people ages 14 and up from the South Bronx, 2) pre-professional training for teen interns on how to spot basic trapeze, 3) outdoor introductory lessons on the trapeze for young people at the Hunts Point Farmers Market, and 4) a culminating outdoor aerial performance featuring choreography created in the workshop. While only four participants saw this project through to performance, many tried aerial dance out at one venue or another. The chance to try something new so typical for middle- and upper-class people was a welcome addition to the opportunities provided in a poorer community.

Marcy Edelstein and Walter Jackson co-directed the History Project. Its goals were “first, to define, explore and personalize for participants the history of Hunts Point, using it as a tool for political awareness and action; and second, to help students develop the technical and design skills to effectively communicate their ideas and insights in a visual format using digital media.” The training was described as both creatively appealing and a chance to acquire marketable skills. The project culminated in the creation of large-scale digitally printed banners incorporating photos, text, drawings and poetry, displayed at the Storefront after the Fish Parade. Requiring much one-on-one interaction, Edelstein and Jackson had their hands full with the four or five adults who regularly participated.

Erin Dunlevy explored the issue of the incarceration of minors from the Hunts Point area drawing from interviews, personal narrative, ethnodrama and Shakespeare. With a core group of former students from her three years teaching in a Bronx high school, Dunlevy expanded her group to a ten-person company. Committed to holding participants to high artistic standards, facilitated because of how much time she’d been building the group, this project exemplified Action Lab’s twin goals of interesting art and community participation.

The public performance component of Action Lab took place on June 17, 2006, at the third annual Hunts Point Summer Festival and Fish Parade. The Parade was a third the size of the previous years, with the unfortunate absence of Action Lab artists and no live music. A police car headed up the parade, followed by two men on Schwinn bicycles beautifully preserved from the 1950s. Third in line was the Bronx Trolley which offers free junkets to various Bronx sites of interest, that day including Hunts Point. Next a jeep pulled a float carrying a papier-mâché mermaid of color, followed by several groups of kids from various neighborhood programs, most festooned with fish imagery – one group carrying fish figures, another wearing headdresses bedecked with maritime life. They shouted out pro-Hunts Point ditties, in loud enthusiastic unison. Paul Lipson, Congressman Serrano’s chief-of-staff, his wife and two small children all wore lobster hats, followed by a group of teens in T-shirts from The Point. More bikers follow, honking their horns, one with a puppet of an elderly lady perched on its seat. Passersby paused in the midst of their morning routines, and customers in a barber shop watched mid-shave, with pleasure, the parade march by.

Nearly half an hour later the Parade reached its destination on Hunts Point Avenue, where two blocks were closed to traffic and two stages set up: a modest one in front of Action Lab’s storefront and a big sound stage halfway down the block. Local organizations had set up information booths between the two. One featured prints made in a workshop directed by Alejandra Delfin, who began teaching this art in the neighborhood as part of Action Lab last year. Now she’s working at the Storefront with Mudbone Collection, a theater company trying to establish itself here. This past spring, ten people participated in Delfin’s workshop, which dealt with immigration.

The Action Lab show began with Universes’ four members at mikes, Mildred Ruiz’s rich full voice in counterpoint with sounds and words by her three partners. “Have you been around the way lately,” she sang — a line Sapp had downloaded from the computer earlier that day from a poem by his friend, the late Wayne Providence. Universes served as a solid through line for the Action Lab performance not unlike Ruiz’s role in much of that company’s own work. The show incorporated poetry from Ramirez’s teens and mask work, movement and monologues from Dunlevy’s group. Ramirez’s teens had come a long way since the workshop I observed some months ago. The four participants delivered their own poetry with good presence. Dunlevy’s group combined narratives from incarcerated youth based on interviews, with fragments of relevant Shakespearean texts. One, about a female raised in foster homes trying to find her own rules to live by, was interspersed with “the quality of mercy is not strained” monologue from "Merchant of Venice," poignantly framing the young person’s experience within Portia’s compassionate words. This group also did some masked performance, and interacted with both other actors and the audience members during the performance.

The results of the two other Action Lab projects were also presented. Large, beautifully designed and executed silk banners from the History Project’s exploration of Hunts Point graced the Storefront. The aerial dancers were the first act on the big stage. The four participants mounted and danced upon four brightly colored swathes of cloth hanging from the top of the stage. Other acts included professionals ranging from a flamenco dancer and guitarist to an amateur tap-dancing team of children in sparkly top hats. The emcees described the event as a celebration of Hunts Point, which they called “a proud and beautiful waterfront community.” I remembered the Parade’s original impulse as a protest against the move of the Fulton Fish Market to Hunts Point, morphing into a simultaneous celebration, and missed that more complex stance.

Reflections

By the time Action Lab ended, its focus had moved from Boalian collective identification of pressing local issues — activism through art — to access to art more generally. The workshops have not led people to problem-solve issues in their collective lives, with the exception of the one directly Boalian workshop offered to teachers around classroom concerns. The nature of the access that Action Lab promoted was twofold, offering Hunts Pointers a chance to see neighborhood-based professional work and to participate in local artmaking themselves. Given the current development of Hunts Point as an artist-friendly neighborhood, such access is genuinely significant, as I explain momentarily.

The one element of Action Lab that I sorely missed in Year #2 was participation in the Fish Parade. This was such a successful aspect of Year #1 and indeed, part of the original proposal, given that the Parade is the community’s primary occasion to represent itself in the streets. (On the other hand, the ’06 event was greatly enriched by the inclusion of the older men in their leather vests riding vintage bicycles, more modest than the vintage cars that characterize other neighborhoods, but no less proudly and aesthetically preserved.) Bessa disagrees with me on this point, questioning if a parade is even the right form for this community. He feels that much effort was expended by Parade organizers for little return. He wonders if a block party is a better fit: “These are partying people,” he says. In fact, he’s considering organizing a block party event outside the Bronx Museum sometime in the near future.

Bessa’s point is worth considering. The week before the Parade, I paused amid the car parts shops and 99 cent stores of Hunts Point Avenue, in front of the mural on the Action Lab storefront, as music blared from the radio of a parked car, to which a little girl danced salsa. I noticed the preponderance of flowers surrounding the houses on Manida Avenue, across and beside the Point. In the Point’s yard, a rainbow of spray paint cans were lined up and ready as a group of young men designed a mural, apparently in commemoration of a young man who was killed. Here were the aesthetics of everyday life, the culture that rises up from local experiences, exuberant outbursts of flowers from Caribbean roots, loud music, and sharp visual art, able to hold their own on the busy urban streets.

I think about the difference between outposts and inposts. In bringing more artists to Hunts Point, Action Lab has tried to avoid assumptions about both what kind of art is worth propagating — outposts from some other culture — and what kinds of art could appeal here, which would have meant limiting their offerings to what is already known. They’ve done a sensitive job, grounding the project in the local cultural center, The Point, yet mixing it up with a range of artists from other neighborhoods drawn to working with people here. Each artist has faced the challenge of attracting and keeping participants. The workshops may have been modestly attended, but the people who participated did so at their own will, and each project made it to the end with a committed core group.

Historically, when artists start settling a low income neighborhood it’s a sign that gentrification will follow. Notwithstanding, artists have every right to find a neighborhood they can afford and in which they can work. But they should be mindful of the collateral damage their presence may accelerate. What makes the difference is that artists also contribute. Both Universes and Aviles benefit from local connectedness, recognizing a relationship between cutting edge art and rootedness in the community in which they situate themselves. Sapp is drawn to getting to know the people — their histories and ups and down—where he is, and making art out of those realities. Ten years ago, Aviles chose to move back to Hunts Point because it is a Latino neighborhood, one that is more Latino than the assimilated area where he grew up, where he could also get cheap studio space. But he does not want to lop off other aspects of his identity in order to be there. He is equally committed to making a space for gay dancers within that culture — a space he did not feel existed when he grew up in the Bronx. The warehouse in which his studio is located now houses ten other artist spaces as well. One day it could be a veritable arts center. However, as Aviles elaborates, “The deal was for our landlord to bring in artists and now he has brought in two businesses – one Pro Printing and the other a trophy business – which means that gentrification is pushing its way in. The landlord had the amazing opportunity to bring in The Ghetto Film School, which was backed by everyone famous including the Bronx Borough President, and the landlord said no.” (E-mail from Aviles, June 30, 2006.)

One day neighborhood children may be less homophobic than their parents, in part due to Aviles' influence. On the other hand, they will be unable to afford to move into their own apartments in the new Hunts Point. Perhaps ultimately the best thing about Action Lab is the seeds it sowed for art that is responsible to the people of its place. Action Lab has embraced that paradigm energetically, supporting artists who both engage local constituents and create work for their own aesthetic satisfaction. Art is never purely about universals; it has a material presence, an impact on its place and time. Action Lab artists have been responsive to Hunts Point, 2004-2006. Whatever else its legacy, which time will tell, that fact alone situates it as an honorable experiment.

Jan Cohen-Cruz is an associate professor in the Departments of Drama and Art and Public Policy, NYU Tisch School of the Arts [TSOA]. She wrote "Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States" (Rutgers 2005), edited "Radical Street Performance" (Routledge 1998), and with Mady Schutzman, co-edited "Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism" (1994). She and Schutzman just completed "A Boal Companion: Dialogues on Theatre and Cultural Politics" (Routledge). Cohen-Cruz coordinates the Drama Department's minor in applied theater and directs TSOA's Office of Community Connections, through which students do community-based art internships.

Bibliography
Adams, Don and Arlene Goldbard (1982) “Grassroots Vanguard” in Art in America. Brant Art Publications.
Boal, Augusto (1985) "Theatre of the Oppressed," trans. A. & Maria-Odilia Leal McBride. New York: Theatre Communications Group.
— (1998) "Legislative Theatre: Using performance to make politics," trans. A. Jackson.London and New York: Routledge.

Original CAN/API publication: July 2006