Book Review: Community Performance: An Introduction

Petra Kuppers’ “Community Performance: An Introduction”is a valuable tool for the new practitioner of the community-based arts. It begins with historical material, but the result is not history as much as an indication of the breadth and diversity of the field, as conveyed by reference to specific practices and practitioners. Jan Cohen-Cruz, in her 2005 book “Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States,” provides more of the domestic U.S. history that is missing in Kuppers.

“Community Performance: An Introduction” by Petra Kuppers (London & New York: Routledge, 2007). This book has a companion volume, “The Community Performance Reader.” Click here to view PDF page excerpts.

After introductions, Kuppers provides the entry-level student with how-to chapters on:

• Setting up and running a group
• Finding motivations, images, sounds, tastes, touches
• Finding inspirations, stories, legends, myths
• Documenting, evaluating, reporting
• Building sustainability

These chapters are not a single voice, but a welter of sidebars. Constant multivocality is one of the book’s most notable characteristics. There are so many sidebars, in fact, that it is easy to lose the point of the text in the chorus of commentary, but Kuppers’ seems to be saying that different voices are the real point of the book. Kuppers synthesizes without reducing, and while she leaves out my friends (sigh) she doesn’t exclude anyone. Her insights on access are one of the books great strengths.

By constructing difference as an issue of access, Kuppers is able to lens race and culture with refreshing clarity. She teaches that disability is different ability — the culture of Deaf is as rich as the culture of Maori. She reminds us to encounter all cultures (race cultures and ability cultures) as different, and to experience that difference as full. Kuppers specifies her own position as a disabled person (British designation) and is clear, even brilliant in her discussion of sensitivities. After making performance across the frontiers of race, age, nationality and class for nearly two decades, I know that the hardest thing to root out in myself or anyone else is the creeping assumption that difference lacks fullness. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the group one engages isn’t “less than” it is “different than.” The varieties of culture and human experience are dazzling. We can make art at the frontiers only insofar as we can appreciate difference.

That said, there is a definitional dissonance in Kuppers’ take on the practice as I know it. Kuppers titled her book with a phrase, “community performance,” which my colleagues and I have been using in different ways for 15 years.

Scholar/practitioner Jan Cohen-Cruz has identified community performance as “a collaboration between an artist or ensemble and a ‘community’ in that the latter is a primary source of the text, possibly of performers as well, and definitely a goodly portion of the audience.” And here is my own definition, from a High Performance article in 1993: “…theater of, by, and for a particular group. It is Outward Bound for towns. Celebratory and critical, it is controlled by the consensus of two expert groups — artists and community members.” Since then, Jules Corriere (my partner in Community Performance, Inc.) and I have published a score of articles using the name and conforming to the definition. Kuppers doesn’t acknowledge our use, and instead redefines the term:

There are many different definitions of community performance, and many practices that relate to it, such as Applied Theatre, New Genre Public Art, Community-Based Performance, Participatory Arts, Community dance, Theatre for Social Change and Engaged Art. This book presents a spectrum of different practices, with many differently nuanced and weighted ways of thinking about communal practice and community performance. “To nail it down,” to define, is an act that opposes many of the principles of community performance work itself, at least in my understanding of it. Thus I invite you to approach definitions as journeys, different paths, ways of moving.

For Kuppers, the best definition of “community performance” seems to be no definition at all.

Another surprise is that many community-based arts practitioners familiar to readers of Community Arts Network do not appear in Kuppers’ book. Granted, it is international in scope, and much of the work documented is from the British Isles, New Zealand and Australia. But almost all my colleagues are missing: Jo Carson, Bill Cleveland, Dudley Cocke, Jules Corriere — and those are only the “C’s.” There is no reference to Alternate ROOTS, a “community performance” organization very well known in the United States. There are only two paragraphs on the Community Arts Network, the richest resource for U.S. community artists and arts practices.

The broad definition of community performance, the far-flung examples and the welter of sidebar voices seem to say, “Here is a book for all community artists from all places.” Yet the book is simply too thin in spots. And it hasn’t the feel of community performance as I know it. There is not much to prepare the student for the self-examination, ego deflation and spiritual growth demanded by the field. But the un-finalized quality of her definitions and the wild variety of voices hints at the best way to receive her brushwork: as a pastiche, an impression, a smattering that conveys the extraordinary variety of this field.

Kuppers’ offerings are fresh and they are not only hers, but belong to interesting community-based artists from around the globe. And for the beginner, gathering impressions while working in the field, this is a good handbook. Starting with a clear and readable font, well-organized chapters and reference designed for immediate access, the book answers needs as the field practitioner encounters them. Notice I didn’t say “answers questions.” The work encourages sensitivity, awareness and dialogue, but it rarely prescribes solutions.

Richard Owen Geer, Ph.D., has co-produced community performance with more than 20 communities in the U.S. and abroad. With his partner, Jules Corriere, he is currently leading projects in Georgia, Florida and South Carolina.  Their organization, Community Performance Inc., is at http://www.comperf.com

Original CAN/API publication: August 2008