Community Conversations through the Arts: Artistic Response After the Virginia Tech Tragedy

Anyone who has ever set foot in Blacksburg, Virginia, will tell you that they could hardly imagine it happening here: a peaceful little college town, surrounded by rolling agricultural fields and mountains. The downtown is quaint and quiet, with bricked sidewalks, boutiques and coffee shops. The people are friendly and quick to smile as they pass you by. On campus, the buildings are covered in a beautiful, grey-white stone, and there are large, open green spaces between them where students play soccer and Frisbee. Walking around the town or the campus, it is still hard to believe that an act of unspeakable violence happened here.

The horrible shooting rampage that occurred April 16, 2007, on the Virginia Tech campus, left 33 students and faculty members dead. It stunned us all and brought the eyes of the world to our town.

I was living in Blacksburg then, wrapping up my MFA at Virginia Tech, focusing on theater arts and public dialogue. I was with my friend Megan in a restaurant less than a quarter-mile away from Norris Hall when the shooting began. Megan’s father called from Pennsylvania to say that there had been a multiple homicide in a dorm room. Then a waitress stood on a chair and said that there was a shooter on the loose and that we had been advised to stay inside and away from windows. Megan and I went back to her apartment and spent the day going back and forth between television, NPR, Internet and making and returning phone calls to friends and family.

The shootings occurred on a Monday and, as classes were canceled and the media showed up from every corner of the world, Blacksburg became a place that was both surreal and in HiDef. Yet, classes started back a week later. People began to strive for a sense of normalcy again.

Now it’s been over a year. Things are quiet again. But many stories go in between. One of those stories begins in a theater in downtown Blacksburg.

The Lyric Theatre is, by many citizens’ claims, the heartbeat of the Blacksburg community. It hosts all kinds of events, from foreign-language films to indie rock concerts, children’s summer drama camps to town forums. This restored art-deco-style movie theater is, to many, the public square of Blacksburg. Many of the major events and passages of my own Blacksburg time are linked to significant trips to the Lyric. So many people look to this institution as a touchstone of their community life, it’s no surprise that in the wake of the Virginia Tech tragedy the Lyric was one of the places that helped to give birth to a significant initiative — HERE: Honoring Experiences, Reflections, and Expressions.

HERE’s mission is “to create safe, sensitive, and diverse opportunities for our community's processing and healing. The events and gatherings to begin this community experience are consistent with our belief that coming together to share and listen to our community stories will help build the road toward a better future, for us as individuals and as a community.”

HERE began out of different people’s drives to “do something.” A disparate group of Blacksburg community members who identify with a lot of different, sometimes overlapping affiliations — leaders of nonprofit organizations, Virginia Tech faculty, representatives of churches, community volunteers, town officials, etc. — found each other and started to talk about their ideas within the first six weeks following the shootings. Joining the Lyric with significant resources and institutional commitment were the Community Foundation of the New River Valley and the local Episcopal Church (linking out to Episcopal Relief & Development). Over time, the working group distilled down to a core of approximately 12-15 folks who were extremely dedicated.

Interestingly, no one in the core group of HERE members directly lost someone that day. There were individuals on the committee who were closer to the harsh reality of our shared community story than others. Ultimately, though, we were all fundamentally rocked by what had happened and we were driven — by our indignation, our sense of loss, our knowledge of the community’s networks and our hope for the future.

I joined up with HERE as their staff member after they’d already been underway for nearly two months. It had been my intention to use my graduation from Virginia Tech as the ideal time to move on from Blacksburg after nine years, but this work seemed like a rare opportunity. I was particularly excited by the group’s interest in foregrounding artistic response and community dialogue. I was also heartbroken that the shootings might be the last chapter in my time there.

In my opinion, facilitating artistic response to tragedy or other significant events is an audacious thing to do. I have admired many people who have come before me in doing this work, even had the opportunity to get to know a few of them along the way. I wondered if the time was right to begin. I wondered if I was the right person for the job. I was inexperienced. I had been planning to leave when I graduated. And yet, I also knew, deep down inside, that the idea of bringing in an outside person to facilitate for the community didn’t feel right in this case. As intimidating as it was, the years that I’d lived in Blacksburg and the time I’d just spent in graduate school specializing in arts & public dialogue had left me in a primed place, and so I moved forward.

By the time I came on board, the HERE group had already created three events to kick off its programming. They simply needed a staff member to carry them to fruition.

Our first endeavor was a display of print and digital images inside the Lyric during Steppin’ Out, a local summer festival. The photos primarily depicted the way the community had come together during the week following the shootings. There were memory books available for folks to write and reflect in. We had first-response-trained grief counselors on board at all times. Over the course of the two days, nearly 700 people stopped by. Initially, we were concerned that members of the community might find it inappropriate to be reminded of the tragedy during what is typically a joy-filled festival, but we were relieved to find that our instincts were correct — most people believed that it would have been inappropriate to let the first year go by without acknowledging the incredible events and changes that had occurred.

A few weeks later we held an ice-cream social on Henderson Lawn. One of the more positive outcomes of the tragedy was that the lines between university and community were blurred. Folks from all across the New River Valley came onto campus to participate in events and memorials as if they’d always felt welcomed there. Another amazing trend during that initial period of time was the amount of unfettered public art-making that happened — everywhere. From poems to banners, songs to interpretive dance, everyone became an artist in an amazing, uninhibited, elementary-school way. I personally watched nonvisual arts professors use colored pencils and stamps to decorate their contributions to shrines in a way that was so beautiful and moving that it is one of my most vivid memories from that time.

The idea behind the ice-cream social was to kick off the new school year by bringing the university and nonuniversity community together again in a casual fashion and to provide on-the-spot art-making opportunities. We wanted to invoke that spontaneous, childlike energy once more. The event was sponsored by a local creamery, which added an extra hometown “flavor.” During the course of the afternoon, approximately 100 people dropped by for free ice cream, hanging out under the tents, and playing with our various visual arts and musical instruments.

Our culminating experience for this initial spurt of activity was a showing of “The Power of Forgiveness,” a film about other communities and individuals grappling with the concept of forgiveness after extreme violence. Some of the places featured in the film include New York post 9-11, Ireland and Beirut. Martin Doblemeier, the filmmaker, had approached us with the desire to bring his film to the Blacksburg community as a gift for our healing. He also brought with him two individuals who were featured in the film, so we were able to build a full weekend of programming around the screening as each of these fellows spoke in local churches, we hosted an interfaith community meal, there was a panel discussion with Q&A immediately following the screening, and one panelist led our first community dialogue circle later on that evening.

We had wondered if people would think that it was too soon to be talking about forgiveness, or if perhaps we weren’t the right group to be facilitating the conversation. The post-film panel discussion was structured by asking audience members to submit their questions on index cards. The cards that were turned in reflect a broad range of emotions and motivations that were in the room that Sunday afternoon. Some of them include:

While the cards that were collected revealed a lot of people were struggling with different questions related to forgiveness (even whether or not they could forgive the shooter, since he is dead), but no one expressed a question about whether it was too early to be having the conversation.

The week of community dialogues that followed was built around topics related to the film, including families and the psychology of forgiveness, the Holocaust, the African-American experience, and a movement known as Gardens of Forgiveness.

We saw 400 people at the Lyric Theatre for the screening of “The Power of Forgiveness,” and, between the community dialogues and all of the faith community activities that tagged on, nearly 1,000 people intersected with the project. It was definitely a useful and timely dialogue.

Having facilitated three substantial events in six weeks’ time, and with no other events immediately planned, it seemed like a good time for HERE to stop and take a breather. We needed to reflect on all that had transpired. Where were we at now? Did we feel successful? Should we press on?

In terms of defining success, we started building some criteria. If success can be determined by numbers, it certainly seemed as if a significant portion of our initial activity had been successful. However, some people were discouraged by the turnout at the post-film dialogues: Only around 50 people total came to the various discussions that took place over the course of five evenings. But I encouraged the committee to look deeper: The quality of the conversations at each of these events had been quite extraordinary and well facilitated. We had built new, strong relationships with other community organizations and individuals through the process. We had also hoped to bring in a broad and diverse population of the community through our activities, and we’d certainly done that. Quality dialogue, partnerships and relationships, and diversity are ways that I always define success, and these things have little to do with numbers.

One thing that I strongly encouraged the committee to look at, however, was that we seemed to be only marginally pointing at, or dare I say “dancing around,” the concept of artistic response. If HERE was going to claim that its intention was really to foreground art-making as a vehicle for our community’s dialogue and healing process, it was going to have to provide more rigorous opportunities to do so. As wonderful as “The Power of Forgiveness” was, it was still based on someone else’s art, someone else’s community. Similarly, as fun as the ice-cream social was, it was more about ice cream on a beautiful day than it was about art. Not that there was anything wrong with that on that particular day. It was actually the perfect day. Still, I think the committee heard me, and so we agreed that soon we would find an activity where local art-making, especially directly in response to the tragedy would be invited. Ironically, it was at that point that a few people decided to walk away.

Late in the fall of 2007, HERE decided to focus itself toward the approaching first anniversary. We knew that there would be many activities and memorials on the campus, but felt that the noncampus community would need space all to itself in order to acknowledge the year that had transpired and the changes that had occurred.

Before I went to Virginia Tech, I worked for the YMCA there for several years, and as such, I used to host a fundraiser known as the Community Performance Showcase. The showcase was intended to give local, amateur performers an opportunity to perform on the Lyric stage. As we were looking for the right sort of activity to provide around the anniversary, I kept thinking about the showcase as a frame: local artists, multidisciplinary, an opportunity to provide artistic response to the shootings or at least to the first anniversary. It seemed like the perfect fit.

One of the first people that I brought on board to help out was Alanna. When I explained the show that I was starting to create, she called it “a ritual.” Alanna had lived in Alaska for a significant portion of her life, and she talked about how, when a certain tribe of Eskimos honor the passage of a loved one, they gather on the one-year anniversary of that person’s death. At that time, each person gives back all of the physical items that the deceased has given to him or her. I saw our show as that same opportunity. We would honor the passing of an old Blacksburg, the things that it had given us, and the significance of the tragedy, and we would look together into the future with new eyes. Such a frame would also give the artists lots of room to create however they felt moved.

We decided to call it “Community Conversations through the Arts,” and selected the Sunday before the Wednesday anniversary so that there would remain a little distance from a day that we knew would be focused necessarily on the campus.

We had a surprisingly hard time fundraising for the endeavor. One would think that, especially given the initial outpouring around the tragedy, we would have had no problem raising the roughly $6,000 we needed to make this show happen. We wanted it to be free to the public for obvious reasons, so we went about writing grant proposals and soliciting corporate and individual donations before the fact. Unfortunately, funding was tough to come by, and we were down to the wire trying to get the money we needed to make budget. I believe that part of the reason for this difficulty was that initial outpouring I mentioned. So many people had given heartily to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund, which was for the victims’ families, and to other charitable endeavors in the initial months, that the Blacksburg community was simply tapped out by the time we came around. I also think that this is another one of those places where more education about the role and value of an artist needs to take place. A substantial part of that budget was to pay for stipends for artist-leaders that I called “curators.” We had a hard time arguing for the need to pay for people’s time in this manner. Of course we kept working on the faith that the money would eventually come. Don’t we all?

As the show fell together, I discovered that some things had changed in the five years that had passed since I last hosted a Community Performance Showcase. For one thing, the availability of technology has made it far easier for folks to become filmmakers anywhere in the world. I’d never had a film contribution to the showcase before, and I suddenly realized, when it came to putting together a multidisciplinary show, that dancers couldn’t dance in front of the screen, and the Lyric’s screen took about seven minutes to raise and lower mechanically. Additionally, the visual arts exhibit that I’d always dreamed of before but never managed to pull off, came together beautifully in the lobby. And yet, in all its wonder, it stopped people from coming on into the theater. These seemingly small technical difficulties can become metaphors for the greater artistic challenge, and really for the greater community challenge that we were all facing — that we all face, all the time. How do we work together in a way that honors all? How do we make it all the way through a process while honoring the spaces in between, the places where the action can just stop if it needs to?

Looking back, I realize now that, even though we had spent all that time exploring what success meant for HERE, I still never articulated for myself or with the group what our criteria for this project would be. At the end of the day, I think that I’m just one of those people who operates from an organic, instinctual place. I simply had a vision for the show that involved people coming together and sharing through art-making. I also realize now that I was personally hoping for myself and for my community that we would provide an opportunity for catharsis.

The day of the show finally arrived, and the acts pieced together into a beautiful flow. I found that one of the most stunning and ultimately healing moments for me was not from the Blacksburg community at all. Students from the Radford University Dance Department presented an original piece entitled, “a solemn declaration of unity,” which was set against music that contained phrases from poet Nikki Giovanni’s now famous convocation speech[*]. Through their dance, the students seemed to be saying that their experience, being so close by and yet slightly removed from the tragedy, had been just as anguishing, gut-wrenching and life-altering as mine had been, sitting in an apartment just off of Main Street for most of that day. Standing in the back of the theater while they performed, it made me think about the countless images of people from all over the world who were standing in solidarity with us throughout that week. We had each entered into a global community of violence, tragedy, loss and healing in a new way. It was the catharsis that I had been looking for.

There are so many other performances that I could describe in depth, including the commissioned film that was about the volumes of gifts, banners, cards and other memorial items that were sent in to Squires Student Union on campus following the murders; the close friend of one of the victims who delivered a spoken-word performance about her movement through the grief process; or the children’s choir that opened the show by parading in, singing “Amazing Grace” and carrying candles. And then there was my unplanned performance.

A couple of days before the show was to happen, I realized that we had lost a couple of acts, and I felt that we were particularly lean on the spoken-word front. We had really striven throughout the process to be truly multidisciplinary — another metaphor for embracing diversity through our art-making. So, to further encourage that balance, I woke up on the morning before the show and decided to pull some poetry off of my blog from the week of the tragedy and knit it together into a performance, which I called “Remember When: A Love Song to Blacksburg.”

Really, I think that the time I spent working for HERE, and especially on “Conversations,” were my love song to Blacksburg. However, I felt compelled, when this opportunity presented itself, to step up and name it explicitly in this way. One of the things that had frustrated me about the events that followed the shootings was how much of the memorializing had become about the “Hokie Nation.” It seemed somehow to have become about football and precluded criticizing or questioning the university administration in any fashion. This trend felt parallel to the sweeping patriotism that we’d witnessed in the weeks and months that followed September 11. While the shootings had happened on campus and to people that were part of the university, they had also happened in a broader context. The entire community was laid bare in one way or another, and so I went about in my piece, spontaneous as it was, naming or invoking some of those places that made Blacksburg special, beautiful and undeserving of what had happened and I paired those places with my personal journey while living there. Harkening back to that sense of ritual, I saw this invocation as a sort of catechism. As I recalled each of these places, I was asking for their healing properties to embrace us all.

Our show was, in many ways, the best we could have done in our limited time, considering the fundraising contexts and other circumstances. Yet, we were all a little bit sad about the turnout.

Despite an extensive advertising campaign, including a lengthy interview on the local NPR station, we had a disappointing turnout of only about 125 (plus the 50 or so artists that were involved in the show). That probably sounds like nothing to quibble with, but the Lyric can hold 475, so people had quite a lot of room to sit far away from each other.

People’s reasons for staying away from the event were many and varied. It’s distinctively hard to go out and ask people after the show, so why didn’t you come? Here’s what I think and what I’ve heard. Our event was at the beginning of what was going to be a long and difficult week and folks were bracing themselves against the storm. I’ve heard since then that some people actually picked that week to go out of town and particularly didn’t want to be under the microscope of media attention again. I’ve even heard some folks say that they just weren’t ever going to be ready, even by the time the actual anniversary came, to feel those feelings again.

For me, as I looked out across the theater, I realized that you could have filled up the Lyric with my own “ghosts”: people that I thought would be there and weren’t — folks who had been avid Community Performance Showcase enthusiasts, but who stayed away from this event as if it were a public autopsy. This is another one of those places for some education. We have to be able to articulate better what artistic response means. Anxiety about the feelings that will be provoked, or even the participation that will be required, is plenty enough to keep some away.

Getting back to that definition of success, I know that those who were there had a profoundly moving experience. Whereas at the beginning of the day, as folks entered the visual arts exhibit and then sat down in the theater, there was a palpable nervous energy in the air — I don’t know what’s going to happen here and I don’t think I like it — afterward they were relaxed and perhaps even replete. One thing that seemed to help break down feelings of isolation was an activity that we built into the first act. One of the performances happened to end with the words “That’s my story, what’s yours?” It seemed like the perfect time to shake things up a bit. Rather than going directly into the next performance in that moment, I came out and asked folks to turn to their neighbor, to meet each other, to tell a story. The crowd’s voices went from a tentative murmur to a swelling din within the first 30 seconds. It was as if, secretly, they were just waiting to be asked.

There were tears at some points in the performances, but for the most part there was just a general feeling of coming together, of breathing together. Whereas before they had sat far apart from each other in the theater, afterward, they crowded tightly into the lobby for the reception that followed, and they stayed for hours. At the end of the day, we had to kick out the last few individuals so that the Lyric could reopen for a movie that night.

Immediately following the success of the show, there was a flurry of activity around the possibility of touring it to other locations. We had dreamed about this happening before the fact. I had a model in mind whereby the visual art, films and poetry could tour easily and build together with local public art-making and dialogue events in other communities. It could come to be about more than just the Virginia Tech shootings — a transforming, growing, traveling arts-based dialogue about violence and community. Representatives from Virginia Tech Outreach had seen the show and seemed to be interested in backing the initiative. People from Richmond were excited and ready to work with us as the first stop on the tour. We’ll see. It all seems to be in a holding pattern for now.

The HERE committee was finished. They may yet find more work to get excited about, but after working so intensely for nearly a year, they were exhausted by facilitating artistic response and community dialogue for the Blacksburg community. It makes a lot of sense. Every single one of those folks is heavily involved in a lot of other groups and initiatives at the same time, and now they can refocus for a while.

Ultimately, we presented a show that was built on valuable relationships and that was truly diverse. To that end, it was our definition of a success. I still haven’t fully answered all of my questions, though, and I think I’ll probably spend the rest of my professional life pondering them. But, I think where “Community Conversations through the Arts” is concerned, it’s simple: After the media came in and extracted from us our stories, our images and our experiences so abruptly last spring, I’d like to think that it was an opportunity for all those involved to reflect on what we had come through, to make something out of that, and then collectively look into the future in a way that was unique and gave us ownership of our own stories again.

Shannon M. Turner is working as development director for Synchronicity Performance Group in Atlanta, Ga. She is an active member of Alternate ROOTS and serves on the advisory board for the Community Arts Network.

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Community Conversations through the Arts: Artistic Response After the Virginia Tech Tragedy

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