Putting Culture to Work: Three N.Y.C. Youth Theaters

Recognizing there are fewer opportunities for youth to participate actively in the public realm, community-based youth theaters are using playmaking and performance to position young people as key cultural agents with the power to shape and revitalize their communities. In 2006-07, I began working as a participant-observer, spending twelve weeks each with three ensembles in New York City: Find Your Light (FYL), a playwriting/performance program for youth associated with the NYC shelter system; viBeStages, an all-girl ensemble (part of viBe Theater Experience); and Ifetayo Youth Ensemble (IYE), a multi-age ensemble for youth of African descent in Flatbush and its surrounding neighborhoods (part of Ifetayo Cultural Arts).

I chose to work with these programs on the basis that they are nonprofit youth-based performing arts ensembles with a mission-driven focus on positive youth development and community building; they are long-term engagements, active in their communities for at least three years;[1] and they are all part of arts organizations that value artistry as their principle means of impacting communities.[2] All of the young artists are involved in a sustained process of creating original performance pieces based on stories relevant to their lives and/or communities. Through their playmaking processes, they begin to identify, critique and experiment with commonly held beliefs about human agency and interaction; to activate and embellish the symbolic systems and repertoires that make up their communities; and to practice new ways of combining that, in turn, provide the broader community with new forms, symbols, structural models and imaginings.

Youth as Cultural Agents

According to Anthony Cohen, a “community’s reality and efficacy as a symbolic boundary depends upon symbolic construction and embellishment” (15). And community development depends on “whether its members are able to infuse its culture with vitality and to construct a symbolic community which provides meaning and identity” (9). In this view, community is something that needs to be observed and reiterated through behavior, practices and social performances. In the act of creating original performance pieces, the youth in FYL, viBeStages and IYE begin to experiment with the symbolic systems that these stories represent, and construct their own rituals (both social and performative), their own languages and their own ways of relating that build community internally, as well as throughout “generations” of participants. Through the temporal locations of rehearsal, performance and beyond, theater becomes a new way of knowing, encouraging Foucoult’s subjugated knowledges — that which is “embodied, tacit, intoned, gestured, improvised, coexperienced, covert” and often embedded in social memory and practice — to emerge and interact, thereby forging new communal practices and repertoires (Conquergood 146).

For Doris Sommer, one’s ability to use creative practices “to pry open room for maneuvering” in otherwise constraining systems is the defining feature of cultural agency (14). Offering an alternative to opposition and critique as responses to oppression, Sommer’s theory illustrates how systems of social relation and meaning making can be interrupted, supplemented and/or transformed by putting culture to work (1). In her view, culture is both a vehicle for agency, at the same time that it is reactivated and reshaped by the cultural agent. This theory builds off of the work of Michel de Certeau, whose extensive examination into “the practice of everyday life” highlights how people, increasingly constrained, still continue to invent spaces, create new forms and reappropriate languages, narratives and products through acts of manipulation, improvisation and stylistic play. “Without leaving the place where [we] have no choice but to live and which lays down its law for [us], [we] establish within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in between, [we] draw unexpected results from [our] situation,” writes de Certeau (30).

Three Conceptions of Building Community with Youth

I use the term “community-based youth theater” to situate the work as created and performed by youth, who either identify with the communities that these three ensembles represent or come to identify with them by virtue of participating in a playmaking process that positions them as part of those communities. This positioning can be an opportunity for youth agency when the work understands the boundaries of community and identity as fluid and fractured and collaborates across these differences.[3] The common threads among FYL, viBeStages and IYE enable me to compare and analyze them as a field. But these ensembles also represent individual operating structures and diverse approaches to cultural form and content that affect each ensemble’s approach to playmaking and performance. These different conceptions are central to an understanding of how youth can be positioned as cultural agents and for what purpose.

Find Your Light: Community Building as an Act of Intervention

In FYL, youth are positioned to implicate the adult world for their communities’ problems and to articulate an image of future possibilities from their perspective as self-identified survivors of violence and marginalization. Founder Juliette Avila created FYL in 2004 as a two-month summer playwriting program, launching it in partnership with a social-service agency that had a Tier 2 shelter at the time. In 2005, she joined this initial group with teenagers from a domestic-violence shelter in Lower Manhattan with the aim of getting them to write a play about their collective experience as “shelter kids.” But despite numerous theater exercises and writing prompts, she found the teenagers were tired of talking about their shelter experiences. Nothing was clicking, explained Avila. That is until one of the female ensemble members had a gun held up to her head after summer school en route to rehearsal. The incident sparked a debate among the nine ensemble members (all of whom attended notoriously violent high schools) over the role of metal detectors in their schools and the root causes of violence. When the gun incident happened, the focus of the ensemble shifted. Instead of pushing her own agenda (i.e., getting them to write personal stories about being “homeless”), Avila began asking the ensemble what they wanted to change in their communities and how they would do it. “That’s when I saw the most passionate side of them come into this work,” Avila admitted, “They helped me discover the new direction for FYL. We now write shows that have to do with social change, any issues that they face in their lives.”

The gun incident and the creative process that ensued became fodder for the group’s original play, “Understand to Be Understood.” When I began working with FYL in 2006, the ensemble was rewriting this play in preparation for the NYC Fringe Festival, which traditionally draws a white, middle-class audience.[4] The play traces the contentious relationships between the “good” and “bad” crowds at a fictional urban high school, and the escalating tension between P Killa, the school bully, and Dennis, a foreign student from Trinidad, who continuously is beaten and taunted for being different. As the story unfolds, we learn that P Killa comes from a broken home and despises Dennis for being a quiet, hardworking student who refuses to fight. We also learn that Dennis, increasingly frustrated with trying to navigate a new set of cultural codes, where respect is gained through violence (as opposed to education), is beginning to believe that the only way to survive is by fighting back. Despite the daily ritual of passing through metal detectors and rounds of security guards, these two rivals eventually go head–to-head with Dennis stabbing P Killa just as P Killa is coming to apologize and seek reconciliation. At this point in the play, the cast steps out of character one-by-one and directly addresses the audience, bearing witness to violence they either have experienced firsthand or seen in their schools and neighborhoods of East Harlem, the Bronx, and areas of Brooklyn. Through personal story and reflection, the cast questions the efficacy of educational, legal and acculturative systems that, in their opinion, seek to restrain rather than foster human agency by positioning youth and their communities as objects rather than subjects. “Violence begets violence, not peace,” remarks one ensemble member in the play, “People tell us we’re failures, so we never strive to be successors. People tell us we’re poor in money, so we can’t see we’re rich in spirit. And everyone stands up and says they’ll be the change. But this cycle is wound so tight around us that we’re numb” (“Understand To Be Understood”).

While not everyone in FYL is a direct victim of physical violence, or has committed a violent act, each member belonged to a neighborhood and/or school deemed violent or problematic by federal agencies and the media at the time of this study. According to Lori Hager, once a particular zip code or group is labeled a “problem,” the people who live there, go to school there, or associate with that place or group are by default identified as “at risk” (19). There is not only “a growing consciousness of children at risk,” concurs Doreen Mattingly, “there is also a growing sense of children as the risk” (454). In interviews, rehearsals and written scenes, FYL members cited stereotypes of despair, deficiency and risk, along with feelings of judgment, shame and isolation as principal deterrents to their faith and participation in community building. At the same time, these youth expressed feelings of being in-between identities, of also struggling to make something of themselves, to feel at home and to develop their own sense of style and strength. “You care about [something] and do the exact opposite and that’s what tears you apart,” said Jerome, who played P Killa, “P Killa says in the play that he has these split personalities… [Like him] I have these personalities where I used to be bad and I changed it up because I wanted it for the better… I don’t think people can classify you.”

The tension Jerome felt between his own ability to “change it up” when he no longer likes his own behavior and the seemingly external constraints of structures that classify him is what Avila tries to leverage in the FYL creative process. Through writing and performance, the youth are asked to activate and exaggerate a repertoire of stereotypes based on identity locations they feel are constraining them and then as one cast member put it, to “flip-the-script” to reveal the constructed and slippery nature of these identity locations and scenarios, inviting everyone (including themselves) to examine and take responsibility for their own part in these constructions. This intervening is accomplished not only through the play (via moments of reversal, good old-fashioned Brechtian alienation effect and scenes that “stop” and play-out reimagined alternatives, similar to Boal’s forum theater), but also by nature of the “as/is” of the performance itself, which reveals these violent scenarios, and the urban youth that are part of them, “as simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘constructed’” (Taylor 3). According to Diana Taylor, the friction between social actor and constructed self “introduces a generative critical distance … [which] more fully allows [the actor and the audience] to keep both the social actor and the role in view simultaneously, and thus to recognize the areas of resistance and tension” (30). As one audience member said after seeing a FYL show, “I came out of the Find Your Light show like, ‘Oh, my God. I’ve really touched this other place and they really let me in’ (Jacob). “Such ruptures [can] signal a breakdown of the necessary duality of conventions which allows performance to ‘play’ with the audience’s fundamental beliefs, without producing immediate rejection,” argues Baz Kershaw (28).

By activating, reflecting upon and using the symbols, structures of feeling and shared practices that mark habits of internalized subordination they associate with being survivors of violence and marginalization, FYL members begin to recognize social and cultural systems as existing through the interactional activities of individuals and groups who are responsible for both their maintenance (i.e.. reproduction) and transformation. Through this process, they also begin to challenge themselves and the largely white, middle-class audiences they write and perform for, to see and experience the hegemony of these systems “as only partial within a decidedly performative matrix.” The FYL process allows just enough “wiggle room,” as Sommers calls it, for both the youth to envision positive alternatives to violent scenarios in their lives and communities, and for the audience to encounter the youth’s proposed “possible worlds” in ways that allow them to carry back their message into “the ‘real’ socio-political world in ways which may influence subsequent action” (Kershaw 28).

viBeStages: Community Building as an Act of Celebration

viBeStages is an all-girls ensemble program that brings together teenagers from throughout New York City three times a year for a 12-week collaborative playmaking/performance process that involves over 80 hours of rehearsal time. During this process, teenage girls are positioned to construct and celebrate a new meaning of girlhood today, and to create a sense of empowerment for other girls, as well as older generations. viBeStages is the core program offered by viBe Theater Experience (viBe), whose mission is to empower teenage girls through the collaborative process of creating original performances based on their personal stories and reimaginings of themselves and their communities. Girls who “graduate” from viBeStages have the opportunity to participate in viBe’s solo performance program (viBeSolos), song-making program (viBeSongmakers), among others, and/or to audition for viBeStages a second time.

Dana Edell and Chandra Thomas, both in their late 20s/early 30s, developed the idea for viBeStages, and ultimately for viBe Theater Experience, after creating and facilitating a one-time theater education curriculum with eight high-school girls in West Harlem. Like Avila, Edell and Thomas had a specific idea of the scope and direction of the project, only to have it transformed by the participants themselves. “We were figuring this out on the ground,” noted Thomas, “But the one thing that was then, and is very consistent now, is that it is always about the girls’ voices.” “And performing them,” added Edell. “Why girls?,” I asked them.

Edell: Because there are few places where [teenage] girls can be really creative and feel free to say and do anything without the pressure of boys being right there…

Thomas: We’re constantly told we’re not supposed to get together as female and do something.

Edell: Something positive.

And while Edell and Thomas acknowledge that often in the rehearsal process there are ideological and personal tensions among the girls, the paradigm they set up for viBeStages is one of affirmation and celebration — not of unity, but of differences. Girls are asked to articulate and share their multiple knowledges and experiences as urban teenage girls in daily check-ins (called Roses and Thorns) and writing exercises, and in the process of designing, choreographing and directing a collage-like performance piece that weaves together and transforms these various knowledges and repertoires into something that becomes a new illustration for what girlhood can mean in America today. “viBe does not censor you,” said Keisha, who has participated in viBe Theater Experience for four years, “viBe says, ‘Write whatever you feel… Do whatever you want. Words. Movement. Action.’ That’s what it’s all about.” When I asked a board member what makes viBe different from other youth arts programs in New York City, she replied: “The way they work from the girls instead of their preconceived notion of what girls need” (Joan).

Through early writing prompts (that ask them to explore different genres) and small collaborative devising assignments (that challenge them to incorporate multiple artistic disciplines), the viBeStages process leads participants through the “stages” of producing a play, but also through unpredictable stages of learning to collaborate with other girls to 1) articulate and experiment with the symbolic repertoires of what they feel it to means to be “a girl” and “a woman” in contemporary U.S. society, and 2) combine these various perspectives and imaginings into an original production that enables connections, but also celebrates fractures. In her book, “Against the Romance of Community,” Miranda Joseph notes that many poststructuralist feminists, like herself, are now proposing “communities of difference” rather than communities of identity or unity, which they define as repressive and totalizing fictions (xxvi). Citing Donna Haraway, Joseph argues new forms of feminist identity and community become imaginable when women organize through “partial and particular — ‘situated’ — narratives, rather than grand universalizing narratives” (xxvi). By bringing girls together to create a play that celebrates their differences as urban teenage girls, viBeStages “enable[s] linkages between [girls] who are not ‘the same’ as each other, but are also not the same as themselves, whose subjectivities, ideologies, and relations are ‘mobile,’ ‘tactical,’ and ‘oppositional’ through a process of interpellation” (Sandoval in Joseph xxvii). In fact, creating a community of difference is one of the primary reasons viBe auditions girls for viBeStages. While viBe rarely turns girls away (Edell and Thomas often find other ways of involving them), Thomas admits viBeStages only works when the ensemble is made up of a real mix of girls from different schools, neighborhoods, artistic backgrounds, etc.

In Fall 2006, viBeStages created the play, “Resurrecting WILDflowers,” which loosely tells the story of eight teenage girls, all of whom are drawn back to the site of their burned-down elementary school after receiving mysterious letters and flowers from their “inner child.” While all of the characters have developed distinct personalities and identity locations as teenagers, they share the common experience of having buried something that was once important to them. At the end of the play, they each literally and figuratively unearth items that symbolize the different things they’ve “lost” and have had to uncover in order to move on and become “strong, beautiful, powerful entities” (“Resurrecting WILDflowers”). Within this single scenario, multiple narratives are being told concurrently, ranging from stories about homosexuality, physical disability, religion, peer pressure and eating disorders, among others. Most if not all of these stories come directly from the girls’ lives. But Edell noted the focus is not on telling the generic “story” of urban girlhood today but on, “How are you going to tell it differently than how you’ve heard it? Why is it important that you are telling this story and that this audience is hearing you tell the story?” viBeStages’ only rules are 1) that you make your own rules and 2) you honor whatever theatrical conventions you’ve created. For this reason — even though every viBeStages playmaking process follows the same curriculum — the experiences, and the final plays that result, are as diverse as the individual girls that participate. Throughout these experiences, viBe girls are using, combining and juxtaposing symbolic systems and repertoires they associate with being a “girl” and articulating a temporary alliance that enables them, in the act of performance, to transfer these new imaginings to other girls and older generations of women. “We go through the same things but at different times and maybe in different ways,” said one mother after seeing her daughter in “Resurrecting WILDflowers,” “[On stage, my daughter] reminded me of me, how I loved to dance and how I loved to twirl. I never had that opportunity… but it’s okay because through her I see me. (Sandra).

viBeStages not only improvises with and expands upon the boundaries of “girlhood” but also builds community from one “generation” of viBe girl to the next through various rituals built into the playmaking process. The viBe rituals are “a specific viBe language,” noted Edell, “that suddenly all of the girls, like any alum from any show can be like, ‘Oh, what was your cheer?’ And they’ve all made a cheer when they went through a viBeStages show. Everybody has a cheer; everybody knows how to viBe-out” (Edell and Thomas). The viBe cheer and the vibe-out are just two of many recognizable rituals shared among “viBe girls.” The viBe cheer is a five-line introduction to each girl that incorporates her name and a least one art form (step, dance, song, etc). The girls create their cheers individually, and then perform them one-by-one at some point during the performance, thereby allowing the audience to get a sense of their unique styles and voices within the whole. viBe-out is the way the ensemble ends every rehearsal, meeting and/or performance; Edell, Thomas and the girls hold hands in a circle and “pass the pulse,” and then all come together in the center to celebrate each other. These rituals are not only recognizable from one viBeStages group to the next, but also are incorporated into viBe’s other programs, allowing for bonding and continuity between viBe alums and newer participants and between viBe ensemble members and generations of viBe audiences. “You almost wait for the moment of the viBe rap [in every play],” said one long-time viBeStages theatergoer, “it has become the touch point…  the girls in the audience kind of know when it’s happening, so it really says to me there’s a continuity” (Jacob).

Some community-based theater scholars (Brady; Filewood; Miller and Román) have critiqued celebration as a cultural strategy, calling it utopian and therefore falsely unifying and sentimental in ways that render participants and community audiences passive. The viBeStages process does indeed position youth to articulate and transfer “what-if” imaginings of girlhood, referencing Bruce McConachie’s rhetorical and authenticating conventions. But the emphasis is on adding to, transforming, and fracturing these conventions, on expanding the boundaries of what these rhetorics and conventions can mean at this particular time and place; the process is not focused on consolidating and reaffirming these conventions but on making them personal and specific, on multiplying and combining them in ways that are positively dissonant as well as unifying. According to Joseph, the very act of articulating and celebrating a community of difference can “generate the strongest of passions,” not passivities, and can “make it possible to build movements based on the connections we do have, rather than yearning for lost or impossible utopias” (xxxi).

Ifetayo Youth Ensemble: Community Building as an Act of Cultural Transfer

IYE traces back to 1989 when Kwayera Archer-Cunningham (Sister Kwayera), a former Jubilation Dance Company member, offered a six-week series of free modern-dance classes to 50 youth in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where she lives. From that original group, ten were chosen to receive full scholarships and begin intensive training and informal rites of passage work, forming the basis for what is today IYE. IYE has grown to include between 30-40 youth, ages 11 to 24, and is just one of seven programs offered by the now incorporated Ifetayo Cultural Arts.

IYE members, who are recommended from other Ifetayo programs or accepted by audition, are meant to represent the “highest level of excellence” within the organization, in terms of their artistic discipline and their commitment to the Nugzo Saba (the seven principles of Kwanzaa: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith). Throughout their tenure, which can range from one to ten+ years, ensemble members train rigorously in their principle discipline (African dance, African drumming, modern dance or acting), and also are encouraged to participate in one of Ifetayo’s rites of passage programs.[5] These experiences are meant to prepare the ensemble to put their cultural heritage to use in the act of creating original performance pieces that address critical issues in the African community today. As ensemble members, they are positioned to look to the past to cultivate a sense of collective identity and vision, but also to infuse that traditional framework with contemporary artistic styles, practices and social/political issues, which keep it vital. In the end, their play scripts and performances become part of a living culture that at once reteaches and restores cultural tradition and memory, while breaking those systems open to embellish and transform them for the future.

The philosophical framework for Ifetayo’s work is rooted in Kwaida Theory, a cultural nationalist philosophy developed by Maulana Karenga that posits that “the key challenge in Black people’s life is the challenge of culture, and that what Africans must do is to discover and bring forth the best of their culture, both ancient and current, and use it as a foundation to bring into being new models of human excellence” and possibility (Karenga 3-4). Karenga argues that tradition is the African Diaspora’s “cultural anchor” (16). But the focus of Kwaida is not on preserving cultural tradition as a rarefied subject, but rather on a process of “select[ing], preserv[ing] and build[ing] on the best of what [Africans] have achieved and produced” (Karenga 16). Karenga posits that only through praxis can the African community keep its tradition from “becoming a stagnant, sterile convention or empty historical reference.” To him, community building throughout the Diaspora depends on a dialectical process of defining a value system, practicing those values and, through that practice, continually redefining values so that “tradition becomes and remains a lived, living and constantly expanded and enriched experience” (16).

In 2006-07, the ensemble was reshaping its play, “The Advocate: Who’s the Mastermind?,” an interrogation of the Prison Industrial Complex that connects “the present-day exploitation of human labor” in prisons to a historical narrative that traces “the imprisonment of African peoples for the purpose of acquiring wealth and building major industrial enterprises” back to slavery (brochure). Using an episodic play structure that incorporates drama, African and modern dance, song and spoken-word poetry, the ensemble recounts a scenario of exploitation and imprisonment, but also begins to interrupt and reshape it by embodying a recommitment to African tradition, values and systems of practice, which they hope will transfer to their audiences and enable healing and shifts in these patterns of abuse.

Ensemble members noted that IYE came up with “The Advocate” after program coordinator and IYE alumna Chiriqui Cooper, and an adult mentor, called them to Mbongi, a traditional Congolese learning circle, and asked them to discuss what they felt was the most pressing issue facing the community at the time.[6]. In the beginning, much of the research for the development of the original play script was given to the ensemble by adult facilitators, who focused on historical moments that resonated with their own memories of the Black Panther Party and other experiences. According to some of the ensemble members, an adult-led research process made it difficult for them to connect personally with the play and to understand its relevance to their community. “You hear revolutionaries and a lot of time, like in my age group, we don’t want to hear none of that … the memory of it is tired,” admits Jared, “You remember it as a great thing but you don’t remember the whole identity of it. You don’t remember the feeling of it… [to get that feeling back] we need the spirit of the past and something new.”

Hearing this charge, Cooper began redeveloping “The Advocate” in winter 2007, inviting the ensemble to incorporate more of their own personal stories and favored artistic styles (i.e. hip hop, step, spoken word, beatboxing etc.). In rehearsals, she asked members to create new material based on their experiences and/or knowledge of the justice system, and rewrite and reblock sections of the play in ways that resonated with them. By combining their own experiences and contemporary artistic stylings with the cultural narratives and repertoires of their ancestors, the youth were able to locate themselves within a historical narrative of imprisonment, but also articulate gaps and create variations within that scenario which were transferred to their audiences through the act of live performance.

In his book, “How Societies Remember,’ Paul Connerton argues that culture “lives in our unconscious memories as a system of classification. In addition to linguistic and verbal mediums, one of the ways in which social and cultural codes/messages are learned, stored, and transmitted is through the body.” In this sense, Connerton explains, “the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body”(72) and through the body’s repeated activity, it is articulated in the present. Diana Taylor argues that the continuance of embodied memory, or what she calls the repertoire, requires presence. In other words, “people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being part of the transmission”(20). And due to its liveness, the repertoire allows room for variation, whereas the archive (or written narrative) does not. Repeated performances of a traditional dance, for example, might maintain the codes and structures of the “original” piece, but will differ slightly based on who is performing, who they are performing for, and when they perform. In this sense, “the repertoire both keeps and transforms choreographies of meaning” (20). By learning a cultural repertoire from elders in the African community and then using (and adding to) that repertoire to deconstruct the play’s scenario of imprisonment, the ensemble compels audiences to question this scenario and their own participation in its reproduction. The African traditions and values performed in the production get passed on as tools for forming a new collective identity, purpose and direction as members of the African Diaspora.

“You need a connection,” said Jared, “Somewhere along the line two paths join and people … have to accept their culture and their past … people come here for growth … wear it like its new clothes.” Just as traces from a cultural archive get reproduced and reshaped through the embodied act of creating an original performance, these performances once witnessed and/or recorded are in turn added to the community’s cultural archive. “In the African tradition arts and culture are a way of life,” noted Sister Kwayera, “that’s why our tagline is ‘Join the spirit of living culture and building community.’ [The arts] are how we express ourselves, how we heal ourselves, how we bring everyone together and create healthy systems for community building and family development. It’s a part of regaining our tradition and our values as people who really have been cut off from that.”

Conclusion
By positioning youth participants as key cultural agents, FYL, viBeStages and IYE enabled them not only to participate actively in a broader community-building process, but also actively transform the ensemble experience itself, ensuring it remained responsive to the community’s changing identities, purposes, interests and needs as well as their own. What was rearticulated, embellished and/or transformed through these cultural experiences does not exist outside of or in opposition to already existing systems of social relation and meaning-making but rather depends upon these systems and feeds back into them. In this way, they are what de Certeau calls “enunciative gaps… certify[ing], by a ‘disorder’ secretly referred to an unknown order, that there is something else, something other”(164). And while only traces of these experiences may be left behind as culture code and practice or embodied as cultural memory, those traces in turn become new fodder and vehicles for change as these playmaking processes are sustained and/or repeated from one generation of participants to the next. Whether through the act of intervention, celebration or cultural transfer, the three community-based youth theaters in this study all build community by putting culture to work, understanding that we are not capable of realizing community (nor should we strive to) as a full and stable form. “Community will vary in theory and practice in every setting,” posits Robert B. Fowler, “and so will our efforts toward community. In the end what will matter is not whether somehow community is achieved, but whether human sharing advances and does so unsullied by lost creativity” (94).

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2008, funded by a Nathan Cummings Foundation grant to the Maryland Institute College of Art.  The essay was reviewed and selected by the project's Editorial Board: Ron Bechet, Xavier University of Louisiana; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Sonia Mañjon, California College of the Arts; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; and Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University.

Heather Stickeler is a Ph.D. Candidate in Theatre for Youth at Arizona State University, and marketing and communications manager at the National Guild of Community Schools of the Arts, the association for community arts education.

Work Cited

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Cohen, Anthony P. The Symbolic Construction of Community. New York: Routledge, 1985.

Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Drama Review 46.2 (2002): 145-6.

Cooper, Chiriqui. Personal Interview. 23 Feb. 2007.

Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
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Edell, Dana and Chandra Thomas. Personal interview. 18 Oct. 2006.

Filewood, Alan. “Coalitions of Resistance: Ground Zero’s Community Mobilization.” Performing Democracy: International Perspectives on Urban Community-Based Performance. Ed. Susan C. Haedicke and Tobin Nellhaus. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 2004. 89-103.

Fowler, Robert B. “Community: Reflections on Definition.” New Communitarian Thinking:  Persons, Virtues, Institutions, and Communities. Ed. Amitai Etzioni. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1995.

Hager, Lori. “Constructing Community: Youth Arts and Drama, Federal Funding Policy and Social Services.” Diss. Arizona State Univeristy, 2003.

Jacob. Personal interview. 13 Dec. 2006.

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Joseph, Miranda. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minneapolis Press, 2002.

Kadija. Personal interview. 3 Feb. 2007.

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Notes

[1] Due to lack of funding and time – on the part of artists, administrators, community members and funders – many community-based theater programs in the United States only run short-term or are planned as one-off interventions. Because these three programs have been part of their communities for a sustained period of time, they have the potential to offer promising lessons on how to enable youth agency and sustain ongoing community-building strategies through the arts.

[2] This is an important distinction to make as community-based theater becomes a “hyphenated” field, linked with education, sociology, community development and psychology, and often positioned primarily to deliver services.

[3] In her book, Against the Romance of Community, Miranda Joseph argues that “to invoke community is immediately to raise questions of belonging and power.” Focusing on how communities are produced and consumed rather than natural or spontaneous, she provides a resource for “imagining, articulating, and constituting … active collectivities, that do not depend or insist on closures and oppressions of community or pretend that difference in itself is resistance” (172).

[4] Three of the original cast members had voluntarily left the ensemble at this point and been replaced with understudies. The understudies had no association with the shelter system, but had the shared experience of living in notoriously violent NYC neighborhoods.

[5] Sisters in Sisterhood or I am My Brother

[6] In his recent book, Mbongi: An African Traditional Political Institution (2007), K. Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau describes Mbongi as an indigenous system of governance that involves collective problem solving and consensus building. Fu-Kiau is a Kongolese native and a member of Ifetayo’s Council of Elders and senior researchers.

Original CAN/API publication: December 2008