The Rubber Meets the Road: Community Arts Activism and Cultural Hegemony

The field of community arts activism imagines itself to be informed about itself and about the communities it chooses to or hopes to encounter: It imagines itself to know what it knows and what it does not know. On any given day, practitioners in the field gather the various teaching/leading/guiding tools at their disposal and boldly move toward encounter with their targeted community, confident that at minimum the encounter will inspire dialogue. But, more frequently than is admitted, practitioners in the field spend far too much time engaged in the perpetuation and recapitulation of the dominant cultural hegemony, often evading directing the critical lens at themselves, hence dodging radical reflexivity and dulling the transformative potential of such encounters. This essay will offer a brief critical exploration of some of the ways in which United States culturally hegemonic language and practices are called upon by community arts activists in order to define themselves and identify and pathologize the “other,” frustrating the notions of empowerment, voice, equity and power-sharing often expressly held to be central to the field.

Dreaming The Road

It is almost always those from within hegemonic cultural paradigms that initiate cultural exchange, cultural diversity programmes, intercultural dialogue. Which begs the further question: whose interests do these serve? Who provides the resources for such programmes and what are the power relations within such intercultural dialogue?
Mike Van Gaan[1]

At this point in my career as a dance artist, after more than 20 years of community arts activism — having worked with and in communities politically labeled underprivileged, underserved, underrepresented, underdeveloped, under siege, at-risk and whatever new buzz words got deployed; having been escorted to and from schools and community centers by rival gang members to deliver programs all sides felt were essential contributions to “saving” the growing new generation — I admit to an internal struggle, an all-out conflict as I reflect on the gains, frustration and losses within the field in the last generation.

I admit pessimism, as it appears that the more things change the more they remain the same; and the language of privileges gets more and more nuanced to privilege the privileged while the same communities (with faces representing the color spectrum from taupe to brown to black and from yellow to red) continue to struggle for the basics in United States society. The current economic crisis notwithstanding, these communities and organizations set up by community members have been continually burdened by dearth of financial support and thwarted in their ability to provide living wages for their employees, contract artists and themselves and sustain vital programs in their communities. I hear the anguish repeatedly in the voices of those — taupe to brown to black and yellow to red — community arts activists as they struggle to find new (or/and renew) funding sources, often pitted against each other for the financial spoils. The recent economic crisis has pitched some of the oft-times-privileged into what has been a day-to-day journey in the lives of community members who are themselves community arts activists and institution leaders. The screeching coming from the back rooms (literally and metaphorically) of the often-privileged reveals both their membership in the dominant cultural hegemony and their sense of betrayal as they are tossed asunder, albeit temporarily, for the “greater good.”

Over the years I have often argued that community arts activism’s work is one-sided and hence a never-ending push against a hegemonic structure adept at strengthening, recapitulating, mutating and reinventing itself to fulfill its needs/wants for privilege, a better-than stance against “the rest.” Despite the currents of time, the privileged continue to be privileged and the pathologized under- “other” continue to be the same. There are those who have been on this unjust Sisyphus journey for longer than I: C. S’Thembile West, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Marta Vega, Aziza Reid, M’Bewe Escobar, to name a few. Their continuous optimism is inspiring as they focus time and commitment toward locating and exploiting fissures in systems that serve the dominant cultural hegemony where they can plant institutional structures that more directly serve their communities, doing away with as many intermediaries as possible. Yet, these systems continue, and now, more and more, everyone’s survival seems as if it must be linked to the dominant culture or survival becomes more and more tenuous. And, still, I continue to wonder.…

At Home Among the Forest and the Trees

I have worked with one community for more than ten years. Before I came there was no art. I had to teach them everything about art. I help them to make and sell art.
Jane/Jonathan Jones 2008[2]

It was the summer of 2008, and I was attending a meeting of more than 25 community arts practitioner/activists. The gathering was intended to be a professional training and development and exchange. Seated in a circle in a square room, participants took turns identifying themselves and the community/ies with which they worked. The practitioner who made the statement above was a middle-aged white man who, following the statement, continued to exalt the work he had been doing with the targeted community.

The practitioner/activist crafted his savior, teacher and provider identity through the community arts encounter. In his narrative, the community plays the role of passive recipient, empty vessel to be filled by his generous and selfless gift of knowledge and wisdom.

Whose identity does the community arts activist/practitioner serve/preserve/conserve? While grand rhetoric of “empowerment” of targeted communities abounds, it is troubling to observe that once the “professional” community arts activist has been engaged, local expertise is relegated to lower or nonexistent status, superseded by The Expert so he/she can declare: There was no art there — or no organization, no leader, no central community value for artist expressions. This Expert script plays itself out as a corrosive agent to targeted-communities’ integrity and dignity, and frustrates its ability and commitment to support the ongoing existence of community arts programs. It was this heralded position of Expert that resulted in a frustrated community-based community arts activist refusing the script, expressing her outrage and exiting the closing activities of the 2008 MICA Community Arts Convening and Research Project Conference. I will return to this incident in a later passage.

Getting into Gear

In many ways my artistic and intellectual meanderings on this subject started more than two decade ago. At a pivotal point in my development as a dance artist, I participated in a dance workshop given by Bill T. Jones. During that period Jones’s life was in the grip of dynamic challenges. His personal and professional partner, Arnie Zane, was on the crest of becoming one of the brilliant lives to be lost in the early encounter with HIV/AIDS. While Zane was at the edge of this life, threatening to any-moment-now transcend his failing body, Jones was delivering what turned out to be an extraordinary dance workshop experience. Jones, whose tendency to view his life in unconventional terms had earned him many admirers and detractors[3], articulated the dynamic tensions that then charged his life: I am here today dancing with you, but I want to at home caring for my partner. However, I honor our love through dance, and by being here dancing with you I honor him, my life, his life and the life we have created together. Life is not only about the choices we make, it is about the tensions and contractions we live and grow with. When life is unmasked it is fully charged, we stand on its pulse. And, on its pulse we have our greatest potential. When, at these moments, our courage fails us, we fail to engage the fullness of our creative possibilities. In such instances, we fail not only ourselves but all that makes us a part of this thing we call life.[4]

Driving Local Roads

My participation in the first MICA Community Arts Convening and Research Project Conference in 2008 was the result of a more than 20-year trajectory from that moment in Jones’ dance workshop. Jones’ eloquent explanation of the struggle that was happening inside him was accompanied by an embodied interrogation that surpassed words. On that day, Jones invited us, the community of dance professionals gathered for the workshop, to engage in embodied interrogation, to delve into and articulate the tensions and contradictions alive within our own bodies, to confront and encounter our troubled and troubling spaces/places with regard to our presence — individual and collective in the dance studio, that day, in his dance workshop. He invited us to enter into honest conversation with ourselves and our lives, to be attentive to the ways in which our individual and collective encounters affect the space of our individual bodies and the dance studio space we collectively shared. He invited us to — through this embodied practice we know as dance — engage in critical self-reflective learning, discovery, recovery and transformation with regard our understanding of ourselves: gendered, raced, classed and whatever else.

In many ways Jones’ summons was an invitation to unpack and momentarily dismantle the hegemony that saturated our lives, an invitation to unmask our personal and professional complicity, and an invitation to engage the tensions and contradictions that informed our understanding of ourselves as artists, as community members and as human beings[5].

Hindsight allows me to link Jones’ workshop to several processes I have been engaged with since those early years as a consciously engaged dance artist. I have yelled, whispered, screamed, journaled, ran, meditated, sung, recited, facilitated, spoken backwards, drawn in sand, drawn mindscapes, designed, walked, spun, twisted, hugged, fallen, planned, caressed, flown, laughed, crawled, murmured, coordinated, taught, observed, danced and sat in stillness all in a quest to hone my skills as a community arts activist. I believed that the digging, prodding and teasing out I was doing was also what kept others in the field busy. Several faces repeated themselves during my journey to the numerous workshops, classes, conferences and seminars and so there was evidence to suggest that my thoughts were not just a product my favorite pastime of dreaming.

Nut and Bolts and the Speed of Desire

Within the confines of this essay I endeavor to tease out two concepts, hegemonic language and practice. Hegemonic language is communication that expressly elevates one culture or cultural ideology, to the detriment and expected subordination of another. Attentive to Chukwudi Anthony Njoku’s assertion that identifies language as the “very root” of a community’s spiritual communion, I recognize language as the glue for the binding and affirmation of community.[6] Language in this sense functions as an activity and a space: It is a central space where individuals perform out their belongingness and community identity.[7] In this instance, the term language is used in its broadest sense, encompassing the breadth of communication techniques humans employ, deploy and engage in, including but not limited to verbal and nonverbal utterances and gesturings that transmit “the implicit and explicit values, hopes, and expectations”[8] rooted in a people’s understanding of themselves, their place in the larger phenomenon called life, and their way of being-in-a-world. Within the scope of this exploration, language is understood to be conscious and unconscious, veiled and unveiled. I argue that hegemonic language allows those who align themselves with the dominant culture to ritually act out their allegiance and affirm their sense of belongingness through overt and covert violation of the “other.”

The term practice is used here in a technical sense to identify those sets of skills and techniques honed and cultivated by community arts activists through “professional” training and skill-building experiences. It includes communication techniques, design and development strategies, teaching/leadership/guiding skills, and evaluation and assessment frameworks.

Practice is the working space of the community arts activist, the space in which social, community and personal allegiances — consciously or unconsciously — are in performance. It is through practice that the community arts activist identifies him/herself to be most profoundly different from the other, artistic and nonartistic, members of the society engaged in the “good works,” works aimed at reducing and/or eliminating oppression/marginalization and its effects. With art at the center of praxis (the meeting point of theory, skills and action) the community arts activist enters into a practice that calls for community building and response through mutual experience of vulnerability and whole-bodied involvement.[9]

Pedal to the Metal

In the months leading up to the announcement of the second MICA Community Arts Convening and Research Project Conference, scheduled for 2009 in Monterey, California, I questioned myself as to whether I would participate. After deciding that I would participate, I delved into the process in hopes of assisting in whatever ways I could. Unfortunately, a last-minute life upheaval made my attendance impossible and hence I missed the transformation that took place between the first and the second conferences.[10] My initial apprehension about attending was the result of language and practices that revealed themselves on several occasions during the first conference but was most poignant in the performance by Liz Lerman Dance Exchange and the statement by a senior community arts activist that resulted in a younger activist expressing verbally her outrage before exiting the closing activities. Both incidents were profoundly troubling not only because the violations they exacted and but also because of the innocence evoked in their defense.

Blind Sighted: The Fog, the Rocks and the Fallen Trees

The dance work was an artistic rendition of an African community’s experience with ethnic genocide, its aftermath and the international trial that followed. Bodies depicting victims, accused perpetuators, the international community and the international court members rolled, pointed, jumped, convulsed, turned, slid and moved through the stage space with thick commitment. With the exception of one pivotal oversight, it could have been (may have been for someone) a transformative moment.

In the post-performance discussion, linked to a critical engagement process that followed, the question that dared to be asked was asked: What was the impetus, artistic or otherwise, for not using African bodies in the dance work? The response: Due to scheduling challenges some of the regular performers could not make this engagement, it hadn’t occurred to anyone to make an announcement explaining this.

Notions of empowerment, voice and equity, powers-sharing are about representation, are about identity, are about being heard in the voice that is spoken. The absence/erasure of dark bodies from such a performance violated the individual and collective identity, violated genocide perpetrators and victims alike, and violated the communities that sought to offer the victims recourse.

The particularities of a community are what make it resonate universally with those outside its confines. The omission of identity markers makes a person and her/history less a part of humanity, airbrushes them into cartoon caricatures without depth and texture outside that given by the controlling artist’s camera or, in this case, moving parts. It is the details of existence that allows the possible cracking open of the doors of otherness and entry into the presence, sensibility and concern of another human subject.

The use of innocence — “it didn’t occur to us, we never thought of that” — to defend our participation in rituals of cultural violence betray our complicity with and positionality in the confines of the dominant culture and pits our desire (for identity, for financial resources, for alignment with power) as ontologically of more value than the identity of the community.

Road Signs and Undergrowth

What is at stake? Fundamentally, at stake are notions surrounding identity and identity itself and hence notions of power. Who has the power to name and define, create and manipulate, discover and recover? At stake is the field of community arts activism, the integrity of communities encountered by practitioners, future cross-community/cultural relations, and the identity of those who call themselves arts activists and those who are strategically lumped into the concept of “the community” or “the communities,” the under-other.

Around the Bend Dangerous Curves

I imagine the practice of the community arts practitioner/activist is the place/space in which the skills of community arts activism are expected to take hold, override the tendencies to situate self and knowledge-base above and beyond the communities encountered. It is a space in which language codes are expected to be made transparent; tensions/challenges are revealed and addressed. The self/community-reflective exercises Bill T. Jones called on in his workshop are effective as part of a critical journey that moves from exploration to transformation. Jones’ process calls attention to the not-so-harmonious fit, the tensions/challenges that must be acknowledged, encountered and engaged. Jones identified courage a necessary characteristic to do such work. A similar call of courage was recently echoed by Angela Davis in her March 26, 2009, Women’s Month Celebration speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia. In speaking out against the escalating violence perpetuated against women and its link to the United States’ growing prison industrial complex, Davis spoke of the courage necessary “to create social systems that make it possible to fashion lives and communities, to fashion societies” that honor and affirm through social conditions and social policies the dignity, humanity and potential of all people.

The type of courage that Jones and Davis speak of is the type of courage that comes “with feelings, with emotions, with desire, with fear, with doubt, with passion and also with critical reasoning.” [11]

Conclusion: Dare the Road /Dare to Travel

I have put forth some notions for rescuing community arts activism from a paradigm that perpetuates dominant cultural hegemony. Calling on a critical self/community-reflective process, I drew on Bill T. Jones’ workshop as a model, calling attention to the difficult personal and profession work this would require from the practitioner. In addition, I highlighted two examples pointing to where the field of community arts activism currently stands, recognizing that presented here are only a few examples of many. That year, 2008, seems to have been a particularly abundant year for such performance of dominant cultural belongingness/alignment among community arts activists. My assertion is: If the community arts activist/practitioner continues to direct the critical lens outward without conducting necessary inward critical interrogation, he/she will continue to do the work of the dominant culture, betraying those to whom they claim to be allied. Moreover, as a result, the field of community arts activism will continue to be yet another veiled expression of cultural hegemony, serving the interest of dominant culture.

The community arts practitioner’s honing of critical self/community-reflection skills offers her/him possibilities for seeing the forest and the trees, alternate perspectives for the viewing of difference and interdependence, and innovative ways of envisioning the ways in which tensions/challenges fill and fuel varying types of coexisting roles and relationships. Therein, these skills offer access to powerful possibilities for creating dynamic positive change within the community arts practitioner/activist, the community/ies to which they belong and the communities in which they engage as professional.

This essay is part of the Community Arts Convening & Research Project, 2009-10, 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: Stephani Woodson, Arizona State University; Amalia Mesa-Bains, California State University Monterey Bay; Paul Teruel, Columbia College Chicago; Marina Gutierrez, Cooper Union; Jan Cohen-Cruz, Imagining America; Ken Krafchek, Maryland Institute College of Art; Lori Hager, University of Oregon; and Sonia BasSheva Mañjon, Wesleyan University.

Carol Marie Webster is a dancer and cultural worker who lives and works in the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. She is currently working on projects focused on women of the African Diaspora, spirituality and dance.