Connecting Californians
Finding the Art of Community Change
An Inquiry into the role of story in strengthening communities

Issues for Analysis

The inquiry also sought to capture the dialogue underway in the broader national community of practitioners and critics. Linda Frye Burnham of Art in the Public Interest and the Community Arts Network was commissioned to write essays answering three questions: How do we talk about this work? What are the ingredients of a successful project? Can a project’s storytelling "energy" continue in a community after the project is completed?

All three of Linda Burnham’s essays can be found in Appendix E. An excerpt appears here. Sources for the piece can be found in Appendix F.

Telling and Listening in Public: The Critical Discourse

The lid blew off the critical community in 1995 when New Yorker dance critic Arlene Croce published a refusal to review — or even to attend — a performance of "Still/Here" by the black, gay, HIV-positive choreographer Bill T. Jones at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Croce objected to the introduction into the performance of audio- and video-tapes of "real" people who were neither dancers nor actors, but people terminally or gravely ill with cancer and AIDS, talking about their own lives. She called it "victim art" that placed itself "beyond criticism" and "unintelligible as theater." Croce went on to attack all forms of "issue-oriented" art. She claimed that "advanced culture" was being turned into "utilitarian art" by "community outreach," "multiculturalism" and "minority groups," rendering it nothing more than "socially useful."

Cornerstone Theater Company creates plays with various communities, building bridges between the artists of the company and people in neighborhoods and regions — seeding a network of community-based theater companies in Los Angeles and across the nation. Photo by Craig Schwartz

In subsequent issues, The New Yorker published responses for and against Croce, and the issue turned up everywhere from college classrooms to daily newspapers. Joyce Carol Oates in The New York Times saw Croce’s stance as a sign of the outworn critical voice, concluding, "Throughout the centuries, through every innovation … criticism has exerted a primarily conservative force, the gloomy wisdom of inertia, interpreting the new and startling in terms of the old and familiar; denouncing as ‘not art’ what upsets cultural, moral and political expectations." Criticism is itself an art form, she declared, "and like all art forms it must evolve, or atrophy and die. Ms. Croce's cri du coeur may be a landmark admission of the bankruptcy of the old critical vocabulary, confronted with ever-new and evolving forms of art."

Following suit, critic Maurice Berger, in his book The Crisis of Criticism, observed that critics are subject to a lethargy that "exemplifies one of criticism’s gravest problems — a tendency that lowers the profile of art in society and affirms most Americans’ belief that the arts have little or no relevance to their lives." Berger believes that the strongest criticism for today can serve as a dynamic critical force, "capable of engaging, guiding, directing and influencing culture, even stimulating new forms of practice and expression." But many artists agree with California artist Suzanne Lacy, who claims that "criticism has not caught up with practice," and unless it does, "its ability to transform our understanding of art and artists’ roles will be safely neutralized."

The Croce controversy brought to light for the first time the position of criticism vis-à-vis community-building narrative performance work. As this new and popular work rises in public profile, mainstream critics either turn away in frustration or struggle with ways to write about it, finding the old tools fairly useless.

In some desperation, artists themselves have begun to suggest and even exercise new critical tools. Suzanne Lacy, in her essay, "Debated Territory: Toward a Critical Language for Public Art," argues that measures of the effectiveness of a work must move beyond its "beauty" and "transcendence" and attempt more complex and multilayered measures of art at work in both the aesthetic and social realms. Lacy asks critics to jettison old notions about artists’ intentions, their interaction with audiences, and the role of the audience itself, and she offers some new perspectives.

Artist Liz Lerman and educator Mat Schwarzman have found new methods for artists and organizers to use critical dialogue during the art-making process. Schwarzman has written about ways for artists and organizers to cross the barricades of prejudice between them when trying to meet a mutual goal of social change. He believes this effort requires both the organizer's materialist analyses of power and oppression and the artist's intuitive analysis of the human spirit. Lerman has devised a Critical Response Process for works-in-progress, a process that puts the artist in control of critical exchange.

Roadside Theater of central Appalachia takes a grassroots approach and puts the audience at the center of the critical dialogue. Sometimes its plays are developed from community "story circles." The technique is often used at the conclusion of a performance, also, as a means to invite audience members to talk about how the performance relates to their own lives. Says Roadside’s director Dudley Cocke, "Audiences are interested in a play’s story and how it connects to their story. By the stories they tell — and how they tell them — we can judge how well the performance went. One of our plays, a co-production with an African-American company, examines black and white history and issues from a working-class, southern perspective. So in the post-performance story circles you have black people and white people from the same community talking about race and class based on their local, personal experience. Their stories become a powerful subtext for the actors at the next performance."

This kind of critical dialogue does not ignore beauty and transcendence, the typical concerns of contemporary U.S. criticism: "Truth and beauty," says Cocke, "are inseparable, and to separate them or ignore one in favor of the other, as often happens in contemporary criticism — and art making — is a mistake. What happens when you separate the dancer from the dance?"

The intimacy of a fine performance, then, prompts deeply personal stories from its witnesses. "When the performance is successful," says Cocke, "the stories in the circle are subtle, sometimes sly, complicated and intimate — like life. The play has been the occasion for the audience members — individually and collectively — to plumb their own feelings and thoughts. This is what is meant when an actor or director strives to be good enough to get out of the play’s — and the audience’s — way."

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