Telling and Listening in Public: Factors for Success

All across the map of the United States, from coast to coast and border to border, you can hear it — the sound of storytelling. Everywhere there are arts projects underway that use story to build community:

From Eastport, Maine — where 300 people are still swapping the stories they told and heard and danced during "First Light," a Liz Lerman Dance Exchange performance on a dock between the U.S. and Canada as the dawn broke over the new millennium —

to San Diego, California — where the Playwright’s Project is pairing senior storytellers with school-age writers to create autobiographical pieces to be performed in senior residences and convalescent homes —

to Gig Harbor, Washington — where the Pat Graney Company is working with inmates in the Washington Corrections Center for Women to explore the issues in their lives that keep them tied to the revolving door of the penal system, and to create performances presented to other inmates, prison administrators, press and invited members of the public —

To Walton County, Florida — where Richard Owen Geer and his crew from Community Performance Inc. are joining a performance project to draw the divided county together and help it find a center.

Everywhere you can hear the sound of stories weaving lives, piercing issues, bringing communities together. Whether or not these community-building performance projects reach an audience, they have the potential to create remarkable change among those who participate. Though miracles often occur, these projects are not created by magic, but by hard work. What are the ingredients that successful projects share?

I took this question to a broad range of practitioners of community-based performance work from all parts of the U.S. and a few other countries. No matter what medium they work in — be it theater, dance, music, visual art, media art or a mixture of all those media — the word I heard over and over was "story." According to these practitioners, the easiest, most effective, most long-lasting way to build a community is by gathering and sharing its stories — and that’s any community, whether it’s defined by geography (a little town in Tennessee, a campus in Ohio, a suburb of Phoenix, a neighborhood in Brooklyn) or tradition (the African-American tradition, the Chicano tradition, the farming tradition) or spirit (the gay/lesbian movement, the labor movement, the Farm Workers movement). Whether the community needs to heal a wound, join in a campaign, recover its own identity, or bring opposing factions together, the gathering and sharing of people’s stories has proven itself a useful tool.

Story is the first thing these practitioners mention when asked about the ingredients of a successful project. The story itself has enormous power, according to Bill Cleveland. * "Story is the oldest, most complex of human forms of communication," says Cleveland. "Story reveals humanity in all its frailty, power and passion. Stories show archetypal feeling and passions. Everything in the world is translated to us through story. Everything we see has a story attached to it. Individuals, families, communities are defined by their stories; we will end up telling them or lose our souls and our dignity."

Story can be used as a tool or a weapon, Cleveland goes on. "Privilege is the ability to manifest one’s story unabated, to the exclusion of other's stories. Dignity is the unfettered capacity to make and share stories. If you have great material wealth, you can buy the story you want. If you have a great story, you can acquire power out of proportion to your material status. Empathy: I tell my story—you tell my story back to me. Subjugation is the withholding and denial of the capacity to tell and disseminate one’s story. Racism is denial of the means to tell one’s story as determined by race. Forms of that denial include cutting off access to the means to tell one’s story, ignoring the story, controlling the story by altering or editing the story."

This dynamic is readily demonstrable in any successful story-based community project. Stuart Pimsler recalls the transformative character of story from a theater project with seniors. "Forgotten, ignored people who have accumulated years of neglect can be healed by the mere phenomenon of getting some public attention — yes, your story is important. I am reminded of three 80-year-old seniors that we worked with as a part of our 'Rest/Stop' project in Gainesville, Fl. This was a work that took the audience on school buses to five outdoor locations to view work created with and performed by community members, relating to travel over a lifetime. These three seniors lived in a retirement community and had been forgotten by the world and their families. When we first met them they were very hesitant and wondered what we were up to. Each week as we showed up regularly to meet with them, hear their stories and, ultimately, show them that we were truly interested in their lives, their demeanors changed noticeably. They remembered more easily, had more energy and started to show the diversity of their personalities, which had gone to sleep. The celebrity mentality of our culture is determined by how much money is connected to someone's life, not necessarily how much substantive, spiritual value is connected. We all fawn after the stars on magazine covers and forget our own powerful stories."

"Story," says Richard Owen Geer, "is the true measure of wealth, and everyone is rich." Valuing one’s story is something that must be taught, or at least uncovered, says Ann Kilkelly, who is teaching a class called "Performing Community" at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va. , and asked her students for stories about being part of the various communities they inhabit. "They thought they had no experience, no stories of interest, yet as they told stories and wrote, the lives tumbled out, often in moments they tried to throw away."

What are some of the techniques for eliciting, gathering, sharing and performing stories in successful projects? Jo Carson has worked in more than 25 community-building theater projects. One recent experience was writing — with the community — "Cross Tides," a play about the lives of the Mennonites and others living in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Carson begins by getting community members to do the collecting work. "I try to help a community understand how to collect stories, from one-on-one interviewing techniques to running story circles. I ask some specific questions of story takers early on in the process: What stories have to be in a play about this place to make it a play about this place and not some other place? And I send people to get as many versions/visions/variations of those specific stories as possible. Same line of questioning: What people can we not do a play about this place without talking about, what events? Examples of answers: Captain Jack and Preacher Taylor in ‘Cross Tides’; the hurricane of 1922 in Belle Glade, Florida's ‘Pot Luck in the Muck’; the coming (and going) of the railroad in Etowah, Tenn."

The "story circle" technique Carson mentions is a simple process of sitting in a circle and sharing stories that is based, of course, on an interactive process as old as the human race. Appalachia’s Roadside Theater focuses on the oral tradition, "not to replace or ignore the written word, but to find its soul." Roadside’s manual on the process, "You and Your Community’s Story," describes a workable process: The circles consist of from five to 25 people, and each story is of importance no matter what its style; stories might be family history stories, local history stories, folklore, ghost stories or even riddles or jokes passed down through the generations. Each story circle has a leader or facilitator who begins, moves along and ends the circle, and guidelines have been drawn from years of experience to pilot the facilitator in his or her duties.

But stories — their collection, swapping and performing — are only one ingredient in a successful story-based community-building project. According to these practitioners, there are many, many more.

The successful project is one that has something to say, that came into being for the purpose of addressing a problem or seizing an opportunity. When the artists of Community Performance Inc. are approached by a community for help with doing a play, they ask, "What’s the scream?" meaning what cries out to be seen or dealt with? It might be what Bill Grow calls "a catalytic event that awakens a community to a new possibility for its future." A community, says Jo Carson, "has to get to a certain level of desperation — often economic desperation — before they think art is going to fix anything. Most people think of parking lots before they think of art."

The successful project clearly identifies and recognizes the community in which it works. It identifies and recognizes all participants’ relationship to that community, acknowledging self-interest.

The most successful projects arise from a particular community, and the context and content arise from that place (to reiterate, "place" is seen broadly by some practitioners, for instance the members of Alternate ROOTS, who also consider a community of tradition or spirit just as valid a source and site for this work). The Grassroots Matrix states: "Grassroots theater grows out of a commitment to place. It is grounded in the local and specific. Grassroots theater is given its voice by the community from which it arises. The makers of grassroots theater are part of the culture from which the work is drawn." Stories used in a successful project are "life stories told by the local people," says Bill Grow, "not histories about the town written by an ‘expert.’ In the case of the latter, the only people who will truly participate in the project are members of the author’s family."

Jo Carson says this: "What is different about these projects is that they are about and out of the place where they are being produced. So it is a monumental leap from just choosing a script from the canon and producing it. These projects are home grown, they have real relevance in a community from the get-go, and people become invested because they feel some collective ownership. These are projects close to the tradition of storytelling in that the common stuff of life in a place is revisited — revisioned in a way that gives it some other meaning than just a hard day at work, or a hard life at farming, or the hard luck of being moved off of land because of revised zoning laws and strip-mall development. And because people participate, it is not just ‘meaning’ applied from the outside. They really do have ownership."

The Grassroots Matrix goes on to place value on the traditional and indigenous aspects of a given place, calling them "integral to grassroots theater and valued for their ability to help us maintain continuity with the past, respond to the present and prepare for the future. Thus the relationship to the traditional and indigenous is dynamic, not fixed."

One of the most often mentioned ingredients for success is inclusion, and its payoff is diversity. Jo Carson is one of inclusion’s most vocal proponents. She admonishes professionals to "relax what they see as ‘professional’ and let the people participate in the making of the art in more ways than just being in the audience. [It’s] always messy, always imperfect, but much more inclusive and sometimes life-changing for those who participate. It involves anybody who wants to participate: Who comes, is."

Dudley Cocke sees inclusion as the most vital ingredient of any successful project, and sees it as his mandate to "include more types of people rather than less. Every community in this country has issues of inclusion. If inclusion is a key value, then our role is to keep pushing the door open, because the status quo will keep closing it."

Inclusion provides a diverse palette for the project, intersecting as many stories, perspectives, lifestyles and approaches as possible. Bill Cleveland calls it, "The ability to crow in different languages." Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard extend inclusion to all artistic media and styles: "Powerful projects have employed visual arts, architectural and landscape design, performing arts, storytelling, writing, audio-visual media and computer-based multimedia in many different combinations and approaches."

To value inclusion also means to question exactly what that means. Participation is not enough, says Caron Atlas. "How are people truly included in the process? Who gets to talk? Whose voice gets heard? Who tells the story?" Just as important as who gets to talk, says Dudley Cocke, is who gets to listen. His company, Roadside Theater, has been significantly successful in its effort to increase working-class presence in its audience nationwide.

The inclusion of many perspectives is not an easy task, according to Caron Atlas, but a fruitful one, offering the opportunity to "embrace ‘colliding truths,’ as Liz Lerman calls them, openness to the multiple meanings that art can reveal. At the same time this does not mean that the work is or can be neutral or objective, rather that the various perspectives are visible — not swept under the table. We must recognize when conflict is there. This is often easier said than done. I remember a storytelling/humanities evening in Alaska. It was organized by a local committee as part of a state-wide project. The event began with a Native American story presentation. Once it was over, almost all of the Native people in the audience left the event. One of the stories in the program that followed was told by an elderly woman who described being one of the first women nurses, and the adventures and dangers of traveling out to the far reaches of Alaska to treat people. Afterwards someone told me that one of the few Native people left in the audience was crying silently throughout the story, and later told him that that same nurse refused to treat Native people, and as a result, a relative of hers had died. How could (or would) this have surfaced during the story sharing? In spite of considerable work done to establish common ground, this ground could not exist outside the context of profound historical realities and relationships."

The Grassroots Matrix holds that successful projects "recognize that management structures and business practices are value-laden; they affect the mission, goals and creative processes of organizations through their structure and practices, self-reliance and collective responsibility." The Matrix says leadership is a community effort: "The people who are the subjects of the work are part of its development from inception through presentation." Participants in successful projects, say Adams and Goldbard, "enter fully into the role of co-directors of the project, making substantial and uncoerced contributions to shaping all aspects of the work and setting their own aims for the project."

No matter how many outsiders are involved, "working closely with key people in the community is necessary," says Jan Cohen-Cruz. "Sometimes it’s been nurtured for years, like Touchstone Theatre’s relationship to Bethlehem Steel and the former steelworkers in Bethlehem as a basis for making ‘Steelbound.’" Caron Atlas also comments, "It was important that Touchstone had established a long-term set of relationships in Bethlehem that went beyond their own specific needs as a theater. Touchstone has played an ongoing civic role in the community by participating on various development and education commissions, and has a firm base from which to build and sustain their project."

The qualities required for leadership are, according to Bill Grow, "vision, unstoppable perseverance and willingness to learn. Organization of the sponsoring body must be constantly worked at to meet changing situations and personnel. Structure is the key to this." Flexibility in structure is also key, says Bill Cleveland, with the anticipation from the outset that "something bad will happen and this will test the strength and resiliency of the project."

A clearly identified and skillfully facilitated participatory process is absolutely necessary to success, say practitioners, and the first step in effective project planning. There are a wide variety of processes already available to be tried, but the first step is to recognize the necessity. Prepared in advance, a good process for building relationships, says Erica Kohl, helps participants to understand the interests and perspective of others. A good partnership process "helps each group to envision what they would like to accomplish before leaping into the 'what, how and by whom' question. This way," she says, "we avoid the ‘we’re not doing this as social work’ and ‘we’re not just making art’ conflict, but instead it leaves room for entirely new ideas and forms of expression to emerge." A good process reveals and documents the strengths and resources of each participant, says Kohl, and these can be capitalized on in the work. "An artist might realize the community contacts and networks an organizer has access to, and an organizer realizes the artist’s expertise in creating a compelling way to get a message out."

Successful practitioners consider learning a valuable goal, and recognize the teaching value of the process itself. "Although projects may yield products of great skill and power (such as murals, videos, plays and dances)," say Adams and Goldbard, "the process of awakening to cultural meanings and mastering cultural tools to express and communicate them is always primary. ‘Action-research’ — whereby the direction of a project is focused through experiments with different approaches to gathering relevant material, each of which produces new learning — is a key element of community cultural development work. Social and cultural creativity are paramount. Freedom to experiment and even fail is essential to the process." One of the measurements of a project’s success, say Adams and Goldbard, is that, after the project ends, participants demonstrate an openness to further learning.

Success requires common goals, clearly stated in advance, and many call for a written contract protecting the project and its participants, preserving community access to resources, specifying the responsibilities of all parties and vesting all participants with the right to determine project direction. "I think one key is honesty in objectives and expectations," says James Thompson. "Objectives, so that one group do not believe they are there for one reason and another for a different reason. Expectations, so that people are not let down by the direction or end point of a project. Unfortunately, participants are not all going to become great artists or get a part in the next hit soap opera, etc. I have seen too many artists create false expectations and not leave the mechanism to manage them. Increased expectations are positive as long as there is a strategy in place to support them."

Goldbard and Adams find that successful projects have a community focus: "While there is great potential for individual learning and development within the scope of this work, it is community focused, aimed at groups rather than individuals, so that issues affecting individuals are always considered in relation to group awareness." Finally, the successful project is one in which the participants feel their own self-directed aims have been advanced and the project’s stated aims for external impact have been achieved.

Respect for all partner’s competencies, skills, responsibilities and limitations is key in successful projects. Mutual respect is seen by practitioners as vital in negotiating differences that will arise in any project. And respect is what allows partners to leverage each other’s strengths when creating innovative strategies. Just as important is respect for the values of the community, says Jo Carson, who observed what she calls "huge doses of courage" when she acted as script writer with the conservative Mennonite community at Newport News, Va. "As benign as my play is in my vision, it took some courage to do ‘Cross Tides.’ It is their stories, and, heaven help them, they may be showing a knee and an elbow at the same time by telling them."

The successful project is one that values trust among all participants — ethical sensitivity to confidentiality; ethical sensitivity to the ownership of stories and to their changing and retelling; ethical sensitivity to the power of stories and their destructive potential if used against individuals or groups. Adams and Goldbard pay special attention the potential for disaster during the crossing of lines of intimacy with participants, when people are asked to share elements of their life stories or their deepest feelings about the way a problem affects them and their communities. The successful project, they say, ensures "that participants are not coerced into a premature or unprotected intimacy. Trust," they add, "must be earned gradually, violations of trust must be pointed out and corrected, and there must always be opportunities for individuals to opt out of situations they experience as intrusive or unsafe."

All participants in the successful project are treated as equals. Activities are not imposed by a social agenda carried in from outside the community, but based on common goals, needs and interests. "What we do works," says Jo Carson, "if it is a project from the bottom up, but not if it is from the top down. The powers that be, whoever they are in whatever community, cannot decide to impose Art and have it work very well." As Richard Owen Geer says, "Anybody can direct, nobody can compel." Expression, not imposition, is the goal, say Adams and Goldbard, otherwise the project loses the benefit of the perhaps highly focused, richly multicultural background of the participants. "If practitioners impose their own artistic or social agendas on participants or attempt to transfer cultural values of other social groups to those with whom they work, they transgress the bounds of authentic community cultural development, which is a non-directive practice." Such exchanges, they say, must always incorporate genuine equality and reciprocity.

The most successful projects are those deemed accessible to anyone, especially people who have not traditionally partaken in arts or cultural projects. "Performance are held in meeting places where the entire community feels welcome," says the Grassroots Matrix. "Ticket prices are kept affordable."

Frequent and systematic communication is a must for success, both inside the project and between the project and the public, according to practitioners. Some communicate within the project through structured means like regularly scheduled meetings of all participants, meetings of groups of participants working in different places on the same project or similar ones, regular e-mail or newsletter communiqués written by and for participants.

Crucial to understanding is communication that is understandable to all, practical and shared across disciplines. This could mean literal translation of one language to another, or it could mean avoiding academic jargon and intellectual obfuscation. Often participants whose birth language is the same are still speaking different languages. "When arts groups initiate partnerships." says Erica Kohl, "it is incumbent upon them to understand the language and the context of the community-based organizations they wish to partner with." James Thompson takes it a step farther: "Much work at this intersection requires a mix of languages. Artists need to develop a type of fluency in the community-development language which is spoken where they are working — whether it be with people with disabilities, in minority communities, in prisons, in housing projects, etc. We must speak the public-policy speak so that we are accepted as sincere and serious. However, the best practice happens when the artists also maintain a strong artistic accent in their social-work speak, whilst enabling the community-development people to start to talk with an art inflection. The work becomes sustainable when you hear public-housing officials, prison officers, etc., demand the art as a regular part of their daily practice."

The sharing of knowledge across boundaries is one of the most creative aspects of these collaborations, whether they be boundaries of race, class and lifestyle or across professional techniques. One of the most fruitful areas for sharing is between artists and community organizers, offering the opportunity to trade methodologies within a project. "Social justice and aesthetics intersect in the moment of recognition of the universality of human suffering," says Richard Owen Geer. "Clearly there is organizing that needs to be done as part of the community-arts process," says Mat Schwarzman. "And there is art, images, stories, etc., that needs to be part of the organizing process. The particular configuration is less important than how the effort is understood and reckoned with within a larger movement-building context."

A successful project is carried all the way through to evaluation and documentation. Evaluation processes and criteria are included in the project design at the outset, and the results are matched against the values set forth in the beginning, as well as those that have evolved during the project. Just as important is the recording of the entire process as well as the product of the project. Grassroots-theater pioneer Robert Gard bemoaned the loss of information about the history of the field when he wrote in 1954: "Perhaps because of the demands upon such men [the leaders], because of the very complexity of the things they attempted, they did not bring themselves to write down their experiences, let alone their dreams. Consequently, the wealth of their experience has not been returned to the people. Who knows how American theater might have flourished had the people been able to comprehend the dreams these men had dreamed for them, or what developments of native playwriting and native literature might have been accomplished if the people had not only comprehended but had actually been able to put such dreams into practice. Somehow it is only by flowing it back to the people that experiences and idealism can mean anything."

Documentation is not considered enough, however; the information should also be made available for easy access by everyone, both in archives and in convenings across the field. A group of practitioners has organized the Community Arts Network on the Internet (www.communityarts.net) to archive electronically as much information about the field as possible before it is lost. Adams and Goldbard see this kind of information as an action with a social-change outcome as well. "Throughout the field," they say, "there must be regular opportunities to share and compare experiences, thus challenging fixed ideas and encouraging new approaches."

The most successful projects have the highest standards, for both artistic quality and organizing quality, says Bill Cleveland. The quality project "holds interest, is aesthetically adventurous and poses questions," says Michael Rohd, and it is one that has been creative and exploratory in "identifying sites within the community to look for partners, to explore points of collaboration, and discover hidden contexts for process. It is open to discovery, challenge and change based on what is learned as the artistic investigation of community takes place."

Critical evaluation of the project is not in the hands of conventional arts critics, say the practitioners, but in the hands of the participants themselves. It has quality if participants "experience a deepening and broadening of their cultural knowledge, including self-identity and a greater mastery of the arts media deployed in the project ," say Adams and Goldbard, "[and if the] participants demonstrate heightened confidence and a more favorable disposition toward taking part in community cultural life and/or social action in future; [if the] participants’ self-directed aims for the project have in their estimation been advanced, and any aims for external impact, e.g., sharing or distribution of products) have been achieved; [and if the] participants feel satisfied with what they have been able to express and communicate through the project." Adams and Goldbard even find a measure of quality in whether or not "practitioners and participants develop a mutually meaningful, reciprocal and collaborative relationship, useful and instructive to all."

As for Ann Kilkelly, quality is freedom of expression: "When I make a project, I teach people [dance] steps they haven't learned before, or a specific but accessible kind of skill that can be done in a group and opens some channel that is really particular and has to do with pleasure and desire and freedom — a group experiencing freedom, expressed as mutual pleasure in common work towards articulated goals. The performance models I love most are musical, where each voice is present and audible."

The successful project has recognized that success requires common effort over time. "Success," says Richard Owen Geer, "is beguiled by vision, but is in love with persistence." Bill Grow estimates a large community-performance project like Swamp Gravy takes three to five years of commitment by a leadership core using participatory methods. Choreographer Liz Lerman says, "Think about time. I can’t create an event in six months that is going to bring some Jews and blacks and whites and Hispanics together to mourn the dead in the city. Six months, maybe six years of constant careful trust-building and thousands of miracles, and maybe we can get to that place. So I’m thinking about time. I don’t know how long God meant us to mend the world, but I’m thinking about time, long time."

Many practitioners include the goal that "something be left behind" after the project is finished, a mechanism that can continue to offer the community the opportunity to keep working together creatively.

The most contentious and challenging ideas about project success revolve around the appropriateness of a cultural organizer from outside the project community. This is generally seen as a person (or team) identified with none of the partners in a project, one who can, in a sense, "broker" the project, negotiate differences and keep the agreed-upon goals and values on track. Practitioners differ on whether this is necessary, or whether one of the partners, particularly the artist, can fill this role.

The term "cultural organizer" is sometimes used interchangeably with "cultural animator or animateur." Adams and Goldbard have used this definition: "'Animation' is derived from the French ‘animation socio-culturel’ and refers to the work of the animateur, a community worker who helps people to build and participate in community life, to articulate their own grievances and aspirations in a public context, and often, to make art from the material of their daily lives."

Erica Kohl adds: "When I was working with social-service and arts and culture organizations associated with a public-school collaborative, we really needed a cultural organizer or outside facilitator to help build relationships and common goals. Someone to bring people together who normally don't interact, work under different conditions or institutional systems, and have different styles and approaches to the work, but are all attempting to strengthen the community through participatory and locally directed means. This is not always an easy job, because turf, funding competition, reporting procedures and community credit and accountability can injure these big collaboratives. It would take someone who understands a bit about each perspective but is not directly affiliated with any of them. Someone who can listen to everyone and be able to pull out the common interests and goals to reflect back to the collaborating groups.

"Throughout the past ten years," Kohl continues, "I've learned a great deal from people like Helen Lewis of the Highlander Center. Helen goes into communities and while her exact role or job description is not fully defined, she manages to bring people together to have conversations that push the work further. Her ability to make new friendships, build trust, listen to people and ask the hard questions in a nonconfrontational way enables her to effectively play this cultural organizer role. Perhaps her ambiguous insider/outsider status, hunger for learning, deep commitment to the work and belief in people inspires others to push their own thinking and approach. It’s a very quiet, listening, behind the scenes job. You also have to understand the people and projects enough to ask the right questions, at the right time and in a way people respond to. And then step back and let things unfold. I saw Myles Horton [of Highlander Center] behave in a similar way."

For Caron Atlas, the role is often talked about in ways that imply outside intervention is a necessary element of social change, "an assumption that I am uncomfortable with as always operating within a cultural context. It raises the question about who holds the power to make change."

Ann Kilkelly says she feels the issue of animation is a difficult one that "bears an important relationship in my world to pedagogy. I don't want to use a ‘banking’ model, where we fill up the passive student receptacles with our (expert) knowledge. I want students to discover how to learn what they want/need to learn. I try to use my acknowledged/acquired skills as a resource for them to draw on. Where I see this intersecting with the dilemma of integrity in artmaking and organizing is around the gap between what I know and do and what they know and do in a particular field. I assume that they are the experts about their lives and communities, and I try to find out what they already know. I need to own my expertise and its usefulness in that community."

Many practitioners interviewed for this article described themselves or their colleagues as animators and organizers, and delineated the skills they felt were required. Kate Magruder felt the role was integral to that of the artist: "I like the idea of a community artist ‘playing’ with the community, encouraging people to recognize the beauty and delight, as well as the pain and complexity, inherent in our collective community life, and finding ways to give it creative expression. It is this special skill that lifts this experience beyond social work and into the realm of art. The artist and members of the community are engaged together in giving their stories shape and movement and meaning — turning them into living poems that both inform and elevate. The community animateur is an essential part of the mix: The role requires an unusual combination of skill, energy, sensitivity, courage, vision, love and limitless good humor. There must be a passion for collaboration and the ability to embrace all the human messiness that comes with the territory There must be a deep respect for the power of story to reveal ourselves to each other; to illuminate the connective tissue of human experience. Muriel Ruykeyser wrote, 'The universe is made of stories, not of atoms' — I think the key is finding creative ways for communities to uncover and express their individual and collective stories: playfully, consciously and bravely sculpting their piece of the universe."

Lisa Mount declares: "Every community-building theater project I’ve ever seen succeed has that element, I don’t care what you call it — animateur, cheerleader — it functions in the same way. Different people do it differently, and it often works in teams." Mount identified the characteristics of the successful animator as "smart, passionate about the work, charming, has the strength of ten, lots of flirting, but with an edge, a confluence of talent and influence. You have to have someone with a big account in the favor bank," she said, clearly seeing the organizer as the producer of the project. Bill Grow, speaking specifically of his experience in the Swamp Gravy community performance project in a small town in southern Georgia, says such projects require "a professional director from outside the community and he/she must cast the play. A local director would have his/her hands full in trying to cast the play and training the cast. And the first few scripts must be written by an outside script writer, or the universality and depth of the play will be lost in the local romanticism and fear of offending." While he did not specify an outside organizer, he did call for "the help of a local resident who has the ability to mediate and problem-solve," with the assumption that a local will know exactly how to best approach conflicts in his/her own community.

"Our experience is, the artist can’t really take that role," says Dudley Cocke. "In our American Festival Montana project between a professional theater and a volunteer community theater, there had to be somebody who could understand both sides and be the producer. Even among artists and arts organizations, both may be about social justice, but use different methodologies. An outsider doesn’t have the rigidities and assumptions an insider in the community takes for granted. Who’s keeping their eyes on the prize that we’ve all agreed to? The more disparate the partnership, the more you need that role."

Caron Atlas says she agrees that the cultural organizer role is important, but "it is a very sensitive position. The person who plays this role needs a lot of skills. I think of it as a listener, facilitator, and as a translator role, and from that it can move into a catalyst. I think that the cultural organizer needs to be rooted — in the creative work, culture and community context. For example: I'm thinking of the important role played by Mohawk Elder Tom Porter when, as part of the Cornell American Festival Project, Roadside Theater visited Akwesasne. It was a very intense time on the reservation with serious fighting between those that supported and those that opposed gambling. The artists (Roadside Theater and musician Carlos Nakai) were invited to perform in the Longhouse, and it wasn't until they were about to enter when our Mohawk hosts discovered that the Roadside Theater musicians had a fiddle. This was one of the five things the Iroquois were told not to touch from ‘the White brother from across the salt water.’ At the time I didn't know what happened as they approached the Longhouse, since I was seated inside. Years later I learned through a subsequent interview with Tom Porter, as part of a site visit, that it was he who explained the situation to Roadside in his role as language and cultural translator. He said, ‘What were we to do? Tell the truth.’ I always felt that what happened was an important moment of simultaneous cultural affirmation and education during a stressful time for traditional Mohawk culture. The company was welcomed into the Longhouse to sing without their instruments and later invited to play their instruments at a community center."

Models for the role of cultural organizer come in many styles, says Cocke, pointing to the dialogic, popular-education model used at the Highlander Center in Tennessee; the power-analysis community-organizing method created by Saul Alinksy in the 1940s to achieve social change in the lives of working families and the poor; and the models of the Farm Workers Movement, founded in the 1960s to organize migrant workers in California’s Central Valley, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, focused on social justice for blacks in the South. Grady Hillman mentions the approach of Brazilian director Augusto Boal, in whose work, "a practical theater artist works out of a Marxist scheme where there is no real distinction between an artist and a social worker — a social activist/revolutionary who works as a facilitator, enabling workers/families to address cultural conflicts through theater and thereby redress or solve them." In this model, says Hillman, the community uses theater as a mechanism for escaping victimization. "What’s frustrating about all these models," says Cocke, "is that they come out of different times and social scenes and places."

It is clear that if a cultural organizer for our time is called for, a model will have to be created anew. It is not likely that a workable model will be created by think tanks or academic theorists. The practitioners in this field share the view that theory must emerge from practice and that ideas useful to this work must be grounded in direct action, so if we are to have a U.S. cultural organizer for the new millennium, that model will be born in future community arts projects.

*The people quoted in this article are identified below. This information was correct as of January 2001. More information about many of them can be found on the Web in the Community Arts Training Directory.

Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard are consultants in cultural development. Quotes in this article are from a report they recently completed for the Rockefeller Foundation. They are based in Seattle, Wash.

Caron Atlas is a freelance consultant on cultural participation and creative support systems for the arts. She was founding director of the American Festival Project in Whitesburg, Ky. She is based in New York City.

Jo Carson is an award-winning playwright who has written more than 25 performance projects with communities all over America. She is based in Johnson City, Tenn.

Bill Cleveland is the founding director of the Center for the Study of Art and Community in Minneapolis, Minn., and author of "Art in Other Places: Artists at Work in America’s Community and Social Institutions."

Dudley Cocke is artistic director of Roadside Theater, a member of the American Festival Project. He is based in Central Appalachia.

Jan Cohen-Cruz teaches community-based theater and an interdisciplinary workshop, Urban Ensemble, at New York University, She is co-editor of a book on the methods of Augusto Boal and editor of a book on radical street performance. She is based in New York City.

Community Performance Inc. produces story-based performances with communities all over the U.S. Based in Chicago, Ill., the Community Performance Inc. team has included Richard Owen Geer and Jo Carson, and has been affiliated with Bill Grow and the Swamp Gravy Institute.

Richard Owen Geer is a theater director and founding member of the Community Performance Inc. team. He is based in Chicago, Ill.

The Grassroots Matrix is a set of ideals and principles appearing in "From the Ground Up: Grassroots Theater in Historical and Contemporary Perspective," a report on a symposium at Cornell University in 1992, edited by Dudley Cocke, Harry Newman and Janet Salmons-Rue.

Bill Grow is staff member of the Institute of Cultural Affairs and director of the Swamp Gravy Institute in Colquitt, Ga.

Grady Hillman is a writer and linguistic anthropologist who specializes in developing arts programs in correctional settings. He is based in Austin, Tex.

Ann Kilkelly is dancer and writer who is associate professor of theater and women’s studies at Virginia Tech. in Blacksburg, Va. She is a founding co-director of the Community Arts Network.

Erica Kohl is a consultant and community organizer with training at Highlander Center in East Tennessee. She is based in Oakland, Calif.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer who directs the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange company and school in Takoma Park, Md.

Kate Magruder is a theater artist and former founding director of Ukiah Players in Ukiah, Calif.

Lisa Mount is a musician and arts-management consultant trained in the Technologies of Participation method. She is based in Sautee-Nacoochee, Ga.

Stuart Pimsler is a choreographer and artistic co-director, with partner Suzanne Costello, of Stuart Pimsler Dance & Theater, based in Columbus, Ohio

Michael Rohd is the founding director of Hope Is Vital, a theater and community-dialogue organization, and author of "Theater for Community, Conflict and Dialogue." He is based in Portland, Ore.

Mat Schwarzman is an educator and was founding educational director of the East Bay Institute for Urban Arts in Oakland, Calif., an interdisciplinary arts school and resource center.

James Thompson is a lecturer in applied theater at Manchester University and former director of the Theater in Prisons and Probation Centre. He is based in the U.K.

Linda Frye Burnham is a writer and founding co-director of the Community Arts Network. She is based in Saxapahaw, N.C.

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Telling and Listening in Public: Factors for Success

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