TCG National Conference 2006 – Building New
Audiences
Transcripts
National Conference 2006
Saturday June 10
Transcript: Kevin McCarthy
Mini-plenary: “Making Theatre, Building Community”
Robert Leonard
Our plan is to let each of the panelists speak for a little bit.
They’ve got particular assignments to open you to what they
do, and then to speak about some particulars of their own experience.
And then we’ll open it up for some questions back and forth,
some questions and answers. But before we do that, I’d like
to acknowledge who’s in the room. I’d like to use some
sociometrics or cultural mapping. So if you would raise your hand
on the following set of questions as you see fit: If you think of
your art primarily as community engagement, raise your hand. Hmmm.
Terrific. If you think of your art as primarily the development
of the canon, please raise your hand. Of established theatre tradition.
You can raise it as many times as you want to. Good. And if you
think of your art as the creation of new work primarily. Excellent.
All right. Finally, if you think of your art as social activism.
Good that’s terrific. Who here works in the context of ensemble?
Oh, this is terrific. And finally—this is a choice, just to
put you on the spot. Who here think that the institution that you
work within primarily either one, providing organizational stability
and permanence, or two, a mechanism to support art making. [laughter]
We’ll go one, is the organizational stability and permanence.
And on the other hand, the mechanical support for making theatre.
Very good, terrific.
So I have asked each of the panelists to provide me with a few sentences that I might introduce them. I’ll start with Marty Pottenger who says she’s an artist-activist living in New York City and she directs and writes plays and solo performances. She has received an Obie for City Water Tunnel #3, Seattle Ten Best Plays for 2003 for Abundance, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian’s Best Award for the category of most dramatic and compelling work from the least promising subject. [laughter]
Marty Pottenger
My favorite!
Leonard
Mina Natarajan is one of the visionaries of Pangea World Theatre,
an international theatre in Minneapolis, Minn. She is a cultural
organizer committed to social change and global dialogue and action.
Michael Sommers, with Open Eye Figure Theatre. He founded the company
in 2000 with his partner Susan Haas, based in Minneapolis, Minn.
The company creates original work with a specialized interest in
puppetry arts.
Michael Rohd, artistic director of Sojourn Theatre in Portland,
Ore., an ensemble-based company making original work. A writer,
director and performer, he serves as guest faculty at Northwestern
and divides his new work collaboratively in professional, community
and education settings around the country.
John O'Neal, I have one [inaudible]. That the role of arts in society
is to stimulate our ability to think and feel critically about how
to make it better.
I’d like to set a context. All theatre is community-based.
In fact, theatre cannot happen without an audience. The event of
theatre is not what happens on stage—I think we all know this.
The event of theatre is what happens between the stage and the audience
in the imaginative space co-created by believers and actors. However,
not only is all theatre community-based, all theatre is political.
Telling stories in public is a political act. So what we’re
talking about is intentions. What stories, for whom, for what purpose.
We’re not talking about whether to base a theatre in the community
but why do we make theatre at all. Why here? Why now? Why with these
people? The art and craft of each panelist is accomplished in the
context of these specific choices.
There are a couple of questions that have occurred to me out of
the conversations that have gone on before. How do we understand
performing or the event of theatre to include the active presence
of the audience? How do we change the institutions to serve the
needs and interests of our intended audiences and communities? This
in some sense is the context that I think we’re talking. I’d
like to turn first to Marty to open her conversation around these
questions.
Pottenger
Hi everybody, hello. I ripped myself away from a lucrative lovely
practice of 20 years of being a carpenter/contractor to spend my
time making theatre, in kind of a backwards way, by asking myself
is there anything more excruciatingly painful than theatre when
it’s not going well? [Laughter.] I couldn’t think of
a thing. Nothing. Nothing. And so I decided there must be something
happening that we don’t quite understand, that we actually
cannot tear ourselves away from in some way that’s very easy
on other occasions. So that was an exploration. I think we’ll
be talking big pieces, right, because we’ve got such an amazing
group of people here and I want to hear from everybody. But I’m
going to show a two-minute excerpt from a piece called home land
security. All lowercase letters, three words. I always said I wouldn’t
name anything that had to be explained but I was wrong.
And the piece began in Portland, Maine, the border patrol in Maine
in response to the doubling of its forces after September 11 and
the Patriot Act did a raid on Portland in January, 2004. The Arts
Center, the Center for Cultural Exchange there, called me and asked
if I was willing or interested in doing a piece with the people
affected by the raid. Portland was rocked. And I came up and spent
one week a month there for over a year, interviewing people. The
final performance, which we’ve now had two runs of—we’ll
have another one this coming October and November—included
as performers the fire chief of Portland, Maine, who’s also
the director of Maine’s emergency response agency. It included
the mayor of Portland, an African-American woman, Jill Duson. It
included a homeless man named Billy Wolverton. It included Oliver
Albino who’s the leader of the Sudanese community. Maine is
still the whitest, demographically, state in the country. Portland
High School now has 32 nationalities represented in the last 10
years and 51 languages spoken. It included Rev. Rincon, who’s
a Chicano woman from Houston, Mexico. She said, “I didn’t
move—the border did.” [Laughter.] It includes Lucy Ann
Mathieu, a very loved and well respected Canadian fiddler, and it
included Rachel Talbot Ross, who’s the president of the NAACP.
Oh, and State Senate President Beth Edmonds who, if the governor
of Maine goes down, Beth’s up at the plate. So these were
the people who actually captured their stories. I interviewed them,
I did storytelling circles with them, I edited the text into this
performance that has had a huge effect in a really nice way. Why
don’t we roll the DVD and do the two minutes and then I’ll
finish up.
DVD Excerpt:
Man: I come back to my site at night, I always
wonder if some trooper’s trashed it in the name of national
security. Do they realize people like me are the first responders?
Woman: I’m scared that Emilien is not going
to be able to travel back and forth to Canada. We have dual citizenship
because of an international agreement but laws can be changed.
Woman: What don’t I do that I used to do?
I don’t make jokes in public about Bush anymore.
Man: I haven’t changed anything. You see?
The Sunnis try to be very proper. You want our papers? Here are
our papers. We carry them with us all the time. For us, Mainers
are very important. That is who we are.
Woman: Well, I don’t put bumper stickers
on my car anymore.
Woman: Around lunchtime on Sept. 11, our faculty
advisor—she’s Penobscott—called a an emergency
meeting for all the multicultural students. She said she wanted
us to all go out and buy flags, pins, buttons, stickers for our
cars. She told us what stores sold them and to make sure people
could see us wearing them. She said to pool what money we had together
to make these stickers saying “We Remember” and hand
them out to students at USM, which basically meant the white students.
I know she meant well, and was only thinking of our safety. I ended
up feeling so incredibly alone.
Pottenger
In the remaining seconds, it’s my exciting assessment that society truly is in a transformative period, which involves collapse and regeneration. As you can see from this excerpt—this is the section they talked about what they were afraid of—this is stories within each of them that lie perhaps forever buried and at the same time forever in reach, waiting for a moment to be asked to be told, by a listener, right? So there’s a kind of theatre I’d like to talk to you all forever about, aesthetics and about possibilities for theatre—what kind of theatre, what are we doing. But for me it all comes down to relationships as the only real form of security we have—our relationships with each other, with the banks, with everything else up for grabs. What I do is I work with communities on very different topics using interviews and storytelling circles and rehearsals and performances and talkbalks and dialogues.
John O'Neal
If any of you saw the little segment from Uprooted night before
last, you should know it’s a collaboration of four different
theatre and movement companies, three poets and Alternate Roots,
a regional organization of theatres in the South. All but Roots
are based in the area affected by Katrina. And if you want to talk
to us about bringing our show to your place, hit the Holden and
Arts Associates on the web. They are representing the piece and
we’ll be glad to talk to you about coming to your community.
I start there not only because we need the work, but because of
this thing about collaboration. Theatre is essentially a collaborative
process. And I tell you the truth every time I participate in a
collaboration I swear I’ll never do it again. Because it means
you’ve got to negotiate your fundamental perspectives and
beliefs and approaches to work all over again. But it always turns
out to be worth it if the effort survives. And I think most collaborations
I’ve participated in, they’ve survived at least to production
and sometimes significantly beyond that.
Since we’re talking about art and it was our feeling in our
preliminary discussions about this panel that if at all possible
we should share some of our work with you, because in that work
is probably the best expression of what our intentions and desires
are…. The last collaboration I was in, that Junebug Productions
was in, was Pregones Theatre and Roadside Theatre, a Puerto Rican
from New York, an Appalachian Company from Whitesburg, Kentucky.
A very appropriate name. And a black company from New Orleans. Looking
at the coincidence of culture and so forth. Coincidence of themes
and concerns among us. We decided to make a piece about love. Because
in this effort to make our country and our world a better place
to be in, we think often of struggle. “Oh Lord, I can’t
do everything I wanted to do.” We think often of struggle
but we don’t often think of love. So our piece came to be
called Promise of a Love Song. And for as much time as I have, I
will share with you the piece, a little poetic piece that we took
that name from and became the theme of the show in a certain way.
It goes: “If I could promise you a love song / I’d take
a meter soft and sweet / and curve the words until they meet the
place your smile leaves off / I’d make a song that smiles
the way that you do / if I could promise you a love song / If I
could promise you a love song I’d cup my hands / to catch
the sound of clear running water bubbling through a bed of stone
and pebble and bring it to the sunny place that you make laughing
/ I’d make a song that lights up the air the way your laughter
does / If I could promise you a love song / If I could promise you
a love song I’d take the days / and stretch them out before
your very feet / I’d take the night’s soft velvet sheets
to wrap your dreams in / If I could promise you a love song / But
such songs of love belong to men who seek the simple end of pleasure
/ A pleasure sweet / Love is still of meat and bone / don’t
live alone / and like water drops, have histories.” That’s
part one of the song. [Applause.]
Meena Natarajan
Unfortunately I don’t have a DVD or video to share, but I’ll
share a few thoughts with you about the programming that Pangea
World Theatre does in Minneapolis. I myself come from a background
of street theatre in India. One of things we’d do is look
at the concerns of society, look at what was missing out there,
then strive to present that when we would go out in the street and
create work. I also come from a multicultural reality, really, in
India. You know, there are many different languages, there are many
different cultures and so I come from this memory of living—I
think things have really changed now with the rise of fundamentalism
everywhere in the world—but I come from this place of living
with different communities amicably and really letting each other
be and appreciating the differences the different communities have.
Pangea comes from that kind of impetus, which is, really, bringing
people together from all over the world, from different backgrounds
and ethnicities, to create work together in Minneapolis, both from
different backgrounds in the United States, as well as bringing
guest artists from around the world to work in Minneapolis. And
so it’s really providing contextualization for work by artists
from all kinds of backgrounds, for a multiracial audience. The word
“pan” means “universal,” “gaia”
is the Greek goddess of the earth, and “Pangea” refers
to that supercontinent that existed before the continental drift
when the whole world was one.
We started Pangea about ten years ago. Our urgency has increased
because of what happened with 9/11 and how immigrants are being
treated right now in the United States. So it’s really risen
out of the need of the community. So we’ve not named programs
and brought them about just because of funding; we’ve actually
really looked at the community we live in, what the requirements
are in that community, and then created programming and then figured
out how to find funding for those programs. I think it’s sometimes
a misnomer to say we create community, because I think community
exists. It exists really happily. The thing we’re really doing
is creating a listening for it now—in terms of immigrant communities.
And our work in Pangea, we do main stage, both classical and contemporary
plays, we create original work, but we also have created because
of this need we see out in the community we’ve created four
series that really speak to community, that works with community,
and it’s really informed by the social context in Minneapolis.
Minneapolis has really become this huge hub of immigrants. There
are immigrants from all over the world, from Africa—there
are 50,000 Hmong people in Minneapolis. Our school systems are really
diverse; there are more than 60 languages being spoken in the Minneapolis
school systems alone. It has people from Ethiopia, South Asians...
It’s a really, it doesn’t seem so but it’s really
diverse. If you go to the airport in Minneapolis it probably doesn’t
look like that, but it has become more and more diverse. And so
we’ve created series over the last five years, particularly,
and ever since the beginning and over the last five years, these
series have really taken on urgency. One of the first series we
created was something called Voices of Exile, which was for refugee
and immigrant communities in the Twin Cities. And for writers and
refugees from immigrant communities to both create bilingually as
well as in their own languages. And we worked with the South Asian
and the Hmong communities and now we’re working with the Arab-American
community. As a result of which we’ve lost some funding, but
really it’s... that’s such a crying need. Looking at
the conference and looking at the representation of Arab-Americans,
I think we really need to figure out how to bring that community
into places like these. The Indigenous Voices series—again
it came out of a need, seeing Native Americans present only in shopping
malls playing the flute, during Thanksgiving. We began series that
presented Native Americans as a political voice, either across the
world or within Minneapolis. Working with the Native community in
Minneapolis—and that’s expanded and grown. We have two
other series but I guess I don’t have time for that.
Michael Sommers
Good morning. The work we do—we’re here with the driveway
tour, I don’t know if anyone has seen it, we were performing
it in the Rich Theatre today. We’re actually taking it outside
where it should live. Where our work has come from is 20 years working
as a freelance theatre artist, doing design, direction, musical
composition. Anywhere from the big machines, the big regional houses,
all the way down to backyards, basements, doing work that way. Out
of that process of living with theatre we decided we needed to find
our own voice and making our own work. So we kept doing that and
doing that and five years ago we formed Open Eye Figure Theatre,
our company.
And in the five years of producing the work that we make, three
kind of little hydra-heads have emerged, three directions we think
the work has going. One is what we call our main stage work—we’re
a very small organization—and we play, we’re interested
in a really intimate relationship with the public, like our house,
we play 60 to 100 people. We really have found that’s the
world we like being in, this kind of event, this kind of community
of sharing with that size group of people. So we have inside of
our main stage work we always make an intergeneration piece—something
like in the punk clubs, there’s the drunk show and the all
ages show and so...anyway. [Laughter.] We make the all-ages show.
We believe in the work that can be consumed or enjoyed or shared
by people of all ages. And then we do our adult work—we’re
still trying to land on what that work is. If anyone has a great
idea of what that is, instead of a “drunk show” or all-ages
show, talk to me afterwards. Then we also make the adult work is
maybe more challenging, like it was said in the little talk—we
use puppetry as a vocabulary in our work. A lot of times our work
is actor-driven and not figure or object driven, or it’s a
combination of both worlds. I’m very interested in the puppetry
tradition and how that works, and the driveway part is a puppet
show, it’s a booth show.
The second thing we do is that driveway tour and it’s something
we take to the communities. We pack up and go to people’s
backyards and we set up and do the show. And the third thing we
do is the Open Studio series, where we invite artists who want to
maybe step outside the way they’re thinking, in this kind
of intimate relationship with the public. And we also invite the
audience in on that process. So the audience sees the artist creating
their new work, this way of thinking and all that. We’ve been
doing that for five years and didn’t have a venue, basically
we’d find places that were big enough to house something.
Someone would say, “Oh, I can sneak this huge lighting truss
system out of this corporate place and you can put it up and make
a theatre. So for five years we were traveling around installing
theatres wherever we go to do our work, anywhere from 50 to 100
seat houses. You can tell I’m getting old, and hauling chairs
was getting tiring, and so we finally landed with my partner Susan
we just purchased a building in south Minneapolis, this incredible
old storefront. Right now we’re in the process of having a
home, having a space for the first time, that we really hope will
be driven by artists as opposed to bricks and mortar, a place where
this box of air will be driven by artists. With that now, the theatre,
the new building, hopefully when we get back we’ll have our
building permit and we’re looking at opening in the winter,
with that space it’s in the very interesting community in
Minneapolis, a very interesting neighborhood, so this adds another
layer of how do we open this box of air, this space, Open Eye, how
do we open that up to the broader community in the neighborhood
and how do we start connecting that way also? That’s kind
of what we do and where we’re at. And come see the show—it’s
going to be outside in the sun where it should be, so stop on by
this afternoon.
Michael Rohd
I make work like so many of us, in a variety of settings. Theatres,
universities, alternative venues, touring houses, high schools,
grange halls, legislative buildings. I’m a collaborator, like
everyone up here. My work is often generated in some part by intentional
engagement and research with and amidst communities of non self-defined
artists. Interviews, open workshops, structures of participation,
and performed by self-defined artists—actors. My company,
or groups of performers wherever I’m working. Most of my work
is movement based, highly choreographic. Some work is site-specific.
I’m fascinated by the potential of architecture, of space,
of remaking meaning, of creating events, of transformation. What’s
important to me—theatre that asks questions. Anne said yesterday
that theatre is a gym for the soul, a workout for the soul. For
me the muscles we’re working out is imagination and conscience.
For me theatre is a place where community is explored, defined,
challenged, examined. The process of building a show, the performance
itself, all an investigation of what it means to walk around in
the world with other human beings. Some work examples that I have
decent photo images of…
My first collaborator, Ping Chong—Guns, Advertising, and a
Culture of Violence in America—a vivisection, as Ping likes
to say.
Sojourn’s second main stage show in Portland, six months of
interviews around Oregon. What does justice mean to you? Performed
in a historic shut-down courthouse in downtown Portland.
Sojourn again, commissioned by the touring Anne Frank exhibit. Interview-based:
human rights and civil rights in America, seen through the lens
of a little girl from half a century ago, performed in an old department
store in a mall.
Sojourn: Lyme, Ohio, in and out for two-and-a-half years, an Animating
Democracy–supported project.
Race, Class and Leadership. Our largest documented theatre project
up to that point. Community engagement and intense political involvement
in that community. Company altering.
Seven Great Loves, an 80-minute warehouse performance journey in
Portland. Sojourn. Twenty cast members, twenty audience members
a show. Multiple shows every night. A bit of a phenomenon in our
hometown. Remounts and awards, a drastic change for our work in
the eyes of audiences. Hugely poetic spectacle and fragmented, immersive
narratives.
At La MaMa, a show with Ping, a fantasia exploring the colonialist
history of the Congo and its legacy today.
A core value of Sojourn theatre, when we make what we call poetic
documentaries, is a passionate interest in civic dialogue. When
tackling a polarizing political issue like public education in America,
we want to hit many sides of that issue so we find balance in the
piece. That way the dialogue events that follow are not sound bytes,
are not heated debates. We place the heat of extreme political perspectives,
all views, many views, on stage and work to offer a different kind
of space for listening and being heard. This show, a big one for
us, two-and-a-half years, over 500 interviews, the largest ever
done for an arts project related to public ed in this country that
we could find. I’ll talk about that later.
Another show with Ping. One of my favorites. Not devised, we wrote
different parts separately then dramaturged each other. It was a
surreal look at the role of America in the world today, and featured
this imagined scene between Donald Rumsfeld and the mother of a
slain U.S. soldier long before any of us knew who Cindy Sheehan
was.
I just like this image a lot. It’s a real Ping image.
Sojourn: a performance journey inspired by the Durrenmatt play.
Site-specific in an old high school, each act in a different performance
style. Each act in a different space in the building. We like to
move audiences around.
Sojourn, one night only, a large spectacle event, for a non-partisan
political awareness fundraiser in Portland. Two thousand people
watching performers in giant welding cages suspended high above
them and swinging between on trapeze and bungie cords, as prerecorded
text and story filled the room.
A dance-theatre made with students and faculty at Northwestern University
and members of the Northwestern and Evanston community. Why do human
beings want to be part of things that make them feel larger than
themselves—faith, nation, hate?
Twenty-five performers, 16 rehearsals, 60 minutes long with gorgeous
sound from the sound designer from Elevator Repair Service, who
was a student of mine 15 years ago at a middle school.
[Applause.]
Leonard
I’ve asked each of the panelists to describe a particular project briefly and then describe a consequence or how they understand the product. Who would like to go first? Michael?
Sommers
I’m going to talk about the Driveway Tour. It’s our
fourth year; like I said, it’s a summer program. In the last
three years we’ve done it we’ve played in 90 neighborhoods
in the Twin Cities to about 7,500 people. It started in Mexico—I
took a small show to remote villages in Mexico with my family and
my children and my partners. And it was an incredible distillation
of the event, just these small marionettes. We’d just go in
and set up and just have this relationship—there was no text,
just image. There was just this image, gesture vocabulary, the puppets.
And I said, “Oh man, this is really incredible. Just so distilled
down. How do we do this when we get back to Minneapolis, our home?”
And we decided the first year we decided we wanted to go to communities
that really didn’t participate in the arts in some way. Maybe
economically or they’re just unaware, they didn’t have
transportation or just didn’t know what to do about it. And
so we wanted to be really really inclusive. So we decided that where
do you do that, how to you do that, well, there’s parks and
libraries—we decided, no, the way we’ll do is we’ll
go to a private space, meaning a backyard. The shows are played
in backyards. The backyard, the private space becomes in an interesting
way public space. And in the first year, we kind of figured it out,
and what’s really interesting about it is—we find the
host, and they’re the producer. They provide the venue, their
backyard, and we give them our marketing packet—in other words,
here’s the idea, we’d like you at least to get 50 people
there, have a refreshment when it’s over—sometimes we
look at the area to make sure the sun’s right and all of that.
And it’s their job to bring their neighbors, their community
to the show.
We do a little bit of fundraising for this so we can do the show
for free. In more affluent neighborhoods we will pass the hat. In
other places we won’t—that’s the way it works.
So the show can virtually be free if we want it to. We found this
formula works, because the more affluent neighborhoods actually
in an interesting way take care of the neighborhoods who can’t
afford to give any money for the thing.
We’re going into our fourth year. This year we have 45 shows
we’re performing and we send out two shows. One’s in
Spanish and in English, and the other show, Katie Tomatie, which
we’re doing here.
I’m just going to go right on to the consequences here. I
think the idea of this host becoming a producer is a really interesting
thing. The event’s really the most successful when the show’s
over and we’re packing up and going away and the event keeps
happening. Some of the incredible consequences have been, like,
when the war happened, we went to a neighborhood where they either
had “support our troops” or “end the war”
signs. And the neighborhood was really arguing with each other and
tearing down signs and arguing amongst themselves. We came in and
gave the show and these people actually had a chance when the show
was over to sit down and they talked for a long, long time together
about what was going on.
Another memorable event was some gutter punks wanted to have us
in their neighborhood, you know the nomadic tribe of gutter punks,
and they were living right next to a Somali family. It was raining,
and we don’t perform in the rain. So the Somali family said,
you can use our basement. We went downstairs, and it was their prayer
room, and they rolled up the rugs and the punks set up boards with
buckets. And when it was over, the Somali women had cooked all this
food and the gutter punks just [inaudible] a bunch of wine, and
these two households had this huge party that lasted into the wee
morning. And that was really, really amazing.
So the show is actually secondary, when it’s very successful.
It’s the event you’re bringing to this community. And
for us, our work is seen—it’s a way to get the work
out. And we have people come see the intergenerational work, people
then come and see what we’re doing. And I guess I’m
done. Thanks. [Applause.]
Natarajan
I’d like to talk about a project we’ve just created
in the last four months or five months called Journey to Safety,
which was a response to, a project based out of a human rights report
by the Minnesota Advocates for Human Rights. The Minnesota Advocates
commissioned Pangea to create a piece of work about a report they’d
done. The report was called the Government Response to Domestic
Violence against Refugee and Immigrant Women in St. Paul and Minneapolis.
So it was in the Twin Cities area. They commissioned sometime last
October or November.
We were already stretched to the rim, but when we heard the topic
we said we’d take it on. And we created this piece with 10
immigrant women. What we did basically was we distributed the report
to all the women and they all were from totally different backgrounds.
There was a Hmong woman, so many different languages, Hmong, Swahili,
Spanish, Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Tamil, just a variety of languages,
Japanese… And these women came together to create this work
based on this report, which was horrific because the report basically
deals with the frustration immigrant women feel in the courtroom,
with interpreters, within their own communities, the kinds of biases
and stigma that they face. The language barriers, the fear of government
they bring with them as refugees; they come from a country where
they’ve not been listened to by the government. So what we
decided to do was to create this piece collectively as an ensemble.
So we decided to distribute the report to these women. It was just
absolutely amazing to see all these women bring themselves, their
fears, everything with them into this room. The other thing about
this project was the fear of deportation. Because abuse is a deportable
offense. So if these women report against their husband and say,
“He’s been abusing me, he’s been battering me,”
the husbands actually can get deported, and then what happens to
them and their children? So it’s a really complex issue.
And we were invited to do this in front of all state Minnesota judges
in November. We created a 20-minute piece that was incredibly empowering
for the women in the room as well, and we presented in front of
the judges, and the project has had such a huge response, it’s
been already between January and today we’ve already completed
six shows of the project. We’ve done it at schools, we’ve
done it at colleges, we’ve done it at correctional facilities…the
places that it needs to hit. It’s also an amazing strategic
alliance with this human rights organization because they follow
it up with training. We create the project, they do the training,
so it’s also a project in which there’s actual systems
change that’s happening as a result of the project.
I think one of the most important things is the women who created
the project are completely transformed by the project itself. They’ve
been incredibly empowered, they’ve been thinking about these
issues and bringing other immigrant women into the project as well.
In fact we just had a show a couple of weeks ago before I came to
the TCG conference. So I just thought I’d speak about that.
[Applause.]
Rohd
The assignment was two minutes on a process and then two minutes
on outcome or consequences, depending how you imagine those kind
of things. I’m going to take the two separate, talk about
different things. Because a lot of, I think, conference attendees
and a lot of conversations have to do with what we define as regional
theatres, I’m interested in really briefly mentioning two
projects over the last couple of years that were collaborations
with regional theatres. One with Artist Repertory Theatre in Portland,
Oregon, and one with Boise Contemporary Theatre in Boise, Idaho.
Both were projects where the theatres commissioned me to do longtime
devising work with community and groups of performers.
The project in Boise, which is a three-year project—they’re
not an ensemble-based company, but they have a group of artists
they work with over and over again, and they’re really interested
in exploring through engagement and contact with their community
issues of the growing impact that technology and isolation have
on the way human beings live together when they are not within rooms.
So we did a lot of work on that over several years, and that eventually
yielded a show that was in the main stage season, and form-wise,
as well as content, it was extremely different for their audience.
But they do a tremendous job of connecting with their audience as
they bring work in, be it a new play or a new project like this
which was quite different for them. That was a really interesting
experience for me.
Artists Repertory Theatre commissioned me to work on a piece exploring
the legacy of Lewis and Clark—a very Oregon topic and a really
interesting one. Allen Nause, who’s here in the room, the
artistic director there, really wanted to create not a history piece
but something looking at the reverberations today. So we did a lot
of interviews and I worked with a fantastic six-performer cast—one
from my company, and five Equity performers in town there. And it
was a really fantastic experience. Their goal was to tour the show
around the state, which we did, to nontraditional venues—not
just schools but all sorts of sites. The conversation that piece
has helped happen around the state seems to be really interesting.
I’ll take my second two minutes and talk about a project my
company did, which is called Witness Our Schools. We spent two and
a half years doing interviews about public education in the state
of Oregon, and the process is not for this moment, but we spent
nine months doing a free state tour in a different community. Every
Sunday for nine months doing a free performance followed by a town
hall dialogue. And the show was, again, comprised of over 500 interviews.
The audiences at the performances after a lot of partner-building
and collaboration, including legislative leaders, included those
who are not traditionally part of policy conversations, there was
a lot of interpretation and translation at these events, folks coming
with a lot of non-English-speaking backgrounds. It was a tremendous
learning experience. As we talked about yesterday, to learn more
about public education in this nation and its history. But in particular
to take a [BREAK IN TAPE] …and we did the show in the Capitol
Building for the House and Senate.
O'Neal
Junebug Productions is a presenting as well as a producing company.
One of the projects that we undertook, one of our long-term collaborators
over the years has been the Urban Bush Women and in a conversation
with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar about 1989, it must have been, she made
the remark that environmental racism is going to be the next big
issue around which movement building will occur in this country.
And so that seemed reasonable to me, and so we set out to build
an environmental justice project, dealing with environmental racism
as its core. The concept of environmental racism may not be familiar
to you, so I should say what it refers to is the correlation between
environmental toxicity and race is greater even then the correlation
between environmental toxicity and poverty, with the exception of
the Native American reservations, where they exist. The darker you
are, the more toxic your community is likely to be in, regardless
of your socioeconomic status. And it’s the kind of thing people
don’t recognize.
The mechanism of the festival was to take a period of four years
and seven companies selected from around the country who we’d
had a history of relationship with, and invite them to come regularly
to New Orleans, which is at the foot of what’s called cancer
alley, the 90 miles of river between Baton Rouge and New Orleans
is the highest incidence of cancer of anyplace in the country and
over 135 toxic producing facilities that dump into the river, into
the air, and so forth. And form relationships between those guest
companies and people who were doing environmental justice work along
that corridor, and commission the community organizations to help
with developing the material these companies might do and commission
the companies to create a piece out of that material and to share
with those community organizations techniques and tools they use
to do their work, in the faith it would be mutually productive along
all fronts.
Well, of course we didn’t raise anywhere near the amount of
money we needed to do all this, so we sort of limped along until
1996, when we had a festival pulling together all these people we’d
been working with over the previous six years, and the outcome of
it has been that most of the companies who participated have increased
the extent to which they work with community organizations who share
their perspectives and concerns. And most of the companies use story
circle process in their work, they put it in their bag of tools.
And most of the community organizations have increased the amount
of energy that they devote to cultural work and cultural activity
in their own programming. [Applause.]
Pottenger
I’m not sure I’ve found my spiritual parents yet, but
my biological parents are radical Right Republicans, which really
gave me from a young age an interest in asking big questions. I
like this slide idea, so I’m going to say “slide, slide,
slide”—but I don’t have any slides. [Laughter.]
Set up a good beat, cadence.
Abundance, a four-year project about American money, touring asking
30 multimillionaires and 30 minimum wage workers in cities and town
across the United States: What is enough? What would be enough for
you? It included a one-year, once a month, four-hour civic dialogue
with the same 14 people. The group included minimum wage workers,
it included an undocumented worker, it included people who had a
million dollars in assets, and it included many people in between.
And we made different forms of art each month as we addressed frighteningly
honest questions about money among ourselves. Civic dialogues in
each of the seven cities in which this show toured. It was under
a modified LORT tour contract with five actors, and I got to do
civic dialogues and radio interviews, just trying to get this question,
as big questions as possible out in the world.
City Water Tunnel #3: a three-year arts project meeting the miners,
the sand hongs, the mayor, the engineers who are building a 60-year-long
tunnel, 800 feet as deep in the ground as the Chrysler building
is high in New York City, and doing a one-woman solo show about
it. The project included a 200-photograph exhibit at each theatre—the
show had several runs in New York—photographs taken by the
people working, themselves, photographs you and I would never have
gotten to see. It included a video installation on the construction
sites and the office building, so people could meet each other.
They worked their entire working careers on the [inaudible] and
were never going to meet. And it included two weekend fairs where
people came and brought their families and got to meet each other
and do good things.
Impacts from home land security—quickly, one impact was what
Oliver Albino and State Senate President Beth Edmonds met through
the rehearsals and Oliver spoke with her about the fact she wasn’t
supporting sanctions against the Sudanese government with the state
pension funds and Senator Edmonds changed her support, and that
was one of the key legislations passed in the main Senate in 2006.
Another was Mayor Duson has never publicly taken an oppositional
position in her 20-year career in public service, and in one rehearsal
she said, “You have given me back my voice,” and if
you want to know what that means, look in the paper tomorrow morning.
Front page news, Mayor Duson challenges city manager on the appointment
of the white police chief over the African-American applicant who’d
received higher gradings in the process that everyone had agreed
to. That challenge resulted in a six-hour unprecedented City Council
hearing where in the end the communities of color and progressive
communities came together and testified in a true moment of collective
collaborative engagement. The final vote was the eight city council
members who happened to be of European ancestry voted for it and
she voted alone against it. But it was huge, and out of that the
city manager told the director of multicultural affairs that she
would be made a department—that position would be made a department-head
position. So it was a big deal. [Applause.]
Leonard
We’ve saved some time for questions.
Question
I was wondering if anybody could speak to your experience of the nonprofit status, you know, the whole structure of being a nonprofit and what does that do to support community-based process or pull you away from that kind of work?
Rohd
Well, for me it was a decision to make. I’d had an organization called Hope Is Vital in the ‘90s which did community-based work around HIV and AIDS and homelessness in a lot of communities using performance process. And that was not a nonprofit. That stayed as a sole proprietorship out of choice, because I was told the nonprofit status would make it difficult to do some of the communities—I was doing work in D.C. and Los Angeles. That the funding structures were going to be more challenging that way than something that could be contracted to come in. And I was told at that time that some of the bureaucratic processes for some of the larger organizations that wanted to partner with us would really find it much more difficult to work with us. But Sojourn Theatre is a nonprofit. And that was also heavily advised, in terms of the different perception of the nonprofit in the arts and culture community than in the NGO and Social Service Agency community. So for me it was a choice both times. It’s a really good question because I think it’s very complicated.
Natarajan
It’s a really challenging question. For us, we’ve actually done our work first and raised the money later, whereas with a nonprofit structure you create a project, you ideate it and then you raise funding for it. We’ve never really waited for that. An example, our Indigenous Voices has never raised a single penny. And we’ve done it out of our general operating because we’ve been committed, and now we’re trying to think—okay—we’ve done it for five years now. So it’s really, that’s how a lot of the projects have happened. We’re now trying to raise money for The Journey to Safety. It didn’t have money to begin with. The struggle for that is it takes really committed people around you and the ensemble structure of the company actually helps because they’re really committed people and they’re willing to do it for very little money, but knowing that we’re committed and the money’s going to come later.
O'Neal
I would say a 501(c)3 is sort of like…whether to join 501(c)3
is sort of like whether to join Equity or not. If you anticipate
doing work in Equity houses that require it, you need to join Equity
or SAG or whatever. If you anticipate raising money from tax exempt
sources and accessing that, it may be useful to have a 501(c)3.
A midpoint between having a 501(c)3 and not is having a relationship
with an organization that does have a 501(c)3 that is supportive
of what you wish to do, and you access support through that device,
for a time. Depending on the nature of the project, but… I
guess a central question for me is whether I want to have access
to tax exempt money.
I don’t think that…I’m not frightened by the political
restriction on 501(c)3 money because that restriction is aimed mainly
at people who are trying to affect electoral politics, either directly
or electoral campaigns that are going on, or issues that are being
voted on, you know, initiatives, various initiatives that will actually
be voted on. And then the restriction is only to about a third of
your resources. So for most of us it’s not significant, I
don’t think.
Question
Would you mind talking a little about how your communities understood what you were doing—for those of us in communities who don’t get theatre or art in the first place. Was the media on your side, or was it confused? Can you help us out on that?
Pottenger
I would say I’m the most unlikely person. I’m not the person any of my communities would have chosen to tell anybody’s story. Due to all sorts of confusions on everyone’s part about who people are—they’re prey to the same kind of confusions we all have about people. During the process in some of the stories, I did a show called What It’s Like to Be A Man, and the men loved telling their stories and were kind of alarmed by how deep they went in their stories. By the end of the interview, that was the clarifying process of connection. In Water Tunnel, it didn’t happen until after they saw the show. I mean, I made deep friendships with a lot of people along the way, but it wasn’t until the men—I kind of did a tricky thing and started something called the memorial fund, the people who died were getting very little money and very little honor, so I said the first performance was $100 a ticket and it’s a memorial fund. I knew I had to do something to get the miners to come see a show right at DTW in West 19th Street in Manhattan. Everything was working against that possibility. And they showed out in force, and only until they saw the show and then everybody is my best friend. I mean, literally, they’re like, “Mahty! Mahty! Remember that time I was down in the garage with you…” It’s totally not true, but it’s in front of all the other guys, and so I’m like “Yeah, yeah, that was a good time, my god, we had a good time that night.” [Laughter.] And then Abundance, it was on people’s reputations and saying it’s an okay interview and go ahead and do it. There’s a need for all of us in our lives to really get to follow our own minds and let the world smack us around as necessary, but that’s where the real gold lies, deep.
Question
I have a question, this is a lot for Marty and for Michael I think too. How do you identify the people you ask to participate—politicians and public policy people. And what do you tell them it’s going to be like, especially when you’re bringing them together with people who might have very different opinions. And how do they agree, and how long does that take?
Pottenger
I said before when I accepted the job in Portland I wanted to work with border patrol as part of the community. I worked with the most conservative columnist they have in Maine. I met him several times and he didn’t quite understand why he was saying yes, but he kept saying yes, he said “There’s something about you that’s making me say yes.” And then I tried to bring him into the story circle because I ultimately wanted him in the performance, right, I wanted that voice. And the other people couldn’t, I asked them… He said, “You know, those people are just going to attack me, they are.” I had several talks, I talked to the people who were coalescing to be in the performance and I could tell they weren’t ready, that what it would be to bring in someone who’d said the things in print he’d said, who’d taken the positions he taken. So to me then that just moved that goal further out, further ahead of me. So my plan this next year is I’m doing another version of home land security with the conservative community. So we’ll have the conservative community where there’s safety in that number, and the rest of the people see that show, and we’ll build from there.
Rohd
That’s completely the same idea. It’s all about partner-building and relationships and we always start a project particularly if it’s around a political or social issue by thinking, who’s the person who’s least likely to talk to us? Who’s the person who’d think, “Oh, theatre, they’re lefty, progressive, they’re going to be looking to railroad us, no way.” We start by building partnerships in that community. And we begin by trying to find ways to connect with those voices and those community members and also the partner organizations give a level of credibility so as Marty discusses all the folks who were working with her in Portland, in our Portland, as soon as we got the Oregon Department of Education, the Oregon Historical Society and a teacher college, Lewis & Clark, on board for the public education piece, it was very hard for politicians not to want to talk to us. It’s not hard to get a politician to talk to you. It’s not hard to get a politician to talk! What hard is to: first, go beyond sound bites, that’s the challenge, to have a conversation that isn’t what everybody has already seen and heard, and second, how to get politicians of really different stripes in the same room together having a different conversation, and then third of course, having—they’re hungry on every side of the spectrum to be in a room of citizens who will hear them speak. But how to turn around that conversation so it’s not just them speaking at people, that’s really what’s interesting and it’s really moving for me to see that piece of Marty’s and hear the process she went through, and certainly what we try to do to get people in the room with us. How we get people and give them a sense of expectation is we really deluge, in a way, this community with a sense of this project is happening, here’s the central question. One thing to sort of hang it on. What does public education mean to you today? How as a nation do we decide what to kill and die for? What does justice mean to you? That becomes an invitation and trying to find a question that isn’t loaded.
Leonard
We have time for one more question.
Question
I was wondering how you determine if an idea or question is worth spending a year or two of your life on. You probably have more than one idea. And how do you choose your collaborators? That’s a two-part question.
O'Neal
Well, what we do is think about what the most engaging and interesting issues that we’re concerned about how they are resonating, whether there are people who share our concerns. And we dialogue with partners and with each other and you sort of know it when you find it, you know? You’re constantly looking for it. On the other hand there’s always a lot of material around, you know, a lot of issues. We live in a period in which Western culture is moribund, is falling apart, and Western control of the global economy and culture is just falling apart. And it’s trying to hold on, and we’re right here in the middle of that and it gives us a lot of stuff to look at if we’re willing to look at it. And it’s all part of one big thing. So whatever strand you start pulling on, it’s going to lead you back to the same center. The other thing I would say is dialogue with the people with whom you wish to communicate to see what resonates for them. At least that’s how we attack it.
Rohd
I’d just say the only question worth spending two years on is the question I don’t know the answer to. That’s absolutely at the core of our work.
Leonard
Courage is referred to by some people as an enabling virtue. You people have glorious, generous courage and all of us sitting out here take our hats off to you. Thank you. [Applause.]
Contact conference@tcg.org or Jenni Werner, National Conference Director at 212-609-5900 x233.