Telling and Listening in Public: The Sustainability of Storytelling

In today's isolating climate, when the national culture entices us to stay home and watch television or surf the Internet alone, communities are fracturing and decaying. Bringing people back to talking with each other, sharing their experiences, has become a community-building strategy.

Many artists and community activists are discovering the power and beauty in people telling their own stories, and are incorporating it into their community-building projects. Some use storytelling as a tool to discover content for a publication or a theater production. Others use the story circle to draw members of the community together, or to draw different communities together.

Whatever their motive, most community-builders find the need to sustain story-telling energy over a long period of time, either because the best story circles need time to develop before they offer up the best content, or because the story circle itself has become a valuable community function.

That need to sustain storytelling energy over time is a central question in the work of researcher Chris Dwyer, who looks beyond the short-term objective of a storytelling project, say a theater performance. She is interested in the powerful long-term change in a community that can result from storytelling. "Event-like storytelling opportunities are so popular," said Dwyer in an interview. "An event has power and emotion, but I want to see it happen more than once — not to be just a big community play, but to include other voices, solve problems."

Dwyer is inspired by "people who get hooked on it, for whom it becomes a part of what they do, for whom it's a most visceral part of what they do. That's where transformation occurs. Story becomes part of problem-solving." In her own work as researcher, she is evaluating all kinds of community interactions to find some answers about storytelling: "How does it move from entertainment to being a way of operating over time? How do we attract disempowered people and keep them involved? How do we bring multicultural voices together? What's often exciting is the story that hasn't been told before: What happens to that story?"

I turned to some practitioners with these questions, and others about how they sustain storytelling energy over time, how they have seen depth evolve in the storytelling process, and how new energy is created around storytelling in a community. My interviews brought forth some interesting insights, and, of course, some stories … stories about a shipyard in New Hampshire, neighborhoods in Ohio, a hanging in Appalachia…

Story Builds Community

Jane Hirshberg, producing director at the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in Maryland, has seen several examples of storytelling energy continuing beyond arts projects in which she has been involved. She recalled her first project with the Dance Exchange, in her home town of Portsmouth, N.H. The Dance Exchange conducted a residency in Portsmouth, the Music Hall Shipyard Project, from June 1994 through September 1996. Hirshberg was then director of development and education for the project's presenter, Portsmouth's Music Hall.

The Shipyard Project included major public events, exhibits, on-stage and site-specific performance, storytelling, new music commissioned for local bands and choirs, and community forums, all exploring the role of the city's 200-year-old shipyard in its history, politics, environment and culture. The initial purpose was to focus the community on the implications of the yard's imminent closing. Storytelling was a tool used throughout the project to organize and bond a core group of supporters (the advisory committee, which met monthly), to find information and other sources, to educate nonshipyard people about the history of the shipyard and its workers, and to gather material for the culminating performance.

Storytelling continued to be used as a tool in community building after the Shipyard Project ended, said Hirshberg. Two members of the advisory committee decided they wanted to do something in 2000 to celebrate the shipyard's anniversary and as a millennium celebration for Portsmouth, and they turned to their story circle to accomplish their goals. This led to a mayor's Blue Ribbon Committee to devise an arts-and-culture plan for Portsmouth, using the shipyard group as an advisory committee.

In this project, storytelling brought people together who had never met, and furnished them with information about a powerful force on the history and dynamics of their community. Choreographer Liz Lerman talked about the enormous amount of energy for the Portsmouth project that was generated during the advisory committee meetings: "Every meeting there was storytelling — they were huge and went on for hours." Lerman said it's often individuals in the community who keep the storytelling energy afloat. "In Portsmouth," she said, "there's a fifth-grade teacher who stayed with her class through sixth grade. They collected stories and we worked with those in performance. She got so excited she spearheaded the next community project, in poetry. She learned her tools through our project."

And one or two members of the committee are joining the Dance Exchange's current work, Hallelujah! — a project happening in communities all over the U.S. The Dance Exchange is attempting to keep energy flowing through the many projects by using a regular Internet newsletter, passing stories and events throughout the network of participants.

For Hallelujah!, the company is engaged in projects in several states, making serious demands on the company's time. This has raised obstacles to sustaining story circles in some locations — each of which has its own local presenter and local organizing committee. The dance company will visit several times over the course of each collaboration. One project in the southwest, said Hirshberg, flagged in energy every time the company left town because the project grew to be very large, and the presenter did not keep things going. "Dance Exchange had to go in and connect each time," said Hirshberg. "People were collected by the presenter, but not maintained." Cultural organizer Theresa Holden found the same problem in a large arts project she worked on in the same region. "Spirit in community will die unless there's someone calling the meeting," said Holden.

Keeping the Energy Going

"There's no magic you can do to make a particular group continue its life," said Holden. "You have to understand that community development sinks its roots and becomes sustainable only in fits and starts. It's like the process of matchmaking, the chemistry of dating. Out of 15 people, maybe only two have a ‘click' about the idea, what's needed, what feels good. It's personal. You have to let it build over time, with nurturing, technical support, and slowly and surely it will build. If it has been forced on them, and they haven't found a personal reason to come, it won't work."

Holden has a number of community-building projects under her belt, one of which is the Dayton Story Project, a three-year process that resulted in performances and a story bank. Segments of the community of Dayton, Ohio, were brought together to discuss the history of ethnic or racial groups in the history of the city. There were many story circles participating over the three years: a Jewish circle, two African-American, two Appalachian, one Polish, one German, one circle of elders the same age and one circle of environmentally concerned people.

All the original story circles were still meeting in 2000 — five years after the "project" was over. Why? The long, slow process of building community, said Holden. "It took an entire year to get it off the ground in the first place," said Holden. "Five circles dropped and four new ones started." The story circles gradually became strong entities, said Holden, working for a whole year before they showed their stories inside their own communities, mostly in their churches and groups of families. In the second year, the circles were brought together with other circles incrementally, through potluck suppers, and they became each other's audiences. In the third year they participated in the National Folk Festival in Dayton, working in the storytelling tent with professional tellers. Finally they performed Dayton Stories, a performance curated and orchestrated, using representatives from all the story circles. It was performed four times. Throughout the process, a regular newsletter was produced, creating a network with stories in print. Those stories are now collected in an archive at the Dayton Historical Society, where they are available to be used by others when developing articles, performances, dance pieces and other projects.

Contrary to what seems obvious, the performances and the story bank were not held up as the objects of the project in the beginning. "If the product gets in front of it, there's no way people can relax and build community," says Holden. "They fear they have to be artists and can't be themselves any more. What you need is people's own strengths. If they see it as 'arty' or theatery,' that detracts from making a sustainable group.

"I remember having meetings with artists where we decided not to tell the participants we were going to perform. The purpose handed out to them was that it was important to find the stories of the city of Dayton. It was unknown how they would share these. This gave them a tremendous sense of what community really is: what role they played in developing a neighborhood and what's happened to the neighborhood since then. Over and over what we learned was that this is the kind of thing that is needed.

"Now the story circles continue with no funding whatsoever. They became a form of people being together. They were people who didn't know each other before. The African-American group has moved into action. They chose some activist things to address, and have started teaching the story-circle method to others."

Thus, a larger goal appears, beyond the art project that drew people together. Actual community building occurs. "If they coalesce and work well together," Holden went on, "those people will carry it in a rippling circle into what they do. The City Council in Dayton is using the method to strengthen a team in the workplace. Out of a project in New Orleans, two different youth groups are using the method to empower groups and meetings in housing projects."

Keeping the Real Story Alive

Responding to Chris Dwyer's question about untold stories and what happens to them, theater artist Dudley Cocke reflected on his play Red Fox/Second Hangin', written with Don Baker. "Here you can compare written history with oral history," said Cocke, "and find the oral history more accurate. This play was the result of 90 years of a story being told; we made it more public. It was being told in family circles, in kinship gatherings, neighborhood gatherings. We took it to public discourse with the play."

The story, said Cocke, is the true account of the hanging of M.B. "Doc" Taylor (a medical doctor, preacher and U.S. marshal called the Red Fox) and a law-and-order campaign by Northern speculators for the purpose of establishing their Appalachian coal-mining operations in the last decade of the 19th Century. The official history, said Cocke, not only defamed Taylor, it undermined the reputation of a people. "The official story paints the Appalachian people as backward, ignorant, standing in the way of progress, living a subhuman life," said Cocke. This portrait of mountain people, he said, is part of the colonial mythology of the U.S., voiced in John Fox Jr.'s Trail of the Lonesome Pine, one of the first million-seller novels in the country. "Fox came here to make a bundle in coal," said Cocke, from his home in Big Stone Gap, Va. "This was to be the Pittsburgh of the South. Enlightened industrialists were bringing light to the backward mountain people. It's about the coming of capitalism. Red Fox was painted as a madman.

"In our research we thought we'd just flesh out and color the official history," said Cocke. "We had no idea there was another story. We had no agenda. Talking to people we found this counter-history." Spurred by the difference, and fueled by energy he'd absorbed by working with the Washington Post in the post-Watergate era, Cocke did research into the "official story," finding data that disputed the accepted view of Fox and the Appalachians. "We found out Doc Taylor was trying to escape a murder rap," said Cocke. Interviewing people in the region, some of whom had known Taylor, they discovered the real story had never been officially told by local witnesses, for fear of retaliation by those in power. Since the play, consciousness has been raised in the region, and the play is often referenced in further tellings of the story. "Taylor has become something of a hero on his own terms, with a clear set of values, and not some nut," said Cocke. "You can imagine how this impacted the family. They'd always know the truth. From time to time it needs to be told in public."

Red Fox/Second Hangin' was produced by Roadside Theater and is included in their repertoire at home in Appalachia and on the road. It has had several performances off-Broadway, has been published in an anthology and is available from Roadside as a video. The video is making the rounds of cable-access television stations, "without permission," says Cocke, "but we let that slide for this other agenda. It's important for the Red Fox story to be told over and over again, lest a revisionist view take hold, written with a political agenda in mind. You have to get the story into the public discourse." And so the local story lives on.

What's the Objective?

Some practitioners insist on storytelling projects having firm goals, be they artistic or social, and others prefer that they have no purpose at all, other than continuing to bring people together across boundaries. But do those visions affect the energy of the project?

Organizer John Suter is one who believes that a storytelling project needs a specific outcome, "something you can recognize when it's done." He is not attracted to the idea of "community building" per se, and feels that is a romantic term, with a nostalgic tinge. What sustains a group is not the idea of community, he said, but a sense of what they can accomplish together. The Ithaca Planning Alliance, for instance, stopped a Wal-Mart from being inserted into their community, but "it took a while to figure out what the issues were, and we went through a stagnant period. If stories are a tool for community building, you need a sense of direction, and a way to measure. If storytelling is a tool that's incorporated into a process to meet a goal, it can be powerful, but I think storytelling itself can't sustain anything but a small group of people who love to tell stories."

In the process of creating some of her arts projects, Liz Lerman has discovered that the community did not need her company to jump-start its storytelling energy — it was alive and well. Lerman recalled two instances in which her arts projects uncovered storytelling as an existing asset to the cultures of two towns.

During a Hallelujah! Residency in Eastport, Maine, Lerman led a storytelling session that had nothing to do with the performance, an event that simply pointed out the existence and value of storytelling already operating in the town. "It was a session about fishing, in a diner with old fisherman," she said. "The place was packed. They were trading stories for beer. There was a long, narrow counter, with the ‘audience' in dinettes. The storytellers sat with their backs to the audience." The event was part of the Dance Exchange festival in Eastport and was advertised all over town: "Come & tell, come & listen."

Something similar happened during the Vermont Hallelujah!, titled "In Praise of Constancy in the Midst of Change." A participant in the process bowed out on a Monday night because she had to "go play cards." It turned out a group of women had been playing cards together in the town every Monday night for more than 40 years. The whole Hallelujah! team went to the card-playing group and found it was really a weekly storytelling session. "There were the old standards — you know, ‘remember the one … tell the one …'. They didn't stop playing cards the whole time." The card-players felt themselves validated by the attention, remarking, "We didn't know they had a name for this." The project reinforced many of the town's traditions, and Lerman reports that people told her, "You make us feel better about who we are."

Both events produced well-polished stories — and participants — for Hallelujah!

The Outsiders and the Insiders

Community-building projects often use "outsiders" to help broker a community collaboration. I asked practitioners about the role of the outsider in sustaining storytelling energy. The people I talked with had played that role in many different capacities and had a wide spectrum of points of view on the subject.

Jane Hirshberg sees the need for an "outside eye," a catalytic force that can cause things to happen. "Sometimes you do need an outsider to come in," said Jane Hirshberg, "because they can see things you can't see any more. But that person needs to be the artist. The ‘brokering' is done by the artist." But Hirshberg believes the person who sustains momentum in the project has to be an insider, "the person on the ground," a role she calls the project director. That is a person who knows everyone in the community and is there full-time.

Ideally, Hirshberg sees a whole team of collaborating organizers and representatives supporting the work in the community, both insiders and outsiders.

Hirshberg outlined her model for the ideal project.

• People in the community provide interest and involvement in the issue of the project.
• The presenter — an arts or community organization usually, and sometimes a partnership of organizations — acts as the sponsor.
• The project director is someone living in the community who is hired to call the meetings and watch the details.
• The producing director (Hirshberg) represents the artist in the project and sits at the table to bring the artist's perspective and organizing expertise, acting as a kind of "middle man."
• The artist is the creative catalyst who brings the different elements together.
• The presenter and the project director are usually insiders. The producing director and the artist may be local or may be outsiders.

Hirshberg sees the project director, "the person on the ground," as the one who keeps the momentum going. That person is key, she says, to contact with the community. Often a community member wants to contribute a story spontaneously, outside the story-circle structure. "That's the way we sometimes end up building things by accident," said Hirshberg, "and you have to capture the informational moment or it can get lost. If that person has to call the presenter, the rep may not choose to hear it for one reason or another."

In reality, most projects do not have the resources to support this kind of team. Because of economic constraints, the team may be made up of part-timers, and the outsider members are not always present, but dropping in and out of town. Sometimes, for economic reasons, the project director and the presenter representative are the same person, but that is not ideal, said Hirshberg.

Portrait of an Organizer

Theresa Holden agrees with Hirshberg, and see the project director (the organizer) as someone independent, who is hired to protect the project's mission and equity for all. "If the organizer is from the presenter's staff or is hired by the presenter," said Holden, "then they get identified with the presenter. You need to be enough removed from the ‘boss' figure [who controls the budget] to say things like, ‘This community is strapped and overwhelmed. They can't do what you are expecting them to do.' You have to be able to speak for all those people and not just the person who's got the money."

Theresa Holden came into the Dayton Story Project because she was associated with Roadside Theater and Junebug Productions, the artist partners. But she was hired by the whole partnership of the project to serve as cultural organizer. "I was to be the eye for equity amongst all the communities and artists. I had a clear connection to Roadside and Junebug, but I got completely immersed in the communities and was able to tell the artists, ‘What you usually do won't work here.' I was the caretaker of the goal, the mission that was agreed upon, and my goal was to protect the common goal." That's why it is important, said Holden, to have the agreed-upon goal written down, an action that should occur in the planning stage, but is often overlooked.

"If the partners haven't arrived at a common purpose, there's no way a community organizer can help it happen," said Holden. "I have to be available from the beginning in planning meetings and hear the language people are using, and question them. I don't think you can bring the organizer in after the purpose has been decided upon."

Holden feels that any project involving artists needs an organizer with arts experience. "There are some wonderful community organizations in the world, but they get completely befuddled when working with artists," she said. For an arts-involved project, Holden feels a good organizer must be a person who:

• Has an appreciation for art.
• Knows how to articulate to people what's going to be happening.
• Understands the language the artists are using.
• Is close to the artists in the project, or does a short intensive course with them, watches them conduct a class, talks to them about their values and why they want to do cultural work, because s/he will have to articulate that to the project.
• Knows the project's "issue" backwards and forwards and is able to articulate it.
• Visits with every single community leader.
• Understands who s/he is "fighting for" in the community and talk to them too.
• Listens for local language.
• Plans meetings with all leaders together.
• Knows a precise method of facilitating to make sure all voices are heard.
• Gets participants to name their purpose in the project, what they agree on and what resources they will present.
• Performs frequent check-in points and mini-evaluation sessions.
• Reassesses the whole project at checkpoints set out at the beginning.
• Gives feedback on what s/he is hearing.

Holden stressed that the project director must offer the proper technical support to the work. When asked what she means by that, she stated emphatically, "I mean someone willing to make phone calls, distribute flyers, create phone trees, do pick-up and delivery, call the meeting. The nitty-gritty, old-fashioned community organizing — grassroots, personal word-of-mouth, person-to-person. Typical advertising won't work. I'm talking about canvassing, walking streets."

Clearly, in Holden's view, sustainability depends on making the right choices from the very beginning of a project, making sure the right people are involved, that they are aware of the issues of their involvement, and that lines of communication are clear from the start.

The Aesthetics and the Givens

Artist Suzanne Lacy believes that one of the most important jobs of the cultural organizer is as collaborator with the artist(s). She will not begin a project that she can't live with, let alone sustain. This means knowing a lot about those with whom she will be working, and — most important — knowing their values.

She herself often takes on the role of organizer in her large public art projects, and has served in all capacities required of such projects. Lacy said she was prepared for that because she trained both in art and in community organizing, in VISTA, in D.C and the South, and studied the methods of organizer Saul Alinksy. She says a similar path was followed by many artists who came of age in the '60s, but "what has happened in the intervening years is a cultural phenomenon larger than the arts: Young people became depoliticized. What this means is that young artists today might need such community-organizing support, might need a political partner who works to negotiate between art and community, leaving them to focus more on the art."

When she collaborates with an organizer, whether one or the other is an outsider, Lacy believes it is crucial that they share, or understand, each other's aesthetic. "I won't, I can't do an image I am not in love with," said Lacy, "and the people I work with and who perform with me won't do it unless they believe in what we are doing together. Mutual agreement. So the question of the cultural organizer becomes one of (1) my ability to agree with the political vision of that person (and I must know enough, or educate myself enough, to understand political analysis and have a political vision), and (2) the cultural organizer's aesthetic, and whether it coincides enough with mine to collaborate."

With regard to the evolution of depth in a story exchange, cultural organizer John Suter looked first at obstacles to that depth: making sure participants are not too angry or suspicious or intimidated to talk honestly. Outsiders can bring people to the table in contentious situations in a way a local cannot, said Suter. As an example he brought up a recent New York State Archives project to fill in "gaps" in the historical record on various topics. This led him into a thorny discussion with Latino communities in New York, whose history is one of the Archives' gaps. The overall group, he says, exhibits two major splits: between those living upstate and downstate, and between Puerto Ricans and immigrants. (Puerto Ricans are migrants, not immigrants, a fact that is sometimes overlooked.) Problems of identity are rampant. Suter has become painfully aware that the term "Latino" sweeps all Spanish-speaking peoples under one convenient heading — convenient only for white or black people. "Latinos" do not find the term useful or authentic within that group.

"We needed an intern who was fluent in Spanish," said Suter. "The one we found learned the language in Spain, so he was clearly in nobody's camp. But even if groups aren't antagonistic, somebody who's not a stakeholder can bring people to the table without them being concerned the conversation is being leveraged in one way or another. But in areas of rivalry or tension, the organizer needs to be someone sensitive to the issues."

Awareness of the nature of his own role in any given project is important, said Suter. Taking on too many functions can prove problematic. "I believe that brokering role should be a background role, like the arranging of space. My role is not one of agency, but catalytic." When working as a presenter in the San Diego area, Suter got himself into hot water. "There have been situations where I've been granting money or selecting artists for a festival, where I was a broker, but did have the final say — who's on stage, etc. We were bringing in a Korean troupe to perform, and I found myself in a split between people from or in sympathy with North or South Korea. It was extremely emotional. I got allied or identified with one group over the other, and had to work my way out of that."

Suter finds himself more useful in a catalytic role. "The catalyst allows a chemical change to happen, but isn't part of that change."

Suter, a self-described "tall WASP," frequently finds himself in conversations with other ethnic groups, and says this makes his "outsider" status convenient. "There's a level of superficiality," he said, "so I'm able to broker some things, but I am not completely taken into any group. My guess is, being a white person working with different groups of people of color, there is a perception that I represent the dominant culture and there's built-in racism. That's a given, and there's no surprise when I make a mistake. If it's a given, it doesn't become a focus, especially when the goal is building community."

Suter has worked with many American Festival Projects, which are often multiracial. "The people involved are very upfront, and do retreats about it (racism). There are enough ‘isms' around that everybody is an oppressor in one way or another. It's explicit that we'll be making mistakes. It's a given. They come in in an open and loving way and it's ideal. More often, the givenness isn't expressed and people will be more or less reticent."

Researcher Chris Dwyer sees outsiders and insiders as having different catalyzing roles to play. "The roles have to be crafted so it's not like a hit-and-run or leaves a large void afterwards. External people have a role catalyzing energy, enlarging the voices, bringing new perspectives. But the outsider has to transfer over the relationship internally so storytelling can happen again. In the Canada projects we looked at, someone living in the community was more successful than someone hired." There has to be a preparatory period in the community before an outsider comes in, said Dwyer. "You have to think about what the community needs to know about bringing someone in; when do ‘we' take over? What should be the quality of those relationships? You don't have to think about those things as an insider. The outsider has to anticipate them."

Heroes, Villains and Society

A powerful scenario delineating the roles of insider and outsider was drawn by Richard Owen Geer, a theater artist who helps develop performance works "of, by and for" communities around the country. In this process, he is almost always the outsider. In this scenario, the project's creative energy is a result of the artist being the outsider and the organizer being a local.

"There's a great book about the mythic structure of story and its relationship to popular art, Sixguns and Society," said Geer.

It examines the great westerns from the '30s to the '50s and asks what they have in common. The answer is, without real exception, that they are structured as myths. The stories all contain three clearly defined groups: The Heroes, The Villains and Society. In doing this, they noticed that the Heroes and Villains were both strangers, while the Society was made up of Neighbors. In our mythic understanding, Heroes are properly strangers.

The hero is similar to the outside artist. This Stranger leads the journey to community performance. The Neighbor (the local leader), by contrast, gets everyone organized in support of the effort. Neighbor can do that because she knows the local network. But at the head of the column when the marching starts is the Stranger.

Why should this be so? Why not a Neighbor as writer or director?

The Stranger sees possibility that is invisible to the Neighbor. We'll follow the Neighbor to the edge of the cliff, but only a Stranger can get us to jump. This is a folie a deux surely: We don't know the Stranger well enough to know she can't teach flying, the Stranger doesn't know us well enough to know we haven't got wings. Working as a team, the impossible can be glimpsed, sometimes even achieved.

The Stranger sees simply, unencumbered by too much information. The stranger can glimpse essence. The Stranger can speak freely and not gatekeep. Gatekeeping is always present for the Neighbor, who knows what needs to be hidden, what can be shown, what must be altered before it is shown.

The Stranger may bring real expertise, expertise not at the moment available in the community. And with good collaboration, the Stranger will have access to detail through relationship with the Neighbors.

Conclusion

Through these interviews we have learned that storytelling can become a part of the ongoing life of a community if it has been introduced or highlighted in a way that energizes those who participate, through a well-designed arts project or a particularly skillful organizer. A story project can preserve community stories that deserve to be told, and that experience can rewrite the story of a community itself. A sensitive outsider can point out the uses of storytelling already feeding the culture of a town, thus providing sustenance to that energy. Energy and depth in a storytelling project is aided by a project director who understands his/her role, has a well thought-out plan and a dedication to the project mission, understands the aesthetic and the issues involved in the project, and is willing to contribute solid technical support.

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

Christine Dwyer is co-owner and co-manager of RMC Research in Portsmouth, N.H.

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

Jane Hirshberg is producing director of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. She is based in Portsmouth, N.H.

Theresa Holden is a cultural organizer who directs The Artist and Community Connection in Austin, Tex.

Suzanne Lacy is a performance artist who directs the Center for Service Learning and Community at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, Calif.

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

John Suter is a folklorist with the New York Folklore Association.

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

Original CAN/API publication: February 2001