Of the People, By the People, and For the People: The field of community performance

One concern that unites the artists who appear in this book is their fascination with the charged relationship between the artist and the public. Within that broad field there are many levels of artistic intent, and many levels of engagement by the public. In this essay, theater director Richard Owen Geer attempts to define those various levels—in performance, and by extension, in the arts in general. At the time of this essay, Geer was especially focused on community performance, since he was deeply involved in a collaboration with a whole town. Geer, Tennessee writer Jo Carson and the citizens of Colquitt, Georgia, created Swamp Gravy, a piece that arose from the oral history of Colquitt's people, was performed by them and owned by them. It continued after Geer's return to his home in Chicago, and eventually became the State of Georgia's official "folklife play." Geer's meditation on performance is presented here as a preface to this anthology, in the hope that it will provide some context for the art that follows. —Eds.

As the anthropologist listened to the Native American informants his excitement rose. They explained the meaning of the designs embroidered on the sashes of the kachina dancers. He noted a pattern in their responses and began to form an hypothesis about the meaning of the designs. Then one of the Hopis asked an awkward question: "Why are you paying no attention to the most important fact?" Abashed, the anthropologist asked what he had overlooked. "The sash," the Hopi responded incredulously. "Without it the designs would not even exist."

The anthropologist's problem is, I think, a metaphor for theater in our culture. Most American theater misses the fact that its matrix and support is the community. As a consequence, theater is self-absorbed, as if it were a universe unto itself.

Community performance, by contrast, is in service to community as the senses are in service to the body. Community performance signals a breadth of practices, and distinguishes it from community theater. Community performance is synonymous with community change.

When a community performs its beliefs and traditions it makes meaning. Fuel, oxygen and heat are required to make fire, and a similar relationship exists between the elements in community performance. People are the fuel, their beliefs and traditions the oxygen, and performance is the heat. Metaphorically, fire and performance are similar. Fire makes nutrients available for digestion and provides illumination and warmth. Performance cooks experience into meaning, provides illumination and security. In tribal societies fire and performance occur at the community's center.

Our tribal forbears applied stage rules to ordinary life. Modern performers know that on stage everything matters, and our tribal ancestors knew that in life everything mattered. The first is called stage performance, the second community performance. Mythologies that teach the sacredness of everything are artifacts of community performance.

Once performative communities stretched from Asia to Europe, Africa and the Americas, but over the span of European history and the conquest of America, community performance attenuated. An important event happened in 1844. That year the telegraph began reporting news as it happened from geographically remote locations. Events were not influenced by the distant audience, nor were the observers' lives affected—except emotionally. Faraway dramas pulled people's attention away from the neighborhood. Community performance was doomed as well by America's territorial imperative. Land that is "there for the taking" is not sacred land. Explorers who claim, settlers who grab, miners who stake, mark out the fault lines of a shift in community belief away from Chief Seattle's image of the brotherhood of living things, or Black Elk's vision of an all-sacred creation, a performative world.

Native Americans shaped tribal life through local varieties of community performance and everyone participated in the group task of culture building. By the early 1880s the Oglala Sioux were a depressed people whose culture was being dismembered by America's manifest destiny. Black Elk, a warrior and medicine man, had a dream in which a whole and holy world was re-membered. Black Elk taught every being in his village, even the horses, to perform his healing vision; everybody sang and smoked the pipe. Afterwards, he said, even the horses were healthier and happier.

But as factories replaced forests the patterns of performance shifted. Like the telegraph, 19th century European American theater carried no local information. Instead it broadcast a "one size fits all" brand of entertainment created by a cultural elite. This professionalized performance genre used play to cloak its culture-shaping work. Theaters were factories for the production of mass culture. Theaters herded people into stalls and milked them for applause, laughter or tears. Audiences oiled the machine with money and submitted to it in respectful silence as it milled them to the dimensions of consuming commodities.

This specialization, this distillation, cost performance its "central driving place" in culture, said anthropologist Victor Turner. In the good old days before commodification, performance was diffused in the community. It welled up to mark the passage of ordinary people as water does to fill a footprint, and each muddy step reflected a little patch of sky. Community performance didn't create stars—distant individual points of light surrounded by darkness—it had humble and direct uses. It created community autobiography in what anthropologist Barbara Meyerhoff called "definitional ceremonies." It took over from play the job of teaching older children in a mimesis called apprenticeship. In times of high emotion, at the death of a loved one for instance, it allowed people to modulate their feelings. It bound the community in times of crisis, honed skills and effected changes in relationships between people and things. It wasn't all serious. It was dances, celebrations, enacted storytelling, carnivals and cross-dressing. It wasn't always kind. It was mobs, shunnings and mass hysteria as well. But it was community life. Through it people gained perspective on themselves, their actions and their group. And when the images were especially bright and clear as with the Horse Dance of Black Elk, a single performance—enacted by everyone—could transform a community.

In 1951 Maryat Lee devised a modern variant on the ancient tradition of tribal performance. Lee, a young white woman with a loathing for traditional theater, went to Harlem on a dare. There she facilitated a piece of street theater based on the utterances of gang members and performed by the youngsters themselves. Dope!, in the early '50s, was a theatrical and social aberration. In spite of its success—a spread in Life, Variety and inclusion in The Best Short Plays of 1952-53—no one wanted to fund further work, nor was anyone in 1951 interested in fashioning amateur theater from oral history. Lee had to wait until 1975 to create EcoTheater in West Virginia. EcoTheater (the name means "a place to see one's home") regularly produces oral history-based scripts and performs them with local nonactors.

Lee's friend, Ossie Davis, labeled this way of working theater of, by and for the community. In the '60s artists made protest theater. In the mid-'70s, with the cessation of the Vietnam War, the temperature of confrontation dropped and conciliatory performance practices began to appear. As the political climate became more conservative in the '80s, liberalizing performance processes like Lee's, designed to work within conservative communities, appeared.

Performance that defines itself through some kind of relationship with community comes in a wide range of types, from sensational dramas that exploit the local culture to original productions engineered by the community to catalyze cultural change. These extremes are the edges of a poorly defined field of practices. What are they? What are the advantages/disadvantages of each? Can a given performance process be analyzed? Can one predict outcomes? It is possible to shed some light on these questions through the use of the terms of, by and for? Singly and in combination they characterize practices and reveal pitfalls in the terrain of community performance.

Community can be defined in one of three ways, according to Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theatres South): by location, spirit or tradition. Communities of location are neighborhoods or towns. Communities of spirit convene around beliefs or values; far-flung examples might be Catholics, gays and Trekkies. Communities of tradition are groups constituted around shared activities and maintained over time through these activities; college fraternities and Americans of Armenian origin are examples. I will not count theater-goers as a community. First, because all theater thereby becomes a variety of community performance; second, because theater-goers do not bring community identity with them to the theater. Baz Kershaw, in his valuable book on this subject, The Politics of Performance, suggests that for social change —the hallmark of community performance—to result, the audience must be constituted as a community before the event. A congenial audience of Chicago theater-goers watching the touring production of Miss Saigon are not, therefore, a community; the multi-ethnic residents of Chicago's Howard Street gathering to watch150 of their neighbors perform a play about the neighborhood are. Many groups fit in two categories, and it is a feature of tribes that they comprise all three.

"Of," for the purposes of this discussion, means "about" or concerning; theater that is of the community is about the community. "By" means through the agency of; theater that is by the community is created (storied, written, performed and produced) by the community members themselves. "For" means in the presence of and in support of a previously constituted community. I have added the second phrase, "in support of," to denote social responsibility. Dope dealers, for instance, perform for a community but they do not act in support of it.

Point of view is a critical determinant of the degree of community performance. My Beloved Blue Coast by the Yakut Drama Theatre of Siberia may be community performance to its author and cast, but not to the Chicago audiences who saw its tour; therefore I will specify point of view under each category.

The Spectrum of Community Performance

Of, by and for create the following eight categories of performance:

Not Of, By or For: Most professional theater in America fits into this category. Nonlocal events written about by nonlocal playwrights are performed by nonlocal actors for a noncommunity of local theater-goers.

Of: Performance that is about a particular community but that is neither by it nor in support of it. According to Appalachian writer Jo Carson, Robert Schenkkan's Kentucky Cycle is about her culture, but its violence, sensationalism and cultural voyeurism code the performance as neither by the community nor for it. The cachet of such a performance is exploitation.

For: Performance directed at a particular community but neither about it nor by it. The performance of Catholicism in black parishes before Vatican II was for those communities, but the performance of Catholicism by white priests and nuns employing white images did not reflect black experience. An attribute of such performance is alienation.

By: The Theater Laboratory of Jerzy Grotowski was a center for research into the actor's art. With unlimited time and absolute concentration, the nature of acting could be fully explored. Laboratory productions were based on classic Polish and international texts, but their essence lay in the specific artistry of the group that created them. One cannot imagine another company doing Akropolis, nor an actor besides Ryszard Cieslak playing the Constant Prince. Communally created performance whose tour de force style overwhelms other aspects is theater by a community. Who watches it (for), or what community is revealed in its content (of) are relatively unimportant. Though the artistry may be stunning, even overwhelming, as an audience member I remain detached, aware that my presence as spectator contributes almost nothing.

Of & By: Lexington, Kentucky's community performance group Working Class Kitchen performed theater of and by their community at the 1993 Alternate ROOTS Annual Meeting in North Carolina. The Hevehe tribal dancers of New Guinea compete against other tribes for cash prizes at annual government-sponsored tourist jamborees. Whether performance of and by one community for another is sharing or exploitation is dependent on other factors.

Of & For: In the late '70s, Dakota Theatre Caravan created theater for and about the people of rural South Dakota. Their work, based on the oral histories of the region's people and performed by college students on summer vacation, was a huge popular success. In the '60s, white middle-class college students from my undergraduate school created street theater to show farm workers how to resist oppression. In both cases the performances were of and for previously constituted communities. Following are two polar opinions of the value of this type of performance. Dakota Theatre Caravan's founder Doug Paterson: "[T]o identify with a people," he said, "to be theatermakers who were as much a part of the community as a grocery store clerk, homemaker or gas station attendant, and to root one's work deeply in the people's lives and stories—this was a step toward cultural alliance." Paterson asserts that the cast was part of the community, but a few weeks of sensitive and respectful work doesn't qualify one for community membership. And, though the performance was adapted from the stories of the people, it was created by the collective labor of the young company. Here is Maryat Lee's opinion of such work:

Street theater died...because...not one of the companies, not one, had street people on the stages...[T]hey were well-intentioned theater folks bringing culture to the streets, or they were activists wanting to stir the people up to action 'for their own good.' They were, in fact, deadly and shortsighted...The naïveté of asking theater people to perform the oral histories belonging to the people is mind boggling.

The bright side of this kind of theater is cultural alliance—Theatre Caravan's success probably resulted from it. The other side of theater of and for can be condescension and appropriation.

By & For: I am not convinced this is a real category, but what it reveals about performance is useful. If a performance is by and for a community it is almost surely about it, though the relationship may be disguised. In performance, texts can be inscribed with community-specific information—Iron Curtain-era East European productions of Shakespeare, for instance. Such codes may be invisible to oppressors even as they broadcast to the oppressed. In the slave South, spirituals imparted information for living the while appearing to speak of the life to come; people in the community where I work remember that "Wade in the Water" was sung to divert the overseer's attention and signal the runaway that it was safe to ford the river to freedom. In another guise, this category is the theatrical equivalent of myth, and speaks to the unconscious through image and metaphor. Performance that is by and for but not, apparently, of employs distance and metaphor to deal with important issues.

Of, By, & For: A community performing its own culture for its own ends is community performance. This type of performance, according to England's John McGrath, can accomplish several things: enrich cultural identity, amplify marginal voices, attack cultural homogeneity, increase community self-determination and challenge the dominant power structure.

Even with these eight categories, I am still left to ask the question: Which of them are community performance? Since pure community performance—of the people, by the people, for the people—probably does not exist outside isolated a-literate societies, it is pointless to set purity as the standard. It is probably not even desirable. On the contrary, optimal community performance may be aided by the Other. Outsiders can bring in a fresh eye. Outsiders, too, are free from obligation, and can enable culturally democratic art.

The boundaries of communities shift with time; exploitation can become advocacy and vice versa. Theater that is of and for may become of, for and by through performers putting down roots in that community. Some performers begin by performing their Otherness, their very lack of community. They start as irritations and end as a pearls, communities solidifying around the spirit that their performances define. Other performance workers teach their skills to members of a community not their own, and assist in creating theater that is (ironically) of, by and for everyone but themselves. All these are community performance. All these link back (in Latin "re-ligio") to the roots of performance in the soil of ordinary life.

True community performance is not an event but a continuous cycle. Through it the community is able to see itself and respond. Generically, we call this cycle "art-imitating-life-imitating-art." It's out of whack in our culture. Instead of community performance that bonds small-scale human groups in networks of mutuality, we are plagued by the global performance of numberless, often destructive, fads (copy-cat killings, skyjackings, etc.). The major feature of rapid, performative, global social change is its insensitivity to local environments. This alienation defines our existence.

Contrast our system of local indifference and distant involvement with a natural ecosystem. In ecosystems, organisms respond to changes in their immediate vicinity. Planetary ecology is nothing more than the network of such locally sensitive ecosystems. The current trend toward community-based solutions acknowledges this eco-truth and strives to put it in practice at the local level. In the task of bringing awareness back home and perspective back to the neighborhood, community performance can fill a vital ecological niche.

This essay originally appeared in High Performance magazine, Winter 1994.

Original CAN/API publication: September 2002