The Ecology of Theater-in-community: A Field Theory

Wendell Berry understands the idea of culture by way of its etymological cousin, agriculture. The traditions, new ideas and interactions that generate systems of human meaning-making are like the particular soil, amount of rainfall and growing season that determine the particularities of plant life. Sandy soil is not better than loamy soil: the former gets you blueberries, the latter mushrooms. That genre of theater that stays close to its origins in terms of place, ethnicity or circumstances, sometimes known as grassroots or community-based, is the subject of this essay. These sources account for intimate interaction with audiences and can also contribute to the making of great theater. This model flies in the face of the conventional wisdom that art making is a self-contained process weakened by close community involvement.

Linda Burnham, Steven Durland, Ann Kilkelly and Bob Leonard invited me to write this essay to put into context a study they instigated, "Performing Communities: The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project." "Performing Communities" generated 1,000 pages of interviews with artists, staff, audiences and extended community members of eight ensembles: Carpetbag, Cornerstone, Dell'Arte, Jump-Start, LAPD (Los Angeles Poverty Department), Pregones, Roadside and WagonBurner. I’ll introduce these companies by the characteristics that link them strongly enough to manifest a field, especially the primacy of place, deep interaction with constituents, and commitment to goals including and exceeding the creation of great theater. I'll also point out differences among them that confound the simple definition with which this field has been plagued. These theaters are part of a great tradition of art in community context, as I'll sketch out in a section on historical sources. I'll describe the political ramifications of their various aesthetic approaches and the mechanisms by which they are grounded in their communities.

I have identified the linked characteristics of these theaters as: primacy of place, deep interaction with constituents and commitment to goals including and exceeding the creation of great theater. In fact, these characteristics are not just linked, they are inseparable from each other. Dedication to a place both engenders and arises from interaction with the people in that place. Deep interaction with the people both arises from and engenders need to make great theater and to go beyond that.

The social ecosystem I am describing situates these ensembles somewhere between theater and ritual. In grassroots theater, communities are involved with the art before, during, and after productions; as in ritual, they are necessary to the art's existence in ways well beyond economic support. Unlike mainstream professional shows, a grassroots theater production in New Haven could not as likely have been created in Minneapolis or Washington, D.C. Whereas many of the same actors, directors and designers work at various mainstream theaters, you can't move all the local people who contribute in some way to grassroots productions. The word audience does not convey the pervasiveness of spectatorial interaction in grassroots theater. As scholar Richard Schechner said of ritual: "There is no audience participation in primeval or contemporary shamanistic performances because there is no audience. Rather there are circles of increasing intensity" (Schechner 1973: 243). Ritual performances (whether sacred as a church service or secular as a political inauguration) need the community because they assert "the group's shared and unquestionable truths" (Myerhoff 1978: 32). On the other hand, theater is open, contingent; a choice, not an obligation; an experiment, an "imagine if." The theaters in this field are on a continuum, not totally theater or ritual, any given production manifesting some measure of each.

Ritual is associated with efficacy, getting something done. Theater is associated with entertainment, often interpreted as the obligation to not get anything done but rather to exist for its own sake. Let both theater projects exist! Like those blueberries and mushrooms, different forms of cultural expression contribute different and valuable nutrients and flavors. Then too, it's not always obvious where efficacy or entertainment may take place. "Efficacy" is part of an ecosystem; a production is transformed by contemporary circumstances. One of my most efficacious experiences at the theater was at a Broadway production of "Falsettos" in 1992. As the characters mourned the loss of Whizzer to AIDS, I wept at the loss of my dear pal David, and inadvertently leaned in to the stranger to my left. He, weeping with an abandon that also seemed to transcend the death of the character, leaned in to me, communicating great empathy. Everywhere I saw weeping spectators, and felt that the theatrical event had transformed into a mass public funeral for our beloveds lost to AIDS.

Grassroots theater is about not just the play but the play in its community context. I experienced this profoundly in 1969, having just landed my first job as a professional actress with the Players' Theater of Manchester, New Hampshire. Thanks to a Title I grant, through which the federal government matched local funds, we were performing in little towns dotted all across the White Mountains. People in one particular town wanted to book our play, based on New Hampshire favorite son Daniel Webster, but wouldn’t know how much money they could contribute until the night of the performance, intending to raise it by holding a potluck supper just before the show. But they could promise us a delicious dinner. We accepted these terms, and arrived at the town hall amidst great excitement. Nearly every spectator was also a producer of a scrumptious dish, setting up a sense of reciprocity such as I had seldom experienced at any event. The spirit of exchange infused the performance itself, accounting for extra generosity on the actors' part and extra receptivity from the spectators. Simply, we were part of an all-too-rare relationship of equal exchange. This "communitas," or community leveling and bonding as facilitated by the performance process, is another link between grassroots and ritual performance. (See the work of anthropologist Victor Turner for more on communitas.)

In contrast, mainstream theater as an institution carries a whole apparatus of hierarchy. Those able to leverage the most money are on top, be they producers or stars. The playwright is generally second, demonstrating western civilization's bias for written expression over the oral and physical. Next comes the director, then the rest of the "creative team" designers, composers, and choreographers. Then the actors, mere interpreters, followed by the even more lowly technicians, mere "skilled workers." Last and least, if discussed at all, is the audience. A few years after my New Hampshire experience, performing in an "out-of-town" (read New York for "town") try-out house, I had the horrible sensation that there was no one in the audience. It wasn’t the bright lights on stage and the auditorium in darkness a community-based play may choose such a lighting design to support focus. Conceived as an out-of-town try-out, the performance was less for the actual spectators there than as a preparation for elsewhere. In a profound way the audience we were performing for was not there.

Community-based ensembles strive for a more egalitarian ideal. They do not embrace the star system. Everyone has some creative in-put. Carpetbag Theatre member Linda Hill describes this as "community-theater-cause-I-want-a-place-to-have-an-artistic-voice model." Playwrights literally "wright" i.e., hammer out plays, often from materials gathered locally. Acclaimed choreographers like Liz Lerman and Jawole Willa Jo Zollar have created techniques to incorporate movement from everyone's gestures. This collective creativity reflects the purposes of the ensembles that include but go beyond art making, and are evident from the very moment of their founding. In 1969, local activists, artists, and educators note that they were not only theater makers founded Carpetbag, "rooted in the desire to have a voice that is uniquely from this community." Cornerstone began when a group of Harvard graduates, led by Bill Rauch and Alison Carey, rejected the model of regional theaters whose audiences are presumed to be homogenous, and set off for small towns and urban neighborhoods to reach a diversity more representative of the country's regions and peoples. Jump-Start's artistic director Steve Bailey says, "It's about making an exchange with a community, which doesn’t solely happen via the theater work."

Place is significant to all grassroots theaters. Roadside Theater of Appalachia is "made from the history and cultural traditions of this place, by ensemble members who grew up and remain in this place." Banjos and ballads accompany wily working-class heroes in traditional stories. Roadside is currently developing a play based on songs and history bespeaking the 200-year history of Scotch-Irish settlers in the region, from core actor-musician-writer Ron Short's research into his own family. Yet innovation is also omnipresent. Stories are adapted to contemporary circumstances and traditional aesthetics are influenced by partnerships with artists rooted in other sources. Short's major collaborator in the current project is Beegie Adair, a jazz pianist and recording artist based in Nashville.

The Dell'Arte Company in northern California also advocate a philosophy of theater of place "created by, for and about the area in which you live. Artists can earn community support while challenging parochialism, bigotry, insularity, apathy; they balance experimentation with awareness of what the audience wants, likes, hopes for, can tolerate, will be inspired by." Founder Carlo Mazzone-Clementi brought a physical theater aesthetic based in European popular theater with him when he settled in Blue Lake in 1974. That "outsider" technique is grounded with "insider" content: "local characters and issues are frequently the subject of original stories that reveal voices and points of view that can be absorbed by the community from a new perspective."

The movement's commitment to particular communities is exemplified by Carpetbag Theatre of Knoxville, which serves a broad local constituency "based upon a shared sense of place, particular traditions or their desire for a just world." A commitment to homeless people is core for LAPD, founded in 1985. LAPD's performance style reflects the energy of its Skid Row neighborhood and depends on improvisation. The ensemble confounds the notion that theater with nonprofessionals is only about constituents' lives and for therapeutic purposes: LAPD plays are a wild, stream-of-consciousness mix of fact, fiction and fantasy. Such theater relies on a high level of skill on the directors' part; director John Malpede finds creative ways to deal with performance mishaps inevitable with untrained people. For example, cast members not in a given scene often remain on stage, ready to call out lines as needed.

When a theater is ethnically homogeneous, sense of place can be more complex. Sometimes it is a sense of many places or a sense of loss of place. WagonBurner director LeAnne Howe says, "The U.S. is our community, from which we draw American Indian actors." WB began in 1993 in Iowa City, with university students, faculty, and friends. "In the middle of the country, the pinnacle of non-diversity, conservatism in that lack of community we created our own, which is why I think we consider ourselves a community theater." They took the things they needed to say "almost like a holy mission," and educated Iowans. Inactive for several years, the ensemble is centered around special events that teach the history of native people. They are also committed to dialogue between under- and misrepresented groups, such as Native and African-Americans. The mission of Teatro Pregones in the Bronx, New York, attests to their commitment to both ethnic grounding and multicultural exchange: "to create innovative, challenging theater rooted in Puerto Rican traditions and popular artistic expressions, and to present performing artists from different cultures, offering Latinos and other communities an artistic means to affirm and enhance our roles in society." Researcher Arnaldo Lopez reflects that Pregones' 22-year trajectory as a Puerto Rican arts organization has meant addressing questions of "self-determination, identity, displacement, continuity and belonging." Pregones is translocal, which "describes the unfixed geography of Latinos in the US." Eighty-five percent of their audiences are Latinos who often travel from some distance to see them.

Building bridges between and within diverse communities is stated in Cornerstone's mission. Initially doing so in towns all across the U.S., they have since settled in Los Angeles. Scholar Sonja Kuftinec identifies a core goal of Cornerstone and community-based theater generally as "creating collectively generated theater with non-professionals" (Kuftinec:10). The more local people engage with the work, the greater their emotional and intellectual investment, which in turn sharpens a production's aim and its potential for impact. Cornerstone helps a community find a story it most needs to tell, then facilitates that telling. In what they call bridge shows, three or more communities enter a single collaboration. Professionals and community residents conduct research, gather materials in workshop and focus groups, develop and stage a play that is "by, for, and about the community." Jump-Start Performance Co. in San Antonio also emphasizes cultural diversity; their mission is "innovation in performance form or content; to be a lasting voice of diverse cultures & address critical issues of our times." JS members resist definition, staying open up to more and more people and groups. They are committed to a "diversity of under-heard voices. Involvement in the community fuels the fire, inspires the work."

These eight companies are diverse geographically, both urban and rural, and grounded in different places, cultures and traditions. Most of these ensembles maintain a company of artists who also create their own unique work and co-define the company's mission. They share commitments to active cultural and civic participation, partnering with local institutions like schools, housing works, social-justice organizations, universities and occasionally regional theaters, thus manifesting the spirit of participatory democracy. Recalling her work in the 1970s with The Road Company (an ensemble directed by this study's co-investigator Bob Leonard), Kathie deNobriga writes that it was "located in the unlikely town of Johnson City, Tennessee. I knew it was unlikely because it was only 20 miles away from the town I grew up in. Having absorbed some of the "You're so good, why aren't you in New York?' mentality, I consider it one of my life's ambitions to make sure every young person makes that same discovery: that heightened sense of self-worth, sense of place, of community, of making a difference as a person and an artist" (1993: 11).

Burnham estimates that there are "more than 50, but fewer than 100" professional grassroots theaters across the U.S. The field interweaves an assortment of historical threads. The tapestry extends far and wide. One thread is the art/ life movement, which theoretically encompasses experimental art practices such as John Cage's expansion of music to any sound, as well as amateur art overflowing aesthetic boundaries at church suppers, 4th of July patriotic pageants and other civic occasions. Open to everyone, at broadly accessible sites and around themes of everyday interest, bringing art and life close together is a recurrent response of 20th century artists for whom theater is overly elite. LAPD's John Malpede might be seen in this tradition. Malpede was a performance artist who arrived in Los Angeles as homeless people were being removed from the streets in preparation for the 1986 Olympics. He quickly began a theater workshop on Skid Row which he has continued via LAPD ever since. "The power of this group's work," avows Malpede, "is a burr under the saddle of those who would segregate community art from High Art."

Another thread is activist performances such as have accompanied the struggles of workers (e.g., the Paterson Strike Pageant of 1913), people of color (as, DuBois' Krigwa Players), and women (such as suffragette theatrics) throughout the 20th century. This reached a critical mass in the late 1960s/ early 70s, when a handful of aesthetically exciting and socially engaged ensembles served as cultural wings of political movements the San Francisco Mime Troupe re: free speech, the Free Southern Theater re: the Civil Rights Movement, El Teatro Campesino vis-à-vis the United Farm Workers and Bread & Puppet re: the anti- (Vietnam) war movement. Exemplary in this regard is Carpetbag Theatre, begun in 1969 as part of the cultural expression of Black Power responding to a national call for arts programming relevant and useful to black experience. Linda Parris-Bailey, artistic director, explains: "Things we were reading about, like the Free Southern Theater, were shaping how I was interpreting and moving forward as a theater artist. My whole notion was what could happen through theater tied to activism. There was that mood, that support, that education about what was going on in the country. I came to Carpetbag in 1974 with all those notions." Nayo Watkins, who conducted the Carpetbag research for "Performing Communities," became a writer and an activist during the Civil Rights Movement. Like others who came of age in that context, what she learned about art making and social justice then has animated her work in communities ever since (2000). Artistic Director Dudley Cocke attributes the Civil Rights Movement as a catalyst to Roadside, too.

The great social movements stretching from the 1950s and the push for civil rights shifted in strategy from popular activism to advocacy and professionalized efforts. By the late 1970s, a localized impulse manifested itself as identity politics, with artists, too, clustering around communities of ethnicity (as, Latino), circumstances (as, elderly) and orientation (as, gay). Dell'Arte supporter Peter Pennekamp identifies this as a move from opposition to affirmation, citing Bernice Johnson Reagon's insight: "Remember when you first recognized injustice? And thought that if you saw it you could change it? Joined with like-minded people, worked at it for years, and eventually felt somewhat defeated? You know what was wrong with the way we approached it? We went out to do battle every day to win, rather than because it was the right way to lead a life." The result is what Lucy Lippard calls "the lure of the local," less about fighting injustice generally than providing alternative voices on the local level. Equally appealing to some grassrooters like Dell’Arte’s Joan Schirle was the opportunity to make a life in the country and still pursue a rigorous physically based acting style.

Woven amidst all these threads is an emphasis on participation and access, evidenced in the early 20th century pageant movement. Whether motivated by a conservative impulse to quickly absorb new immigrants or by progressive attempts to get women the vote, groups of people with a shared core identity performed tableaux and spectacles in public spaces, often for thousands of spectators. The Little Theater Movement decentralized performing arts beyond the big cities, laying the groundwork for both the professional regional theater and community-based movements of the past 40 years. From 1919 until the Great Depression, the Harlem Renaissance demonstrated a great range of creativity on the part of African Americans. Workers theater in the 1920s and 1930s engaged thousands of people not hitherto part of the U.S. theater scene, though many immigrants had been artistically inclined in "the old country." The Federal Theater Project (1935-1939) was a massive, gloriously eclectic government-supported effort to put theater professionals back to work all across the U.S. Although Alexander Drummond was already at work at Cornell in the 1920s, universities picked up some of post-Federal Theater Project slack, with Frederick Koch in North Carolina and others developing what Robert Gard practiced in Wisconsin and wrote about in "Grassroots Theater" (1955), "plays that grow from all the countrysides of America."

As much about place as Roadside Theater is, Cocke was not familiar with Gard when he co-founded Roadside in 1975-6. But he embraced the term grassroots which came to identify the movement over the past 20 years. Cocke, Harry Newman and Janet Salmons-Rue theorized it as:

Burnham identifies grassroots as one of two flanks in community-based art, the other emerging from the avant-garde. She writes,

Several other historical markers are important to note. Bob Leonard emphasizes the Living Theater, founded in 1951, which worked in a community of alternative-minded people and aspired to art integrated in life (hence its name). He suggests a progression from the short-lived period during which artists disenchanted with the status quo dropped out, then sought alternative communities, and then connected with community partners. CETA grants, in the late 1970s, provided artists with economic support; equally important, many required artists to have community partners. As Leonard points out, "Sometimes arranged marriages work." Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South), founded in 1976, is also part of this history, as well as an important membership organization in the present (though some longtime members feel that it has lost focus). Ruby Lerner, a former director of ROOTS, sees this movement as "the contemporary manifestation of a recurring cultural ideal of an art relegated not to culture palaces, but relevant to daily life, an art whose home is in the streets, in schools, church basements, city parks, and other institutions dear to community life" (1994: 15). While performances in alternative sites are not categorically preferred a Pregones member points out that being housed in a church for many years kept as many people away as it welcomed in the spirit of Lerner's remarks would likely be embraced by all the ensembles examined here.

One of the debates concerning grassroots theater is the question of radicality. The movement is radical in the American Heritage Dictionary sense of "arising from or going to a root or source." The source consists of a broad base of people from whom cultural traditions emanate but who are typically left out of art and policy-making activities. While grassroots theaters may not advocate change per se, their commitment to audiences of every class and race is contrary to mainstream theater audience composition of the wealthiest 15% of the population. Burnham believes that grassroots is often equated with left-wing politics because of the term's association with organizing, "meaning you can't accomplish change without going to the roots of the problem and including the people whose feet are planted in that place, maybe even being those people."

Both grassroots and community-based imply that theater is not a self-contained entity but rather gains meaning in a context, integrated in people's lives. But community-based artists do not necessarily share a core identity with the people in the contexts in which they work. They can catalyze and support but are less likely to sustain radicality because they constantly move on to other projects. Grassroots theater practitioners sometimes begin as outsiders e.g., Dell'Arte members moving to Blue Lake but become insiders, sharing their constituents' way of life, essaying to eliminate boundaries. When Cornerstone Theater traveled from town to town they made community-based plays with local residents; settled now in Los Angeles, they are becoming a grassroots company, albeit stretching the term by all the ways that they define connectedness.

Floating the idea of grassroots theater as the left flank of the community-based realm brought this response from Bob Leonard:

I appreciate Leonard's call for a paradigm for our times, and can understand a hesitancy to enter a community with what may seem like outsider political language. Yet many of these groups demonstrate the ongoing relevance of lessons learned from art expressive of left wing ideals. Brecht, who sometimes referred to his oeuvre as dialectic theater, may be seen as a direct forbear of the contemporary progressive movement for art-based civic dialogue. Boal, an avid Workers' Party activist, and his "theatre of the oppressed" is an inspiration to many of the companies in this project. Leonard's distinction between "popular democratic" and "left wing" sometimes blurs; both stand for access to and participation by all.

Linda Burnham's response to grassroots as community-based's left flank was as follows:

These responses confirm a tension between the two senses of radicality, i.e., rooted in community and left-wing. They converge in a shared principle: "arise from or go to a root or source" rather than to impose from on high, i.e., facilitate the self-expression of communities that have a vested interest in change from the status quo. Paradoxically, such companies are often conservative in the sense of preserving or celebrating a cultural heritage. Another challenge to the embrace of radicality is that such ensembles will only survive if they can sell some of their productions. Dell'Arte's marketing director, Dave Firney, told me that they had to take some of their more radical (as in challenging the status quo) productions out of circulation because they could not book them.

Problematic for the field, the terms "grassroots" and "community-based" often evoke inaccurate images. According to Pregones, both labels signify "lacking in rigor," causing mainstream audiences to withdraw. Malpede rebels against "community-based" as a code word for "bad" theater and the assumption that it is primarily therapeutic for participants, flatly reflective of their lives, and of no aesthetic value. Cocke finds "community-based" too vague all theater comes from some community. Others see "grassroots" as too integrally allied with the idea of social change, which is not always the work's goal. These are professional ensembles, and if "grassroots" connotes an activity done by amateurs alone, it is undermining. Long-time cultural theorists Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard now prefer the term "community cultural development," which they define as "a range of initiatives undertaken by artists in collaboration with other community members to express identity, concerns and aspirations through the arts and communication media, while building cultural capacity and contributing to social change" (2001:107). I find "development" too redolent of "underdeveloped countries," and I miss an aesthetic marker (the word art or theater). Do any of these terms: theater "of common ground," "of exchange," or Dudley Cocke's suggestion, "theater of inclusion," capture the spirit of the field with fewer drawbacks?

Although grassroots theaters get flack from some for being too radical and others for not being radical enough, at their best they shape responses to any concerns of their constituencies. Pennekamp points out how knowing the community merges the political with the psycho-social; for example, Dell'Arte "articulated that the issue of timber decline wasn’t just jobs, but a whole notion of being taken care of by an industry. This was the first time that had been raised." Grassroots theaters invite collective input vis-à-vis choice of project themes, script development, ownership and responsibility. Most do some productions in collaboration with community participants. This is as much an aesthetic as a political choice. Says Cornerstone’s Bill Rauch, "There's something aesthetic about the variety of ages and body types and life experience, a diversity that is part of the fabric of the work, and that's what makes it powerful." Cornerstone and most others do some productions with just the core company because, says Rauch, "there are certain muscles that we can only exercise with ensemble members."

Many of these ensembles situate themselves within culturally syntonic traditions that bring depth to both their craft and to their relationship with particular audiences/ communities. For example, Roadside's immersion in Appalachian music and storytelling engages a broad local audience at productions at home in Whitesburg, Kentucky, just as Pregones' intimate knowledge of Puerto Rican theater and music packs Latino audiences (and others) into their performances in the Bronx. Innovation is equally core; as artists they allow themselves the freedom to experiment and reinterpret traditions for their particular time and place. As Roadside's Dudley Cocke explains, "People who work with a consciousness of a tradition, whatever it is, have even more incentive to be creative than artists who are unconscious of tradition. They know what's already been invented which is the springboard for inventing something else. Otherwise you're flailing around with no sense of where you're going because you have no sense of where it's been" (2002).

Beyond these common practices, aesthetics vary widely. The signature grassroots approach is personal story-based, which offers people a subjective way to respond to social circumstances. Roadside members introduced story circles to Appalachia to bring back storytelling traditions there. The company's aesthetic is equally musical theater: Cocke explains, "Our native ballad tradition, by definition, is story-based" (2002). From the Appalachian region themselves, ensemble members grew up surrounded by these traditions. One of their joint artistic/ political goals is to break stereotypes about Appalachians, an expression of commitment to the people of that place. Story circles are also core on tour; Cocke defines the goal of Roadside's residencies as "to help a community listen to itself, learn about itself, and express itself publicly so that participants can hear and appreciate their own words" (2000). He also attests to the historically political role of stories as "dissenting oral narratives arising from suppressed histories" (2002).

Dell'Arte and Pregones are grounded in different yet also nonliterary approaches: a great range of European and Latino popular theater traditions, respectively. Popular theater has historically relied on techniques accessible to people no matter what their education, such as the physical, archetypal Italian commedia dell'arte and Mexican carpa, or tent show. The popular is often linked with democratization of theater, extending to the working class by virtue of content, form and venue. The French tradition of the popular was articulated by Romain Rolland in his book, "Le theater du peuple" (1903), described by theater historian Marvin Carlson as "a theater accessible to the workers without being condescending, and educative without being pompous or exclusive. He proposed for it three basic concerns: to provide relaxation for its patrons after a day of labor, to give them energy for the day to come, and to stimulate their minds" (1993:317).

The popular also bespeaks a sense of broad cultural ownership. Pregones member Jorge Merced describes a performance at a high school that began really badly but when the Latino music and poetry started, the whole event turned around. Pregones acknowledges the influence of Boal (Brazilian), Buenaventura (Colombian), Dragún (Argentinean), and collective/ political/ experimental Latin American Teatro Popular and Nuevo Teatro. These sources share popular theater's emphasis on theater as a communal event, participating in the celebratory, political and effective life of the populace.

Many grassroots ensembles work in contemporary genres. LAPD reflects Malpede's grounding in experimental, stream-of-consciousness techniques. That LAPD artists have not attended The Academy is the point: Malpede believes that artists encounter and express forces and situations that the rest of us are unwilling or unable to. Malpede asserts, "LAPD artists send back messages as vital in this regard as any other artist." Carpetbag called a recent piece a hip-hop opera. Jump-Start favors original interdisciplinary work. Company members' proposals are usually accepted but initiators must carry the work load that comes with it and share a vision of a changing world and disenfranchised voices. Jump-Start considers its ideas of inclusion at once reflective of participatory democracy and an aesthetics of taking risks. Cornerstone is most known for adapting classical plays via intensive community interviewing though they sometimes create plays from scratch with a playwright, company and local participants. Rauch explains, "The company's aesthetic is to include the community's dialogue with itself in the script, which calls for opposing voices and layers of meaning and a vital richness. Multiplicity of viewpoints: it's essential to our mission."

WagonBurner creates a close rapport with audiences by breaking the fourth wall "it's not TV" and encouraging participation. The ensemble looks for humor without offending: "Don't enjoy yourself as an actor at a character's expense." For example, director Howe felt that one actor's characterization "told more about how a straight male thinks about a gay male than how the gay male might interact in the situation." Their plays' "Indian-style" humor is intended to educate, break stereotypes, keep you from just being depressed. White audiences are often afraid of offending them, and don't laugh till the actors give permission. The name "WagonBurner" captures the satire and anger "Yeah, we're Indians, those savages who fried your ancestors; where were they going and on whose land by the way?"

Community-based theaters manifest a deep belief in the power of art to bring different people together, and the result is that stereotypes are cracked open in the unfolding of the art. Seeing Roadside's bluegrass gospel singers and pickers perform with an African-American gospel quartet reinforces similarities among people such as integrating song into everyday life and the centrality of spiritual expression as well as nonhierarchical, aesthetically pleasing differences in harmonies, styles and instrumentation. Blueberries and mushrooms.

Community-based theaters can be deeply integrated with their constituencies because theater is not just the performance but all the processes leading up to and following after it. Schechner articulated the phases of performance as training, workshop, rehearsal, warm-up, performance, cool-down and aftermath (1990). In what follows I suggest how these phases provide opportunities for deep exchange with communities. As concerns training, given this field's interdisciplinary nature, grounding in multiple skills in addition to the artistic is necessary. Dudley Cocke, for example, emphasizes the need for grassroots artists to learn community organizing. Alice Lovelace believes artists working for social change need training in conflict resolution. One must also be mindful of the attitudes particular techniques transmit to an audience. Interviewer Mark McKenna reflected about Dell'Arte's school: "Students come to understand the performer's responsibility to the audience." Commedia, for example, is an inherently interactive mode. The school's focus is also on creating one's own work, typical of this field as a whole, so it's about everyone's voice at that level, too. Steve Buescher, associate school director, says that before he did workshops with Michael Fields, he "didn't know that as an actor you could have your own thoughts."

The next phase, workshop, frequently incorporates communal input. Each Cornerstone community show involves an average of 20 meetings with local focus groups and leaders. The company begins by finding one local person "making the leap of faith" and becoming an advocate for the project, helping find appropriate people for an advisory board. Cornerstone tells the board how they build a project and the board advises the company how to do so there. In the development of the art work, integration of local stories is one way that different points of view are put into conversation with each other. Dell'Arte audience member Kit Zettler emphasizes the cross-pollination this accomplishes: "You are not necessarily going to get a logger who comes see this play and walks away saying I'm never doing that again. But a logger comes to the play because their friend got interviewed or was talked to." He thus ends up hearing other points of view. In other projects, the community has a united point of view and creates the play as a form of advocacy. Both of these dynamics also take place during grassroots rehearsal processes.

Warm-up is the process immediately preceding a show. In plays meant to maximize audience participation, spectators are often given a way to prepare, too, perhaps through pre-performance interaction or actual warm-up exercises. Next, the performance itself offers various dynamic ways for actor-spectator exchange. Carpetbag's "Red Summer" was based on historical documentation of activist Knoxvillians during the civil-rights era. Director Linda Parris-Bailey saw it as a way to tell residents that their belief nothing could change was historically incorrect: "Maybe if we just remind you of what has been here before, you can see some possibility for the future. We talk about people who take control." Parris-Bailey sees a fundamentally celebratory component in the company's historical pieces. It is satisfying for actors and spectators to return stories to the communities they came from. LAPD’s "Agents and Assets" is a transcription from a Congressional hearing on CIA involvement in crack cocaine sales in California. It's an indictment of the War on Drugs. There's an irony in hearing the words of educated, skilled politicians spoken by actors who at some point were casualties of the war on drugs. Having an LAPD actor portray a politician creates a built-in critique. Pregones' "The Embrace" is an example of a production using Boal's forum theater to engage audience dialogue on the spot. Forum invites spectators to replace a protagonist struggling with a social issue, in this case as a result of having AIDS. Spectators enact different possible ways of handling those struggles.

What Schechner calls the cool-down phase immediately follows performance and may take the form of discussion. Though often very effective, there's some ambivalence about this format. Sometimes spectators aren't ready to talk about a play so soon; sometimes artists bring in discussion leaders but audiences really only want to hear from artists. Pregones usually only uses dialogue after a new show that they're trying to figure out; the conversation function as an evaluation. Sometimes panel experts learn as much as anyone else, as with LAPD's "Agents and Assets." Experts on developing countries and the CIA reported being educated by their outspoken and eloquent LAPD co-panelists from Skid Row. In another example, Cornerstone, in a collaboration with Touchstone Theater, arranged post-show gatherings over dessert and drinks so spectators had unmediated conversation with each other. The artists of Alternate ROOTS often use critical response from the audience after showing a work in progress. This has led to the development of Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process, which puts the artist herself in charge of the feedback session.

Aftermath/long-term activities not immediately following the artwork take the initiative further. For example, during the years that Cornerstone did residencies in towns across the U.S., they regularly donated money for each community to start a theater. LAPD partners with SRO Housing, which has renovated 30 former slum hotels into "single-room occupancy" hotels. They share the overall mission of helping people off the street, to build a life. LAPD adds a creative dimension to SRO which in turn lends an infrastructure that nurtures LAPD. Many interviewees said that seeing one of the eight ensembles influenced a later decision to become actively involved in political/ civic life. Like Susan Ingalls' concept of "the key positive experience," it's often not till years later that people realize they had a transformative experience through art (Cohen-Cruz and Novak, 1998).

Still and all, the relationship with the community ought not be romanticized. Sometimes the artists are more ready for change than is the community; Parris-Bailey describes the need for sensitivity given that her community is not so proactive: "The community is sometimes challenged and needs to be challenged, and sometimes they don't like that. But that's a part of how we all grow. So it's not that we have to constantly please." Roadside describes a need to "begin where the community/ participants are. Not ahead (unrealistic) or behind (patronizing)." Every ensemble in the study attests to the lack of what Jump-Start's Steve Bailey expresses as "enough time, money and staff to do the creation of new work and community projects both well." Because many of the companies are run by the artists themselves, they also have heavy administrative loads.

Not to be underestimated is the ongoing struggle on many theaters' part for fuller communal engagement. Dell’Arte’s July 2002 project is a case in point. "Wild Card" is a piece about the opening of a casino on Native American land in Blue Lake amidst a great range of communal responses. The ensemble was not able to engage people of different opinions, especially Native Americans, as fully in the making of the piece as they had hoped. Thanks to an Animating Democracy Initiative grant, a dialogue specialist sat down with six Native Americans and heard their points of view. But Artistic Director Michael Field expressed some frustration at the difficulty of having such exchange more regularly.

Another challenge is apparent in the past tense of grounding: grounded. While on the one hand grounded refers to a deep-seated sense of self, there is also the colloquial meaning of being forced to stay home. Some ensembles risk becoming overly insulated. Jump-Start members express their need and that of their community for exposure to the rest of the world, to see what artists elsewhere are doing and what they can add to it. They regularly present artists from elsewhere. Dell’Arte, too, bridges its geographic isolation by connecting with other cultures, artists and trends: "We bring you things from around the world and down the block." Pregones, Roadside and Cornerstone likewise have formidable touring schedules that bring in both money and contact with other audiences and artists. Malpede has done projects with the homeless in cities all across the U.S.

Most of the ensembles express concerns related to sustainability. Would they continue after the founder or artistic director was no longer with them? If so, how? Core members frequently work for little pay, 24/7. Seldom will someone hired on later accept such conditions. Many ensembles have tried to bring in younger artists but none seem totally secure that the next generation will take up the organizational reins. On the other hand, a delicate situation arises when longtime company members are not producing up to par. These ensembles are never just professional; people give their blood and soul, so it's very hard to fire them down the line. How can ensembles be responsible to people without whom they may not have ever existed and still use limited monies at the service of the company’s greatest needs? One of the ensembles was trying to solve this by restructuring core artists' duties, but there are no definitive answers.

Then there's passing on the aesthetic approach. Dell'Arte already has a school and Cornerstone is developing one. Some techniques of popular theater are taught in professional programs in universities or elsewhere; CAN (the Community Arts Network, the source of this project) publishes an online list of such opportunities. Members of some companies express anti-university sentiments. Pregones' Jorge Merced described it as a "less committed approach, less sense of being given the role to make your own." To me, it's a question of what kind of university training; though even great university training is too expensive. Others have had very productive university-based collaborations, such as Roadside’s three-year residency at Cornell in the mid ’90s. Carpetbag has a relationship with Knoxville College; WagonBurner began at Iowa State.

A healthy relationship with academic institutions is just one ingredient of a well-established field. Others include a discourse both orally via conferences and in print via books, journals and Web sites; membership organizations where practitioners can meet, share, question, develop; places to train the next generation; agreed-upon categories of assessment; and sustainable sources of money. But first funders need to know what their grant money is going for. They need to understand the field as a contemporary expression of a very old theatrical paradigm: art that expresses, generates and challenges meaning in a specific community. Rather than conceived as old-fashioned ("Let’s put on a play!") and amateurish, these theaters embrace an ecological expression of art as a balance between conceptualizers and receivers, rather than a hot-house flower on display. Those of us who have worked on "Performing Communities" hope that our effort will help towards the sustenance of this field.

Jan Cohen-Cruz is a scholar/practitioner of activist and community-based performance. An associate professor and the director of Theatre Studies in the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Drama Department, she co-edited "Playing Boal: Theatre, Therapy, Activism" (1994) and edited "Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology" (1998). From 1995-97, Cohen-Cruz co-directed Tisch School of the Arts' AmeriCorps project (President Clinton's domestic Peace Corps) focusing on violence reduction through the arts. Jan co-directs Urban Ensemble, through which Tisch School of the Arts students do community-based art internships, and co-ordinates the Drama Department's minor in applied theatre. She also teaches and is on the faculty advisory board for the School's Center for Art and Public Policy. She is currently writing a book about U.S. community-based performance and helping organize creative deterrents against the war on Iraq.

[Note: All unattributed citations are from this research project and can be found in the online interviews of "Performing Communities: The Grassroots Ensemble Theater Research Project."]

Adams, Don and Arlene Goldbard. "Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development" (NY: Rockefeller Foundation), 2001:107.

Carlson, Marvin. "Theories of the Theater" (Ithaca: Cornell U Press), 1984; 1993:317.

Cocke, Dudley. "Change: Keynote Address," KY Arts Council conference, October 20, 2000.

Cocke, Dudley Harry Newman, Janet Salmons-Rue, eds. "From the Ground Up" (Ithaca: Cornell U), 1993: 13.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan and Lorie Novak. "Urban Ensemble: University/ Community Collaborations" (NY: NYU Tisch School of the Arts), 1998.

deNobriga, Kathie. "An Introduction to Alternate ROOTS," High Performance #64, Winter 1993:11.

Kuftinec, Sonja. "Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-based Theater" (forthcoming).

Lerner, Ruby. "searching for roots in southern soil," in Kathie deNobriga and Valetta Anderson. ed. "Alternate ROOTS: Plays from the Southern Theater" (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann), 1994: 15.

Schechner, Richard and Willa Appel. eds. "By means of performance" (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press), 1990.

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The Ecology of Theater-in-community: A Field Theory

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