Running Commentary: Alternate ROOTS

This summer I visited heaven: the Alternate ROOTS Performance Festival in Atlanta, September 16-20. Seeing performances by Southeastern artists, doing live critique sessions and participating in a symposium on art and community, I worked like a dog at least 14 hours a day. A lucky dog.

I could write 10,000 words about the great artwork I saw, what I learned from my fellow critics and the issues that arose during our critiques. But in this limited space, I’ll try to identify what makes the ROOTS experience so unique.

Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South) is the most interesting arts organization I have ever come across. It’s a multiracial coalition of some 200 performing artists from all over the Southeast who are creating "original indigenous work," that is, new work arising from the culture and history of the place they call home. Instead of relating artistically to the standards of the large urban centers like New York City, they draw from and give back to the unique culture of the South. After ten years of energy and refinement, ROOTS has succeeded in cultivating a magnetic center of its own, a regenerative atmosphere, fertile and exciting.

The official mission of Alternate ROOTS is "to increase the self-sufficiency of its members by providing access to artistic resources and creating opportunities that would be beyond the scope of any single individual or organization." Among the activities of the organization are a member bulletin, a nationally distributed newsletter, mini-events throughout the region, touring subsidies, and liaison with potential sponsors, other organizations and artists, and similar networks. Financial support comes from a variety of sources: foundations (including Ford), the NEA, the Southern Regional Council, and state, county and city funding agencies.

The two most fruitful aspects of ROOTS, from my point of view, are the group’s artistic working methods and its focus on the place of art in society. ROOTS started because artists who had chosen to stay in the South and make new work desperately needed somebody to talk to about it. Ten years later, ROOTS has a polished agenda of artist feedback and professional criticism that has resulted in some of the strongest, most intriguing work being done in performance today. To each annual summer meeting (the last was at Black Mountain), the artists bring works-in-progress and, along with visiting artists from other regions, engage in intensive workshop and feedback sessions on each others’ pieces. Every two years a public performance festival features critiques by writers brought in from other parts of the country, allowing diverse perspectives on the work. Thus, most of the plays and performance pieces are seen in several stages before they are finished and taken on tour. While a working system like this isn’t a new idea, it is surprising to encounter such rigor and sophistication in a group spread across so wide a geographical area. Equally important is the ROOTS frontal assault on deeply ingrained social problems as they apply to the arts and their place in specific communities. I was astonished at the honesty and courage that are the backbone of this collection of colleagues, friends and lovers.

Speaking of colleagues, I learned a lot from my fellow critics, New Yorkers Alisa Solomon of the Village Voice, freelancer Lucy Lippard and Jim O’Quinn, editor of American Theatre. As a group we provided expertise in theater of all kinds, as well as performance art and the intersection of art and politics. Between us we attended some 40 performances, sat in on each others’ crit sessions, met with local Atlanta critics and spent the little time left over exchanging opinions, critical methods and information from our own corners of experience. It was especially important that we were looking at live work together, not attempting to meet over theoretical documents and talk in the abstract. We wrestled with familiar issues that had a new twist because of their geographical location, and we learned that we don’t have all the answers. It is of utmost importance that sponsors nationwide create opportunities like this for critics in our field if writing and theory are to dialog with new art in a meaningful way, particularly in regions outside the major metropolitan and educational centers. I would like to see all performance festivals incorporate the critics component, if only for the sake of critical growth in the field.

We saw some remarkably crafted, responsible new works during this festival, including many by artists who tour nationally, like the excellent Roadside Theatre from Appalachian eastern Kentucky (reviewed in the LA. Festival portion of this issue), and Southern Theatre Conspiracy of Atlanta. I would heartily recommend them and the following individuals as artists at the peak of their power, able to impress audiences anywhere, in theaters or artspaces: Jo Carson (Johnson City, Tennessee) whose incisive, sensitive and hilarious stories smack of Southern character; Celeste Miller (Atlanta), in my book the next great "talking dancer"; Leslie Neal (Miami), a performance artist with a nearperfect sense of balance and visual exposition; John Spelman (D.C), whose composite picture of the Vietnam vet was masterful, and John O’Neal (New Orleans), well known for his work with Free Southern Theatre and now carrying tales of the black South with his storyteller persona, June Bug. Of enormous interest to me were the strategies employed by the black theater companies at the festival, like Carpetbag Theatre of Knoxville, whose play focused on a 1919 race riot in their town; Everyday Theatre of Washington, D.C, an ensemble of unemployed, foster-care and "adjudicated" young people who make musicals about social problems; Jomandi Productions of Atlanta, whose Tom Jones did a comic piece about growing up black and male.

Many festival performances unearthed the kind of controversy so endemic to ROOTS, including thorny issues about relations between races and sexes, the oppressive situation for gays in Georgia, the problems in the reexamination of the Vietnam War, the crisis in the black family, the separate but parallel histories of the black and white Souths, the hazards of regional stereotyping in theater, the use of traditional material, and the involvement of "non-artists" from the community."

As we struggled during live critiques to confront stylistic and thematic problems in the work, we found ourselves invigorated by the give-and-take of the discussions. Often we were confounded by the problem of critiquing the craft of a piece whose major accomplishment was a cathartic human ritual, such as a work about gay issues and AIDS by Rebecca Ranson, which featured performances by many non-actors from the gay community and brought its audience to a standing ovation. While the play and performance were flawed, as an event it was not only successful, but crucial to its community.

However, not all struggles were resolved and sometimes we went away from critiques frustrated by lack of communication. It’s common, Jo Carson told us, in ROOTS work to experience difficult and emotional discussions, especially where hidden racist or sexist tendencies are uncovered. Serious rifts have occurred, such as the incident at the last festival where an artist performed a racist character without comment or reflection, and black audience members were incensed. "It took us six years before we began to face each other with these things," said Carson, "and I learn something new about myself every time."

Conventional theatrics came up often in our critical sessions. Having been exposed to so much experiment in form, we balked repeatedly at traditional staging and the built-in obstructions of blocking and acting. I enthusiastically supported anything performed outdoors, or anywhere besides the stage of a theater, arguing that more formal and logistical elbow room might help the artists unravel some of the difficult social snarls they are trying to confront. I would suggest that performance artists be brought into the next annual meeting to offer some suggestions for experimenting with the shaping of these works.

One of the most interesting events of the festival was a conference called" Making Links: Art Working for Communities," which invited artists to dialog with people working in race relations, land use, education and economic development about the relevance of performing arts to these concerns. ROOTS director Josephine Grant said this about the conference: "By imagining that art works for communities, I hope to suggest that there is more to our work than art for art’s sake, that, in fact, there is an intimate connection between the quality and character of a people’s political, economic and cultural participation, and that art can and should investigate that relationship."

As a point of focus, we looked at a "regional cultural development plan" being written by ROOTers Ruby Lerner and Dudley Cocke (with Grant and incoming ROOTS chair Celeste Miller). The paper articulated’ a philosophical framework for this type of work, then looked at issues specific to the Southeast and to ROOTS, and finally discussed arts partnerships with organizations in the region. While the plan is importantly specific to the Southeast, its hard-headed thinking about these issues makes it useful to the subject of regionalism itself, and I think that’s crucial to the arts right now. I believe the concentration of artists on the coasts is about to dwindle rapidly, and more and more young artists are staying home. New York and Los Angeles are becoming far too expensive, inhuman, unlivable and useless to emerging artists; for some, those centers are simply not an option, and for those who live there now, urban flight has seriously begun. As artists establish themselves in "regions" around the country, they will need the information ROOTS is researching now.

In looking at the importance of the concept of regionalism Lerner and Cocke quote Kentucky writer Wendell Berry from his contemporary essay, "The Regional Motive": "The regionalism that I adhere to could be defined simply as 10callife aware of itself. It would tend to substitute for the myths and stereotypes of a region a particular knowledge of the life of the place one lives in and intends to continue to live in. Without a complex knowledge of one’s place, and without the faithfulness to one’s place on which such knowledge depends, it is inevitable that the place will be used carelessly, and eventually destroyed. I look upon the sort of regionalism that I am talking about not just as a recurrent literary phenomenon, but as a necessity of civilization and survival"

Philosopher Sheldon Woldin is quoted on the forces that oppose regionalism: "The major structures of power in this society, whether business, education, finance, the military, government or communications, require, as a condition of the effective exercise of power, the destruction or neutralization of persons or places. Persons or places are more likely to survive if they repress their local peculiarities, surrender old rhythms of life and the accompanying skills, and fashion themselves anew to accommodate the abstract requirements of assembly lines, data processing and systems of impersonal communications."

In looking at art’s role in this process, the paper goes on to quote Berry as saying it is important to be able to "bring to bear on the life of one’s place all it is possible to know." This view of regionalism, say Cocke and Lerner, "advocates exchange and dialog among communities within and outside the region, as well as exchange with other cultures. Art from outside the community is not, however, presented in the spirit of demonstrating ‘how art really should be done.’ Instead one learns about other cultures and communities in order to better understand one’s own community and culture. Such exchanges serve a fundamental purpose of art, which is to help us come to grips with ourselves."

If, by magic, the terms of this paper became reality, there would be better training for Southern artists, relevant to their place in the world; more support for local art and organizations; more artistic exchange and dialog; more appropriate performance facilities; better communication with audiences in rural, minority and inner city communities; new presenters; more new work presented by established sponsors; a whole new attitude about the environmental impact of importing art; more writing about regional work by cultural reporters, and revision of art history books to tell the real history and development of Southeastern art. Criticism would shed its marketing function, corporations would be reinvented, and all regional’ development plans would put cultural work on the agenda, with a voice for artists of color and artists creating new work. What I like about this plan is that it assumes artists are among the most important members of society, not the most expendable, and it mandates artists to save their neighborhoods, their communities, their towns, their states, their regions and their country from the dissolution, gentrification, redevelopment and homogenization that is destroying them. Fairly grandiose, I grant you, but if art isn’t that important, why are we killing ourselves for it?

ROOTS’ philosophy and experience are important to all communities, large and small. When it comes to understanding the right relationship of art to life in our time, this, as far as I can tell, is as real as it gets. I think these roots should grow all over America.

If you’re interested in learning more, write to Alternate ROOTS, Little Five Points Community Center, 1083 Austin Avenue, Atlanta, Georgia 30307.

Linda Frye Burnham was the founding editor of High Performance magazine. This article, from the "Running Commentary" series of editorials by the author, was published in High Performance #39, 1987.

Original CAN/API publication: October 2003