community » Joe Salvatore

Art is discursive: a day with Upstate Theatre

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Jul 262012

Today we worked with Upstate Theatre in Drogheda, a city of about 37,000 people in County Louth. This is our eighth summer program working with Upstate, and the company has rolled out an amazing welcome and an inspiring input each and every year. Today was no exception.

We were greeted by Upstate board member Irene White and Director Declan Mallon, and Declan proceeded to walk us through the history and ethos of Upstate Theatre. This was followed by two panel discussions with artists talking about the creation of new work with members of the Drogheda community. Feidlim Cannon and some of his company members talked about a new work called The Far Side that will premiere in November of this year, and Paul Hayes and actors from his project talked about the very successful Ship Street Revisited, a site-specific work that has its audience travel to five different houses to explore the people and history of Ship Street in Drogheda. We were also welcomed by the Mayor of Drogheda, Paul Bell, and he presented me with the coat of arms of the city (see below).

After a wonderful lunch, we walked through town to the Barbican Centre for a three-hour movement workshop with Zara Starr, a choreographer working with Upstate on a new piece about the idea of home in Ireland. Zara took the group through an intense physical process that pushed the groups’ collaboration skills to the max. She followed this with some great work to create movement phrases, what she called strings. She set the group off in pairs, and asked the partners to create 12 points where they moved around, by, and/or through each other. Once these strings were set, she then asked the performers to take the work one step further by adding various dynamics to the phrases. Following a break, Zara then split the students into four groups and gave them 20 minutes to create an original piece about home. Each of the groups shared their work, and Zara recorded the material, with the intention that it may actually find its way into Upstate’s new work.

Upstate ended the day with sandwiches and drinks at a pub in town, complete with a trio of Irish musicians. As usual, the group left with a lot to ponder based on the inspiring work that we saw and participated in throughout the day. Our work with Upstate is always a highlight for this course, as students really see the range of possibilities that exists when a company fully embraces what it means to be engaged with the community. Upstate has been doing that from its beginnings, and it is evident in the depth and scope of the work that the company creates and produces.

Here are some additional notes, thoughts, and quotations, that I took from the day’s events. I think they are worth consideration for anyone working in an applied or community-engaged way.

From Declan Mallon’s presentation:

“Cultural inclusion is an equal right to participate in the nation’s artistic and cultural life . . . a fundamental democratic right.”

“Civic aesthetic space belongs in the psychological space that we all share.”

Sometimes the methodologies we use don’t work for the communities we’re creating with. We have to change the approach so that we build trust with those participants.

“Art is discursive.”

The terms “citizen artist” and “artist citizen”

Reminder: The belief that all people are creative

In community work, people may be the most comfortable with their own stories.

“There’s no one way to skin this cat called art.”

“We are multicultural within our own communities.”

From Feidlim Cannon:

Hand over the workshop to the participants. Make it about them instead of about the artist.

“Trying to make the screen dance” as it relates to the use of video in performance.

Because the lead artist is not from Drogheda, it may be easier for him to make choices about what stories and materials stay in the play and what parts come out.

Concise steps for interviewing participants for stories: “Interview, take the testimony, go off and investigate it.”

From Paul Hayes:

Paul mentioned the “rules of dramaturgy” for his project, and it made me think of the importance of aesthetic. Being rigorous about consistency in performance is part of that.

A paraphrase: Paul is aiming his shows at people who don’t come into formal theatres.
How can we all think more intentionally about this idea? Not everyone feels comfortable coming into a traditional theatre. How can we tell stories in places other than traditional theatre? It’s happening, but it needs to happen more. It’s a new challenge for myself.

From Zara Starr:

Create a string of movement with a partner:
Around someone
By someone
Through someone

“Hold on tightly; let go lightly.”
Practice this when creating new material for a work in progress.

“If the art is good, it can hold a lot.”

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Jul 252012

The title of this post comes from something that Phil Kingston, Community and Education Manager at the Abbey Theatre, the national theatre of Ireland, said during his facilitation today. As part of an exploration of applied theatre practices in Ireland, Phil hosted a three-hour session with the students, and he invited five of his facilitators and staff to join him in the presentation.

The morning began with us meeting Phil at the front doors of the Abbey, where he proceeded to greet each of us by name with a handshake. Phil had checked out the pictures and bios of the students in advance on our online course site at LORE.com, and he had taken the time to “know” everyone before we arrived. Throughout his three hours of work with us, Phil repeatedly made specific references to past experiences that students had included in their bios. His greeting set a welcoming tone that continued throughout the entire session.

Phil’s facilitators demonstrated a number of challenging moments that they have encountered in the various community projects that they’ve been working on, and it was helpful for us to see that issues that arise in Irish culture are often similar to the kinds of challenges we face in US settings. Conversely, both settings have their own unique challenges as well. It just reminded me to reflect again about community. I encouraged everyone to consider the commonalities that a community of practitioners might share, while also thinking about how experiences might be vastly different based on geographic location, time period, etc.

Phil also provided the students with the opportunity to choose a show from the 2012 Dublin Fringe Festival program and begin to consider different education and outreach possibilities that could be created for each show. The exercise provided an excellent, somewhat related practice run for the final project in the course, a prospectus for an original applied theatre project. Students encountered various degrees of specificity and success with their brainstorming in this process, thus allowing for a very safe experiment in thinking about developing new artistic ideas.

The group also had a chance to hear about a project that Phil’s office is developing with women who work as sex workers or who have left the sex work industry. The project involves interviewing these women and learning more about their stories. These stories will eventually lead to a theatre piece with a tentative showing date in November. As this kind of work with interviews is of particular interest to me, I was excited to hear about this new development for the Abbey. Then to model this project’s process, students worked in groups of three to interview one member of their trio, and then the other two students created a short improvisational piece representing what the interviewee said. Six pairs showed work, and it was moving and respectful. Building artistic work from the stories, ideas, and beliefs of real people requires the artist-facilitator to have a heightened sense of empathy. The interviewees discussed amongst themselves how it felt to be interviewed, and I appreciated the empathy-building that occurred as a result.

I also asked the students to begin to think about what each of our facilitators is doing, and how it might be helpful for the participants (them) in these different inputs that we’ve had and will continue to have. I’ve asked the students to always stay fully engaged as artist-participants in the various processes they are experiencing, but then to reflect after the fact about how that particular process might have unfolded. This prompt of “what is happening and why is it helpful” is one way to focus observations of another’s teaching, facilitating, or directing practice.

At one point in the session Phil said, “If the art is good, it can hold a lot.” I’ve known this concept to be true, but it’s always taken me more words to say it. I appreciated the brevity of Phil’s words, and the power of their simplicity. Artists making work in communities have a responsibility to aesthetics, just like any other artist. Maybe more so. The art-making can’t primarily be about “fixing” injustices or people or societies. Or about therapy. All of these things may be byproducts of the work, but they can’t be the primary focus of the work.

“If the art is good, it can hold a lot.” Simple and to the point.

Thanks to Phil Kingston and his team for a fantastic and inspiring session today!

Settling into the academic work and a statement about community-engaged work by Declan Gorman

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Jul 242012

Very busy today with the applied theatre course. Morning session focused on continuing our discussion of community with Declan Gorman and Jenny Macdonald. Each facilitator provided a short session on how s/he might begin work with a new group of community participants. Declan also shared a statement that he wrote about reflecting on what applied and community-engaged theatre might be, and I’ve included his words below as part of this blog post.

The afternoon session with Joanna Parkes introduced the Educational Resource Packet model, which is a way of preparing a community to experience a play for the first time. The model comes out of work that Joanna helped to develop at the Abbey Theatre, and she uses this methodology as the template for our students to create packets for two plays by Enda Walsh, Chatroom and New Electric Ballroom. Students will work in groups over the next few days to develop these packets, and they will present on Saturday afternoon. Joanna delivered a four-hour session, which included the Abbey’s Archives Resource Box, an educational tool that helps communities throughout Ireland to explore and understand the history of the national theatre of Ireland.

The evening featured a performance of A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde at the Gate Theatre. We were lucky enough to score tickets to the opening, and even sat a couple rows in front of Gabriel Byrne, who was in attendance that evening. The production featured a gorgeous costume design and some very fine acting. The play itself raises some questions about Wilde was actually going for with this story, particularly in the second half. Seems like he didn’t quite know how to wrap it up, so he kept heading down a new road, then backtracking, then heading down another road. He finally found his way, and the play finishes up. But suffice it to say, it takes awhile to get there.

What follows is the short text that Declan Gorman shared with us in his facilitation. I appreciated his statements immensely, and his transparency with us about needing to move through this writing process to relocate himself in his own practice. His words helped all of us to reflect on what it is we’re doing here and what we aim to do in the future.

From Declan:

A group of people gathered in a room is not a community – not yet – even if common cause has brought them to the room and common social bonds unite them outside the room (such as race, shared geographical home, gender, disability or commitment to a given social justice principle).

The term ‘Community’, when it is truly applied, when it is intended to describe an active, conscious social organism – and not used simply as a flaccid label to describe outwardly homogenous groupings in society (the Irish Community; the Gay Community etc.) – must be earned by cohesive, collaborative action.

That can be achieved in a room or a city square or an athletic club by shared commitment to arts practices, cohesive protest, sport, collective response to tragic events or other action. It reaches its highest plane however where conscious strategies are employed and embraced actively to celebrate commonality, recognise and respect difference and above all to MAKE something.

As artists, we automatically, instinctively and systematically make, and that is why our natural work if applied consciously (and not patronisingly) is proven to add value to community building.

Our responsibility as artists is seldom to create community. It is not for any individual to create a community, however charismatic or well-intentioned. That can only ever be a collective action. But we are sometimes called upon and can offer to enhance community by enabling the most beautiful and rigorous making that the forming community can achieve.

There are many ways and methods that artists can bring to this task – there is no single correct or best one. Different artists have different ‘tools’ that they share within good collective arts practice. But the endgame is always the same – whether we are working with disaffected youth in a border town somewhere or with a group of keen students on a study abroad program – to apply our artistic skills, intuitions and methods towards creating quality art in communal settings and thus enable the growth and consolidation of that community.

The course work begins

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Jul 232012

First day of course work on the applied theatre experience in Dublin. Some quick thoughts and observations:

1. “Applied theatre” is an academic term according to Helen Nicholson in her text Applied Drama. Theatre in communities has been happening for many years prior to the emergence of applied theatre as an academic discipline. Like so many things in the academy, people gain stature through the naming process. Terms come into existence so that phenomena can be named and categorized. I appreciate the term, but I don’t always find that it’s necessary to categorize the work that I make. The term “applied theatre” provides legibility and legitimacy for certain kinds of work in the academy. Seems a bit unnecessary on many levels. I may go to academic hell for writing that, but my ticket to hell has been stamped for so many other reasons at this point that I’m not sure it makes a difference. Main point: I worry that in our urgency to name something in the academy, we sometimes dilute that thing’s core principle. In this case, applied theatre needs to be theatre with a strong artistic aesthetic. Do we need anything beyond that, regardless of who we’re making it with? That’s the core question for me at the moment.

2. Orla Hasson facilitated an opening exercise with the students and asked them to consider what it means to be a community. The session concluded with a series of post-its on the wall documenting important characteristics of any community and hopes that students had for their newly developed community here in Ireland. After witnessing Orla’s facilitation, Joanna Parkes noted how an exercise in the hands of another facilitator can unfold in a completely different way and yield different outcomes. We know this as facilitators, but it was exciting for all of us to see Orla at work. I liked so much of the language that she used and how she transitioned from one section of the exercise to the next. And she consistently reminded the group about tempo. Slow. Yes. Like it. Note to self.

3. Seeing Declan Gorman in his one-man show introduced me to a lesser known work by James Joyce and made me want to read it. Through his nuanced portrayal of multiple characters of varying ages and experiences, I was reminded of the rich history of Dublin, as well as how theatre can actually capture the essence of a community through the enactment of the people and the time in which they live. Declan created a stellar adaptation of primary and secondary source material and left the audience wanting more of his storytelling. An exciting work that more people need to see. The Dubliners Dilemma: check it out!

See the images below from our morning facilitation with Orla Hasson in the Beckett Centre at Trinity College.