About Roadside's CCD Methodology

Community Residency Methodology

Roadside’s community-strengthening residencies can begin with public performances of plays selected from Roadside’s repertoire, complemented by workshops that explore Roadside’s history, purpose, and artistic process.

In the second phase of a multi-year residency, the community, with Roadside’s help, begins to uncover its own stories and music through a specific story and music collecting process (story circles). This second phase culminates with public performances by the community of its stories and music – often in conjunction with big potluck suppers or community cook-outs.

In the third phase of a residency, a community’s stories and music form the natural resource to craft plays, which are produced by a community’s artists for the public.

The final phase of the residency formally acknowledges the local project leaders and artists, seeks to identify infrastructure and resources to establish a place for their work in their community, and introduces their work to other theaters and presenters in the national arts community

Philosophy of Change
By Dudley Cocke, Roadside Theater

Effective community organizing invariably begins small. The basic unit of such organizing is the individual discovering, through experience, his or her own truth of the issue, then testing and developing that truth in dialog with others who also have direct knowledge. Aggregate and organize this knowledge about an issue and communities can change. Such change can only be sustained when this grassroots process of individual and collective learning continues to inspire and shape awareness and action. Conversely, when people and their organizations lose touch with such knowledge as the shaping force of change, reform will begin to collapse. This philosophy of change holds that those who directly experience a problem must make up the generative base for devising and enacting the solution.

Story Circle Guidelines
By Roadside Theater

Here is a summary of the Story Circle methodology Roadside developed for creating and developing original plays and for telling and listening to stories in communities across the US.

About: Story Circles
By Roadside Theater

Each one of our stories is a gift to those who are listening, with the quality of the listening a gift in return to the storyteller.

The stories we’re able to tell ourselves and others, those we can understand and imagine, define not only what we believe to have already occurred, but what we believe to be possible in our individual and collective lives.  Story Circles engender appreciation for the unique intellectual, emotional, and spiritual qualities of each participant, and develop oral expression and listening skills.  Each one of our stories is a gift to those who are listening, with the quality of the listening a gift in return to the storyteller.

Roadside’s ensemble members grew up without television, immersed in a world of local stories and oral histories.  The oral tradition, often in ballad form, is the most prominent feature of our shared Scots-Irish heritage, and it has shaped the content and determined the form of our plays.  If you have ever sat around with friends and kin singing, spinning tales, and recounting histories, you will quickly see where we’re coming from: the play’s lines suddenly doubling and overlapping within a general motif of call and response.  In our Appalachian performance tradition, as well as in other performance traditions into which we have been invited to perform (the southern African American and Puerto Rican traditions come right to mind), call and response extends beyond the stage to include the audience. The grand result is the rich choral effect of harmony and counterpoint that is group storytelling, whether on a front porch or in an auditorium.   

Not only can the oral tradition effectively generate content for building plays from scratch (Roadside has created 58 such plays), but, after performances of the staged play, Story Circles with audience and cast can provide a nuanced feedback loop for audience members to integrate the play’s experience into their own lives, as well as for the play’s artists to deepen their understanding of the performance.  In effect, such circles continue the play’s action into a new Act, providing a way for the community to talk to itself about the play’s themes, and for the performance itself to mature.  Based on this experience, sometimes community leaders will invite Roadside to help their community discover and publicly present its own songs, stories, and oral histories.  A basic building block of these extended community cultural development residencies is the Story Circle.  

In the course of sharing stories, difficulties in a community often rise to the surface, including issues from which its members are suffering.  Roadside’s Story Circle methodology supports a basic principle of such community change work: those who directly experience a problem must make up the generative base for devising and enacting the solution.  In this work, Roadside first uses its Story Circle methodology to help individuals discover their own truth of the issue, and then to test and develop that truth in dialog with other community members.  By periodically collecting and organizing the knowledge about the issue generated by the stories, communities have an informed basis for recommending change, abetted by an enhanced sense of mutual trust.  To sustain the momentum for change, the process of individual and collective learning about the issue must continue to inspire and shape action.  

 Because stories are so powerful, they can easily be used for purposes of domination and exploitation, rather than collective development.  Consequently, Roadside is formal about its methodology, and we encourage those interested in the method to contact the company for training.  The training includes how to become a Story Circle facilitator and how to use Story Circles to create plays, is a lot of fun, and can be accomplished in two days.

Booklet: You and Your Community's Story

General Theory of Cultural Organizing
By Dudley Cocke, Roadside Theates

Cultural organizing is characterized by a willingness to reexamine basic assumptions and test hypotheses through repeating cycles of posing questions and trying to answer them. A humble curiosity, an openness to simple questions and unexpected answers, a willingness not to know the answers – these are the qualities of the learner that cultural organizing cultivates.

Cultivation of this culture of intentional learning is a defining characteristic of cultural organizing. Such intentional learning is demonstrated by collective governance and consensual practice in the articulate pursuit of three questions. What are we trying to change, and why is that important? How are we trying to make this change, and why is that the best strategy? How will we know we are making the change; what data will provide us evidence, so we can improve the work and we can demonstrate its accomplishment to others?

Cultural organizing begins its programs and projects with all stakeholders present for partnership. A locus for program design is determined by defining the problem, separating what is known from what is unknown, and discerning the difference between causes and effects, root and branch. Having located an authentic point of departure, the partners can proceed in an orderly fashion, relying on manageable cycles of action and assessment in order to learn together.

If the cycles of action and assessment are producing learning (generating knowledge, developing skills, altering attitudes, changing behaviors), the partners can expect that the plan of work will evolve as the work proceeds. Flexibility is an important value. This flexibility does not absolve the partners of accountability to outside audiences, or of the important need to develop and follow strategic road maps. But there should be a willingness, indeed a desire, to improve the road maps as new evidence is uncovered and new ideas are generated.

A Matrix: Articulating the Principles of Grassroots Theater
By Dudley Cocke, Harry Newman, and Sanet Salmons-Rue

A concise matrix designed to address the questions: What makes a grassroots theater a grassroots theater? What ideals and principles distinguish it from other kinds of theater activity in the country? What elements and goals do the various grassroots theater efforts in the U.S. have in common? 

Excerpted from: From the Ground Up: Grassroots Theater in Historical and Contemporary Perspective; Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, 1993.

Story Circle Training

Roadside's Story Circle methodology is deceptively simple. Because stories are so powerful, they can easily be used for purposes of domination and exploitation, rather than collective development.  Consequently, Roadside is formal in its approach, and we encourage those interested in the method to contact the company for training.  The training includes how to become a Story Circle facilitator and how to teach others to facilitate Story Circles.  It's a lot of fun, and can be accomplished in one day or less. 

Community Participation and Civic Dialogue
By Dudley Cocke

Remarks to Renewing Democratic Civil Society, The Centennial Assembly of the Commonwealth Club

San Francisco, CA - February 27-28, 2003

Good morning. As Rich DeLeon just said, place matters. I'm from the Appalachian Mountain coalfields, near Harlan and Hazard, Kentucky, where southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwestern Virginia, and upper Tennessee back-up on one another. When I got started making talks like this, I asked a preacher for advice: First, son, you tell them what you're going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them. So, I'm going to begin with the assumption underlying my thesis, then state and illustrate my thesis, and conclude.

***

Here we are in a room above Market Street, Homo sapiens, the storytelling animals. As a species, language is our chief selective advantage, and the stories that we tell ourselves and others, those that we can understand and imagine, define what is possible in our individual and collective lives. Without our stories, how will we know it's us? And without hearing and reading and seeing the stories of others, how will we know who they are?

If you believe this about the centrality, for humans, of language and story, as I do, you understand that the arts and humanities, practiced democratically, are the sine qua non, the irreducible ingredient, of civil society. If our civil society is presently at risk, then so must be our arts and humanities. And I think that this is precisely the case.

Here is my thesis: The arts and humanities have put themselves between a rock and a hard place which prevents them from reaching, in a meaningful way, the majority of Americans. The rock: Now 80% of the audience for the not-for-profit performing arts is the wealthiest 15% of the population. And the hard place: In our popular culture, which is a product of our mass media, the arts and humanities are edited to make money. (Have you heard about the new Beverly Hillbillies reality T.V. show that CBS is planning? They're presently conducting a "hick hunt" to find the right poor family for us to laugh at.) Whether such programs tell us anything about ourselves or others is irrelevant. And yet, doesn't a civil society absolutely depend on this effort to know one another and ourselves?

Fortunately, there is a pocket of possibility between this rock of elitism and this hard place of venal numbness -- a third arts and humanities sector, mostly overlooked or dismissed by our institutions, where resilience exists, where democratic promise resides. It is the unincorporated sector of non-professional humanists and artists (dare they even call themselves artists and humanists?): The millions of Americans who sing in choirs; who write poetry, plays, memoirs, and fiction; who dance; who avidly study history and literature; who craft meaning and beauty with their hands and eyes. Robert Putnam and his book, Bowling Alone, have been mentioned often during this assembly. When I was interviewed by Mr. Putnam, his first question was what happened to the community theaters of his youth, when neighbors got together to put on plays?

Let me tell you several stories to illustrate the great promise of this unincorporated, so-called amateur sector. Thirty-odd years ago, a famous folksinger from California came to the coalfields of central Appalachia to perform in a high school auditorium. A big crowd was on hand as a local string band opened the concert. The local folk musicians, rising to the occasion, had the audience's rapt attention. I'm told that you could hear a pin drop. The famous folksinger followed with some success. Backstage, she made a point to congratulate the local band on their performance, noting that she, too, often sang from the same Appalachian song book. She went on to say how keenly the audience had been listening to their music and wondered what their secret was. "What is that little something extra you seem to have?" she asked repeatedly, each time more emphatically. The so-called amateur band kindly looked at the floor as she pressed for an answer. Finally the fiddle player spoke up, "Well ma'am, the only difference that I could tell was that you were playing out front of them ol' songs, and we were right behind 'em."

Ralph Ellison in "The Charlie Christian Story," deftly spins the fiddler's point:

There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a context in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity, and as link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it.

I am a member of a 27 year old traveling theater company, a merry, sometimes depressed, band of thespians whose core activity is conceptualizing, writing, staging, and touring plays. None of us were trained in our craft by the academy. We studied theater in our church services; sitting around telling stories, recounting family and community histories, swapping tall tales and jokes; singing and playing music with our kin and neighbors.

One of our long-standing collaborators is the African American Junebug Productions, based in New Orleans, and one of our co-creations, Junebug/Jack, is about the historical and present-day relationships between black and white working class southerners. As we toured the United States, naturally we wanted black and white working-class people to attend the play. The problem is that black and white working-class people do not typically go out together (or separately, for that matter) to the professional theater.

Our solution was to ask the sponsors of Junebug/Jack, which is a musical, to pull together a group of singers from different quarters of their community - for example, from their white Methodist church, from their black AME Zion church, from their integrated public high school, and from their women's choir. With their designated musical director, this new community chorus would rehearse the show's music over the course of several months, and then in final rehearsals, I, as the play's director, would stage them into the production. Junebug/Jack would swell from a cast of our six to say twenty-two.

Out of support for their family and friends, as well as curiosity about this new thing happening in their community, large numbers of people showed up for the performances who would not otherwise have attended. And not only did the broader community's presence onstage and in the audience make the play's story more vibrant, the rehearsals brought seemingly unlike people together around their common passion for singing. That prompted some real artistic exchange! And in the process relationships naturally formed, bringing with them insights into the universals that we share.

Subsequently, if enough interest is expressed, which is often the case, we offer to help such a community continue building these relationships. To accomplish this, we developed a methodology that relies on the arts and humanities to stir a community to raise its voice in public. But that is a much longer story. For today, suffice it to say that this methodology rests on the realization that people want to participate and contribute, not just watch and consume. Once the community is engaged, the collective task becomes to maintain an open place in the process for the unexpected and controversial aspects of local life to appear.

People often ask, is Roadside Theater the only group doing such work? Not at all! There are thousands of artists across the nation equally engaged. To begin learning more about them and their work, I recommend www.communityarts.net. Several years ago, in collaboration with the Community Arts Network and the Irvine Foundation, we conducted a research project, Connecting Californians-An Inquiry into the Role of Story in Strengthening Communities. One of our research questions: In your county, have plays about local life been produced in the past five years? In all but one California county (Glenn), the answer was an enthusiastic, yes!

Let me end close to where I began: democracy is built as the community is built--by encouraging citizen participation and by bridging the social lines that want to divide us. What can be more effective at this than the arts and humanities? More than the law, politics, or the economy, a democratic arts and humanities based on participation connects us to our fellow human beings in most powerful ways. Let us fully tap our resource. It is to our advantage to do so.

Community Cultural Development as a Site of Joy, Struggle, and Transformation
By Dudley Cocke

Published in “Arts and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practices and Dilemmas” (Routledge, 2015). You can purchase the book at http://goo.gl/aXkbJu 

Testimonial: Community Cultural Development
By Mike Gary

Mike Gary was a student at Haysi High School who participated in a Roadside Theater CCD residency, through which students and senior citizens worked together to great performances from local stories and music. 

A Week-Long Immersion in the Activist Theory and Practice of Appalshop
By Jamie Haft

Preface by Arlene Goldbard

Last year, I joined several colleagues in The Curriculum Project. Together, we investigated the state of higher education for community cultural development in the United States.

A key issue that emerged from our research was the challenge of offering students truly meaningful opportunities for community engagement as an integral element of education. The type of work that Appalshop does cannot be learned entirely in the classroom; students need the give-and-take, the sustained experience of community, to develop the requisite skills and sensitivities. Our research revealed difficulties in building equitable partnerships between universities and the community partners who could accept student placements. We saw that constraints on time built into academic systems made it difficult to achieve the continuity of relationship so essential to good practice. There were strong community engagement opportunities here and there, but most were seen, even by their creators and colleagues, as less than sufficient. The challenge of connecting the culture of the university and the cultures of surrounding communities needed to be recognized both as formidable and as well worth tackling.

Jamie Haft’s essay foregrounds these challenges. In describing her own eye-opening experience with Appalshop, a leading practitioner of community cultural development, she draws out questions of privilege and inclusion, questions that go to the heart of education’s purpose. She explains that she and her fellow Tisch Scholars returned to NYU from their Appalshop experience only to discover that the university will not nurture and support the type of learning they experienced there. She quotes keynote speaker Michael Roth, then President of the California College of Arts: “The university is no longer a place where one goes to access opportunity, but rather, is just a mechanism for preserving privilege.” In this 2006 essay, she predicts a global crisis gathering force beneath the radar of privilege. As we read her words today, the crisis has arrived.

When we began The Curriculum Project in the summer of 2007, we remarked that higher education programs oriented toward community-based artists had been proliferating at a time when funding was scarce for the field of practice students in these programs would enter. Would there be jobs for graduates? As I write this in early 2009, the funding situation has become much more dire. As Roadside’s artistic director Dudley Cocke recently wrote, members of Congress succeeded during debate over President Obama’s economic stimulus package in portraying the arts as a “toxic amenity.” The Tisch Scholars program has ended, and with it the Appalshop immersion experience for NYU students that Jamie describes. Appalshop and other community-based organizations are facing unsettling future prospects, given that both contributed and earned income are falling with the economic downturn. There is hope that the new administration will recognize and support the essential importance of culture to recovery; and that university leaders will be inspired by The Curriculum Project and others’ urgings to invest in and configure programs in ways that will prepare students to take part in that vital work. But whether these hopes become reality remains to be seen.

* * *

A Week-Long Immersion in the Activist Theory and Practice of Appalshop: The NYU Tisch University Scholars Travel to Whitesburg, Kentucky

By Jamie Haft (NYU Class of 2007)

This essay is drawn from the California College of the Arts’ Conference session, “Appalshop: A Student Intensive Model in Community-Based Art,” co-facilitated by MacKenzie Fegan.  In 2003, Professor Jan Cohen-Cruz and Appalshop’s Dudley Cocke created the NYU/Appalshop immersion program, and they have continued to mentor its participants. Special thanks to Dudley Cocke for the conversations about Appalshop’s history and about his own theory of social justice which informed both the conference’s session and this essay. The quotations cited in this article are from the final March 18th, 2006 reflection circle at the most recent NYU/Appalshop immersion.

When excitedly preparing for our session at the California College of Arts’ conference, MacKenzie and I noticed a contradiction. The theme of the conference was “Creating a Vision for Art, Equity, and Civic Engagement,” and our case study was the Tisch University Scholars Program’s weeklong immersion at the activist Appalachian arts and humanities center, Appalshop. Given the theme of the conference, it became clear that the underlying theme of our presentation would be the tension between an elite university program and the social justice principles of our immersion host, Appalshop.

The Scholars
The Tisch University Scholars Program began in 1965 at New York University as a recruitment tool. Students accepted into the program received a full scholarship and a free international vacation each year. Administrators believed that admittance into this prestigious program could be the decisive factor in a student’s decision to attend NYU.

By 2002, it had become clear that NYU no longer needed such a recruitment tool. The university was celebrating a steady rise in applications, despite September 11th, and Newsweek was consistently ranking it the #1 dream school of high school students. NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts had become the premier undergraduate arts program in the nation; its alumni included stars like Chris Columbus, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. Tuition hikes accompanied Tisch’s rising reputation; this year, the annual cost of attending Tisch is $50,000 plus.

No longer needed to woo the best and the brightest, administrators and deans at Tisch began to ask, what purpose should the Scholars Program now serve? And how could it be restructured so participants shed the sense of entitlement that the program once intentionally engendered? In the past five years, the Tisch Scholars Program has been refocusing on leadership training, and the annual freshman class trip to Appalshop has become one of the most successful ways this refocusing has occurred.

The Activists
Appalshop, from Appalachian Workshop, began in 1969 when a handful of young people – some still in high school – secured funding from the federal “War on Poverty” to set up a filmmaking program to help their working-class and poor families and neighbors grapple with their region’s poverty. Through the 1980s and 90s, Appalshop connected the struggle of Appalachia to the struggles of other poor and marginalized communities across the United States, confronting a range of issues including race and class: cultural, gender, and sexual bias and stereotypes; human rights violations in the criminal justice system; and immigrants rights and citizenship. The young activists’ passion for social, economic, and cultural justice expanded to other artistic forms, resulting in the creation of hundreds of community-centered plays and numerous new grassroots theater groups, the production of over two hundred documentary films and community-initiated radio projects; and the launching of programs to stimulate citizen participation in social reform and policy change.

Appalshop believes that effective grassroots organizing for social justice begins small, with the individual. First, one discovers his or her own truth of an issue, and then tests and develops that truth in dialogue with others. It is believed that if this individual and collective learning process is multiplied, a national movement for reform will develop and change society. This theory of change holds that such a movement can only be sustained when this grassroots process of individual and collective learning continues to inspire awareness and shape the plan of action. This bottom-up theory of change emphasizes that those who directly experience a problem must make up the generative base for devising and enacting the problem’s solution.

The Immersion
For the past three years, during the NYU spring break in March, a group of students and faculty from the Tisch Scholars Program have traveled to Whitesburg, Kentucky to participate in a five day immersion in the activist theory and practice of Appalshop. The preparation for the immersion begins at NYU months before the trip when Appalshop’s Dudley Cocke facilitates a story circle in one of the Scholars’ weekly meetings. Cocke’s goal is to get students and faculty to think about their own cultural roots and identity.

Appalshop filmmaker Elizabeth Barrett’s Stranger with a Camera is screened and discussed at another Scholars meeting prior to visiting Kentucky. The documentary investigates the circumstances around a cold-blooded murder in Letcher County, Eastern Kentucky in 1967, when a famous Canadian filmmaker, Hugh O’Connor, was shot by a local man while he, an outsider, was filming the region’s poverty. Students are shaken by Barret’s stark narration in the film, in which she asks: “Can filmmakers show poverty without shaming the people we portray? I came to see that there was a complex relationship between social action and social embarrassment. As a local filmmaker, I live every day with the implications of what happened.” 

Students are also asked to study the Appalshop website (www.appalshop.org) and to formulate several questions that the site’s content raises about their own future careers as artists. Questions from last year include:

• What is it like to be part of an intimate, creative environment so far from the main, widely known urban centers of artistic activity?
• Can community-based work become too insular?
• How do others describe Appalshop’s place in the national arts community?
• Have there been any negative reactions to Appalshop? If so, why?
  
  

Finally by way of preparation, students and faculty are asked to select a personally meaningful song or spoken word recording to play and discuss on Appalshop’s radio station, WWMT, which broadcasts to parts of five states and streams live on the Internet.

The trip to Kentucky begins before sunrise, when everyone travels together to JFK airport, takes an airplane to Atlanta, and then transfers to a small propjet bound for Tri-Cities, Tennessee. From Tennessee, the group caravans for several hours through the mountainous coal fields of southwest Virginia before reaching Whitesburg’s Super 8 Motel. Freshmen Scholars quickly learn that Whitesburg is a dry town in a dry county, which adds an immediate disappointing twist to their first college spring break. But because the Appalshop immersion is built around engagement, the experience will bond students more than any week of drinking in Cancun.

NATE JONES, CLASS OF 2009: "A lot of people have been saying that they liked the sense of community, and that’s my favorite thing about this week, too. I went to a high school where we had a strong sense of community, so one of the things I don’t like about NYU is that we don’t have one. But here, when you’re out on the street, people say hi to you. And this week, we even became a community within ourselves."

Soon after settling into the Super 8, everyone heads to the Courthouse Café to break bread for the first time with Appalshop staff and local folks. A majority of the meals during the immersion will be at the Café, which is a delight to most participants who can’t get enough of the homemade Tanglewood Pie! After supper, the group goes to Appalshop, for the first time, to get an introduction to Appalachian culture on the Roadside Theater stage with singer-songwriter-playwright Ron Short.

LUCIA GRAHAM JONES, CLASS OF 2009: "I remember the first night when we watched Ron Short. I never really liked bluegrass at all – I hated it. I was just really glad to get to watch that performance, because it gave me a greater appreciation for it."

Before drifting off to sleep, students head to Food City, the grocery store behind the motel. Marveling at how much more reasonably priced the food is than in New York City, they stock up on all kinds of goodies for the upcoming nights of friend-making and philosophizing.

ERICA TACHOIR, CLASS OF 2009: "Thursday night we had been up really late working on our projects, and everyone decided that it was sleep night, and that we’d hang out tomorrow. We had this really long day, so we were drained. I went back to the room with Lipica and Rochelle, physically exhausted and determined to go to bed… but then, we started to talk about what this experience meant to us. We sat there so fired up. It wasn’t girl talk about boys or anything. We were talking about how this place inspired us and how we want to do something with this experience back at NYU."

On the second day, before the sun has dried the dew, Herbie Smith, who joined Appalshop in 1969 as a teenager, takes a group in his van for a tour of the region, stopping for pictures and to relate historical details about the coal mines and the tightly-packed coal camps where the miners lived. The group also visits the very place where the 1967 murder documented by Stranger with a Camera occurred.

While Herbie’s tour is happening, another group of students and faculty is broadcasting on the radio, sharing their favorite songs and swapping stories with the Appalshop DJ. Upon learning that two of his guests are musical theater majors, DJ Dee Davis calls for a song. Never shy about an opportunity to get discovered, the two students burst into a beautiful two-part harmony from one of their favorite Broadway shows.

Still a third group is participating in story circle training. The methodology of a story circle, which keys off the power of traditional Appalachian and Scotch-Irish storytelling, was created by Appalshop’s theater wing, Roadside Theater. The rules of the story circle are simple. The group sits in a circle, and each person tells a personal story based on a mutually agreed upon theme, such as experience with race or class. One person volunteers to begin, and the circle moves to the right. You can pass if you aren’t ready to tell a story, and the opportunity to speak will come back to you. Stories should have a beginning, middle and end, characters, and maybe even conflict. No one can join the story circle late, and everyone must participate. Even if someone tells a controversial story, there is no cross-talking to respond; participants must wait to respond through their own story.

Story circles have the immediate grounding effect of personalizing something abstract. For example, I have trouble imagining what residents in New Orleans felt like during Hurricane Katrina, but I could tell a story about a moment when I felt displaced from my home or comfort zone. Through telling a personal story, I am able to better understand the stories of New Orleans residents. The exploration of one’s personal narrative is important in grassroots work for several other reasons. It helps students to value their own identities more, and taking turns listening and sharing builds compassion for those who are different, helping each participant better understand his or her relative position in society.

SARITH DEMUNI, CLASS OF 2008: "In terms of what this place is doing with the tradition of the area, it got me thinking about my roots. I was born in Sri Lanka, and I’m pretty far removed from that. I think I should really start thinking about where I come from, my people. I really don’t know much about it, and I’ve never cared to learn until now."

ALICIA MATUSHESKI, CLASS OF 2007: "I’m thankful for my experience here because I feel like I got to slow down and think about my life, in ways that I seldom find time to do in New York. I put this pressure on myself when I’m at school to reject my community and my home. When I have the chance to write about it, I think, oh it’s not good enough for this class. I really admire how everyone here embraces their community. It makes me want to go back to my home and do that."

The immersion’s interlacing activity revolves around trips to the Courthouse Café and meals prepared by Appalshop staff and community cooks. Imagine this: Beans – cooked in a big pot, transformed into soup – with cornbread for dipping – and homemade fudge for dessert, all enjoyed in folding chairs and tables in a make-shift mess hall in the lobby of Appalshop. The burning question the local cooks have for their New York dinner guests: Why in the world would anyone request vegetarian soup beans?

Midway through the third day, the immersion moves into an intense 24-hour production phase. Students and faculty divide into groups based on their interests. In the most recent immersion, students had three options: To team with Herbie Smith and Robert Salyer to make a video biography about James Caudill, a much respected preacher and singer in the Old Regular Baptist Church; to collaborate with local youth in the Appalachian Media Institute to create two video and two audio public service announcements – one to encourage young Appalachians to vote in the upcoming local elections, and the other to confront the rise in deadly drug use among local youth; or to work with Roadside Theater artists to devise a performance piece based on story circles. After the groups pull an all-nighter to complete their projects, the production phase ends in a celebratory showing of the new work for all Appalshop staff and community participants.

SEAN CALDER, CLASS OF 2008: "It’s a weird thing being from New York ... everyone thinks identity is an individual thing, and if you’re not blazing your own path, tearing down traditions and creating something new, then it’s not worthwhile. Even people who have influences try to like, claim it as their own. It’s this shameful thing to be a part of something, especially at Tisch. It’s nice to see artists who are just naturally following in the tradition and in others’ footsteps."

SHAINA TAUB, CLASS OF 2009: "I think that what Appalshop does is beautiful. Being a young artist in New York, in an environment such as we are in at NYU, it can become very … the social lifestyle can become very judgmental, petty, material, very quickly. In that environment a lot of the joy falls out of the work. Appalshop really reminds me that the joy coming out of doing the work is why we do it in the first place."

The immersion, which by now also become an exchange, closes with the most popular event of the week: the potluck supper and square dance at the Cowan Creek Community Center, which is naturally right beside a bubbling creek. At Cowan, community members of all ages are present, and students and faculty delight in having the opportunity to cook and share one of their favorite dishes made from ingredients bought at Food City. As the Old Time band swells to as many as fifteen – including Tisch students and faculty – the crowd goes wild with two-stepping and storytelling. In one corner, NYU students are recounting tales from their exciting city lives to bright-eyed local teenagers; in another corner, Kentuckians under the age of eight are teaching NYU students the dance steps they can do in their sleep, rolling their eyes in disbelief that university students can’t figure out how to do the Virginia Reel.

ANITA GUPTA, DIRECTOR OF THE TISCH SCHOLARS PROGRAM: "I had shared with some of you in one of our story circles about how uncomfortable I felt when I first got here, thinking that my Indian-ness didn’t belong in Whitesburg. I didn’t know how the week was going to evolve for me. But each day parts of me have opened up. I had the opportunity to share so much with the people here, and had so many people take interest in who I am. That all culminated in last night’s square dance – there were so many complete strangers who just came over and talked to me! I felt like, wow, I guess in my own way I do belong here. I also just want to say to the Scholars – I’ve had the chance to work with you in different subsets, story circles and projects, even just being in the van together! It’s been incredible. I have so much respect and regard for each of you. I honor you, and I’m going to take that back to New York with me."

The Implications
The Tisch Scholars return from Appalshop enthused, ready to take on the world with their newly developed activist spirits. However, they are now ahead of their institution, and they quickly discover that the environment at NYU doesn’t nurture this kind of work. As sadly noted by the conference’s opening keynote speaker Michael Roth, President of California College of Arts: “The university is no longer a place where one goes to access opportunity, but rather, is just a mechanism for preserving privilege.”

Dudley Cocke believes that universities can change in two ways: from the top-down, with a dean, president, or provost committed to social justice; or from the bottom-up, with students demanding they get a different, more socially-responsible education. Those working at the top of any hierarchy have the highest stake in preserving the hierarchy’s privilege, so the change may not easily occur from the top-down.

If doing social justice work was a priority for students, they actually would be in a position to demand such change. In our consumer society, students, as “buyers” of expensive university degrees, could in theory purchase change – and the university, as “seller,” would have to adapt its product to the market. However, it is psychologically difficult for students to be active in university politics. Many have had to take out large loans to attend school and get their degree, which doesn’t even guarantee a job, so their minds are often narrowly focused on just getting the training necessary to have some chance of success in the marketplace.

There is one huge problem, however, that the present status quo is not taking into account: Outside the university, there is an impending crisis. This crisis takes many forms, including gentrification, the rising cost of real estate, environmental degradation, racism, stark economic inequality, pandemic disease, and global terrorism. For the arts, the specific crisis is elitism, which prevents artists from playing their historically important role of holding up a mirror to all of society. For the arts, it is a silent crisis, as no one, including those affiliated with university training programs, is acknowledging it as such. For my art form, theater, the evidence of this elitism is found in audience surveys which consistently report that both the nonprofit and commercial theater audience is 80% white and overwhelmingly from the wealthiest 15% of the population. Not only are universities ignoring this rampant elitism, their practices are perpetuating it. If the gateway to becoming an artist is now through a very expensive university degree, art will become increasingly exclusionary.

Elitism not only greatly reduces the talent pool upon which artistic excellence depends; it cripples the formidable role the arts can play in a pluralistic society. The effects of elitism in the arts are especially poignant now when we are fighting global terrorism, because the only credible path to world peace is through increasing our tolerance and compassion for one another. It is a role of the arts to help us find this compassion within ourselves. For the well being of humankind, the 21st century university must address the role it is playing in preserving and perpetuating elitism. Mindful of Appalshop’s theory of change, it is we who are affiliated with universities who must implicate ourselves in this problem and begin devising and enacting solutions. For my student peers, we must become active in university politics, knowing our tuition is the fuel that the university runs on.

I find hope in the democratizing efforts being spearheaded by some inspired faculty and students at universities. At NYU, the Tisch Drama Department offers a Minor in Applied Theater, conceived and directed by Professor Jan Cohen-Cruz, who is currently working to transform it into a major. The major would include a studio specifically designed to train theater artists committed to using their skills to further justice. Cohen-Cruz also runs the Office of Community Connections, a clearinghouse, which helps connect Tisch students to community engagement opportunities in the city. In the past five years, the Tisch Department of Art and Public Policy was formed, and it recently created a socially-relevant core curriculum for all freshmen undergraduate arts students: “Art and the World” and “The World through Art.” In fall 2007, the Department will also launch a Graduate Program in Arts Politics. And then, of course, there is the ever-evolving Tisch Scholars Program. This year’s weekly sessions are framed by the theme, “Paradigms of Privilege.” In retrospect, had I not encountered such socially conscious curricula, I may not have gained awareness of my own level of privilege, nor would I have understood the opportunity my privilege offers me to fight for social, economic, and cultural justice.

DUDLEY COCKE, INTERIM DIRECTOR OF APPALSHOP, ARTISTIC DIRECTOR OF ROADSIDE THEATER: "There’s a phrase down here in the mountains that goes, 'Don’t get above your raisin’.'  You can imagine that in planning this NYU immersion some friends and neighbors have said, 'Why are you messing around with an elite university in New York City? You know that a large part of our poverty here was caused by just such privileged institutions. Looks to me, son, that you’re trying to get above your raisin’.' I’ve responded, 'Right, NYU is an elite institution with privilege, but that doesn’t mean that the people there have completely bought into that privilege. In fact, we often find that the students and faculty who visit us here care deeply about justice.'  I think this weeklong immersion and exchange is evidence that this is not about copping to some sort of elitism. It’s not what you’ve come here for, and we at Appalshop thank you for that.”

Evaluation: Roadside's Story to Performance Workshop
By Prevention Research Center, Lexington, KY

Quotation: Flowing it Back to the People
By Robert Gard

"Perhaps because of the demands upon such men (the leaders), because of the very complexity of the things they attempted, they did not bring themselves to write down their experiences, let alone their dreams.  Consequently, the wealth of their experience has not been returned to the people.  Who knows how American theater might have flourished had the people been able to comprehend the dreams these men had dreamed for them or what developments of native playwriting and native literature might have been accomplished if the people had not only comprehended but had actually been able to put such dreams into practice.  Somehow it is only by flowing it back to the people that experiences and idealism can mean anything."

Robert Gard, Grassroots Theater, 1954

Philosophy of Change 2
By Dudley Cocke

By Dudley Cocke, drafted in response to a series of meetings he facilitated in New Orleans on the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, August 29, 2006

Effective grassroots organizing around issues of social justice invariably begins small. The basic unit of such organizing is the individual discovering through experience, reflection, and study of his or her own truth of the issue, then testing and developing that truth in dialog with others who also have knowledge. Aggregate and organize this knowledge about an issue and movement for change can develop.

Such a movement can only be sustained when this grassroots process of individual and collective learning continues to inspire and shape awareness and action. Conversely, when people and their organizations lose touch with such knowledge as the shaping force of reform, the movement will begin to collapse. This philosophy of change holds that those who directly experience a problem must make up the generative base for devising and enacting the solution. Sometimes tarred as political correctness or social engineering, grassroots organizing is in fact an antidote to both.

This bottom-up philosophy of change provides a critique of some progressive art work. For example, an artist with a formidable liberal & progressive reputation has an exciting idea for a performance that addresses some aspect of social justice. Funders are attracted to the artist and his or her “cutting-edge” conception. A grant is made, and the artist begins working with the community to realize the performance. The problem, from the perspective of our philosophy of change, is that the artist’s conception is not tested and re-conceived by people in the community based on their individual and group knowledge of the issue. The project is launched some distance off the ground and eventually floats away without affecting the problem it seeks to address. It fails because those most affected, those with the problem, are not the generative base for devising and enacting solutions.

Class and the Performing Arts: Class Diversity in Community Development
By Dudley Cocke

Fall 2008: An essay explaining how Roadside has been able to consistently attract an audience fully reflective of the nation’s economic, racial, and geographic diversity.

Alexander Hamilton, political rival of Virginia planter and slave owner, Thomas Jefferson, proposed that the President and Senate be elected for life. Hamilton wrote: “All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and wellborn, the other the mass of people. The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true in fact. The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right.”

The Founding Fathers rejected Hamilton’s elite proposition in favor of Jefferson’s declaration of equality. Thus began our nation’s journey – still not completed – to align the Deed with the Creed.

Several months before the 2000 presidential election, a Florida reporter interviewed citizens about why the vote was important. She approached two retirees relaxing by the pool, “Why is the upcoming presidential election important to you?” Without hesitation, the first responded, “The Supreme Court.” The second added, “the economy.” Then, almost in unison, they said, “The culture.” The reporter blinked and wondered, “What do you fellas mean?” The first retiree looked squarely at her and answered, “Who controls the culture . . .” The second jumped in and finished the sentence, “ . . . controls the story the nation tells itself.”

The past quarter century has been unkind to the democratic impulse in the arts. A 2002 poll by the Urban Institute found that 96 percent of respondents said they were “greatly inspired and moved by art.” However, only 27 percent said that artists contribute “a lot” to the good of society. National surveys (including those by the League of American Theatres and Producers and the 1991-1996 Wallace Foundation-sponsored AMS survey) consistently report that audiences are 80-plus percent white and originating from the top 15 percent of the population, as measured by income and education levels. The widening income gap between rich and poor is threatening to create a permanent underclass. In a 27-year-long trend to apply market values to our social life since the presidency of Ronald Reagan, we have embedded our spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and political life in the economy. And economic globalization has been the steroid of this trend. The exact opposite should be the case. 

I will argue that culture – and its concentrated expression, art – has an important role to play in realizing our nation’s democratic aspirations. But in the not-for-profit performing arts – and many other arts fields as well – progress toward leveling the playing field has stalled, leaving our many U.S. cultures without an equal chance to express themselves, to develop and cross-pollinate. The good news is that knowledge and new opportunities do exist to remove obstacles blocking arts’ progress toward inclusion.

Art in a Democracy: Four Historical Vignettes
Ever since our forebears began putting on dramas, the U.S. theater has been a social forum where race and class, cultural power, and separatism versus integration have been debated.

In 1996-‘97, it was the late playwright August Wilson going at it with Harvard theater director and critic, Robert Brustein. In 1821, it was the African Grove Theater, in Manhattan, where a growing community of free African Americans was mounting productions of Shakespeare, as well as original plays like The Drama of King Shotoway, which called for a slave rebellion. The African Grove’s audience was racially mixed, although the theater’s management found it necessary to segregate whites, as some did not know “how to behave themselves at entertainments designed for ladies and gentlemen of color.”

It’s January 16, 1936, Des Moines, Iowa. At the Shrine Temple Auditorium the curtain rises on the encore performance of the opera,The Bohemian Girl. Regina Steele, 12 years old, steps from the wings and in a clear voice, which carries to the last person in the audience of 4,000, brings the story of the opera to the second act. The cast of 150 is from 50 of Iowa’s 100 counties. They are farm girls and boys, farm men and women. Regina is wearing her blue 4-H uniform. “Who can measure the rewards of such an event?” wrote Marjorie Patten at the time. “Perhaps the greatest value lies in the rich experience of each person who took part in it, the growth through good training, the joy of having had a part in producing a lovely thing and the freeing of some craving for expression.” As one cast member put it, “We have no new linoleum on the kitchen floor, but we have sung in opera!”

In 1991, I invited Robert Gard, founder of the venerable populist Wisconsin Idea Theater, to a meeting of 100 grassroots theater practitioners at Cornell University. It was to be his last public address. He described a vision he had when he was 27 years old: “I felt the conviction then that I have maintained since – that the knowledge and love of place is a large part of the joy in people’s lives. There must be plays that grow from all the countrysides of America, fabricated by the people themselves, born of toiling hands and free minds, born of music and love and reason. There must be many great voices singing out the lore and legend of America from a thousand hilltops, and there must be students to listen and to learn, and writers encouraged to use the materials.”

After politically motivated investigations by the Congressional Dies and Woodrum committees, at midnight on June 30, 1939, only four years after its inception, the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project – the apotheosis of the theater’s democratic impulse – was closed by Congress. The Project’s director, Hallie Flanagan, put its aims succinctly: “National in scope, regional in emphasis, and democratic in attitude.” In its first two years it had presented 42,000 performances to more than 20 million people of all races, creeds and classes.  According to meticulous audience surveys, 65 percent of those attending were seeing a live play for the first time. 

Finding Answers: A Contemporary Case Study
Roadside Theater, which I direct, is a working class ensemble based in the central Appalachian coalfields, where 98 percent of the population is white. The theater has performed in thousands of communities in 43 U.S. states and around Europe. The demographic profile of Roadside’s audience is the inverse of the national norm: 73 percent have annual incomes under $50,000, according to a Wallace AMS survey, and 30 percent earn $20,000 or less. Seventy percent live in rural communities. One third are people of color. How did this happen?

In 1990, as Roadside was preparing its strategy to diversify the audience for the professional American theater, many experts advised us we would fail. We found ourselves wrestling with tough questions. What is a public space? What is an affordable ticket? What are acceptable protocols (e.g., must a show start promptly? should children be admitted?) What community organizations should be our partners?

We determined the key was finding presenters and local leaders who would join us in wrestling with such questions. Over six years, using a process of trial and error, Roadside developed a cultural development model that guaranteed audiences that looked like the whole community. In Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert Putnam describes our approach as “mustering diverse local folks to celebrate their traditions and restore community confidence through dramatization of local stories and music.” The model’s methodology rests on five pillars:

• Active participation;
• Partnerships and collaborations with an inclusive range of community organizations;
• Local leadership;
• Engagement over the course of several years;
• Flexibility to alternate between the roles of leader and follower.
• Roadside’s method can be represented as a circle that rests on these pillars, but the different points on the circle don’t necessarily occur as discreet events. Here’s how it works.
  
  

The first point of the circle is when we come into a community and perform from our repertoire of original plays. People see and evaluate what we do. We explain our history and process in workshops after the performances.

In the second phase of our residency, we prompt the creation of community music and story circles, so the participants can begin to hear their own voices. We pick a theme – maybe a local historic incident – and community members start listening to each other’s stories and songs. They often hear new information about a common experience. The songs and stories, which are often recorded, become the ingredients for community celebrations at the end of the second phase. These often involve potluck suppers; people play music, sing, tell their stories. Through such big, structured celebrations, the community voice proclaims itself.

In the third phase, the community’s own stories and songs become a natural resource for creating drama. Nascent and experienced local playwrights, producers, directors, actors, and designers use this material to make plays. We fill in the gaps in inexperience. The fourth point comes after the drama is up and running. We suggest ways for the community to honor its artists and leaders, and we help establish a theater in the community. We then introduce our new colleagues to the national network of artists and communities that are engaged in similar explorations.

Roadside’s model is labor intensive. It requires that each Roadside artist become a producer (Paulo Freire’s writing oriented us to this new role). Early on in each multi-year residency, the assigned Roadside producer sits down with community leaders to articulate common aspirations. The farming and ranching community of Choteau, MT completed the circle and established a theater company. Here is the agreement that guided our partnership:

• The plays will be given their voice by the community: The artists will be part of the culture from which the work is drawn. Their histories and feedback will inform the work. The audience will not be consumers of, but rather, participants in the performance.
• The plays will witness a commitment to place: They will be grounded in the local and specific, which, when rendered faithfully ad creatively, can affect people anywhere.
• The traditional and indigenous are integral to rural life: They help us maintain continuity with the past, respond to the present, and prepare for the future.
• The project will strive to be inclusive in its producing practices: We will partner with community organizations. Performances will be in places where the community feels welcome. Tickets will be affordable.
• The project will recognize that management structures and business practices are value-laden: We support broad participation, self-reliance, and collective responsibility.
• The project will be consciously linked to struggles for cultural, social, economic, and political equity: Advocating equity often meets resistance, and such resistance, when articulated, is an opportunity for positive change.

This kind of residency work is never smooth sailing. Even so, we were rewarded by the AMS survey results. After all, we had demonstrated that there were no insurmountable barriers to attendance – a good thing for the box office, for democracy, and the art form. We expected that the arts field would be excited by our success, but there was no such reaction. Apparently, we had misunderstood something. Looking back, the warning signs were clear.

One warning sign confronted us in Alabama. We had arrived at the northern Alabama venue greeted by a crowd – “twice as many people as show-up for our performances,” exclaimed the presenter. The audience was a cross-section of the city. The working class people had a great time because they understood our Appalachian working-class play better than many who were from the more formally educated class. But they didn’t invite us back. After our third follow-up call, the presenter said, “We’ve not had such a big crowd before or since. But our board of directors just didn’t like the way y’all talked.” Alabamans didn’t like the way Appalachians talked! Apparently, for some folks, the arts are like a country club – a chance to be with their own kind.

Another example of what the Brooklyn poet Marianne Moore described as “people not liking what they don’t understand” occurred in Scottsdale, AZ. We were performing at the charming, upscale Kerr Cultural Center. The event, sponsored by Arizona State University, was supposed to bring together a diverse audience: wealthy white patrons, folks from the Chicano community, and Native Americans from the Pima Reservation. The culture clash occurred around the performance protocols. Some Chicanos and Native Americans showed up an hour early. They were made to wait outside in the cold for 30 minutes until the doors officially opened. Others arrived 10-15 minutes after the 8:00 pm curtain and were not admitted. The kids from the local Boys & Girls Club (our special guests, performing their own stories) were made to sit on bleachers “to control their behavior.” (It reminded me of Ngugi wa Thiongo’s experience in post-colonial Kenya. It was not censorship of my words, Thiongo had said, but censorship of the desired configuration of the performance space and of my audience’s other cultural norms.)

Despite such attitudes, Roadside has become adept at removing barriers. A long-standing Roadside collaborator is Junebug Productions, an African American theater in New Orleans. One of our co-creations, Junebug/Jack, is about the relationships between black and white working class southerners. As we toured the U.S., naturally we wanted black and white working-class people to attend the play. The problem is that black and white working-class people do not go out together (or separately, for that matter) to the professional theater. Our solution was to ask the sponsors of Junebug/Jack, which is a musical, to pull together singers from different parts of their community –from the white Methodist church to the black AME Zion church to the integrated public high school. Out of support for their church, family, and friends, as well as sheer curiosity, large numbers of people showed up for the performances, who would not otherwise have attended. The disparate parts of each community came together to sing. Only then began the journey of understanding each other. 

New Possibilities
Insisting on participation has been a key to Roadside’s success. There is alignment between this principle and the Wallace-sponsored RAND report, Gifts of the Muse, which found no conclusive evidence that the instrumental valueof the arts (raising test scores, improving health, etc.) caused people to become stakeholders. Interestingly, the study concluded that the intrinsic value of the arts was not perceived to be the artwork itself. Rather, if people did not have deeply meaningful experiences while they engaged with the art, they were unlikely to become active supporters. Direct, hands-on participation in the creative process is the most powerful and moving aspect of artistic experiences. If embraced, this realization would cause a paradigm shift in the arts field. Cultural programmers (also known as arts presenters) would become organizers of cultural participation, giving up on the fixation that catharsis resides solely in the ticketed performance event.

The question, then, becomes how to open-up the creative process to the entire community?

Here is one example. The impetus for a recent Roadside initiative was the construction of super-maximum security prisons in our own backyard, and the rights abuses occurring in them. By morphing our methodology with new media, we were able to shine a light on the impacts of the prison system, especially on poor urban communities, from which a disproportionate number of prisoners are drawn, and on poor rural communities, like Roadside’s, where a disproportionate number of the prisons are sited. 

In prison slang, “to shoot a kite” is to send a message. Our Thousand Kites web platform brings together theater, music, radio, video, and the Internet to test and disseminate a new experimental theater creation, presentation, and community-engagement model in which the live process is mirrored virtually. To succeed, the model has to respond to the needs of its stakeholders. Steady creation of new content in multiple formats has to be matched with the ability to reach established and new audiences.

The play, Thousand Kites, is written from the stories of prisoners, victims, corrections officers, and their families. An online play production kit accompanies the play (both the play and the production tool boxes are available at no cost). We conduct on-line consultancies to connect the play’s community-based producers with Kites staff and with others who have previously produced the play. We produce audio and video documentaries of the productions highlighting the audience’s engagement with them. Dissemination strategies include:

• Live play productions with radio broadcasts and podcasts (featured on Kites 24-hour web radio);
• Radio productions, co-produced and distributed by the National Radio Project to more than 300 stations;
• Social networking sites and data exchanges with stakeholder organizations;
• Viral communication.

The greater audience Kites can reach, the more it is called upon to deliver messaging for other artists and organizations. Such service trading within the arts and community-organizing fields holds great promise. It can serve as a new model for reinvigorating and diversifying the arts, social justice, and education fields by attracting young artists to its ranks; inspiring the development of new types of theater companies; growing the presence of community cultural development in higher education and community organizing; and inspiring new models for cross-disciplinary funding. In short, the combination of arts and media can help to meaningfully connect communities to the arts. 

Strategic Directions
The community itself is the answer to the problem of the class gap. Outside expertise can help. 

Here are some approaches that, in our experience, are demonstrated to work:

• The principles of community cultural development as articulated above;
• Diverse and equitable community partnerships which free the partners from the prejudices of their silos;
• Learning together through manageable cycles of action and assessment;
• Storytelling;
• Remembering that those with the problem are the basis for the solution.
  
  

These are some things that, we have concluded, do not work:

• Community outreach (what is required, instead, is community in-reach);
• Allowing the community to select which development principles to include in a project;
• Trying to make one community’s cultural development project fit all communities;
• Allowing large power imbalances among community partners (too much power can be a deterrent to learning);
• Inhibiting the community from taking the lead.

Finally, some directions for philanthropy to consider:

• Supporting collaborations between professional, amateur, and folk artists;
• Stimulating critical discourse about practice and ethics in the community cultural development field;
• Supporting new leadership (e.g. mentorships that pair veteran and young leaders);  
• Using media to bring participation to public attention (televising the National Heritage Awards in the
• Folk Arts may be more compelling to the public than the Tony Awards);
• Encouraging strategic partnerships across foundation program silos in order to take what is working to scale (e.g., poverty is an issue for economics and culture);
• Publicly stating the impacts for which the foundation is willing to take responsibility and periodically reporting the results of attempts to achieve the stated impacts (one learns as much from failure as from success);
• An “ignorance audit” to determine if there are aspects of the foundation culture that reward staff and grantees for appearing to know more than they actually do know;
• Determining what in the field is working and why (this will require keeping a close ear to the ground which, in turn, may mean hiring more foundation staff).

Conclusion
A joke from the Depression: Two black men are standing in a government breadline; one turns to the other, “How you making it?” The other looks up the line, “White folks still in the lead.”

For a sustainable future, society needs creativity and innovation from a healthy arts ecosystem. For 27 years, we have failed to advance the fundamental principle of cultural equity, or, as my mentor Alan Lomax insisted, “to tap for our common good the inherent genius of every cultural community.” There are, however, indications that now might be a moment of opportunity:

• Unprecedented numbers of young people are seeking opportunities for civic engagement, often motivated by a search for meaning – religious, spiritual, or humanist.
• Colleges and universities offering steady supply of new community cultural development courses, programs, and engagement opportunities. (Syracuse University Chancellor, Nancy Cantor, was recently honored by the Carnegie Corporation for her efforts on behalf of public scholarship. She is co-founder of Imagining America, a coalition of 80 colleges and universities devoted to creating knowledge in the arts, humanities, and design to help communities and campuses transform into centers for civic engagement).
• A lot of the action is happening at the intersections of disciplines, of fields, and of cultural boundaries. Unlikely suspects, such as environmental activists and politicians, are finding themselves drawn to collaborations with artists.
• A critical mass of analytic writing has accrued, bringing attention to community cultural development theories and practices that have been gathering force over the last 50 years.
• As ever, the folk arts remain vibrant and flying under the radar. Their audience already looks like the whole community.
• New concerns about how the U.S. is negatively perceived by many in the world is awakening government leadersto the need for re-starting international arts exchange programs which demonstrate our nation's commitment to pluralism and cultural diversity abroad as well as at home.

As any Darwinian will tell us, when challenged by change, the fatal response is denial. At a time when the arts should be innovating broadly (not just in a narrow, avant-garde sense), we have become too uptight, too hesitant, too risks-averse. We must encourage citizen participation and bridge the inequalities that divide us. More than the law, politics, or the economy, democratic participatory arts connect us to our fellow human beings in the most powerful ways. 

Video: Save Our Towns

Save Our Towns addresses the opiod crisis in central Appalachia and Elaine Sheldon's video Heroin(e). Roadside Theater's Program Director, Amy Brooks, is quoted in this video clip. The full transcript appears below.

Recognizing Arts and Culture as Community Assets

Amy Brooks, Program director, Roadside Theater (division of Appalshop)

Do you intersect with small towns in the course of your work?

I live in Big Stone Gap, which is a very small town that some of you might have heard in Southwest Virginia. I work just up the road in Norton, Virginia, which is only about 13 miles away, very small town. Appalshop, my parent organization for Roadside, is located in Whitesburg, Kentucky, which has a population of around 5,000 people, I believe. That is over Pine Mountain in Eastern Kentucky, and is a very small town. Roadside is the only Appalshop division that is based in Virginia rather than Kentucky.

What do you do in your work with towns?

Roadside is an organizing political theater company, although we don’t claim to say that any politics are the right politics. The way we make change is, we go into a town, by invitation only, so the people there have to identify a problem that they want us to work with or address through playmaking and story circles. We go and we facilitate story circles for the community where we invite people to, in a very kind of formal way, get together and respond to a prompt that invites them to connect in an empathic way and an emotional way rather than just lobbing their ideas back and forth and their opinions. That enables people to communicate across their perceived and their actual differences in a way that maybe just asking for their opinion doesn’t. That’s a good moving forward point, at which point, we start making a play together, if that’s what they want to do, that is about this problem they’re having in their town that they all agree that they would like to find a way in.

In this play building process, which we make using story circle stories from the citizens in the town, we make sure that multiple viewpoints are represented so that there’s no just one viewpoint that we’re trying to pound people over the head with. An example in Whitesburg, in a play we recently did, might be coal culture, and what is the future of Letcher County, and do we want coal to be a part of it or do we not want coal to be a part of it and the different points of view and their feelings about that. That began through story circles. We didn’t ask them about coal to start out with. We asked them about their families and their backgrounds, and their memories of childhood, their ideas and their imagination for the future.

In coming to work with people in a way that’s not didactic, we help them make a play about their community, and then that leads to more story circles that might suggest some kind of community action that people can take together. We’re not really the ones taking the actions and making the change, and implementing what we think needs to be done. We help people talk to each other, so that they can identify what they – the citizens of this town – want to do with each other.

How can the arts help with economic development?

Roadside’s orientation has always been to poor and working class communities, both in rural areas and also in cities. We’ve never just been strictly a rural company.  We also have done residencies in West Baltimore, in New Orleans, and urban sites all across America. We’re continuing to make plays and organize in this way. Recently, we’ve started a project called “Performing our Future,” that is Roadside Theater working with another Appalshop project called the Letcher County Culture Hub, which is an economic development organizing project. We’re working with them and a couple national partners – one of them is Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, and the other is called EEGLP, the Economic Empowerment and Global Learning Project.  It’s a really long title, but a really great organization, that’s based at Lafayette College in eastern Pennsylvania.

So we [have a] team of people – including now some partners at Virginia Tech [such as] Bob Leonard, through the Virginia Tech Artworks Initiative – [who] are looking at asking each other, how can arts and culture catalyze equitable development in communities with histories of economic exploitation? That’s a lot of communities around where we live and work. We sort of use Letcher County as a test site, making plays and organizing with Letcher County Culture Hub partners there – which is kind of a loose knit organization of 19 non- and for-profit businesses and artists organizations and government agencies and volunteer fire departments and food services and all different sorts of organizations within this county – to see how they can work together, coordinate their activities and sort of leverage their latent assets in the community, which we have a lot of.

People don’t necessarily think of things like arts and culture as assets for their community if they haven’t been generating a lot of cash or revenue to date. But they are assets. So we help sort of brainstorm solutions for them using these assets and activating them and making them available in a way that makes sure that they – the communities that produce the value – enjoy the benefits of that value. So if they create songs and stories, rather than outsiders extracting it and profiting from it, the community that create these songs and stories enjoys the financial benefit of that.

Are there towns that you can think of that do a good job of using arts assets to spur economic development?

I think Whitesburg, Kentucky, is a good example, which is where Appalshop is based. I think [it] speaks to the power of an institution like Appalshop as a community center of power, which is the role that Appalshop has played there in Whitesburg since 1969. In a nutshell, the background is it began as the only rural outpost in a mostly urban cohort of test sites for Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty initiative in filmmaking. They came, they gave these eastern Kentucky people filmmaking equipment and taught them to use it and the assumption was that these young people in Letcher County, Kentucky, would leave and go get jobs in the filmmaking and TV industries. They said, “No, I think we’re gonna stay and we’re gonna make documentary films about our families and neighbors and the way that people live here. We’re going to tell first voice stories about real rural life in eastern Kentucky.”

That was the beginning of Appalshop, and since then, as an institution, Appalshop has encouraged not just Whitesburg, but cities and towns in Letcher County and throughout central Appalachia to speak up – to tell the truth about the way that they’re living, to make media, to host music presentations and live theater, and to participate in organizing activities to help them sort of represent themselves rather than having the national news media represent them. Which is something that’s been kind of a big issue, always, but especially since the election.

What do you most wish that mayors and town managers in small towns knew that they don’t necessarily know?

First and foremost would be – it sounds obvious, but it’s a really important thing – to remember is that you serve the people. Therefore, it’s absolutely incumbent on you to listen to the people and to be accountable to the people. I think that politicians and local civic leaders are like anyone else. We become embroiled in a certain mindset that’s oppositional. Maybe we feel it’s a zero sum game, that it’s us against them, that it’s my party and party loyalty is the thing I need to be most loyal to to further my career, my agenda. Everyone has a self-interest and it’s not honest to say that anyone is doing anything through altruism, that’s not realistic. But to be a public servant is a huge responsibility, particularly in a de-industrialized community. And there is great need there.

I would say to leaders, to see you physically doing town halls or out speaking to people or working directly with them to solve problems. I know in Appalachia, and in many other places, there can be a problem with remove from the constituency and a separation between the politicians and the public that they serve. We need for that separation to be mended a little bit and for there to be more direct communication with the stakeholders and the citizens so that we can begin to solve these problems together, not from our silos of occupying the position of power higher up, and citizen lower down, who never gets to talk to anyone in power. Let’s make it a less oppositional thing and a more conversational thing.

Can a town come to you and say we want you to come, and you will?

It’s not a guarantee that we will, but we don’t go into a community residency unless we’ve been invited. Part of that invitation means reading our literature, the documents that are available for download on our website so that you understand our methodologies and the way that we work, the way we like to organize within in a community, the way we like to work with people. If you’ve done that kind of due diligence, and there are people who have identified a problem in the community, or something you’d like to address, or a challenge that you’re facing, or even an opportunity, and you know who we are and what we do, and you get in touch with us, if we can within our capacity work with you, generally we will.

Is there a charge?

It depends on the conditions that we’re going into and what people are able to offer. If people are in need and are inspired by the work and they want to work with us and they want either training or a residency, we just build it according to the availability and the needs of the people. We’re not able to work for free a lot, because obviously we have to sustain ourselves, but it’s highly negotiable in terms of time, in terms of compensation. In general, we’re going to ask more compensation from say a large institution that has that kind of thing.  But for, let’s say an inner city community of color really with no infrastructure or without any kind of attachment to an elite institution wants help, whatever we can do we’re going to try to find, even it’s just a series of conversations. Whatever we can do.

How do you define a residency in terms of time?

Some are less than a week. A brief story circle training residency might be three days if that’s what works out best for both parties. Then there are extreme examples in the other direction. We’ve had 25, 30-year, very elaborate, in-depth community cultural exchanges and artistic collaborations with communities like the Zuni Pueblo in Zuni, New Mexico. There’s a Zuni theater company there called Idiwanan An Chawe. Over the course of many years, we created a play with them called “Corn Mountain/Pine Mountain,” that had both Appalachian traditional song and storytelling and Zuni song and storytelling. The script was published in a volume that is bilingual, that has the Zuni language on one side, English on the other, and that book became the textbook for teaching the Zuni language. That culture, like a lot of Appalachian cultures, is rapidly disappearing and changing in the modern age.

We’ve had similar partnerships – partnerships with Junebug Productions in New Orleans, which is an African-American theater company, and with Pregones Theater Company in the Bronx, which is a Puerto Rican working-class theater company. Intercultural exchange is another huge part of what we do, because there’s no real point in promoting and advocating and building Appalachian arts and storytelling if we’re not connecting our communities and saying, “What are the economic conditions and the social conditions that we’re facing here that other people are facing elsewhere that we might assume we know nothing about, who are strangers to us or live really differently from us? What is the commonality there?”

Podcast: Community Cultural Development as a Site of Joy, Struggle, and Transformation

Thursday, January 30, 2014

How can communities use art and culture to develop themselves? How do they define the issues they want to address? What steps need to be taken for this process to be inclusive and effective? How do the aesthetics of theater change in community-based contexts?

These questions are taken up in an in-depth conversation between Roadside Theater’s artistic director Dudley Cocke and Max Stephenson, a scholar of civil society and public administration at Virginia Tech.  Stephenson organized a book The Arts and Community Change: Exploring Cultural Development Policies, Practice, and Dilemmas, which was published in 2015 by Routledge and the Community Development Society. As one of the field’s leaders, Cocke wrote a chapter for the book, Community Cultural Development as a Site of Joy, Struggle, and Transformation.

Max and Dudley discuss the power dynamics of exclusion, and how it can be addressed proactively.  Max asks -- how do you get diverse audiences to come to the theater?  Dudley describes the process of using communities’ own stories to create plays, and the excitement and agency a community experiences when it begins to hear its own voice. Moving from specific stories drawn from Roadside’s 40 years of community cultural development experience to culture policy, Max and Dudley discuss the principle of cultural equity as expressed in the Universal Human Rights Declaration (Article 27, Section 1) and its application to cultural development.

The last part of the conversation touches on some of Roadside’s current projects, including the Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail Project, and Chorus for Change with refugee artists from Liberia. The conversation was recently broadcast on Andy Morikawa’s program, Talk at the Table (WUVT-FM Blacksburg 90.7). Give it a listen:

Email Dudley ([email protected]) for your comments to inform his book chapter.
 

Video: Art and Democracy - Aspects of a People's Theater

Dudley Cocke's talk on Art and Democracy: Aspects of a People's Theater given March 31, 2011 at the Lyric Theatre in downtown Blacksburg, Virginia. Dudley is the Artistic Director of Roadside Theater.

Audio: Q&A with Dudley Cocke at Lyric Theater

This question and answer session followed Dudley Cocke's Community Voices talk at Lyric Theater on March 31, 2011. Some of the questions include: How do you connect to a community? Do you develop new works when you get invited? How would you distinguish your theater from "street" theater? What is the essence of community today?

Transcript: Q&A with Dudley Cocke at Lyric Theater