Q: What made you want to tell the story of community-based performance in the U.S.?

A: I’m rather obsessed with helping to build the field of community-based arts. It is a large piece of the legacy of the engaged theatre of the ‘60s and early ‘70s. We need models of theatre projects that are part of social discourse, and this field is one that deserves to be much better known. Community-based arts allows us to combine ritual, political organizing and education, to which I am also very much drawn.

Q: How has your background in the arts prepared you for this?

A: I have a lot of theater training and some of my most profound artistic experiences happened in groups that combined trained and untrained artists. When I was 21, I worked in the NYC Street Theatre Company. We participated in a drama workshop in a men’s maximum security prison. The theatre we made with the men felt so necessary, so worth communicating, so creative and surprising, and was a great process for breaking down our mutual stereotypes about each other, and a strong way to communicate the extreme injustice of much of the U.S. prison system.

 While my theatre training serves me well when I work in this field, I wanted to highlight the fact that many of our collaborators are less-practiced in theater, but have more knowledge than we do in some other field or experience.

Q: What is the difference between “community-based performance” and “local theatre,” which may be a more familiar term to many people?

A: Community-based performance is collaboration between professional artists and people with expertise about a certain subject. Local theatre or community theatre is done entirely by amateurs. It consists of productions of plays that made it big commercially and are now being done all across the U.S. by casts of people who enjoy theatre but are not professional actors.

Q: Are there specific communities or areas where community-based performance has been especially prevalent?

A: Community-based performance is prevalent in places where the artists make a commitment. These include the home towns of the nine artists/companies that I write about in this book.

Q: How did you decide which groups to use as case studies in your book?

A: I wanted to give a sense of the diversity of the field aesthetically, geographically, ethnically, and methodologically. I also wanted to write about companies and artists that I have followed for a long time.

Q: Would you say it takes a special kind of professional artist to interact with a community in order to produce this kind of performance?

A: I would say it takes special proclivities. In other words, any artist can develop skills in dialogue, shaping non-professional work, and in making partnerships between artists and other community members. But you have to want to do this; you have to see the value and meaningfulness of it for yourself as well as others to do it whole-heartedly and to have the patience to develop the necessary craft.

Q: Is there ever tension between community members and professional artists?

A: Sure! Just as among any group of people trying to do something together whether all are artists or none are artists.

Q: In what ways is it a learning process for both sides involved?

A: Bill Rauch of Cornerstone says it well: the artists learn from the experiences and stories of a great diversity of people. Those people get the expertise of the artists involved in order to tell those stories.

Q: Do the aesthetic standards of community-based performance vary greatly from the aesthetic standards of more “elite” productions?

A: I see community-based performance somewhere between art and ritual and thus its meaning has a higher value than aesthetics. However, some community-based artists choose to derive source material from a cross-section of people but then have only professionals perform so as to have more aesthetic control. Other companies combine professional and first-time actors, and develop skill at casting people in parts in which they can thrive with a minimum of technique.

 Technique is modulated with the value of participation in community-based performance, so achieving certain aesthetic standards can be a challenge. There is a great range of aesthetic standards in both community-based and high art productions.

Q: How does the performing arts establishment view community-based performance?

A: Overall, I think the performing arts establishment does not consider the value or even existence of community-based performance nearly enough. There are a few exceptions. Cornerstone Theater’s productions, especially at home in the Los Angeles area, seem to get as much attention as other innovative not-for-profit theater. Liz Lerman Dance Exchange is generally valued as creatively exciting, technically competent, and socially meaningful all at once, so much so that artistic director Lerman is a recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant. Dell’Arte is recognized for its physical versatility as well as for its commitment to what they call place-based theater. Pregones is recognized internationally for their integration of Latino music, movement, and acting traditions. But unfortunately, the community-based art field as a whole is not recognized for its contribution to the performance spectrum.

Q: Is there a typical process of how something goes from being someone’s creative idea to a full-on performance by a community group? How do all people involved come together? Where does funding come from?

A: Most community-based art is instigated by artists looking for “where the juice is.” The artists are looking for something people feel passionately about, a story that needs to be told, and where they can offer their skills in the telling. Different artists/companies involve participants in different ways. Many look for community sites where they can spread the word about a project or partner with community organizations where local people are likely to be affiliated.

 Funding is always a challenge since 9/11 and even before as more conservative administrations have cut arts funding. Private foundations are incredibly important to support this field. Sometimes such foundations are interested in this democratic kind of art or sometimes they are interested in various endeavors such as social justice and recognize that the arts may be a vehicle to help reach such goals.

Q: Is community-based performance accessible to those outside the community? How?

A: This depends. Some such projects are only intended for those involved and their friends and family; others find a way to make work of general interest from the particulars of that place or group of people. A lot of companies have multiple identities; they are community-based but they are also ensemble theaters, like Roadside, Pregones, Dell’Arte, and Cornerstone. They are also bearers of particular traditions like Junebug Productions, and are also performance art like Suzanne Lacy.

Q: How does a performance in one community reach others on a national and international level?

A: Through a great deal of effort. Numerous artists are especially interested in building bridges to other communities, either to break down stereotypes about their own communities or to share strategies of using performance toward education, therapeutic, community organizing, etc.

 The four-year Animating Democracy Initiative (ADI) gave a great boost to inter- community-based performances, bringing together people who generally stay apart though the incorporation of a dialogue component in their funded artists’ work. National convenings by groups like ADI and Alternate ROOTS are another necessary way that work circulates. This field depends on touring, especially as so many practitioners are from poor or rural communities where there aren’t enough people or enough money to support them. In addition, there are very strong correspondences between the Appalachian Roadside Theater with its strong sense of tradition and place and the New Mexican Zuni Theater with similar values albeit within a very different cultural context. They have been working together for nearly 20 years.

 Finally, I dare to say that books are a way that the work becomes known beyond borders. So I am very grateful that Rutgers University Press has published this book, and I hope that it helps spread the word about the community-based performance movement in the U.S., well beyond our borders, and from one community to another here at home.