Community Performance

An Introduction

Petra Kuppers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429590030
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

Community Performance: An Introduction is a comprehensive and accessible practice-based primer for students and practitioners of community arts, dance, and theatre, offering reflection on the ethical issues inherent to the field. It is both a classroom-friendly textbook and a handbook for the practitioner, perfectly answering the needs of a field where teaching is orientated around practice.

Offering a toolkit for students interested in running community arts groups or community performance events, this book includes:

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• international case studies and first-person stories by practitioners and participants

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• sample exercises, both practical and reflective

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• study questions

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• excerpts of illustrative material from theorists and practitioners

This second edition has been completely revised with over 25% new content to bring the book up to date with developments in both society and performance, including the rise of social media, updates in the contexts of social justice, new standards and norms in social practice, and the changing faces of funding, evaluation, and professional development.

The book can be used as a standalone text or together with its companion volume, Community Performance: A Reader, to provide an excellent introduction to the field of community arts practice.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Experiencing myself and others dare to tell stories usually hidden, dare to face one another, via theatrical expression, via the power, the danger and the safety of theatrical process, about our differences, our unequal opportunities, our unequal privilege. And to stay in the room together, via the theatre image, and tell the truth, listen and hear each other as we hadn’t before.

Jan Selman on popular theatre as social transformation, Prentki and Selman, 2000: 2

As a community theatremaker, it is my duty to also be a community activist, because creating work is like holding a mirror up to the community. The entire community is affected by every situation or problem, so through theatre, we help the community to solve or face the problem. (HowlRound)

Mxolisi Masilela, artistic director of TX Theatre Productions, South Africa, 2015

Our collective experience after 23 years of writing shows based on people’s direct experience of resistance is that every interview reveals a new reality for us, as well as hopefully for our audiences. Each new project involves a continual process of digging beneath the media representations of reality to find out what is really happening in people’s daily lives. This reality is frequently revealing, often shocking and always an education for us. It is, after all, a privilege to be able to reflect on these concrete experiences and to take these experiences, combined with our own reflections, to a wider audience. If, as part of this process, we can help to make connections between people and ideas, that’s one thing; if we can clarify issues along the way, that’s something else; if we can boost morale and help to develop solidarity and mutual support as well, then we’re really getting somewhere. We don’t pretend to provide cog wheels for the great machinery of progressive change, merely a few drops of lubrication oil.

David Rogers of the UK-based Banner Theatre Company, 1997

Do you want to change the world through performance? Do you want to facilitate people so that more voices are heard, more moving bodies seen, more experiences felt? If so, this book can go on a journey with you. No one can give you an answer about how to change the world, but many different voices here can show you that there is value in acting creatively and communally in our lives.

Figure 1.1 The Olimpias Community video still: Lady of the Lake circle. Photo: Petra Kuppers

Here, I offer you ways of thinking about and engaging with community performance. I think of this book as a toolbox: it offers different materials, voices, wisdoms, practices, and experiences that hope to provide inspiration and ideas to people engaged in, or hoping to find out more about, community performance work.

This book focuses on practices that involve different people, facilitate communication, and encourage new thinking and experiencing. An important design feature of this book is openness and dialogue. Many community artists, theorists, and historians speak in these pages and share their experiences. Their voices mix with my own to weave a sustaining web, a snapshot of ways of working and thinking that go beyond one single person’s imagination and ways of doing things.

This book’s emphasis is on questions rather than answers and on inspiration rather than prescription. I try to guide you through significant stories about and issues in the historical development, practical application, and aesthetic practice of different community performance approaches. But this book offers a partnership, a joint journey: I ask you to become involved and think about the issues from your own perspective, your own grounding in your local environment and personal history.

The aim of this book is to be a developing ground for the reflexive practitioner: an artist and facilitator who is grounded in thoughtful and ethical practice, aware of the direction of current debates in community performance issues, and able to be flexible, engaged, and empowering. Clearly, this is a large agenda for a book. Ultimately, you are the one who enables yourself, embedded within your local framework, and this book is only a tool in the process.

How to use this book

This book works as a continuous text as well as a resource to be dipped in and out of. Throughout it you will find exercises: some are reflection exercises, some involve external research, and some are practical. Some exercises address you as an individual; some encourage you to work with a partner or a group. Often, these exercises draw you to problematic areas in thought about community work. They are points of departure and offer moments of reflection. Therefore, there is never a right or wrong way to go about working with them.

Some exercises later in the book point back to work you have done earlier: you might therefore find it useful to hold onto the notes you make to yourself.

Beyond the specific exercises, you might find it useful to create a file with material you have gathered or worked with. In my own practice as a community performance facilitator, my laptop is loaded with session ideas, impetus material, and playlists for specific sessions. I also have large contact files for professional associations, fellow local artists and local agencies, collaborating organizations, art providers, and so on.

My physical kit includes chalk for street drawing, scarves for dancing, small musical instruments, beautiful stones or leaves, and postcards. When I am on the road for a multiple-day workshop, I add books such as Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors and Dagyaw: A Manual, Laban dance charts, and other inspirations to the box. This box traveled with me in my car every day when I was working as a community dance artist in Wales, covering large distances to get from one group to the next. It is now in my home and acts as a mini-filing cabinet from which I draw material for the Olimpias interdisciplinary arts workshops.

If you do not already have electronic files or physical boxes like these, you might find it useful to create the beginnings of a file system like it while working with this book. Whether you are a dancer, theatre artist, musician, visual artist, or interdisciplinary practitioner, you will have resources that are particularly useful to you and that stem from your base disciplines. They can provide the basis of the box, and the kind of exercises offered here can build on these original disciplines. For many of the exercises, I invite you to use your specific performance skills in order to address ways in which they can work in community settings. You will quickly notice that my own background emerges from dance and storytelling traditions—but throughout this book, I try to model how to reach out across disciplines, adapting forms in order to bring out voices, bodies, presences, and memories.

What is community performance?

There are many different definitions of community performance and many practices that relate to it, such as Applied Theatre, New Genre Public Art, Community-Based Performance, Participatory Arts, Community Dance, Theatre for Social Change, Social Practice, and Engaged Art. This book presents a spectrum of different practices, with many differently nuanced and weighted ways of thinking about communal practice and community performance. “To nail it down,” to define, is an act that opposes many of the principles of community performance work itself, at least in my understanding of it. Thus, I invite you to approach definitions as journeys, different paths, ways of moving. In the following, I will share some way-marks in my jo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Epigraph
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface to Second Edition
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Remembering histories
• 3 Setting up and running a group
• 4 Finding motivations
• 5 Finding inspirations
• 6 Documentation, evaluation, reporting
• 7 Building sustainability
• Epilogue
• References
• Index