Hello everyone,
To begin, I would like to share a favorite quote of mine from Jan Cohen-Cruz’s book, Local Acts:
“A community-based production is usually a response to a collectively significant issue or circumstance. … Indeed, the community-based art movement of the past
thirty years is often a cultural expression of identity politics, referring to
groups of people who connect on the basis of shared identities fundamental to
their sense of themselves.”
This is how I approach community cultural development – through the lens of shared performance and applied theatre. It is important to me that artistic work that I am creating has basis in meaning for those involved and for the audience, and that we are achieving work toward a certain goal.
That being said, a conversation came up the other day among some peers about a community-based performance we were researching. They were operating on a $600K grant from the Irvine Foundation, and they created a performance piece around the death of a little boy who was playing in the street and was struck by a car. He didn’t have any parks or playgrounds to play in, and so one of the themes of the piece was community galvanizing around the creation of a new park for the kids.
However, at the end of the day, there was no park made. Yes, they made an extraordinary performance that created deeper bonds of community and enriched the lives of the hundreds of community members who participated in the project. But couldn’t they have just taken that $600K and made a park?
So really, can we say that our cultural work is worthy of attention and funding, when there are so many other ills that beset communities like homelessness, hunger, and substance abuse? In a perfect world, we would have funding for all of these projects, but unfortunately again and again we as artists and cultural workers find ourselves having to defend ourselves against these kinds of questions.
For the record I absolutely believe we should be funding cultural and artistic work, as I think we can combat those ills through our work, but I know these are questions that I have been asked before and will continue to be asked forever…
This is a very interesting example. It is useful to view the performance as a reflection of the current community and cultural conditions present within the community and a reflection of a tragic community event. Viewing performances as artistic documentation as well as a call to action for the community makes me wonder about the success of the event and its exposure within the community as well as additional actions that the artists and community members could have conducted in order to produce change and built the needed parks within the community as well as the demographics and landscape of the community.