Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

How can theater facilitate an artist’s understanding of their relationship to their surrounding community? As a community-based artist, I have often thought about where I’m reaching towards in my collaborations, and less about where I’m reaching from. In addition to where I’m from, there’s also the who, what, when, and why I’m from. In my eagerness to decenter myself as a white artist and help tell marginalized stories, I have taken myself out of the story entirely. Doing so has only perpetuated the dominance of the white narrative. This workshop is a group exploration of the communities we come from, how we shape and are shaped by our communities, and how we carry our communities forward with us in our collaborations. Guided by the Story Circle methodology of Junebug Productions and Roadside Theater, and Augusto Boal’s Image Theatre exercises, participants will co-create a definition of community. Through reflecting on the power and limits of the stories that pattern their communities, they will rehearse new modes of relating across differences. It is a microcosm of my own experience moving to Baltimore, MD. Presenting my self-research in a workshop setting invites participants to contribute their own community histories to my thesis that community specificity is a prerequisite for collaboration, contributing to the forward trajectory of the field of community-based theater.