 Welcome back, Todd. Welcome back, Mark. Hi, I'm Mark Valdes, and this is Todd London. And we're here doing the art part, a two-person theater conference. And we are on topic four, which we're calling the Aesthetics of Civic Engagement. Aesthetics of Civic Engagement. Before we go any further, just to again thank HowlRound and Vijay Matthew for livestreaming us. And ArtChangeUs here at Cooper Square for hosting us. And all of you, three people, 12 people, 2,000 people who've checked in. Thank you for participating. And we really do hope this is participatory. So feel free to write in with comments or questions at any point. We tend to be taking them in the last 10 minutes of each 40-minute segment. But we're really happy to hear from you and to be able to talk to you and to hope that you will have your own conversations because we don't want to be the only ones whose voices are hanging in the air on these subjects. And if you have questions, you can email us at theartpart at howlround.com or via Twitter, hashtag HowlRound, or on the Facebook page of HowlRound. And if you are going to have a conversation of your own, please let us know through theartpartathowlround.com. Let us know now if you'll commit to this. This is our Art Part May Day Challenge. But the challenge remains open even when we go home today. We have two commitments so far. And we'll shout them out again at the end of the conference. Yeah, the end of the conference. We have two more sessions. This is on the art of civic engagement. And the next session will be on lineage and legacy in the theater. So I'm going to start us out by turning on Mark. First, I'm going to embarrass you and congratulate you. Mark just got a great award and grant from the Americans for the Arts. And tell me what it's called exactly again. It's the Johnson Fellowship for Artists Working in Community Transformation. Community Transformation. Wow, congrats. That's amazing. That's a big check, too. That's a big check. So we've been talking most recently about playwriting and sort of the individual voice, genius, flowering. We've been talking before that about the group genius, community of working in collective or ensemble. And it's interesting as we stopped for our little break here, remarked that it seemed like a strange transition now to shift to community-based work, civic-engaged work. And I think of it also under, to a certain extent, the umbrella of social justice. And interestingly, I think it's less of a sharp turn, but I want to talk about that. So to me, first of all, let's talk about what we're talking about. And I'm going to turn to you because this is really your field. What do we mean when we talk about civic engagement, socially-engaged work, social justice in the theater? I think the work that lives in social practice or civic practice, a term Michael Rode and Center for Performance of Civic Practice, kind of coined by which they mean, that work that is driven by the needs of non-arts organizations or community partners. And that artists bring their tools and their resources to address the need of somebody other than the artist themselves. Still satisfying in taking on, can does the work of the artist, but also is serving a need outside of the artist. And social practice, of course, art that is driven by the artist that is addressing social needs, kind of social issues, social justice. OK, before I'm going to try and provoke you like you provoked me before, but before I do, so I became aware that such work in communities was happening in our lifetime. Probably in the late 80s, I was working here at NYU with a wonderful woman named Jan Kohn Cruz, who's really a leader in documenting this work and thinking about this kind of community-based, socially engaged, civic-engaged work. And I became aware that there were companies working out of Apple Shop and the roadside in Weizberg, Kentucky, Junebug, and New Orleans hubbed around alternate routes in the South, a sort of congregation of such theaters. And really, in lots of places around the country, a road company was still in existence down in Tennessee and later Pragonis in the Bronx and so on and so forth. And it seemed to me at that time that there was a great connection between these theaters and place, that they were very much theaters about the place they were, which I later learned goes back to a whole kind of rural arts movement. To what extent is that true? How much is community engagement also about place engagement? I think it's absolutely connected. I think they're very much tied together because the community makes up the place. It is not just any community. It's a community often geographic, could be ideological, could be kind of religious, faith-based, could be anything, but there's a shared, whether it's literal ground or kind of spiritual ideological ground. But it's grounded in place. And so I think they're absolutely, absolutely one. Connected. I don't know how. The work itself doesn't have to necessarily be about place. But I think that's the difference going, thinking about the conversations we've been having about groups and individual. There's something in this work that I spent many years working with Cornerstone. And one of the things that we always struggled with was that we make place so specifically that they're not going to be published. They're not going to be done. It's not going to go to Broadway. It's not going to be picked up by other companies. It's a one-time, one-place event. And some of them live as literature or as kind of document or as study, but they're so specific for their time, for their place, for the people who are engaged in the making of them. So here's the thing. And I don't mean it to be provocative. This is the way that I've heard this conversation happen. And it tends to be a conversation that in certain parts, sectors of our fields, the more sort of Western, canonic, stressing the sort of a certain kind of professional virtuosity in work, there's a sense of, yeah, that's really important, but it's just not that artistic or not good. It's not that especially if you're using amateur actors working with professionals. And then I've heard the people who've been doing this work for 30-plus years who are excellent say, I'm just not even going to have that conversation anymore, because our work is art and it's excellent. And we're just in a different part of the art. It's a different tradition. And then I've heard this from, Cornerstone is a good example, because they work with playwrights who haven't always worked in community-based ways and so on. And it feels like Cornerstone struggled over the years with people's perception of, are they an artistic theater, a sort of more traditional theater? Are they a community-based theater? Do they care about aesthetics? Do they only care about social justice? So I guess my question for you is, what makes these a whole? Why are we talking, and I say this to say the question, not because it's my question, but why are we talking about civic engagement in a conversation about the art part? Lots of things there. No, but it's great, because I mean, I do think that. So I think I heard this from Lisa Mount, and I've repeated it since then. But there was something that happened. And when the NEA said, address artistic merit and artistic quality, and suddenly they became two different things. And suddenly, if you were excelling at one, you didn't have to excelling at the other. Or, and I think the NEA would probably argue that we want you to excelling at both. But having been on many of those panels, we kind of took it as either or. It kind of got split. And I think we internalized a lot of that. And I think it became that question of, it's either community or it's good. There's no good applied to, like once you do that, you just kind of forget about it and just accept it as feel good. And there's some of that that I understand. But I think everybody I know who's working in this world, you're, you know, like nobody wants to make bad work. Like nobody wants to do mediocre work. And I've been in so many rehearsal rooms with community members who demand that the work be the best. And they're really clear, like this has to be on the same level as like the best theaters you can think of because it's my community. It's my, it's me who is up on the stage talking to my neighbors about our place. And we will not accept anything that is less than excellent. I think oftentimes we just don't know how to define excellence. So yeah, if you're looking for virtuosity of a performer, it's a different kind of virtuosity. Like I think the non-professional performer brings things, brings qualities, brings personalities, brings experiences that are as virtuosic on stage. That looks different, but it's still virtuosic. And I think because we haven't developed collectively the tools or the criteria, what to look for, that we just, it's easier not to look at all or just to kind of just brush it generally, you know, because A, we don't want to be jerks who are being or saying bad things about somebody who's not a professional actor or we just don't know what to look for and so we just don't talk about it. Well, what do we look for? I mean, if you're talking about legible artistic practice and that practice and the methods include amateur and professionals. Sure. How do you read excellence? There's a couple, so recently, Animating Democracy brought a bunch of people together and created this aesthetics framework for looking at art for change. And there's some things to look for, series of questions, you know, they don't define it. They just like, these are some things that you might want to look at. My favorite, and I think this is kind of one of the best, is Jerry Stropnicki created these five A's. I think you may have added a sixth, but I don't know what that, but the five are audacity, authenticity, accuracy, artistry, and agency, yeah, agency. And he's like, look for like, where does that live? And part of it is like artistry, like part of it is like, it has to be of... Right. The aesthetics that we understand that we know, and we know things like presence. Like, you know, we know how to look to see like how someone takes a stage and fills a space. We know how to look for kind of these moments of... We're saying to... Exactly. You know, we know how to look for kind of these joyous moments or these really honest moments. And it doesn't, it's not different. We just kind of like... I don't know. Well, it's interesting because, you know, as you're talking, I'm flipping back to our conversation about ensembles and we had talked a little bit about improvisation, but we were talking about to like, we were adulating the Rude Max and some others. And some of the companies that we were talking about actually kind of celebrate an almost amateur aesthetic. Sure. You know what I mean? So there's a way, I mean, it's a kind of odd contradiction that we might, you know, love it if... Oh, I don't know. What's a company, a Tony company that actually goes for a kind of amateur feel like the... It's not 600 highway, man. Like, yeah, like... But they'll involve people. I mean, they'll involve people and they'll do that. And then, but then we look at like a community-based social justice aesthetic or, you know, a set of priorities and we'll diss it for the kind of amateurism. So what is that? Is that a kind of class thing? Yes. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, I think part of it's like framing, you know, like, we know how to view, if you put it on the stage of your most prestigious places, we know how to look at it. Or your edgiest spaces. Yeah, exactly. We will kind of bring into it kind of an openness to like, I'm here in this space, in that edge of space, because I want to experience something different, something that makes me question, re-look at what I think, how to look at it, what it might be, and we will accept it. And if you go to the high school auditorium, you are immediately like feel like you're at your kid's play and you will not take, you know, you will just accept it as nothing to be taken seriously to challenge yourself. So, okay, so I'm gonna take this. I've been putting you on the spot, but I mean, I feel like this is connected to our conversation about playwrights as well, that ultimately everything turns towards the audience in the theater. More than it does towards the reader when you're a solitary writer. So we rely on that final event and the questions around this kind of engaged work are questions around, I think, what is the role of the audience? To what extent are we positioning our audience not just as ticket buyers, but as community? Yes. So we want to reflect things that either speak to or from the community, we want to challenge the community and to some degree, and we want to open channels of humanity with the community. And so I feel like in a way, this is, I mean, I set up the question, but I feel like it's a false distinction even on a level of intention. So let's leave training behind for a minute because that's I think what we talk about when we talk about a virtuosity, right? We're really talking about training and a certain kind of lens with which to watch work because when you say the high school auditorium, I think, man, I was so happy when I saw my fifth grader play Nick Bottom in mid, you know what I mean? It's like I, when you see kids dance, it's like, okay, I forget the name of that amazing dance company in Tel Aviv. Or the nine year olds, you know, that's where I live, you know, so they're different, but the spirit, the engagement is the same. When I saw, so the closest I've ever been to a cornerstone production was at New Dramatists, we did a partnership with Cornerstone, Playwright James McManus, and it was a piece that was done, became Love on San Pedro. So it was with the people who lived on Skid Row and several service organizations on Skid Row and the cast was half-ish cornerstone actors and half-ish residents of Skid Row and it was just a fantastic piece of theater and in a way it was made greater by knowing that that person who was doing that monologue actually had been living on the street six months before and yet had everything inside of him to do that. Or recently, I've in love with this work called Jack and which is Canesa Shaw in a collaboration with Cornell Alston I think is his name and Cornell was a long time incarcerated man and the piece is about re-entering the world and they did it together and Canesa has this deep, I mean she's worked with Elevator Repair Service and the Worcester Group and all those kind of like arty ensembles and it's about re-entering society but it flips from like sitcom to art installation to monologue about the bakery where he works at night to get by and it's a totally artistic piece and completely personal and Cornell is not a professional actor but he's dedicated his life to this work and Canesa to him and it's again, it's kind of more extraordinary for not being right out of Juilliard which there's nothing wrong with Juilliard. Nothing wrong, it's great, it's cool. So I feel like and that I was sitting next to like in the theater where I saw it the first time I was sitting next to two guys who had come through a prison program and then I was sitting next to Anne Hamburger who's the producer of Angada Arts which is one of the most amazing avant-garde companies. I feel like sometimes people will see it like what you're talking about is a great, is an example of excellence, of virtuosity in however you wanted to find it but you feel it, right? You know that I'm watching something really good and I feel like sometimes not all work is always good but that's true of everything, exactly, so that's just like saying I'm never gonna ever see a play because I saw a bad play once. Right. You know what I mean? And I feel like sometimes somebody has the bad experience of seeing a community-based play that just kind of doesn't have that level that hasn't risen to that level of full virtuosity for whatever reason, not the right context, underbaked, not ready. There's any number of reasons why a work may kind of miss its mark but because of that there's just like, oh well I'm just never, it's always bad and every part of our field has, it's hit and misses and we wouldn't just write one whole thing off. So since we're living in love today and we're doing the art part, let's talk about what we love about that work. Totally. I mean for me it's the, this is how I prefer to make art. Like there's something about the joy of just doing it. It's that thing that you remember, that the passion, the thing that took you there in the first place that just let you, that just lets you lift that up every single time and there's a, none of it's precious. There's nobody's like, and all the work that I've done kind of in community settings, it's, people ask really hard questions. People are constantly questioning you. People are constantly, there's agency to just always throw out ideas so people are always trying to make it better or saying like, why would we just, we don't do it this way. No, and in ways that just kind of make the process and I think the product for me just like, more rewarding and it's more interesting and it feels like in the previous discussion around playwrights and individuals, it feels like that modeling and Bogart quote of like we are making a society in its truest, in its truest sense of we are all coming from a whole bunch of places, from a whole bunch of backgrounds and not everybody has bought into the idea that we're, that this is gonna work but I'm here to try to make it work and so how do you arrive there? Yeah. And there's, you know, yeah, I know something like the one we started, you're talking about plays, I also think about that Dr. Campesino and like the actors of like taking these tools and making them useful to like organizing and, and it goes, and there's something about this that goes. Because you're in the fields. You're in the fields. And you're on strike. On a bed, on a flatbed truck, on strike, there's people with guns wanting you to stop. Yeah. And, and there's, you know, there's power. Like this. Right. And it has to do, I'll stop you in just a second but one of the questions that I think about and there's a question that was posed to me by the woman who used to run the Cuyahoga Arts Council whose name I'm blanking on. But she just, she asked, what is the role of the public in the public arts agency? And as, as we have these public institutions, what is the role of the public in our, in our institutions? And we were really good at doing the four. And, and what I derived, the satisfaction drive and the love I drive is the doing with. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. And again, it's like I've been, I've been editing the collected writings of Zelda Fitch Handler who founded Arena Stage and really the field with a couple of other, you know, important people, Nine of Ants, Margot Jones, the field of institution, what became institutional theater, regional theater. And her thing is always, it's not this or that, it's this and that, right? And so I don't want to create a sense that we're having to choose one or the other. I guess, you know, the other thing is I keep thinking as we started with why we fell in love with this art form. And I, for me, because like you, I've made my life in the theater in one way or another, part of what it is, is that I see something and I want to be it or I want to do it. So there's that thing about us that we aspire to that, which is before us, if it's beautiful or if it's exciting or if it's courageous or whatever, we follow by wanting to like, oh, I want to hit that home run or I want to dance that dance or whatever. And so there's something about the work that you're describing and the kind of work within community which is like, I want that for everyone. I want them to want to make it. So if they're in there making it with you, with Cornerstone, with Carpet Bag, with Junebug, with Pregonas, with Roadside, wherever, then that's where it lives. I want everybody rather than selling each other shit that they don't want and yelling at each other on opposing journalistic outposts, I want them all to be in rooms together making dances. Or making theater. Yeah. So why, so that goes to this question of training end and aesthetic, what, we have sort of aesthetic, I mean, yes, I would read a novel that is written badly and I would have no, I wouldn't read it. Yeah. What's different maybe about theater? Is there something in the groupness of theater that mitigates the sense of like, because the truth is, so I have an older kid, he's 24 now and when he was maybe 10, we had this clown to his party and the clown was a woman clown who was part of this group of clowns and she was clearly mentally ill or on the verge of mental illness. It was very scary and she did this kind of one woman performance, I won't describe it because maybe somebody knows her and I don't wanna, but it was really scary and the kids were freaked out and that is neither to me. That's just, so I guess this leads to a ridiculous question, it was like, well, how do you know if it doesn't even qualify as good enough to be, I like those A's, but why you... But I mean, isn't that the question always, like how do we know that anything is good enough? I mean, at the end of the day, we like it because we like it based on our education, based on our culture, based on our, every, you know, like the things that make us us. Like you, we treat, so we treat community-engaged work, I don't know, like we treat it like it's fragile or you know what I mean, like there's something that we just, like, what if we just looked at it? What if we just looked at it critically and hard and what if we like gave it the support and the benefit of a doubt that we give everything else, you know, and then, you know, there's something I think there's... It's sort of pre-dismissing. Pre-dismissing or pre-elevating, you know what I mean? Of, you know, I think part of it, the heart of this is this divide around amateur and professional. And I think that's part of the complexity. That's really the heart of it, yeah. You know, and I think we either just dismiss the amateur or we're afraid that... Or we hold up the amateur. Yeah, or whatever, like I just spent my entire life trying to be this profession, trying to perfect this thing that somebody with no training is somehow equal to me. And like, it's... Well, is it possible that what that exercise is, is to hold both the kind of naive spirit of love sport or love play, which is amateurism in the word and the kind of intensity of practice over time that you were talking about even with ensembles that they create a third thing, which is better than, you know, I think of like, I don't know what in my life, but when I think of virtuosity, I think of like, when I was a kid and I saw a production of Bill Ball's ACT production of Taming of the Shrew on television. And there was something about the physical athleticism and virtuosity of those actors playing together. And that was extraordinary. But I haven't seen that a lot since. You know, sometimes in companies that kind of like group virtuosity. And so what happens is the shell remains and the spirit is the hardest thing to maintain. So maybe putting them together does both. I don't know, what's it like with Cornerstone? How do those actors who have spent their lives being excellent, how do they, what do they get from working with the non-professional actors? I mean, I think it's different for each individual, but I think things that often get talked about are, I think we all just have this deep curiosity. And so the things that we get to learn from the people that we get to make with, I think we all have deep passion for the world that we live in. And so getting to understand somebody and the place and the culture and the community in a way that acknowledges that we're guests and that we're here to co-make, to co-create, that tries to level some playing fields, feels good. I think something that just is just so firmly rooted in the love of a form, of a way of making, of a practice that it just kind of, you're always kind of reminded of it because you're always kind of bringing people into it. And each time you get to re-experience that, it's always the first time. Yeah, yeah. We have a comment about exactly this. Do you want to read it or shall I? You go for it. Okay, this is Rebecca Novick, writing, I assume, from San Francisco. Hi. When I worked with Cornerstone, we had a homeless actor playing a homeless character and one day he said to me, this guy is nothing like me. This guy hasn't figured out how to handle his rage. And it was so striking to me, this idea of how we let identity lead, but of course, people are just different people. That's phenomenal. That's so good. Boom. Yes. Sparkle. Yes. Yeah. What to say, what to say. I don't think there's anything. I just feel like, yeah, exactly. Like it can live. It can live by itself. Yeah, it's extraordinary. I was gonna ask you, because I feel like you get a little peeved with this discussion. Am I just misreading? No, no, you're completely reading. Totally got it right. Because you just take it for granted or because you've had it. No, because I kind of feel like, it's that thing when we started this conversation of I feel like I want to be in this theater and the theater doesn't always want me. Yeah. You know what I mean? And I feel like this kind of gets to the heart of it. There's so many people who want entry and access and to be a part of it. And we're just, we're really mean. Like we're really like, just kind of, it's just, yeah, but I gotta say something here. I mean, I have watched the field that we work in, ignore this work for three decades. And it is really clear to me that this work has prevailed and actually is now the dominant form in our country, even though it's not reciprocated by the marketplace. So there is hardly a theater in this country that doesn't talk about its audience as its community in a way that it didn't. There is hardly a theater in this country that doesn't look to public works and Lear de Bessonet's work at the public or look to you or other people who are practitioners of this to try and bring you in to help them jumpstart this work who doesn't look to their audience and say my audience is aging and dying. I haven't done what I need to do to build a new audience, to root myself in it. And I think the kind of what the, that on some level, and I don't even know how to even articulate it, I feel like this community based and civic engagement work has won the day and all you have to do is talk to a group of 25 year olds to realize it. And that if the theater doesn't realize, the field doesn't realize that, it is not hip to its own demise. I don't think we realize it yet. I don't think we've fully come on board yet. I think we're starting to, I think we're seeing like what theater doesn't have an engagement person at this point, right? So, but it becomes the function of an office, not the work of the institution. And I think until it becomes the work of the institution, it's just a function of a person. And it's not genuine. And I think people are really smart about, you're being sold things all the time. And I think people just know that, especially some of the communities that they're trying to be, kind of they're trying to engage with, where there's just a history of broken promises, a history of extraction. It's like, are we just repeating, are we just adding to that? And part of it is like, I think until an artistic director understands that this is art and not just good work or work for survival, it will always be on the fringe. It will never really be treated with any kind of seriousness at the institution or certainly in the field. And it's art. And it is art and it's brilliant art and it's important art. And I would add something else, which is, I mean, I've done this research work about the founding of our field. And what I was most surprised by is that the work of the Art Theater in America, which begins around the turn of the 19th century, begins in immigrant settlement houses that are reform houses that are social justice works places. And starting with the Hall House in Chicago and later Neighborhood Playhouse here in New York, Henry Street Settlement and others, that the work of creating an America of different people from different backgrounds is in the genetic code of the art theater. And that's where Ibsen and Chekhov and all those modern dramatists come to us. That's where we get Sanskrit drama in America. That's where we get, you know, pageant plays. And so somewhere we divided ourselves into art and social good when in fact they're... Is it professionalization? Yes. At that moment where suddenly like I'm gonna be the professional and therefore I know more, I'm more skilled, you know, like, you know, and suddenly, and I think there's a real fear. I think there's a real fear to put non-professionals on stage. Yeah. I think because we don't understand the aesthetics, I think because it feels like, I think people commit their lives to a practice, to building a way of working and it's just too scary to let that go, to trust somebody who doesn't have that level of experience. Well, you also work your life with the sense that who wants this anyway? So you have to doubly invest in the professionalism of this art. Yeah. There's another one I think I've before because I know time is what it is. There's, and it's your quote, and it's something that you, it's a quote of yours that I love. Oh, I love being quoted. Which is about, something about like, we have to re-center our theaters. That we have to re-center them in, you know, like if the regional theater movement was about decentralization, we are now at a moment of re-centralization and the need to re-center our institutions in our communities, in our places of worship, in our schools, in our social groups and that that is the work before us. And I kind of feel like, as we get into kind of deeper and deeper and deeper into the weeds of art and practice and aesthetic, I kind of want to, I hold on to that kind of that request that demands, that, you know, that gauntlet really tightly. That's fantastic. I don't think I said it, but I'm glad to have. I think you did. I think it was you. I don't know, but I'll cut it here if it wasn't. So we're going to be back in about 18 minutes and with our final segment, which will be, and final chance to sign up for the May Day art part challenge. And we will, we're going to read that. I'll read that at the end. And we're going to talk about lineage and legacy and how to carry it forward. Thank you.