Urban Theatre is a theatre company based in Australia. They create community engaged works that highlight the lives and stories of members in their communities. Their work can described as testimonial, documentary, and autobiographical performance. In October 2009, Byroni Tresize and Caroline Wake facilitated a roundtable discussion with members of the company and their partners. It is one of the most impactful interviews that I have read and I decided to blog about it.
The approach to this post is going to be slightly different from my recent annotations of other papers and essays. The nature of this publication is recorded dialogue, so I thought it best to discuss like dialogue.
The bulk of the discussion is a probing question and answer period that explores the success and methods of Urban Theatre and how they negotiate the questions of ethics and disclosure with their works. Immediately, in application to my work- Urban Theatre articulates their practice in a way that I have been looking for. Their definitions of personal experience and the reliving of trauma resonates with my process of asking actors, collaborators and even myself for stories and experiences that can be shared in a theatrical way.
For this annotation, I'm going to pull out lengthier quotes/passages and unpack them a bit more in terms of meanings and applications to my practice. The first is a response from Alicia Talbot. Here, she discusses how she frames a process to protect her participants:
“When working with people in crisis we often relate to people in terms of their problems. Rather than engaging people as a pathology, the process of public dialogue and consultation engages with people as experts. There are a number of international theatre companies who use the term “expert” Rimini Protokoll, Quarantine, or Mammalian Diving Reflex. In my practice, the consultants or experts
are asked to respond to the thematic concerns of the work. So, when I was working on this process with young people who were experiencing homelessness in a work called The Cement Garage, the work was about the concept of belonging. Rather than speak about their personal trauma.” Alicia Talbot (Performance Paradigm 5.2 pg 2)
I chose to reference a larger section in the above passage because I feel it contextualizes the most important statement which states that Urban Theatre focused on concepts and issues that frame the creation of work. This creates a space where participants can offer stories and experiences to add to a piece of work as opposed to becoming the product. In the undergraduate class- Community Engaged Art that I was a part of- many of the students entered... and I would say, left with an idea that community based work in some way has to involve the marginalized. On the final presentation day of classes, the majority of the students recounted proposed projects where they would work in high risk communities (sexually abused persons, prisons, at risk youth, etc.) and ask the members of these communities to share their stories through text and video and potentially present them as plays and in various forms of theatre. As the presentations progressed- I could not help but think of this reading and how we could have better framed our presentations to avoid putting ourselves and our participants at risk for further trauma.
“We need to destabilise what we expect from people in trauma. When someone is in crisis, they tell their story to the social worker, then to the mental health worker, and then to someone else and so on, until they have retold their story many times. In essence, they are reliving trauma and crisis, potentially without a sense of containment. When people are consulted instead of interrogated, they are more likely to cooperate and, ideally, collaborate.” Alicia Talbot (Performance Paradigm 5.2 pg 3)
Containment is the key word, and in direct response to my previous paragraph, I want to make sure that my work provides a clear frame and container to allow participants to 1) give whatever they can/want/need to give 2) ensure that what they offer is still turned into quality performance. What I mean by quality performance is that it goes beyond a cathartic retelling of their story to a group of anonymous/familiar faces. I've spoken a great deal on this blog about humour, self deprecation, and victimization in the process of empowerment through comedy.
Hopefully I can avoid sounding trite, when I say that the last thing I want to have happen is for community based art to turn into the stereotype of an after school special.
So how does Urban Theatre accomplish this? Some key thoughts from the article exemplified how they make a point to connect with as many parts of a community as possible when creating work. For instance, if the theatre work involves exploring a conflict within a community, UTP makes a conscious effort to connect with both sides of the argument with the intention of creating a fuller story.
Often times conflicts arise from misunderstanding, and this work, like comedy, can provide a space beyond retribution where through a developed common language and framework of performer and audience- they can discuss sensitive issues that hopefully will foster dialogue and change in their communities.
“What specifically makes us into witnesses, as opposed to watchers, bystanders, spectators or voyeurs in your work? What are the different communities of witness that UTP’s work assembles and how do these co-connect?” Bryoni Tresize
“A very important part of the work is that we feed back to the community. It’s essential to the truth of the work that it goes back to the communities who created it, and those communities are all invited to be present on opening night as VIPs. At one of the school shows I asked how many of the audience were at the Cronulla riots, and most people put up their hand. Performatively speaking, that’s a very interesting moment where the watchers are also the people who have been interviewed for the work, or who have in different ways lived through its context.” Rosalyn Oades (Performance Paradigm 5.2 pg 8)
A beautifully poignant part of the discussion focused on the ideas of being 'witnesses.' in the passage above, Rosalyn Oades articulates how they bring the work back to the communities who produced them. By inviting the members of the communities who were interviewed and recognizing their contributions, and also elevating their status in the context of the performance that night- in a way it validates and affirms their integral role within the project. Without the source material, there is no performance, and through the performance- change can be instigated in a symbiotic relationship of creation and experience.
I recently struggled very much with this concept. In Spitting Too Close, I allowed personal dialogues, conversations, memories to enter my writing. It was the first time that I made a conscious choice to NOT list names or relationships in a specific/identifying way. In past work- I would list/label roles such as father, mother, sister, or relation- to which the audiences would then know/connect the performance with the real people in my family. I did make reference to geographical locations as specific as major highway roads, or monuments, or landscapes. I thought this would be enough to maintain anonymity, while specific enough to locate the work as a device to help audiences "land" the work and be able to connect it to themselves.
As expected- members of my community and people in my life who were part of the conversations and thoughts that I repurposed for the performance- recognized it. Overall there was a sense of pleasure and enjoyment of the show- but there was definitely an awkward and resistance that was present. Had I crossed the line? Had I gone too far? Was it less about publicly identifying them as contributors to my experience? Was it perhaps their own sense of privacy that was violated?
WOULD THEY FEEL SAFE INTERACTING WITH ME AGAIN, OR WOULD THEY BE APPREHENSIVE ABOUT THE POSSIBILITY OF ME COMMODIFYING THE WORK AND TURNING IT INTO PERFORMANCE (ART)?
“At one point, the ending of Stories of Love and Hate was ‘the riots’ - we’d had all these strong stories and characters drawn together by ‘the riots’, so our first instinct was to end with the big, climactic event. But then it became obvious that that wasn’t the right shape for the work and it was really important that the story went beyond that point; that it was also about how to reclaim your dignity after you’ve gone through that sort of trauma. Whereas the media leaves everyone at the moment of crisis, theatre gives us a chance to go beyond that.” Rosalyn Oades (Performance Paradigm 5.2 pg 14)
Some of the text in Spitting Too Close focused on heart break, struggle, and the need for nurturing a relationship. I will admit now that from some times of stress and emotional upset, writing and performing the piece was a part of my healing. I wonder- because I didn't look to my partners and friends to broaden the specific experiences and create a bigger picture, did I 1) do myself an injustice? 2) impede the healing of another person because of my very public testimony of troubles?
To be quite fair- these moments and some of these writings made complete sense for the work and were written for the work. The concepts with Spitting Too Close were to examine the negotiations that men who are artists and men who do not conform to certain standards of masculinity have to make on a personal and social level. From scene to scene exploration, we worked in states of being and perspectives to create visually engaging moments on stage. That said, it would have been stagnant to have characters existing without some purpose or action. So framing the characters in scenes where they exposed themselves as characters but then showcasing how they engaged and navigated through murky relationships and conflicts provided a much more telling experience for everyone in the theatre.
Dealing with gender identity, sexual orientation, and questioning the masculinity of a cast of young men can be as traumatic as working with war survivors or at risk youth. I know that I needed to frame the work around activities and actions to give space for the actors to express in ways that felt true to them and bring integrity to the work.
As mentioned in my previous post on Chutes Incandescentes, in a very intimate moment, one of my actors stated that he had never had relationships like this before. He was referring to playing tag and forming relationships with the other cast members through the activity of running around. What I did not realize was that all of my actors for this show had been through some form of bullying and at some point felt isolated and lonely in their childhoods. Thankfully we created a safe space to openly discuss and process these realizations. So in connection with the last line from the passage above- Spitting Too Close as a theatre piece allowed us as creators and the audience to go beyond what is often presented in the media. It allowed for some healing for my actors, and the discovery of making newer and equally strong relationships with other members of their community.
Tresize, Byroni. Wake, Caroline. "On the Ethics of Non-Disclosure: A Roundtable with Urban Theatre Projects and Collaborators" Performance Paradigm: A Journal of Performance and Contemporary Culture. Issue 5.2. October 2009. Last Accessed: April 12, 2013. http://www.performanceparadigm.net/journal/issue-52/interview/on-the-ethics-of-non-disclosure-a-roundtable-with-urban-theatre-projects-and-collaborators
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