Be The Street: Reflection Portfolio & Epilogue

When I first entered the STEAM factory for a four-day residency with Teatro Travieso (or Troublemaker Theatre, a theatre collective dedicated to social justice), I experienced a surge of emotions—excitement to be surrounded by others interested in the merging of art and activism; fear of a room filled with unfamiliar faces; and a deep curiosity for the new skills I would learn and the connections I would make over the next few days. I was brought to the residency with a group of students as preparation for an upcoming semester of engaging with and facilitating theater workshops for Columbus’ Hilltop neighborhood with Be The Street (BTS), a community-engaged performance project at The Ohio State University. As a future co-facilitator, it was important for me to understand what my community groups would soon experience. In the following days we got to know each other through icebreakers, played devising theater games, accumulated material we might use in the future, shared mini performances, and discussed the ethics of community-engaged work. We were encouraged to work with the concept of “challenge by choice,” challenging ourselves while participating at our own comfort level. Although I appreciate the autonomy that “challenge by choice” provides I remember feeling nervous about my ability, or lack of ability, to push myself through discomfort. This exact circumstance is a clear example of the need for establishing Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens’ brave space as opposed to safe space.

“As we explored these thorny questions, it became increasingly clear to us that our approach to initiating social justice dialogues should not be to convince participants that we can remove risk from the equation, for this is simply impossible. Rather, we propose revising our language, shifting away from the concept of safety and emphasizing the importance of bravery instead, to help students better understand—and rise to—the challenges of genuine dialogue on diversity and social justice issues” (Arao and Clemens 2013, 136).

As I ventured through the games, discussions, and exercises I was in a constant battle with myself. On the one hand, merely showing up to a devising theatre workshop was already a big step outside my comfort zone. On the other, I knew I was still holding back—that I could have taken more risks. If I was not able to encourage myself to sit with discomfort, how was I supposed to set an example or provide the space for my future community members to do so? This war with my fear of judgement started at a very young age, and it is not a war that is easily won within the duration of a semester or even the duration of a master’s degree. However, I was and still am dedicated to learning how to be vulnerable with the hope that I can spread some courage to those I work with. At the conclusion of our first day with Teatro Travieso, director Jimmy Noriega cautioned us all to “be aware of the dangers of safety, comfort, and group-think.” Reflecting back on my experiences both as a participant in the residency and as a facilitator with BTS, this warning holds true.

In the following weeks my classmates and I drafted facilitation plans and practiced teaching exercises with each other in anticipation of entering our community groups. I was assigned to work with senior citizens at a local senior medical center in Columbus. Having worked with seniors with Parkinson’s Disease in the past, I was excited for the opportunity to engage with and learn from members of a different generation. As my co-facilitator and I thought-up ideas for our workshops, I kept the words of a mentor in the back of my mind: “be prepared for nothing and ready for anything.” I wanted to create a facilitation plan that was detailed enough to support us if we had extra time, but loose enough to provide room for adapting to the people and the environment. I used my experience as a certified Pilates instructor to find creative exercises appropriate for different ranges of mobility, endurance, coordination, and memory. My co-facilitator was very good at considering how we would craft language and space that was inclusive and supportive, and I was good at structuring materials and organizing people. Together, our strengths fostered an ability for us to be both leaders and listeners within our community.

Prior to my involvement with BTS, I had taught dance classes within many different community settings. I went into the community-engaged performance field believing that my job was to take the access to artistic expression that I had and to share it with those for whom access and/or resources were limited. I know, now, that community-engaged work is, as applied theater professor Jan Cohen-Cruz states, a practice of “call and response.” In her book Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response, she talks about the importance of reciprocity, of both parties—in this case facilitators and community members—benefiting from the project. As I entered the senior medical center for the first time, I felt anxious. My journal entry from that day read “I was the first person to arrive today, and I entered the space in a funk. I was feeling tired, unfocused, overstretched, and anxious. I tried to keep my internal dialogue from influencing the vibe of the room as people arrived. I think entering collaborations and community spaces like this is the toughest part of the experience. How I enter on the first day sets a tone for how people will perceive me as the sessions continue.” This first-day reaction parallels with a piece of advice Jimmy Noriega gave us on our first day of the residency. His advice was for us to be okay with feeling overwhelmed and to make our roles as facilitators known in the beginning. As we progressed through exercises that day, it comforted me to see that same nervous energy in the community members. Eventually as a group, our shared anxiety became shared excitement. We closed our first day by taking stock of the exercises our community collaborators enjoyed and by offering suggestions for future workshops.

“Translated to engaged performance, call and response foregrounds the many opportunities for inter- activity between a theatre artist and the people involved in the situation in question. These exchanges happen at various points along the performance process: the early phases, especially research and devising, or perhaps a workshop not intended to lead to anything else; the duration of the play itself; and the period following, whether a talkback conversation, story circles, or more long-term actions that the production supports or inspires. The process is iterative: the call may be initiated from a community, and the response may come from an artist, who then sets forth a new call directed to an audience. The overall process of such art must be reciprocal and must benefit the people whose lives inform the project, not just promote the artist…An active relationship between actors and community, not only the connection among the actors, is at the heart of the work”(Cohen-Cruz 2010, 1-2).

During our second workshop I began to get a glimpse of the personalities in the room. I took a mental inventory of those who seemed outgoing and those who seemed to be more introverted. My journal reads “I noticed that she, too, shows some signs of insecurity. During Bam-Pow she seemed anxious about sharing. When we did Ball Toss she said she ‘was just happy we hadn’t asked her to tell a story.’ During Machine, she seemed very nervous and said that she ‘just didn’t know what to do.’ Once I prompted her to think of making sound with her body instead of her voice she began to clap. A minute later, in the same shape, I looked back and saw her clapping, in her pose, smiling and laughing with the group. Seeing her make it through her discomfort and into enjoyment felt like a win. I hope to continue finding gentle ways to pull her out of her shell.” I thought back on my experience with insecurity during the Teatro Travieso residency and decided that in order to support this individual, I would have to step up. I would have to lead by working through my own discomfort in an effort to create a “brave space” so she could do the same. Two weeks later, I wrote “These last two weeks have brought me a lot of joy. It seems like we’ve reached a point where our group trusts us, or at least is becoming more comfortable with working through discomfort. Not only did I notice this in the group, but also within myself. It’s wonderful to be both giving and taking from each other and I appreciate the support they’ve shown us as facilitators, which has made me feel more confident in my leadership skills. I hope they are feeling a response parallel to the one I am discovering in this work.” As weeks passed our sense of community began to grow. We learned about each other’s likes and dislikes, families, careers, and memories. Most of our time was spent sharing stories through words, sounds, and movement. We created more material than we knew what to do with, but eventually we started to feel the pressure of time. “Creative groups need to nurture an atmosphere where people feel safe enough to take risks; otherwise, only heroes will bring forth creative ideas; others will censor themselves (Kerrigan 2001, 86).

My co-facilitator and I were repeatedly forced to make in-the-moment decisions, cutting exercises from our plans and then choosing which remaining exercises were most important for the group. Outside of our workshops I struggled with having adequate time to reflect on what had been accomplished the previous week in order to build a plan for the next. All along, I believed that we had taken Jimmy Noriega’s advice to begin with small moments and gradually build them into a cohesive whole, but as our performance date approached it became clear that we weren’t bringing our small moments together quickly enough. One of my last journal entries before the Covid-19 pandemic halted our work with the senior center read “I’m realizing that our facilitation plans are really focusing on the particular day but are not thinking ahead to the big picture of what we are trying to do. I believe we are doing a good job of scaffolding in each facilitation plan individually, but we still don’t know what it is we are building up to overall. It’s difficult to reflect adequately enough to know where we are building to. It feels like our time between reflection and building the next plan is so short, and I’m constantly struggling for more time to consider where to go next.” This was a major turning point where I began to recognize the importance of reflection.

Looking back on our last few weeks at the senior medical center, I can’t help but find irony in our relationship with time. It was only a month ago that we were scrambling, gripping onto as much time as we could to prepare. Now, most of us have more time and less to do. The university’s shift to a digital platform has been an adjustment for all but has been particularly problematic for continuing outreach with our senior community. With some participants having limited or no access to technology, staying in touch has been difficult. My co-facilitator and I brainstormed the possibilities for our group to create something tangible. We called community members one by one to check in, offering ways of making something new together. My conversations with participants gradually turned into discussions on how they were passing the time, what was bringing them joy, and the good deeds we were seeing in our neighborhoods. Some opened up about the hardships they were experiencing and others shared photographs of their pets. Although it doesn’t feel like closure, it does feel like we succeeded in creating a brave space for our community to share their stories. One participant told me how she believes that in times of crisis, we find our true selves. She said that now is an opportunity to start new, to decide who we’d like to be when the pandemic is over.

As I move forward with my academic and professional careers, I want to continue chasing discomfort and taking risks. I will continue using applied theatre techniques and community-engagement as a platform for people to share their stories. There are multiple divisions between people—geographic, cultural, societal, and political barriers, but covid-19 has and will continue to affect us all. I believe that when the covid-19 crisis ends, there will be a need for creative expression, building connections, and sharing stories through art like never before. In my research I am questioning if/how academia prepares students for community-engaged collaboration with vulnerable populations. As a graduate student and an artist who has been working with underserved communities for the last few years, I still don’t feel adequately prepared for this work. I question how educators can begin this training at an earlier stage of a young dancer’s academic career. I am excited to bring the skills I’ve learned into my service with both local and international underserved communities as I forge ahead with establishing OSU’s Movement Exchange chapter. Movement Exchange unites dance and service through its network of university chapters, international dance exchanges, and year-round programs in local, underserved communities. For many of our chapter body members, this will be their first time working in/with/for vulnerable populations. I hope to build from the work of Jan Cohen-Cruz, Jimmy Noriega, Brian Arao, Kristi Clemens, and Sheila Kerrigan to provide applied-theatre workshops, facilitation strategies, and discussions around the ethics of entering and exiting at-risk communities for our body members in order to prepare them for our exchanges abroad and for our work locally. I hope to build a brave space within our chapter’s community, offering a space where students feel supported to take risks as they learn about cultures different than their own, through movement.

Works Cited

Arao, Brian and Kristi Clemens. 2013. “From Safe Places to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice” in The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators, edited by Lisa M. Landreman. Sterling: Stylus LLC.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan. 2010. Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response. Abingdon: Routledge.

Kerrigan, Sheila. 2001. The Performers Guide to the Collaborative Process. Portsmouth: Heinemann.

Building Community and Taking Risks in the Dance Studio: Spring Concert, 2020 Reflection

In college, I was the choreographer who showed up to rehearsal with counts and movements written out in a notebook, having envisioned the finished work in my mind a hundred times over before ever choosing the cast. In my first semester of graduate school my composition teacher asked, “what does it mean to care when it comes to the creative process?” As I thought over this question it became clear that I’ve directed my care externally, toward the thoughts and expectations of my mentors or colleagues, and toward the finished product. The following semester I quickly jumped at the opportunity to switch my way of thinking—to focus on input over output, on process over product. This new creative thinking brought me to my first choreographic work as a graduate student.

My research explores dance, community engagement, and civic service—connecting people across social, political, cultural, and geographical borders through art. As an advocate for refugee rights, I wanted to draw attention to the current refugee crisis in the United States. In the past, I had worked with a non-profit organization dedicated to helping refugee children become acclimated after arriving to the U.S. and I wanted to continue contributing to this cause. I went to an event titled “Examining the Refugee Crisis Through Art,” where Columbus artists shared their work and talked about their creative processes. There was deep conversation about the representation of refugees as statistics along with a lack of individualized attention, the desensitization of the crisis among Americans, and the need to humanize these people who have been marked as criminals. But how could I choreograph a piece about the refugee experience when I, myself, was not a member of the refugee community? I couldn’t. I could, however, create a piece about the human condition and highlight the shared human emotions involved in refugee experiences.

With this work, I wanted to draw attention to shared human emotions during times of hardship. The work was unnamed and involved a cast of six dancers with various levels of experience. I knew that this process would require an ability to sit in discomfort—to be vulnerable—for both myself and the dancers. For myself, the discomfort came from an unsettling fear that I would unintentionally cause harm to others by taking on this topic. For the dancers, I anticipated a discomfort in revisiting past emotions and experiences. Working off of Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens' concept of brave space, it became my goal to cultivate a rehearsal space and a creative process that empowered the dancers to be brave and to take risks.

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Part I: Establishing Brave Space

In their essay titled “From Safe Places to Brave Spaces: A New Way to Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice,” Arao and Clemens begin by discussing the importance of establishing ground rules. This first step is the key to creating “a learning environment that allows students to engage with one another over controversial issues with honesty, sensitivity, and respect” (Arao and Clemens 2013, 135). Our first cast dinner took place over pizza and began by establishing community ground rules. This gave us an outline for how to move forward and support each other throughout the process. As a cast, we discussed what felt important and accessible to us, as well as how we could express these elements in the choreography. Words that came up included displacement, exhaustion, and reaction.

Every rehearsal included three elements aside from the actual creation of choreography. These elements included (1) a check-in, (2) a team-building exercise, and (3) a check-out. Our check-ins provided an opportunity for the dancers and I to celebrate something that brought us joy or to confide in the group over something weighing us down. Check-ins offered a space, every week, where we could always count on being heard and seen. Our team-building exercises were used both as a physical warmup and as a way of getting to know each other. Our check-outs allowed us to reflect both as individuals and as a community, creating a space for each of us to share what we were enjoying or what needed to change throughout the creative process.

In “Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response” applied theater professor Jan Cohen-Cruz discusses the methods of fellow social justice advocate and director of Roadside Theater, Dudley Cocke. Cohen-Cruz states, “Cocke asserts that effective grassroots organizing around issues of social justice invariably begins small. He sees the basic unit of such organizing as the individual discovering through experience, reflection, and study his or her own truth about the issue, then testing and developing that truth in dialogue with others, who also have knowledge” (Cohen-Cruz 2010, 97). This concept of beginning small with individual, self-reflection and expanding gradually into group discussion served as the foundation of our rehearsal process.

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Part II: Collaborative Choreography

The choreographic process was also a community effort. I compiled a list of 16 different emotions or keywords mentioned within refugee narratives. The dancers each took the list and next to each word, wrote about a time in their lives when they felt that same emotion/role. They also had the option of skipping a word if they could not relate it back to a memory. I purposefully chose to isolate the individual keywords on the list from their correlated origin because I did not want the dancers to compare their own experiences to those of the refugees, but instead to focus on the similarities in what was felt. The dancers then took their experiences and interpreted them through movement, creating one movement phrase/gesture per each word on the list. These phrases and gestures became the backbone of our work.

We chose to open the piece with the elements of displacement and exhaustion, brought up during our first meeting. The dancers discussed how, although they’d never experienced physical displacement, they could find a connection to an internal sense of displacement associated with not knowing how to deal with their lived experiences or the emotions that emerged. Their internal, emotional displacement was a metaphor for the physical displacement of the refugee. To show this, we drew multiple possibilities for arranging bodies in the space (we called these “orientation keys”), crumpled them up, and placed them in a pile on the floor. The dancers each randomly chose one key each and used the keys to orient their bodies in the studio. The dancers set up for their first position in blackout, the lights would rise, fall, and the dancers would move to the next position in darkness. We did this several times, over and over, trying to literally exhaust and disorient the audience with not knowing where a dancer would pop up in space each time the lights came up.

Once we had our movement, we began piecing it together through games and exercises. Our first exercise was an adaptation of Arao and Clemen’s “Crossing the Line” (also known as “One Step Forward One Step Back” and “Leveling the Playing Field”). In the original exercise participants line up at one end of a room while a facilitator calls out a series of statements related to social identity, privilege, and oppression. The participants then take a step forward if they believe that a statement reflects their lived experience. The original goal of Arao and Clemen’s exercise is to demonstrate the effects of social stratification and injustices within the lives of the participants. I wanted to use this exercise, but to manipulate it in a way that would highlight the commonalities present among the dancers as opposed to highlighting what made them different. The dancers lined up, side by side, at one end of the studio. One at a time I called out each emotion from the list. If a dancer had a particular experience that correlated to that emotion, they stepped forward. If they didn’t, they stayed in place. At the end of the exercise the dancers looked around and found that, for the most part, they had traveled forward together as a group. Not one dancer was left behind, and not one dancer led the group. Although each dancer felt these emotions at different intensities throughout their lives, what brought them together as a cast was that they weren’t harboring those emotions alone.

Reaction was the third word that came up during rehearsal discussions. The dancers spoke about how although they could not control the experiences that related to the emotions on our list, they did have control over how they react to those experiences and talked about how their reactions influenced where they ended up next. We chose to show this in our work by using a process that was uncontrollable (to an extent) to outline how our dance would evolve. We had two dice. One was twelve-sided and the other six-sided. The dancers grouped together and took turns rolling the dice—first, the twelve-sided and then, the six-sided die. The twelve-sided die decided the number of steps to be taken and the six-sided die decided an action to be taken (1 was roll, 2 was jump, 3 was slide, etc.). The dancers could not control the physical movement, but they could control which direction they chose to take that movement.

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Part III: Reflection

Although this work never came into fruition due to the unpredictable effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have never been more proud of a choreographic undertaking. While reflecting inward, I am proud of myself for stepping outside of my comfort zone and my typical way of choreographing. During my first semester of graduate school I had a debilitating fear of judgement that distanced me from my creative process. I was so afraid of doing the work wrong that I didn’t do it at all. As I reflect on the dancers, I am proud of their vulnerability and honesty. Author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown said “there is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it.” I feel that as a cast, we did that. I am a believer, like da Vinci, that art is never truly finished—it is only abandoned. This is the one work that I feel okay leaving behind, because it was never about having a finished product. It was always about the process.

Works Cited

Arao, Brian and Kristi Clemens. 2013. “From Safe Places to Brave Spaces: A New Way to

Frame Dialogue Around Diversity and Social Justice” in The Art of Effective Facilitation: Reflections from Social Justice Educators, edited by Lisa M. Landreman. Sterling: Stylus LLC.

Cohen-Cruz, Jan. 2010. Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response. Abingdon: Routledge.

Abstract: A Revolutionary Reversal of Fascist Body Politics, by Michaela Neild

“A Revolutionary Reversal of Fascist Body Politics” explores the transnational influences of German expressionist dance on American revolutionary dance during the early to mid-twentieth century. Beginning in 1914 Germany, this paper first looks at Mary Wigman’s Witch Dance, and follows Wigman’s influences as they immigrate to the United States in the body and teachings of Hanya Holm in 1931. It then traces German expressionist influences as they are passed on from Holm to second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant dancers of the revolutionary dance movement, Edith Segal and Miriam Blecher, and finds evidence of these influences in their Anti-fascist choreographic works, Kinder, Kuche, and Kirche (1933) and Van der Lubbe’s Head (1934). While researching these key figures and their works, this paper also examines the social and political issues that surrounded and informed the dance community at the time. “A Revolutionary Reversal of Fascist Body Politics” is heavily informed by Clare Croft’s book Dancers as Diplomats, which discusses the use of dance by artists as well as nations in forging new, idealistic identities and utopian narratives throughout history— especially during times of social and political controversy. It is interested in the irony of Russian-Jewish immigrants using German expressionist elements in their choreography to criticize and challenge fascism, arguing that by embodying and utilizing the German-Expressionist roots that grounded American revolutionary dance at the time, Jewish immigrant dancers reversed the body politics of fascism. Photograph: Members of the New Dance Group in Improvisation, 1932. (New Dance Group Collection, Music Division, Library of Congress)