Cornerstone's Community-Based Exchanges

Cornerstone's community-based productions rely on a number of social, material, and aesthetic transactions that animate relational networks while transforming what makes theatre “good.” The Marmarth Hamlet (1986), for example, brought together North Dakota mayor Patty Perry (as the clownish gravedigger) with the town “bad boy” Rod Prichard (as Laertes), creating new dimensions in local perceptions of both. The rehearsal process also allowed for labor exchanges that expanded on notions of “expertise” and marked mutual willingness to engage in new practices. Thus, Cornerstone's recent Harvard graduates tended both goats and a local bar to enable participants to rehearse. Marmarth's Hamlet also inaugurated an adaptation process that illuminated and reconfigured problematic cultural assumptions on the part of both Cornerstone members and local participants. After potential cast members asked company members to translate Shakespeare's arcane language during auditions, the company decided to update the play radically. But that adaptation, according to several participants, included too many “bad words.” In a meeting called by the Marmarth Historical Society, members of Cornerstone, community actors, and several members of the local church sat down with the script and discussed each textual problem. The meeting revealed to Cornerstone members that their word choice reflected Harvard's urban collegiate culture rather than Marmarth's rural ranching culture. The committee reevaluated such phrases as “downright prick” and changed it to the more locally acceptable and accessible “horse's rear end.”Footnote ² Yet the meeting also prompted some illuminating communal dissent. Members of the historical society discussed whether or not they ever used profane language. Cornerstone's artistic director Bill Rauch recalled, “They decided the men did and the women didn't. But then the women said, ‘That's not true.’”Footnote ³ The process enabled the community to address and complicate their own cultural narrative. “Bad language” had more currency in everyday conversation than had previously been admitted and complicated assumptions about gender-based decorum. At the same time, the idea of participatory adaptation of Shakespeare revised ideas of what makes a “good” play. After viewing a sold-out production, one local cowboy affirmed, “A guy should see it twice.”Footnote ⁴

In addition to making cultural assumptions visible and producing new aesthetic possibilities, Cornerstone's production process allows for a more complex negotiation of social relationships, giving a name and face to the “other” within communities. An astonishing moment occurred during rehearsals for Cornerstone's “bridge show” For Here or to Go (2000), which brought together participants from ten community-based productions in Los Angeles. During the rehearsal process I witnessed a former felon and several Los Angeles police officers, who ultimately sang together onstage, sharing their experiences and fears with each other. Of course, this and similar examples signal instances of potential enacted between individuals rather than institutional shifts that require more attention to dynamics of power, especially in policing relationships. When recognized as the beginnings of social exchange rather than as embodiments of social change, however, these encounters accrue significance.

Remembering Mostar with Balkan Youth

The encounter with the Other in a community-based context gets amplified in larger-scale conflict zones. For several years in the 1990s and early 2000s I worked with youth in Balkan and Middle East regions, engaging theatre as a technique for conflict transformation (detailed in Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East).Footnote ⁵ I argue that devised theatre in the Balkans—particularly in divided cities like Mostar—generated spaces for local youth of different ethnoreligious backgrounds to counter civic narratives of division.

Performance in Mostar offered a way to cross geographical as well as perceptual borders, “to hear what others think through theatre,” as one self-identified Bosnian Croat participant put it. Through generating fictionalized performances that reflected on lived experienced, the youth in and around Mostar became more attuned to how ethnic national sentiment was produced and exploited. The youth responded by reanimating public space, regenerating a more expansive collective identity, and forging ways jointly to “re-member” the place where they lived.

Collaboratively created performances within and around the city of Mostar also operated as a response to active forgetting. These performances generated a restorative archive that embodied a set of testimonies and countermemories, challenging the production of ethnically segregated collective memories in Bosnia–Herzegovina. In Poštar (Postman), also known as Pisma (Letters) or Where Does the Postman Go When All the Street Names Change? (1997), participating youth devised an absurdist clown show that reproduced Mostar through a series of encounters in which bouffon characters attempted to deliver letters to each other in a rapidly changing city.Footnote ⁶ Podrum (The Basement, 1996) brought youth from various ethnoreligious backgrounds together to reflect on their experiences during the war through physical storytelling. Working with a process that invited the youth to articulate genuine questions and that then juxtaposed those questions with everyday ritual activities moved them from an initial impulse to narrate their lives through a more detached and spectacularized action-movie genre to an authentic collective meditation on their experiences during the war. When they performed together in a bombed-out hotel site in Mostar, the youth also embodied a new narrative of collaboration. The performance of Podrum marked the first time that residents from both sides of the city had been in a public space together since the war had begun.

Although important as interventions into the discourse of separation and in conjuring new spatial and social imaginaries, these community-engaged productions feel in retrospect like temporary interruptions and exchanges rather than sustainable cultural shifts. In order to explore the dynamics of change through long-term movement building I turn to Combatants for Peace (CFP), an alliance of Israeli and Palestinian ex-combatants. I look at how CFP members tactically deploy adaptations of Augusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques to strengthen their agenda of social change.

Animating Alliance with Combatants for Peace

Combatants for Peace emerged in the early 2000s as an offshoot of the Israeli-based “refuse movement,” made up of soldiers who refused to serve in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Members of this group formed an alliance with Palestinians who had chosen nonviolence as a tactic for resisting the occupation. Working together, CFP members challenge a discourse of separation in the Middle East for multiple audiences. They strive to “out-legitimize” the oppositional framework that sustains the current conflict, dramatizing inherent social contradictions until they can no longer be sustained by the populace.Footnote ⁷ Without abandoning attachments to identities as Israeli and Palestinian, they work to expand those identities to include the relational perspective of the Other and to accept the internal complexities within each identity position.

Chen Alon is a cofounding Israeli member of CFP who trained as a theatre artist. Over the past decade he has developed what he terms a “polarized model” of Theatre of the Oppressed, adapting Augusto Boal's techniques of collective analysis, spectatorial engagement, and rehearsing for change within a conflict context.

In 2007, I traveled to the Palestinian village of Shufa to witness (and assist with) the first TO workshop with members of the Tulkarm–Tel Aviv branch of CFP. Alon and his Palestinian cofacilitator, Nour Shehadah, framed the workshop as part of the political mission of CFP: to work in partnership to stop the occupation in order to lay groundwork for two mutually secure and independent states. Alon emphasized that this would not be “reconciliation” theatre that builds emotional attachments but reduces the desire actively to transform the political situation. Rather, the theatre would create an aesthetic space that enabled the group to reflect collectively on the structural dynamics of oppression and work toward rehearsing concrete change. The session concluded with dynamic images of what the group could do together, many of which were activated in the following months.

In addition to generating proposals for alliance-based actions, the images enabled sophisticated collective analysis of the conflict while crafting alternative social and spatial realities. An Israeli participant noted the way that games “erased barriers.” Several Palestinians added that the asymmetrical control of space and movement outside the room sustained separation. “The feeling in this room is different from outside,” reflected one Israeli woman. “Tel Aviv is a bubble that allows the Israelis to ignore the occupation. The bubble of the workshop creates a space of coexistence that lets us imagine a future together beyond the occupation.” As a Palestinian citizen of Israel translated this reflection into Arabic, the Palestinians nodded. The Israeli woman had expressed a resonant feeling in the group, one that Jill Dolan might term a performative utopia.

Dolan describes these performatives as moments within theatre that animate “fleeting intimations of a better world … one full of hope and reanimated by a new, more radical humanism.”Footnote ⁸ The activated future vision in Shufa seemed particularly significant in that it was both felt and embodied through acting together, embodying the interchange of participation and witness. CFP members additionally distinguished between two “bubbles”: one that protected Israelis from confronting the consequences of the occupation and another that modeled a different way of being together in a site of egalitarian regard. This feeling of coexistence grew from a mutual witnessing of traumas and a mutual commitment to nonviolent actions that would develop the security and humanity of all those in the room and in the region. The theatre illuminated how each group could separately and together help achieve their common goals.

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As a dialogic process, community-based theatre can animate a number of exchanges. Cornerstone's community-based theatre enlivens relational networks and produces new social and aesthetic narratives, nuancing what makes “good” theatre. Devised theatre created with Balkan youth in a postwar situation can interrupt a civic discourse of separation. For Combatants for Peace, theatre operates as a more sustainable and flexible space that supports collective analysis, activist intervention, and ongoing movement building. In each instance, theatre works as a site of mutual exchange rather than as a service rendered. Some of the most profound changes are to the theatrical form itself.