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From The Ground Up Grassroots Theater in Historical and Contemporary Perspective Edited by Dudley Cocke, Harry Newman, and Janet Salmons-Rue Community Based Arts Project Cornell University 1993 Editors' Note All reports of this kind are provisional. Time and space constraints have only allowed us to provide a sense of what the symposium was like and present its significant highlights. Though we have made every effort to be accurate in this, we can make no claim to being comprehensive. At the same time, the editors take full responsibility for any errors, omissions, or misinterpretations in the report and are happy to receive corrections. This report is dedicated to Edward Kamarck (1919 - 1992), who enthusiasti­ cally helped plan the symposium, but did not live to participate, and to his friend and mentor, Robert Gard (1910 -1992), who made his last presentation on grassroots theater at this gathering. The effect of the cultural bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. It makes them want to identify with that which is furthest removed from them­ selves; for instance, with other peoples' languages rather than their own. It makes them identify with that which is decadent and reactionary, all those forces which would stop their own springs of life. It even plants serious doubts about the moral rightness of struggle. Possibilities of triumph or victory are seen as remote, ridiculous dreams. The intended results are despair, despondency, and a collective death-wish. — Ngugi wa Thiong'o Decolonising the Mind, 1986 Table of Contents Introduction 11 Five Historical Perspectives 15 Contemporary Response 55 Scenarios 69 A Matrix Articulating the Principles of Grassroots Theater 80 Issues and Concerns for Further Consideration 82 Appendix 86 Introduction n the 1990s, grassroots theater finds itself in a period of transition and re-definition. The progressive social movements of the 1960s which gave rise to and supported much of Ithis work in its current form have been diverted and diminished by more than a decade of conservative attack. Communities have changed; economies have worsened. Many artists have burned out or been drawn into other kinds of theater, for personal or financial reasons. Many theaters are facing difficulties in passing the work on to new generations, as well as in coping with unforeseen challenges such as the AIDS crisis. At the same time, many grassroots theaters seem more robust than ever, their work never more vital and necessary. It is the grassroots theaters, the theaters that have had a larger social purpose to their work than simply "doing plays,” that are managing to survive relatively intact the economic and societal pressures that have caused many comparably- sized theater organizations without their sense of mission to close or change focus significantly. The grassroots theaters have continued to produce work of high quality and have continued to have a direct effect on the lives of their audiences and communities. Oddly enough, it is their on-going vitality and impact which are creating new challenges for grassroots theaters. As non-grassroots theaters are becoming more threatened economi­ cally and more isolated socially, they are becoming attracted to the grassroots theater's promise of relevance and connection. Already some basic ideas of grassroots theater, such as empowerment and commitment to community, have found their way into the rest of the theater world, so far as little more than rhetoric. Though the acknowledgement of the value of grassroots theater is long overdue on a national level, such acceptance may only be the first step towards its greater imperilment, especially as the already scarce resources for this kind of work would get shared with organizations that have no grassroots history and only a professed commitment to it. This seems a particularly good time, then, to ask what is the state of grassroots theater today? How has it changed over the last decade and the last century? What will the next century bring and how can we prepare for it? With these questions and concerns in mind, one hundred practitioners, scholars, and interested observers of grassroots theater met in early October 1992 at the Center for Theatre Arts at Cornell University for a two and a half day symposium, entitled "Grassroots Theater in Historical and Contemporary Perspective." Part of the Community-Based Arts Project, a three year joint effort of the Cornell Department of Theatre Arts and Roadside Theater of Whitesburg, Kentucky, in association with Junebug Productions of New Orleans, Louisiana, the purpose of the symposium was to review the history of grassroots theater in the United States, to determine what grassroots theaters from various cultures and communities currently have in common, and to begin to prepare a concerted response to the present and a strategy for the future. To the organizers' knowledge, the symposium was a first. There had never before been a gathering solely devoted to surveying the breadth of grassroots theatrical activity, contem­ porary and historical, nor one which involved people from so many cultures, generations, geographical regions, and professions. The participants included Chicanos and other Latino Americans, African Americans, Asian Americans, people from Appalachia and other European Americans; theater workers active in the 1930s, the 1950s, the '60s and '70s, and today; people from California, Colorado, Texas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Washington State, Washington, D.C., Maryland, and other states, as well as the New York region and New England. Professionally, the group included directors, performers, playwrights, critics and historians, professors of theater, primary and secondary school teachers, graduate and INTRODUCTION undergraduate students, theater administrators, and arts funders. Attendance was not limited to those involved with grassroots theater, but included artists and managers from all kinds of theater, from off-Broadway to the alternative theater to the large not-for-profit regional theaters. This kind of mixing was seen as important and necessary to the success of the symposium, a central aspect of which was its emphasis on fostering and expanding dialogue. The symposium began the evening of October 9 with a presentation of a new play, Junebug/Jack, a collaboration between Roadside Theater and Junebug Productions. Saturday, October 10, opened with a series of presentations on the histories of different grassroots theaters: the African American, the Hispanic/Latino, the European American rural theater, and the Depression-era Federal Theatre Project. Saturday afternoon, the participants were divided into eleven groups, more or less equal in size, for discussion about the history, present, and future of grassroots theater, and about their own work and concerns. The day concluded with an evening of staged readings: Wedding Clothes by Grace Kiner, originally performed in the 1920s as part of the New York State Rural Life Plays Program at Cornell University; two Spanish-language vaudeville sketches by Netty and Jesus Rodriguez, one from the 1920s and the other from '30s; and excerpts from A Medal For Willie by William Branch, first staged in 1951 by the Committee for the Negro and the Arts in Harlem. Sunday morning, October 11, started with a plenary session, in which summaries of the previous afternoon's small group discussions were presented and discussed. Then, the groups reconvened and each was given a scenario to develop, which required the partici­ pants to make a case for grassroots theater in a non-arts setting, for instance, at a school board meeting or before a Congessional subcommittee hearing or to a commercial publisher. After an hour or so of preparation, the rest of the afternoon was devoted to the enactment of these scenarios. The symposium ended with closing comments and an informal celebration. This report has a two-fold purpose. The first is to serve as a document of the event itself and as a means for communicating its significance to a wider audience. Toward that end, attention has gone into trying to retain the tone and quality of the exchanges at the symposium. Included in the report are edited versions of the historical presentations, excerpts from the small group discussions and the plays presented, excerpts from the scenario presentations, and an appendix which contains a schedule for the symposium, a list of attendees, a list of books and texts relating to grassroots theater, and other supplemental materials. In keeping with the goal of documentation, the report follows the symposium in its order. The reader, however, should feel free to skip from section to section while reading it. The second purpose is to deepen and extend the dialogue begun by the symposium. Historically, people in the grassroots theater have not had much opportunity to talk with each other about the work they are doing, about its unique values and needs; just getting the work done has been nearly all-consuming. Unfortunately, this has kept the discourse about grassroots theater at a basic level, even among its makers. With this report, we hope to forward the discussion of the issues that inform grassroots theater by identifying and elaborating upon the themes and the ideas expressed at the symposium. Two sections of the report are devoted to this effort. The "Matrix Articulating the Principles of Grassroots Theater" is an attempt to derive a multi-layered description of the general characteristics of grassroots theater. The last section, "Issues and Concerns for Further Consideration," came out of an analysis of the materials from the symposium — including commentaries by the participants after the event — during the months that the report was being put together.

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