Year One: A Reflection

Jan Cohen-Cruz wrote Local Acts, Engaging Performance, and Remapping Performance, edited Radical Street Performance, and, with Mady Schutzman, co-edited Playing Boal and A Boal Companion. She worked with A Blade of Grass, an organization that supports socially-engaged artists, from 2013-2019. She earned her PhD at NYU Performance Studies and was a longtime professor in the Drama Department, initiating its minor in applied theater.
Rad Pereira are a multi-spirit mixed Black, Indigenous Brazilian, Jewish (im)migrant artist currently based in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn). Their creative practices range from social sculpture, to popular theatrical and TV/film performance, to participatory liberatory artmaking and healing that weaves together an Afro-futurist longing for transformative justice and queer (re)Indigenization of culture.
They have curated stories from over 75 interviews and informal exchanges that offer insight into the field of Socially Engaged Performance in the United States over the past 55 years. The book’s voices bring the reader from 1965 through the first wave of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. They point to more diverse and inclusive practices and give hope for the future of the art.
Their book, Meeting the Moment: Socially Engaged Performance, 1965–2020, by Those Who Lived It, will be published by New Village Press in May 2022.

In the 10th episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Gary Stewart, an artist and experimental sonic musician based in London.
Arlene and Gary first met more than 30 years ago in a community arts project, and his work since that time has taken him to Africa, Latin America, the U.S., and numerous spaces in the white-box gallery and prestige festival worlds.
In this episode, Gary explains how he came to do the work he does. He explains about Dub Morphology and their approach to their work. He and Arlene explore the possibilities and challenges of bringing the emergent, co-creative, egalitarian values of community-based arts practice into other types of creation and interaction, putting marginalized voices at the forefront, and the powerful results when kids in Brazilian favelas are trusted to master the full complexity of their art.

In the ninth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard talks with Meena Natarajan, Artistic and Executive Director of Pangea World Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and Chrissie Orr, community artist and cofounder of Seed Broadcast in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
In this episode, they talk about the Seed Syllables project, facilitating dialogues with 32 community artists and cultural activists to offer a composite portrait of life in the quadruple pandemic of virus, racial violence, economic meltdown, and climate crisis — and what comes next.

In the eighth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk with Bermudian artist Bill Ming in his studio in Nottinghamshire, England.
Bill’s work in sculpture, assemblage, painting, and collage draws on the whole of personal and collective history, from the racism he faced growing up in segregated schools to his reponse to the death of George Floyd, from childhood toys to the blues to the Middle Passage. He’s worked in schools and communities, his work has been exhibited in major museums, and his public art can be seen in several countries.
Bill talks about how all of this fits together, each practice informing the others, and his long journey in making art out of the materials that come to hand.

In the seventh episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and François Matarasso talk about the explosion of story-based work in community and participatory arts and what it all means.
Antecedents include the women’s movement and the civil rights movement, and examples include a 360-degree view of the close of a psychiatric hospital to a national dialogue culminating in a "Poetic Address to the Nation.”
François and Arlene touch on the strengths of this practice, the ethical challenges, and the importance of having a clear intention.

In the sixth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Jade Campbell and Erin Walcon of Doorstep Arts in Torbay, England. They talk about running 14 different drama groups in youth clubs, church halls, and schools; setting up Doorstop with a consciously feminist and flexible model; what it means to “co-parent” the work; engaging the hard questions in ways that respect children’s intelligence; and much more!

In the fifth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso interview Denise Griffin Johnson, a cultural organizer in West Baltimore on the east coast of the U.S. She talks about racial justice, building on community strengths instead of deficits, the “highway to nowhere” and more.
Denise Griffin Johnson is the director of the Arch Social Community Network in West Baltimore, a community-led cultural organizing network founded in 2015 and based at the historic Arch Social Club. Denise has decades of experience as an organizer and advocate in Baltimore, during which she has held many positions in government and nonprofit organizations and served on numerous boards and advisory groups.
She is a co-founder of CultureWorks Baltimore, a member of the national network Alternate ROOTS, and a Cultural Agent with the US Department of Arts and Culture (a non-government entity).
In 2011-2013 Denise collaborated with Alternate ROOTS and Roadside Theater to produce a cultural festival that drew an audience of 11,000, and in 2015 she collaborated with the higher education consortium Imagining America to produce a national conference and cultural organizing institute in Baltimore.
Denise is a graduate of Coppin State University, with an MS in Family Counseling.

In the fourth episode of A Culture of Possibility, Arlene Goldbard and Francois Matarasso compare U.S. and European funding systems for community arts. In this discussion they are not interested in who gets funding and whether that funding is deserved. Nor are they concerned with where funding goes. Instead they focus on the underlying bases for making funding decisions in the first place.
They find that both the American and European systems are way too focused on the wrong questions, with results that are politically, ethically, and culturally problematic.
How did this happen? What would be better?
Francois and Arlene have both written a great deal about questions of cultural policy and cultural funding over many years. This discussion can only scratch the surface of their thinking. If you are interested in what they have to say then you should check their websites for articles and links.