A community bombazo at Africaribe Cultural Center, Chicago

I am a musician and Teaching Artist.  I have found myself repeatedly invited into musical cultures different from my own ethnic heritage.   This is a gift, and my impulse to reciprocate has led me to develop community projects that I call collaborative ethnomusicology.  In this essay I will share three examples of these types of projects, the philosophical and pedagogical frameworks that support them, and the nuts and bolts of how they get done.

Conceptual framework

Over the past 10 years I have been invited into the worlds of Afro-Caribbean music and dance as it lives and breathes here in Chicago.  This is due to a combination of things working together over time: my own curiosity and open mind, geographical proximity to Hispanic-strong neighborhoods, and musician friends whose generous spirits open doors that would otherwise be closed no matter how nearby I lived to them.  And of course my musicianship; without my ability to hold down parts well, I would be much less useful to have around.

A community bombazo at La Casita, Chicago

I do not come from the ethnic group that created and maintains this music; therefore, I am a guest by nature, and my being there at all is a gift.  It is a privilege to be present as a musician for ceremonies and events that are primarily attended by insiders- either by blood, by marriage or by music.  I am a participant-observer, a boundary crosser, traveling very near my home.
In recognition of the intrinsic value of the gift of sharing culture, which is intangible but deeply felt, I have the impulse to reciprocate.  I help carry drums, I help make the music, I help bring people out to shows, and I teach when it feels right.  I demonstrate the relevance of this music beyond the culture of origin just by being there and participating, as a Jewish non-Caribbean person.  And it is crucial that I recognize and can readily articulate what it is that I relate to about this music, on a human level, beyond ethnicity.  But beyond that I feel drawn to help document, to do what I can to help support, sustain, and celebrate this music.  I can help hold the mirror.

When research and knowledge about musical form is used to help sustain the culture that

A patient at Rush University Children's Hospital listening to the song of a New Orleans watermelon vendor

created it, we approach the realm of applied ethnomusicology, an academic term for what happens when cultural boundary-crossing musicians and scholars try to describe what is happening, for and with whom, and why it’s important.  Jeff Todd Titon of Brown University identifies applied work as follows:

APPLIED ETHNOMUSICOLOGY is the approach guided by principles of social responsibility, which extends the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding toward solving concrete problems and toward working both inside and beyond typical academic contexts.

Applied work doesn’t just involve participant-observation research in musical cultures, but also collaborations as people in the community take a major role in practical problem-solving having to do with the place of music in the life of the community. Applied ethnomusicology sometimes is a gift and it usually results in some kind of tangible result or product. Examples include musical apprenticeships, cultivation of musical skills, and the transmission of music; musicians-in-the-schools, festivals, radio, television or computer programs; written histories of the musicculture; policymaking on arts councils and other political and cultural agencies; community musical documentation projects; films and videos made for the music-culture and, often, the general public; festivals, parades, and public concert series; arts consultancies; surveys of traditional music with a view to bringing the musicians into contact with one another; museum exhibits and demonstrations; and archival preservation initiatives coupled with repatriating music from archives back to the original communities.

Other examples of applied ethnomusicology include public programming involving documentation and presentation of under-represented music at museums and festivals; participatory action research, involving partnerships with community scholars to work toward mutual community music goals such as encouraging conditions under which music will flourish; music, peace studies, and conflict resolution, particularly with regard to ethnic rivalries in the Balkans and Middle East; education, enabling multicultural initiatives such as a diversity of music in the curriculum; and cultural policy regarding music, including sustainability initiatives.

-from JEFF TODD TITON’s blog sustainablemusic.blogspot.com
This is active, collective community scholarship, at work for the good of the folks, as they define it.  Though my undergraduate work was in Anthropology, and I have presented at academic conferences on my work, I am not currently affiliated with any university in my community work.  As a Teaching Artist, I do work through Columbia College (Center for Community Arts Partnerships and Arts Integration Mentorship) and Northeastern University (Chicago Teachers’ Center), but in direct service, not research per se.

Un Arbol Que Me De Sombra: Bomba in Chicago
I have become deeply involved with the Afro-Puertorican music community in Chicago, studying and performing Bomba and Plena music with 4 different ensemble families.  After several years of workshops, classes, lessons, community bombazos, rehearsals and performances, a feeling began to rise up in me that I was witnessing and participating in a golden moment.  The timing was right: along with my growing familiarity and comfort within the community and vice versa, right now there are 5 different groups in Chicago actively researching, teaching, performing and growing this music, and several supporting cultural organizations working to provide outreach and educational opportunities.  In a typical week this summer I could easily find myself spending 4-5 nights a week at a rehearsal, class, community event or performance, and still have the feeling that I wasn’t putting enough practice or research time in.  For a relatively small community, this is an extremely active and passionate one.
I began meeting with the musicians and proposing a documentation project. The film as it stands now is intended to document the depth and diversity of the community, through the music itself.  It is being organized as a collection of songs and stories through which the larger issues will be recognized.  Each group/ organization featured in the film is being offered the opportunity to present one song from their repertoire that they feel represents their approach, philosophy, and beliefs about this music and its historical and contemporary relevance.  From my work in Arts Education, I am using the process of Inquiry to drive the project: I have developed a list of guiding questions in collaboration with the participants to help focus our ideas.   I ask each participant which of the questions he or she relates to most, and we go from there into a discussion of the ideas which follow, and then toward a design for the shoot.

This project is intended to be a collective statement, to pull our voices together in a way that will be of value to cultural insiders as well as outsiders.  It may include some words, but it will be primarily musical.  I dabble in scholarship but I am primarily involved as a musician, because I love the rhythms, songs and stories, and because I relate to the ideas underneath them.  This project is not an analysis, it is an alternate experience of the form.  I want it to be most interesting to the players themselves, to document, celebrate and share what we know and are curious about, at this time.  It is a collective musical ethnography of chicago bomba circa 2011-12, a visual album with a goal of musical and cultural conservation and sustainability.
Secret Voices: Homan Square Park Community Jukebox
The Secret Voices project was developed as part of my fellowship with MusicianCorps Chicago, a pilot program of Music National Service in 2009. The program placed musicians in community sites as part of a domestic musical Peace Corps, to serve in whatever way makes best use of that musician’s particular skill set.  Our goal: find a relevant community issue, and collaboratively design a music project in service to it.

I felt it was important that the issues be identified by the community itself- not by me. But it takes time to build the trust necessary to have honest discussions about issues that matter.  I began by offering a basic rhythm workshop to get to know folks and let them get to know me.  Eventually I became aware of an intergenerational tension that existed in the park.  There were park kids who scurried around, park staff who wrangled them, maintenance staff, older gentlemen playing chess, teens, and other passers-through of all ages.  Many recognized each other but did not interact much.  And, many held unfair impressions of each other (“Old people can’t play music,” “Young people are thoughtless thugs”).  With further discussion, we decided to focus on intergenerational dynamics.

My musical skill building focus became polyrhythm; holding together several simultaneous, contrasting rhythms.  Polyrhythm is a graceful metaphor for human dynamics, and a great exercise in active listening.

We soon decided on our larger project: to create a sonic archive of the community. Anyone found around the park was invited to contribute a recording.  It could be a song, statement, rap, giggle, poem, lullaby, or sound effect, made with their voice or any instrument.  Over 60 community members made recordings to add their voices to the archive.  I made sure many of them also learned to use the recording equipment in the process, if they were interested.  We used a Zoom H4N Digital recorder, a Roland Microcube amp for playback, and I did the simple editing and mastering using Audacity.

The privacy of the recording sessions created a crucial, nonjudgmental space.  The only guidance I gave was technical- bringing attention to levels but leaving the artist to control the aesthetic.  If they felt good about their recording, it went on the disc.

Then the idea came up to remove the names, listen back and try to guess whose voice we were hearing.   Now some very interesting things started happening!  People were surprised by voices they didn’t recognize, which ended up being people that they know.  Formerly unknown people were introduced to each other when folks heard the CD and then went around listening to find a match.  The hidden talents of some of the quieter members of the park community came out.  The resulting compilation is full of surprises.  Many of the recordings were later developed into larger pieces that we arranged, rehearsed and performed.  Even better, we had several intergenerational jams!  Sound and video documentation of the Secret Voices project can be seen at http://jamietopper.com/communityfieldwork/homan-square-park/.
Street Cries: Applied Ethnomusicology in a Children’s Hospital
The STREET CRIES project took place while I was Musician-in-Residence at Rush University Children’s Hospital through Snow City Arts.  Seeds for the project were planted when I brought in some recordings of the calls of street vendors and shared them with the young patients at the hospital because I thought they were interesting.  I love the use of musical tools in daily life for practical effect.  The calls of street vendors, singing out loud about their sweet watermelon, shoe shining and avocadoes, are a prime example.  The more attractive the song, the more successful the sale.

In a child’s hospital room, there is a similar stream of visitors each day: nurses, doctors, food service, and visitors.  We began to wonder: what if, instead of coming to a child’s room uninvited, all of these people passed through the hospital halls, calling out their wares, and the children could respond if they liked what was offered?  What would the ‘street cry’ of a doctor or nurse sound like?  The kids were very familiar with hospital staff’s tactics for sweetening something up to get them to accept it.

Using the field recordings as a model, we uncovered a structure: find a lyrical way to describe what’s on offer, stretch the words into a melodic line, add percussive sounds for effect, and repeat.   The children drew upon the unique heritage of this music to make compositions of their own that reflect the beauty, pain, and humor of life in the hospital.  Process documentation and the final product can be viewed at www.jamietopper.com/snowcityarts/street-cries/.

Conclusion
“This work,” writes Jeff Todd Titon, “involves and empowers music-makers and music-cultures in collaborative projects that present, represent, and affect the cultural flow of music throughout the world” (“Music, the Public Interest, and the Practice of Ethnomusicology,” Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, no. 3 [1992], p. 315).
Moments that clarify the development of this role are: actual friendships developing, with a certain kind of ease, humor, and reciprocity.  Again, Jeff Todd Titon: “This attitude of reciprocity, although it overlaps with academic concerns of applied ethnomusicology, is not new; it is how friends behave toward one another.”
As I continue to look for ways to sustain the things that sustain me, applied ethnomusicology is a field I come back to and hover around.  I welcome any opportunities to discuss and share my work.  Details of these and other projects can be explored at http://www.jamietopper.com.

Jamie Topper has been a Teaching Artist in Chicago for over 10 years for nationally renowned arts organizations such as Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), Columbia College’s Center for Community Arts Partnerships (CCAP) and Project AIM (Arts Integration Mentorship), Snow City Arts, and Chicago Teacher’s Center of Northeastern University.  In 2010 she won the 3Arts Teaching Artist Award for her work.  www.jamietopper.com

Editor’s Note:  this article evolved from a shorter piece that Ryan Conarro wrote for the ALT/space section in issue 9(2).  One of the exciting things about the ALT/space section is the way it functions as an incubator for longer articles and offers the authors and TAJ readers the chance to revisit a subject or question in greater depth and perhaps with different insights.   We will be publishing more such “evolutions” both in the pages of the print Journal and as web-only features on TAJournal.com In this way we hope that the ALT/space idea mirrors a similar dynamic that many of us find so appealing and educative in our work as teaching artists.  I’m grateful to Laura Reeder for conceiving of,  and editing the ALT/space section in this way, and to Ryan for giving us such a interesting model of how a short, powerful essay can be developed into a deeply reflective and engaging article; together the pieces form a compelling example of a new way of writing about our work and field. –Nick Jaffe

TUESDAY

Early autumn sunshine is spilling into the classroom of this school in an Inupiaq village on Alaska’s northwest coast. I’m a Juneau-based drama teaching artist, working for the Department of Education as an “arts content coach,” visiting some of the state’s struggling rural schools. Today, I’m modeling a drama integration activity for a jaded high school history teacher who seems to lock horns regularly with her students. I’m guiding the youths in analyzing the visual elements of stage pictures so that later in the week they can create their own tableaux of important historical inventions.  But at the moment, the sun is calling them; and the glinting waters of the Chukchi Sea, which will freeze soon enough; and the open door of the classroom, through which I’ve seen a few students wander today, ejected by their exasperated teacher.
 
Daniel is one of the more engaged students in the group, and he readily volunteers to help me make a model tableau.  I’m relieved, grateful for his enthusiasm.  He sits again at his desk. Moments later, he sneaks a forbidden glance at his cell phone and then slides it back into his jeans. The teacher stands and pounces.  Daniel shouts, “No!” But the teacher won’t back down and hauls Daniel from the room.  My drama lesson is disrupted and deflated. Daniel, it turns out, will be suspended tomorrow.

WEDNESDAY

“Dyou hear? They got beluga!”

The student pushes past me and dashes out the school door. Her announcement—that someone in the village has shot and harpooned the first beluga whale of the season—explains the suddenly empty halls and the flurry of four-wheeler traffic I’ve been hearing outside the building. By the time I make my way down the beach to the crowd gathered beyond the village airstrip, much of the whale has already been divided and shared, in Ziplocs and plastic grocery bags, everyone in the community getting some, a woman with a clipboard ticking off the names of villagers as they take their slabs of blubber.

The head of the whale sits on the rack of a parked four-wheeler. The hunters will keep it—the head is a delicacy. Turns out, two teenage boys are the providers today.  One of them is Daniel.  His mother walks right up to the school principal: “Thank you for suspending my son.” He’s being hailed by everyone as a hero: a successful hunter providing for his community. It’s the best thing that could have happened for him.

WEDNESDAY NIGHT

I’m thinking and puzzling, lying in a sleeping bag on the classroom floor—my usual accommodations during visits to what seems to me to be the confused, confusing territory of rural Alaska’s schools.

Alaska Native communities are straining under cultural change, which began with the first Russian trappers and traders. The changes continued when missionaries of various stripes met in the late 1800s and divvied out Western Alaska’s villages for their cooperative effort of Christianization and civilization.  The missionaries established schools, and by the early 1900s, many Native teenagers were bound for regional—or even out-of-state—boarding high schools, their only option for earning secondary degrees. The changes accelerated when Alaska became a state in 1959 and oil was discovered in 1968. The state’s eagerness to build an oil pipeline—which would flow oil south to Valdez and would flow cash further south into Juneau’s state coffers—motivated officials to settle long-standing land claims disputes. The solution was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971.

During this school visit, I’ve been reading some of the essays of Seth Kantner, a non-Native man (who calls himself a “white boy”) who was raised by back-to-the-land midwestern parents in a sod house they built not far from this village. Kantner writes and produces wilderness photography from his home in Kotzebue or his camp on the Kobuk River.  He explains how ANCSA initiated a quick shift from a subsistence lifestyle to a cash economy in the Alaska Native world:

With ANCSA, the federal government granted Alaska Natives a portion of the land (which was already theirs), plus half a billion dollars and property-tax-free status. It required that they conduct themselves as corporations, each Native person a shareholder. Overnight, the trail from hunting and gathering to capitalism was widened and paved. And every last person—some running, some dragging their feet, even some misplaced barefoot white boys—ended up on that trail.

The government then began saturating rural Native communities with more money, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars per person, in an attempt to bring living conditions closer to national norms. (National norms apparently don’t include storing fermented walrus flipper in the ground or using a kerosene can for a crapper—in other words, living with what you have: subsisting.) The excess in money brought with it excesses in alcoholism, suicide, drug abuse, and corresponding off-the-chart statistics that made available even more grants and government funding. Hence, today, we are awash in dollars, those little green soldiers of capitalism. (Kantner 158)

Close on the heels of ANCSA and the first barrels of oil in 1972 from the terminus of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, rural Alaska Natives fought for local high schools. They wanted the option to keep their young people at schools at home through their teenage years, instead of a situation in which “the entire village turn[ed] out each fall on the gravel airstrip to see off teenagers bound for boarding school for the next nine months… Villages…were almost devoid of teenagers throughout the school year” (Cotton 30). The landmark Molly Hootch case (Tobeluk v. Lind) in 1976 demanded the construction of 126 new village school facilities to provide local secondary education: “As mandated by the consent decree, a massive wave of rural school construction to house the new high school programs [began]. In all, [this decision was] the largest settlement in the history of American education litigation” (30).

As new local schools sprang up, villagers began to meet larger annual crops of teachers from “Outside”—many of whom are fresh-faced young people looking for adventure or a sense of service, or elderly retirees from the Lower 48 who’ve decided to experience something new and make a bit more money. There is a slow, growing movement to train Native graduates to become teachers and return to their home villages.  But in some communities, the annual teacher turnover rate is regularly higher than 75%.

When I moved from the east coast to Alaska—to Nome, in 2001—all this changing was marching on in new ways. Several of the villages in the Nome-Bering Strait region were seeing their first satellite TV apparatuses installed. In my teaching artist travels in recent years, I’ve found myself on bush planes in southwest Alaska next to Lower 48 engineers charged with erecting cellular service towers, or Anchorage salesmen packing bags of cell phones to pass out in exchange for cash.

As mass-market technology and entertainment have grown in villages, some traditional cultural pastimes have inevitably faded—as has young people’s use of their Native languages.

I roll over in my sleeping bag.  Before I lay down, I cracked the window a bit, and now I can hear the Chukchi Sea surf breaking on the beach outside. There seems to be no solution to this cultural quandary. I wonder, as usual, if my presence isn’t part of the problem; I’m just another white guy who happens to have made his adult home in Alaska.

I keep coming back to Seth Kantner’s musings, and his incisive questioning of “national norms” for living conditions. I wonder whether the same question should be asked of “national norms” for education, for what’s important for young people to know in this village, in this state, and in this country. Students in the Alaskan bush often seem to find little relevance in curricula written to create “college- and career-ready” graduates. There’s no college here, and no careers really, not in any Western sense of the word. In the childhood days of the parents and grandparents of the students I’m working with, there was a clear, obvious connection between what they needed to learn and what they needed to do. They left their schoolhouses or their traditional community houses, and they put their knowledge to use directly. Now, the content of courses in the modern school buildings doesn’t always pass such a simple relevancy test. Certainly, educators today aim to give Alaskan young people the skills to make their own choices, to move into the outside world and create whatever sort of life they dream for themselves. But the underlying message of some high school curricula seems to me to be that “success” equals leaving the village.  “Success” is scoring high on tests written solely in English.  “Success” is coming to class and sitting in your desk on time, even when the sun is out and the food is swimming past the school door.

The waves outside the classroom window are crashing more heavily tonight; stormy weather is moving in from offshore.  The roaring water makes me think about the handful of rural villages up and down the coast that are fighting erosion caused by a combination of these waves and the absent sea ice, which comes later and later every year due to climate change.  I visited one such village during my time in Nome, after a fall storm took nearly 50 feet of the shoreline.  I conducted an impromptu poll of people I met during my stay: What can be done about the dangerous erosion? Some villagers wanted to relocate, to find new ground where they could keep their community together. Others resisted the idea of voluntary relocation, which would take them away from traditional hunting grounds and sacred sites. They said they preferred to stay, struggling to maintain stop-gap seawalls, even though that might mean an eventual exodus from the village site that could cause the community to disintegrate, extended families and friends separating as they move to Nome or to Anchorage or into other nearby villages. It seemed hard to know what the best answer was.

Maybe the cultural change here could be compared to the literal erosion of the land. The shift is happening, and some people embrace it while others resist. Some young people here, like Daniel, hunt seals and whale and tend to rebel against the academics at the school. Other kids are drawn to the exotic worlds that pass by on televisions and computers, and they long to go there, or to bring those worlds home to the village. Most teenagers here probably feel like Daniel sometimes, and like the other kids at other times.  But I wonder whether the education system, originating as it does from a place very different than this one, can’t help but privilege a way of life outside the village over a path that includes staying right at home.

Perhaps paradoxically, village schools have become primary community gathering places: “To even a casual observer, the establishment of a new high school appears to affect markedly the fabric of village life. The high school gym usually dominates the village skyline as the only two-story building in most of the smaller communities” (Cotton 30). Native dancing happens here some evenings; people come here for hot showers in communities that otherwise have no plumbing. Some school administrators may also be caretakers of the village fuel tank supply, of the drinking water supply. The schools are also de facto hotels for outsiders: for the tower engineer, for the cell phone salesman, and for me. We’ve each found our own classroom to curl up in.

I fear that it’s grossly imperialistic of me to presume to question what’s best to teach and learn here. I’m no seasoned classroom teacher or administrator, and I’m not from this place. I’m coming from a position of privilege in the culture that’s imposed itself upon this land for so long. Yet I do ask the question, to myself, prone on the classroom floor, waiting for sleep.

Perhaps part of the answer is not what is taught and learned, but how it’s shared by teachers and how it’s applied by students.

Last summer, I read Maxine Greene’s Releasing the Imagination. I’m thinking now about her ruminations on the power of what she calls “aesthetic education”:
 
…participatory involvement in the many forms of art can enable us to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines have obscured, what habit and convention have suppressed… When we see more and hear more, it is not only that we lurch…out of the familiar and the taken-for-granted but that new avenues for choosing and for action may open in our experience; we may gain a sudden sense of new  beginnings, that is, we may take initiative in the light of possibility. (Greene 123)

Now I’m thinking of Daniel’s classmates in their tableaux yesterday, active and engaged before the cell phone incident. Their performances were simply reproductions of their imagined images of historical events, but perhaps such drama activities can help encourage the kids here to grab on to what they know, to show it their own way, to shape it, and to look toward the future and envision and manifest the lives they want for themselves.

THURSDAY

The sky is spitting rain and breakers are stacking up on the beach beyond the school. Daniel is back in class after his one-day suspension. It’s the final session of our drama integration project, creating tableaux of historical scientific inventions. After a period of small-group work, the student actors perform their images in front of the classroom. Several students have brought me down from last night’s cloud of idealism: they’re timid; I have to prod and cajole them to volunteer to share their performances with their peers; I feel as though I’m in a precarious dance to avoid the trap of imposing myself as a demanding authority, as their teacher regularly seems to do, rather than an inviting collaborator. Then again, as they work in their small groups, some students are grinning, even laughing; every single person participates; and when the students speak, I can hear each of their voices.  

Daniel’s group takes the stage: “The First Flight of the Wright Brothers.”  One boy spreads his arms like a plane. Another boy stands behind him—the pilot.  And then there’s Daniel with his hand on an imaginary trigger, one eye squinted as if sighting down a rifle barrel.  

“Daniel, who are you?”

“I’m hunting beluga.”
     
I’m fairly certain there was no one hunting beluga whales from that plane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903.  But we leave the tableau just like it is.  We’re all smiling and laughing. Daniel is participating. And when he speaks, I can hear his voice.

WORKS CITED

Cotton, Stephen E.  “Alaska’s Molly Hootch Case: High Schools and the Village Voice.” Educational Research Quarterly 8.4 (1984): 30-43.

Greene, Maxine. Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. San Francisco: John Wiley & Sons, 1995.

Kantner, Seth. Shopping for Porcupine: A Life in Arctic Alaska. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2009.

• Wendy Bable, Samantha Bellomo, and Sarah Waxman on using collaborative blogs in teen theatre work.
• Kong Ho on exploring collaborative mural painting in Bulgaria.
• John Toth on video podcasts and art museum visits.
• Eve Kagan on The Laramie Project in Uganda, homophobia, politics and culture.
• Kathryn Humphreys on perspectives and why we do TA work.

Alt/Space edited by Laura Reeder: “What do you wish you’d known when you started?” nurturing the ARTIST in teaching artist, and many more gripping tales, reports and voices from TA’s in the field. Research Review edited by Dan Serig: Beyond brainstorming: mind maps as art.

Resource Exchange edited by Becca Barniskis: A cross-country and intercontinental working meeting of TA’s discusses “community,” and looks at some student work, all in real-time via Skype; and more.

• Ryan Conarro on teaching artist work and cultural context in rural Alaska.
• Courtney Lee Weida on the idea and reality of “home” and art making/teaching/learning.
• Judith Tannenbaum’s outline history of the teaching artist field.
• Anne Thulson on students reclaiming their school surroundings through art making.

Alt/space edited by Laura Reeder: anti-immigrant racism in Tuscon, El Sistema comes to L.A., and many more gripping tales, reports and voices from TA’s in the field.
Research Review edited by Dan Serig: Material Culture and Literacy in Arts Education
Resource Exchange edited by Becca Barniskis: A panel of Minnesota TA’s addresses some big questions, and raises others…and more!

In the street and in our minds, the shadows of gender oppression dance against the fabric of society. At Srishti School of Art and Design, in Bangalore, India, I collaborated with Arzu Mistry in facilitating Gender Shadow, a participatory theatre project interrogating gender though shadow puppets, movement, improv theatre, and masks.

Gender Shadow was a 10-week endeavor of 20 young design students from all over India. Because our personal experiences of gender are part of a larger social narrative we creatively addressed gender violence and oppression through playful and personally meaningful dialogue.

In reality, even as an anti-oppression theatre project our improvisations were still saturated with gender stereotypes. The tension between traditional gender values and the modern desire for gender liberation was playing itself out in our rehearsals. Young women played ditzy characters objectifying themselves for chauvinistic males. Although the performers knew better, stereotypical characterizations were ever present. We were
at a sort of stalemate, at the crossroads of traditional patriarchy and modern feminism.

We challenged our own assumptions through sounds and hand shadows to dramatize gendered conflicts. Although we didn’t always embody the values we discussed, we remained open to seeing our own contradictions. This was critical as we moved to take our project to public venues.

Engagement from the participants was different than we anticipated. New ways of using the materials in space emerged as we spontaneously facilitated continuous engagement. Regardless of what we intended to happen, actual participation means relinquishing total control over the outcome.

We kept ourselves attentive to what was emerging in the moment as we entered a deeper phase of personal sharing with purpose. We all wrote out stories of how we or someone close to us has been impacted by gender violence and selected the most resonant pieces to expand into scenes for our public performances.

In our public performances, we warmed-up the audience to participation through creating a non-threatening, playful and inviting atmosphere. The responsibility to facilitate participation fell on the Jokers (Boal, 1979). The Jokers (like wild cards in the deck), kicked the show off with interactive games to engage spect-actors (spectators with the potential to be actors) with their bodies, the people sitting around them and the
actors on the stage (Boal, 1979).

With an engaged audience the play was performed once with shadows, music, masks and dance. Then the Jokers replayed a few scenes and invited the audience to interrupt the injustice on stage, replace a character who’s lacking power and try out an alternative action. The performers spontaneously responded to interventions by reacting in character, providing realistic resistance to any tactics brought by spect-actors. In the
end there was no right or wrong intervention, just a wider range of possible actions and consequences.

In Gender Shadow tradition all our show’s end in a dance party. It’s amazing how smoothly we can go from intense dialogue to night club style dance party. That’s Gender Shadow though, transforming trauma with rowdy resilience.

Photographs by Jackson Porretta.

Boal, A.(1979) Theatre of the Oppressed . London: Pluto

On a rainy Saturday in Caldera’s Teen Center, we’re talking with twelve high schoolers about child trafficking — a subject difficult for adults to discuss, let alone the young people whose iives this issue most affects. Joining us is filmmaker Libby Spears, whose documentary about the
subject Playground is showing to audiences around the world, having first gained the support of Steven Soderbergh and George Clooney.

Caldera, a youth arts and environmental education non-profit founded by Wieden + Kennedy’s Dan Wieden, uses all kinds of creativity to connect with Oregon’s young people. Both in the year-round program and at summer camp in Central Oregon, they respond to challenges in their lives with amazing art and resilience.

However, children enslaved in the sex trade is a horrific subject that’s in the news far too frequently. As Spears’ documentary points out, we might think these crimes are just overseas, but they are here in America, in communities where these kids come from.

The choice was clear when presenting Spears with a mini-residency. Her child trafficking work continues using Caldera’s digital filmmaking equipment to edit a segment of the FOX show, America’s Most Wanted.

Yet what was not at all clear, was how to gain youth perspective on such an intense subject.

What to do when it’s too dangerous for them to go on a shoot or hang up a ‘missing’ flyer? What of the emotions the content triggers? Is the subject just too severe? When watching the AMW rough cut at the Saturday event, one young lady who was all smiles earlier about getting straight-As for the first time in her life, leaves the room in tears.

But she does return. And facing this is the key to educating kids about the pimps and opportunists who use their ignorance to trap them. After hearing the filmmakers’ perspectives and viewing their work in progress, the assembled teens — diverse in race yet mostly challenged by socioeconomic status — are asked to thumb through stacks of donated stock photo books.

Where meaningful conversation proves daunting, they go right to work cutting out healthy and unhealthy images of sex and relationships. In pairs, they create collages of juxtaposing pictures, put in perspective with found words or ones they choose to add.

The resulting “mood boards,” work much like those that inspire an ad campaign. The girl who had to leave the room pits lurid images labeled “degrading one’s self,” against shots of a healthy woman, family and a smiling baby. “As women, we can be independent and we can love
ourselves,” she says on camera afterward. “And out of sex you can have kids and they can be one of the happiest things the world cherishes.”

What they make serves as their voice, staying on display where Spears and crew finish their important project. And after giving their free Saturday to staring down a difficult topic, these dozen extraordinary teens go home, hopefully, with a different perspective — and strength from their ability to fight fear with art.

For more: www.calderaarts.org and www.playgroundproject.org

On a street that acts as a border between gangs, in a neighborhood with a changing racial demographic, 200 low-income kids attend free group instrumental lessons and orchestra rehearsal 3-4 times a week. Our team of Teaching Artists struggles with establishing proper
technique, developing ear training, note reading, instrument care, and… racial tensions. It is easy to find training on pedagogy and classroom management, but where does a Music Teaching Artist learn about community organizing and social justice?

Our program takes place in a Los Angeles Community Center situated in a historically African-American neighborhood that in the past ten years has become home to a large number of Central American immigrants. It is not uncommon to discover the underlying feelings of resentment that exist within the community. Within our numbers, the divide is clear. Less than ten percent of our participants are African Americans, with almost all of the remainder Latino. It would be easy to say that many African American students come from single parent households and thus have more transportation issues, or that they look to be more involved in sports. Perhaps they would prefer to sing gospel in the church choir than learn classical music in an orchestra.

Regardless of stereotypes, and perhaps even because of the falsities they promote, our program needs to step up to the responsibility of representing the whole neighborhood. Due to an already long waiting list, we have done little recruitment. Most on the waiting list are Latino who know of the program through word of mouth. Many African-American parents have told me that they assumed the program was for Latinos, and had doubts about enrolling their children. All of these children have an ear for music somewhere, and it would be a missed opportunity for the program and its Teaching Artists to not find a way to attract a most diverse group of kids and develop a
musical community less divided than their own neighborhood.

As the face of our program, the Teaching Artists are the ones who must learn to accurately represent the intent of the program. However, in several instances, I have heard Teaching Artists ignorant to racial issues. “I just can’t talk to Ishmael’s mother, I feel like she’s always
busy and not present like the other parents. I don’t think she cares.” In this particular case, Ishmael’s mother, who is an African American, works 2 jobs as a single parent while the rest of the students in the class, all Latino, have stay-at-home Moms that hang out with each other right outside the classroom. In another case, an African-American student quit her class because she felt like her Teaching Artist spoke Spanish in class too much. Her mother told me, “She felt like the class wasn’t for her kind.”

Our Teaching Artist faculty is a loving group of professional musicians extremely proficient. What we lack is training is in Sociology and Cultural Sensitivity, practices that would be fully relevant in a program such as ours, where practicing music is the mode towards building community and fighting for Social Justice. While it’s not surprising that ‘Social Action through Music’ is not a common course in today’s top Conservatories, perhaps it is time to think about the benefits of such training to assure effectiveness in marginalized communities.

Teaching Artists could lay a claim to caring more about arts education than just about anyone else. We have given up hope of high salaries with great benefits in the interest of educating young people in and through the arts. Many of us have learned our craft experientially. because, until very recently, there were very few training programs for our field. All the while, we have continued to grow as artists, knowing that we demand excellence of ourselves in both our art form and teaching. We are improving our practice through action research, arts integration and documented outcomes. We are professionals. Let’s be like other professionals and ask our bosses for a raise. While we’re there, let’s ask for a larger workforce to meet the real demand for arts education in our communities.

We deserve a living wage that includes enough money to pay taxes and have health insurance. What we do has incredible value to the education of children around the world. It’s time to show policy-makers that value by introducing ourselves to them. We don’t generally have that opportunity. After demonstrating the value of arts education through testimony about our practices, we just ask for more money. That’s really it. What’s beautiful is that the better we do for ourselves, the better we do for kids.

Arts Education Month is in March. During that time, let’s make a commitment as Teaching Artists to Testify for Arts Education in March 2011. This is an important time in the budgetary process for school systems. Decisions made during this time will dictate school budgets for the next year. If arts education partnerships are not in the budgets at this time, it’s harder to “find” the money for a teaching artist later. The Board of Education determines the budget for the entire school system. If they require all schools to have budgets for arts education programs, then that

becomes policy for the system. If not, each principal decides on how to allocate discretionary budget lines, including artists or transportation.

Teaching Artists have direct evidence about the benefits of arts education. We must gather our lesson plans, compile our anecdotes, line up our slides and write speeches about how our programs have affected students’ lives. We must tell the board members our stories and convince them to spend more money to create more stories like that. Let’s tell them why we are Teaching Artists.

While we are with the Board of Education, we must also advocate for arts specialists in every school building. The truth is that arts specialists make it possible for us to have the impact that we do. Teaching artists are complements to specialists, not replacements. We must always make that clear to policymakers.

Join Teaching Artists and other arts education advocates across the country in a new social community at www.testifyforartsed.ning.com. Our goal it to build a grassroots movement of people that want to make sure that kids in our communities have arts education. It requires everyone’s help. Teaching Artists must be at the table of school reform, arts education standards and school system budget decisions. Showing up and testifying is a great start. Please e-mail me at joan@creativityandassociates.com to share your story or ask questions.

The town hall started with a talk onthe nature of art and community; then the group watched and discussed a video from local student artist Leche Fair. Teaching artist Daniel Shea and Corrine Rose of Columbia’s Museum of Contemporary Photography also spoke and gave more insight on Leche’s work, as she could not attend.

There was even some Twitter backchannel discussion taking place under the hashtag #teachingartist.

If you attended the town hall we’d love to hear your thoughts and encouraqe you to continue the discussion started at tonight’s event!

It’s fine if you are working on writing your script by your self, but how does a writer deal with the actor saying “My character wouldn’t say that, so I’m not going to.” Or when a lighting designer says, “What do you mean the dancers need to wear red? This won’t work with the design at all!”

Musicians approach the stage differently than actors do. A choreographer addresses a piece of music in a completely different way than a set designer

An opera singer could belt something out that melts your heart, but then you have to stuff her into a corset, throw a number of VERY hot stage lights on her and have her sing the exact same thing folded up into a ball.

In many cases a variety of disciplines need to find a way in which to communicate effectively with one another. This is much easier said than done and more often than not conflicts arise from an inability to communicate or even fundamentally understand how your collaborators work. The creative process from artistic discipline to discipline tends to be VASTLY different.

Over the next few articles we’ll look at how different disciplines can effectively communicate and collaborate on various projects. We’ll be providing examples of successful (and not so successful) collaborations and examining why they may or may not work and provide interviews with the artists involved.