Convenings
Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Los Angeles, November 15–17, 2002
Andrea Assaf
2002
Case Sessions: ZONES (or Where Does Your Soul Live and Is There Sufficient Parking?)
Part of its faith-based theatre project,
ZONES is part play, part community conversation—a participatory theatre experience that invites the audience members to share thoughts and experiences as the action unfolds around them.
"A little known religious group is on the agenda of a local Planning Commission hearing, the setting for ZONES. A proposed piece of sacred architecture divides a community and a family. As characters confront the challenges of living in a religiously pluralistic city, audience members are encouraged to do the same."
ZONES Debrief
Following the performance of ZONES, the group re-convened to deconstruct this experience, look at the range of arts-based civic dialogue efforts within Cornerstone's multi-year project, and spin off to related broader issues of interest to the full group.
Introduction: Peter Howard (PH), playwright of ZONES, and people related to Cornerstone or Cornerstone's work introduced themselves before opening the floor for discussion.
Mitty Owens (MO): Please give background on ZONES—how do you use the piece, who do you target, how do you set it up with the space and audience, and when did the project start?
Bill Rauch (BR): It was a centerpiece in our proposal for ADI, created late last summer 2001. We took one week off in the middle of rehearsal process for Peter to do rewrites. Performed a few weeks later at our festival of faith venues, a Buddhist temple, synagogue, Ba Hai center, Islamic private school, a Christian church, and 7 other times at other places of worship or religious affiliated institutions.
Elizabeth Gonzalez (EG): Remounting allowed us to continue our partnerships or enter into new partnerships within the faith-based cycle.
David Campt (DC): How far do you think ZONES can go (locations and audience)? What is your vision for the future and the project’s evolution? What is your vision of how you plan to keep using it in terms of audience participation and development with this piece?
BR: We’re not sure, but hope it can keep going and changing. Perhaps commissioned works? It's a small house, usually only performed for 60 people. Usually it's always linked to a community partner. We didn't know last year that we would be able to do it this year, but we would love to have the opportunity to keep developing it and changing it. We also did one commissioned performance of it this year at the University of Redlands.
Q: How is ZONES different for NCCJ from carrying out a normal dialogue?
Dani Badau (DB): It’s scripted. Taking the characters’ needs and scripting a dialogue process that will feel like it’s coming directly out of the characters (that was what PH wanted). We tried to bring these two things together. Scripting a dialogue process that would feel spontaneous was difficult. It was fun to coach actors in how to facilitate, to know what to look for, how to deal when people freak out, etc. The part that wasn’t scripted was how the audience would respond.
Geoff Korf (GK): Also, in theatre making, the most fundamental thing is risk-taking, and in dialogue it’s about creating a safe place.
Larry Hott (LH): I am someone who participates in zoning hearings, like ZONES, very frequently. Initially, when facing the front of the room in presentation format, I felt comfortable in both the theatre and the dialogue. But when in small groups, I felt that it got away from the more interesting performance aspects, and I felt less interested and comfortable. It made me wish that we could get back to the scripted part with little bits of participation. What do you do when the audience is not as rarefied as this one? Does a normal audience get it? Do they object? How do they react when you take it out of the scripted realm?
PH: It's been about striking certain kinds of balance, and it changes so substantially depending on who is the room. At times, we may fail to achieve balance with certain audiences, but we tried to mix it up enough to keep people from turning off.
Sue Wood (SW): There were times when I was very involved with the characters and there were times when I felt they were too much "types," and there were times when I thought that they were commenting on their types. What did you go through as a playwright, or a director, with this—was it an issue for you?
BR: How theatrical is it? How artistic is it? We talked a lot about the beginning being as dry and dull as possible, but our theatrical sides took over as it became too dry. There has been a lot of resistance from recent audiences with some of the exercises.
PH: As far as characters go, one of the interesting processes was trying to have characters be moved and motivated by whatever went on in the room. And as much as it's about religious differences, it is really about power and control.
Abel Lopez (AL): Do you have several of these productions going on at once? Does your casting influence the way people respond to the piece?
Wayne Winborne (WW): Mother/daughter characters were both black, but this did not seem to be about race—was that intentional? The theme was squarely on religious difference, and race and ethnicity weren’t a major factor in the play, were they? The racial differences in the characters throw another dynamic into the dialogue. Was ethnicity important? Is this just about religion, or is it also about race and class? It seemed more about the casting than the writing.
BR: The casting was intentional, but race and disability were sub-textual. As a director, I enjoyed Peter's instinct that race and disability were always sub-textual. Also, the pastor has been different races in different shows, and this has changed the show.
Q: I think the balance between textual and sub textual is interesting. I think there's something in Diana’s case with the disability that is very interesting—I have been to so many meetings like this. The problem that I have with what you just said is that 95% of the time when people are at these meetings, the issues of race are VERY TEXTUAL when there are issues of public zoning.
Q: It was one of the things for me that elevated the play. It would have been so obvious if it was about race and class, and the religious issues became a metaphor for everything else—the casting was great, and for me that's art. If they had done the standard town hall meeting, it would have become bitter and cynical.
Q: What were the compromises in terms of the artistic creation?
DB: The size of the audience. Dialogue folks want small audience numbers, theatrical folks want larger numbers. Settled on approximately 60.
BR: Dialogue sequences, how much we were going to give over to the scripted play—what happens in the dialogue exercises affects the emotional temperature of the room, but the plot always stays the same. There was a lot of negotiation around how the dialogue was created.
PH: The closing movement, the circle of hanging questions—we envisioned cross talk at the end, a completely open forum, and I have to credit Michael Rohd for helping us to come up with the perfect compromise to hear everyone in the room, but to not need to talk about it all, and to have a ritual to close was a fortunate thing that came up late in the process.
Lucky Altman (LA): There is a possibility for that dialogue to continue. What does it mean to be biased? How far can I go? Where are the lines? And it enables us to continue those conversations later
BR: Back to the casting: last year, the meeting was run by an Asian American actress, and it does change the piece from race to race—one thing that always comes up is it's relation to Christianity and the pastor, what does it mean to do it in the audience where 95% of the people are born again, or when 95% is atheist? A Jesuit priest thought that the piece was too biased towards Christianity; he talked to us about Manachaesm and we wanted to let the pastor in our play have the perspective that that particular priest had.
Q: I am just curious about why you chose Wicca religion or how you came about it as a concept?
PH: What did you hear in the piece as being partial to Wicca religion? That's not a perception I was seeking. She mentions it once in the context of feeling allied with other persecuted religious belief systems, but her religion is fictional. Many of the details come from real religions, but the combination is made up.
Lori Robishaw (LR): What has the after-effect been? What do you hear from communities? Have any minds or hearts been changed?
BR: My first response is that it's part of a process. We've never done it cold, it has always been with communities we have or are partnering with, and it usually has to do with other things within the community rather than ZONES in particular.
Q: How do you deal with a need that might come up in the process that really needs to be discussed? How do you keep the play going? If someone all of a sudden needed a safe container, how do you allow for time for nurturing without stopping the whole show and throwing out the risk of Theatre?
Shishir Kurup (SK): There were people who were willing to thwart the process and there was a vehemence in not being told what to do—you have to find different ways to cajole, and you have to find the middle ground between respecting what this person needs and what the rest of the group needs.
BR: There have been lots of different ways of creating “safe space,” but there has not been a set place or set way of dealing with uncomfortable or strong feelings that may come up. Audience members and cast members have reacted to emotions in lots of different ways…I’ve seen audience members reach out to actors, and I’ve seen actors reach out to audience members who are upset. I feel like there's been a lot of care-taking. I think in small ways, at the end, some people are shut down and some people are weeping—just where people do or don't go at the end...
GK: We've had people leave the show because they weren't comfortable with the audience participation, and we planned on that.
Armando Molina (AM): It functions as a personality test—some people get really into the proposal, and it functions as a workshop. Everybody's reaction to it depends on who they are.
SK: In terms of safety, there were people who wanted to thwart the process. One guy would not move at all. Twice this happened and after a while I let him stay there. After a while he realized that he was now in the way, in a way he wasn't comfortable with, and he moved.
Q: I felt at different points that the process was being manipulated at certain points and didn't know if it was testing the audience to see at what point we would participate. Are they trying to avoid getting to the issue? And I’m not sure how much you do want this tension, or how much you just want people to participate.
Q: It was about the democratic process as much as it was about religious diversity...how much do you have to have an agenda and how much can you depart from it?
BR: We wanted it to be as disorienting and reinventing as possible.
Jay Nuegeboren (JN): I have a critique: it feels that we come away with too much of a feel-good feeling than is appropriate to the issues.
Q: There seems to be two different dialogues going on: a dialogue between bigotry, hatred and intolerance…and the dialogue between people who are intolerant and people who are tolerant.
Wayne Winborne (WW): A critique of performance: I felt it was an excellent melding of the art and dialogue, even if it did require that the audience somewhat give itself over to the experience. Typically, artists think that post-performance conversation is dialogue, but that's not dialogue. This moved beyond that.
Q: It concerns me that we assume it would be more successful if everyone moved in the circle—I would hope that there would be a lot of people who don't conform.
