ANIMATING DEMOCRACY E-NEWS

 Animating Democracy News and Updates

Urban Bush Women featured as part of Imagine Festival

www.UrbanBushWomen.org
As part of the first Imagine Festival of Arts, Issues, and Ideas in New York, Urban Bush Women presented an encore performance of “Are We Democracy.” This dance piece, created in July 2004 with 16 community-based artists and activists at Urban Bush Women’s summer institute, Building Community through the Arts, incorporates spoken word and percussion with dance to explore the topics of who votes, who doesn't, why don't they, and how we can change that. The Imagine Festival, a citywide cultural festival designed to inspire, instigate, and support civic engagement through the arts, took place August 28 to September 2, 2004.

Sojourn Theatre launches its “Witness Our Schools” tour

www.SojournTheatre.org
On August 20, 2004, Sojourn Theatre launched the first performance of its statewide tour of the “Witness Our Schools” project. Using its interview-based approach to create original documentary theater, Sojourn Theatre has worked in partnership with the Oregon Department of Education, the Chalkboard Project, the Oregon Historical Society, and the Lewis & Clark College Graduate School of Education to host community dialogues and gather voices from across Oregon to explore the roots of public education issues across the state. The play will tour the state through May 2005.

MACLA’s Rogue Nations exhibition concludes

www.maclaarte.org
MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana) in San Jose, CA, continued its issue-based explorations with its recent exhibition, Rogue Nations: Cuban and Chinese Artists. MACLA curator Anjee Helstrup conceived of the show after noticing the use of the term “rogue nations” to describe various countries, including Cuba and China, that the Bush administration has deemed problematic. The exhibition sought to transcend the loaded term by revealing what artists in some of those nations have to say about the human condition. Fifteen artists who work in a wide range of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, photography, and video, were featured. The San Jose Mercury News reported on August 31 that, “If the show seems to push the boundaries of MACLA's self-definition as a Latino arts organization, there's a reason: The center has been presenting shows recently that look at the intersections between Latinos and other ethnic groups.” MACLA’s exhibition Ties That Bind (supported by Animating Democracy and curated by Helstrup with Maribel Alvarez), featured work by Lissa Jones and Jennifer Ahn and explored the history of Asian and Latino intermarriage in the Silicon Valley and related contemporary social and civic concerns. Rogue Nations curators—including Helstrup, Antonio Eligio (known as Tonel), and David Spalding—chose work that goes beyond images of Mao Tse-tung or Ernesto "Che'' Guevara. Instead, the artists addressed a wide range of issues including urbanization, migration, loss, longing, and death. The exhibition closed September 4, 2004.

 News from the Field

Center for Digital Storytelling hosts Washington, DC, workshop

www.storycenter.org
The Center for Digital Storytelling, working in conjunction with the Washington Storytellers Theater, will be hosting a workshop in Washington, DC, September 30-October 2, 2004. The workshop’s goal is to design and produce a three- to five-minute digital story that serves as a personal narrative media piece for the participants, including the participant’s voice, visuals (stills and video), and music. Participants will be given materials prior to the workshop to assist them in preparation, including suggestions of limits in script duration, number of images, and use of video clips. For more information or to register for the workshop, visit the Center for Digital Storytelling website.

Center for Creative Community Development formed at MASS MoCA

www.massmoca.org
The Center for Creative Community Development, a new joint project of Williams College and MASS MoCA made possible through a major grant from the Ford Foundation, has been created to serve as a national focal point for research, education, and training on the role of the arts in community redevelopment. The Center plans to pursue this mission by undertaking research in a diverse range of communities nationwide to explore localized neighborhood effects of the arts with a particular focus on communities in the midst of change and by promoting practical training in the application of these techniques. It will make research results and analytic methods more widely available to policymakers, funders, arts administrators, and community development practitioners.

Manifesto 2004 invites video responses for nonpartisan documentary-style film

Working with Collaboration Filmworks and a diverse group of artist, activist, and social organizations, Manifesto 2004 is producing a nonpartisan, multimedia, multigenre, documentary-style film exploring truth, justice, and the American way in order to encourage a broader range of young people to participate in the shaping of America’s future. In September 2004, an early “rough cut” will be released. Manifesto 2004 invites activists and artists/filmmakers from across the country and around the world to view it and shoot their own film/video creative “reaction” to be considered for inclusion in the finished film before distribution. For more information, contact John Galanis, outreach coordinator, at outreach@manifesto2004.org.

 Articles and Publications

Center for Cultural Exchange Case Study posted online

www.americansforthearts.org/AnimatingDemocracy/reading_room/reading_002.asp
The Center for Cultural Exchange’s African in Maine aimed to build culture and community by assisting three communities of recent African immigrants in Portland, ME, develop cultural programming that would represent their respective cultures and people. Dialogue occurred first within each of the Sudanese, Congolese, and Somali groups, and later between individual African groups and the wider, white community of Portland and Maine. The project worked to address how cultural representation (or misrepresentation) can impact public perception of refugee communities and to build broader awareness of the diversity and conflicts affecting these African communities. It also sought to identify what constitutes valued cultural resources for these groups and how they could be recognized and supported.

The African in Maine case study, written by Bau Graves and Juan Lado (with a preface and reflections by Animating Democracy project liaison Patricia Romney), challenges the concept and illuminates the realities of “dialogue” within and between cultures, particularly divided immigrant and refugee communities. It deepens understanding of the significant internal differences that exist within each African national group—tribal, generational, religious, immigrant/refugee, and gender—and how these differences need to be taken into account. It further explores language and cultural differences between the Center’s predominantly white U.S. staff members and the immigrant groups, and examines the role of an “outsider” cultural organization in fostering cultural democracy.

 Events on the Horizon

Reflections of Community
Dates: October 20–22, 2004
Grand Rapids, MI

www.midwestmuseums.org
The Association of Midwest Museums and Michigan Museums Association Joint Annual Conference features a wide variety of presentations and sessions by specialists on how museums can serve as vital resources in their communities. Liz Sevcenko, secretary general of the International Coalition and vice president of interpretation at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, will be delivering this year's opening keynote speech on making museums centers for civic dialogue.

Museums and Civic Engagement Conference
Dates: November 18–19, 2004
Chicago, IL

www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/2004conference/Programtentativeweb.pdf
The Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, in conjunction with the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, is organizing an international conference to explore how museums, historic sites, and historical societies can serve as our new town halls and centers for dialogue on pressing social issues. The conference will feature presentations from historic sites around the world, including a keynote address by Memoria Abierta on successful strategies for promoting dialogue on difficult topics and interactive workshops. To register, visit www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/2004conference/registrationwebsite.pdf. All registration forms must be postmarked before October 30, 2004.

Public Conversations Project announces fall class schedule

www.publicconversations.org

The Art of Interviewing: Transforming Stories about Conflict
Date: September 14, 2004
Watertown, MA

Increasingly, a wide range of professionals—including human resources managers, educators, journalists, mediators, clergy, EEOC officers, and counselors—have to work with people in conflict. When people are caught up in difficult and intense situations, it can be a challenge to explore what matters to them in ways that lead to new ideas and constructive engagement with others. This workshop introduces an approach to interviewing people in conflict that can help them tell their stories in new ways. The workshop focuses on skill-building exercises, interviewing opportunities, presentations, and discussion.

Inquiry as Intervention: Crafting Questions with Purpose & Impact
Date: September 29, 2004
Watertown, MA

Everything a third party does in an intervention has an effect. The choices practitioners make about which questions to ask, as well as when and how to pose them, have an enormous impact on how all parties listen, pay attention, and respond to each other. Questions are not only for eliciting information. They can set the tone for interaction, reflection, relationship development, and problem-solving.
 
Participants in this workshop will focus on the power of crafting, asking, and responding to questions. They will also evaluate the potential for questions in their own practice.

Staying Grounded When on the Spot: A Skill-Building Workshop for Facilitators
Dates: October 12–13, 2004
Watertown, MA

No matter how much practitioners have done to design a dialogue that is responsive to the hopes of the participants, and no matter how well prepared the participants are to enter into that dialogue, practitioners have to be prepared for the unexpected. At those moments it is important to be grounded in a principled approach to serving the participants and their shared purposes. Through presentations, exercises, case studies, and discussion, participants will develop skills in designing constructive, purposeful responses to the unforeseen and often unforeseeable. Participants will reflect on how the personal, social, and cultural attributes they bring to the facilitator role may help or hinder them in "staying grounded" when working with people whose identity, world view, and communication style differ from their own.

The Power of Dialogue: Constructive Conversations about Divisive Issues
Dates: October 21–23, 2004 (Seattle, WA); October 28–30, 2004 (Watertown, MA); and November 18–20, 2004 (Philadelphia, PA)

When conflict in the public sphere is expressed by devaluing, stereotyping, name-calling, and demonizing, vital energy is diverted from constructive purposes. People become loyal to their viewpoint and denounce what they believe to be an “opposing” situation. This can rupture the sense of community and conceal positive options for living and working together.
 
Chronic polarized conflict is often grounded in differences in values, identities, or world views and is often resistant to conventional methods of intervention. Dialogue, however, can be a transformative force because it goes directly to the ground where protracted conflict begins. It encourages people to articulate and understand their own and others’ values, identities, and relationships, creating openings for civility and respectful coexistence. As a result, new ground is created where people can learn to work respectfully and constructively with differences.
 
Through experiential exercises, an extensive dialogue simulation, presentations, and demonstrations, participants will learn how to apply the key elements of Public Conversations Project’s dialogue facilitation.

 About Animating Democracy

Animating Democracy is a four-year initiative of Americans for the Arts and is made possible with support from the Ford Foundation.

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