Building Community Outside of the Theatre Space

If there’s one thing that being a college student during COVID, graduating just as the world was opening back up, and immediately packing up and moving across the country to attend graduate school taught me, it’s this: true community & connection are hard to come by, but impossible to live without. Thankfully for us, most of us in the theatre world are natural community builders. We see this all the time: ensemble building activities during rehearsals, production wrap parties, and that whole “theatre people” concept that binds us all. And I can’t even begin to count how many people I know who met their best friends through That-One-Show-They-Did-Fifteen-Years-Ago. 

Similarly, in the Applied Drama and Theatre for the Young program, we spend hours discussing and putting into practice community engagement strategies, in classrooms, rehearsal spaces, and beyond. We work to create classroom standards that encourage the creativity, risk-taking, support, and dignity of every person in the room. We use our skills as facilitators to regularly check in with participants and adjust our lesson plans to the group of individuals around us. We listen deeply and mold experiences to the ideas and discoveries of the group. Ultimately, we strive to be in tune with communities as we work to create drama and theatre experiences. 

This is one of the most beautiful and powerful parts of theatre & drama: its ability to bring people together and build real life skills. However, when I moved to Michigan in August and wasn’t immediately involved in a production or teaching a class, I felt completely lost. How was I supposed to find a community now? Where else could I find this connection I craved? I began to clearly see one of the challenges of theatre - this community can be exclusive and narrow at times, and hard to break into when you’re the new kid. I saw that creating relationships with only other theatre artists or community members in rehearsals and workshops is not enough. Which brings me to my question today: what would it look like if us “theatre people” used our natural community-building skills outside of the theatre space, and thoughtfully began to craft a world in which these skills were joyfully used in every facet of our lives? 

In one of my classes this semester, we studied Augusto Boal, activist, artist, and founder of  Theatre of the Oppressed. The study of his work, as well as the work of many other Applied Drama practitioners, provides some answers to this question - but diving into all of that would be a whole other blog post, and probably a much longer one. However, I would like to highlight one quotation that illuminated this issue for me, and provides key insight into how us theatre artists can take community-building practices out of the theatre/drama room and into the world. 

“When a group of people get together… it becomes a space that is more than physical space, it has memory and also imagination.” -Augusto Boal

What I love so much about this quote is that he doesn’t specify that this space must be a rehearsal room, a classroom, or a theatre. It’s anywhere that there’s a group of people together. And what is community but a space in which we can consider individual memory, make collective memories, and imagine the future together? To me, this quote tells us that the chance to build intentional community includes settings such as the grocery store, a general education course, the farmers market, or even the sidewalks of a college campus. When considering these vast opportunities to reach out and begin forming new connections, the rehearsal room or classroom seems pretty small and limited. And the good news? We already have the tools to start doing this. 

So I encourage you all - ask the silly, ensemble building questions in your gen-ed classes. Ask your grocery clerk the same thing! I challenge you to think about the last time you checked in with your friends the way you might at the start of a rehearsal. Or allowed your co-workers the space to let you in on the experiences and discoveries they’ve made lately. Take the risk, organize the event, and invite everyone to the party. Look outside of the “theatre person” bubble and offer your design, building, writing, or performing skills to an organization that has no idea what stage directions are. I have a feeling that not only will this begin to form a network around you that is vivacious, varied, and lush, but your personal artistry will improve, you will begin to see more people in our audiences, and all of the small choices you made to open up your circle will bring a big amount of empathy to your neighborhood. 

• Olivia Allen 

BAs in Theatre, Education

First Year MFA