Department of Theatre, Film, Television and Interactive Media, University of York
What might a ‘radically open’ large-scale community theatre look like? What are its structures, possibilities, and challenges? My contribution to the conference aims to cherry-pick some of the questions and aspirations generated through a recent research project which reached out to theatre-makers engaged in this kind of work.
I’m a Lecturer in Theatre at the department of Theatre, Film, TV and Interactive Media, and I also review – and occasionally direct – theatre in and around Yorkshire.
mark.smith@york.ac.uk
York has a history – both recent and much more deeply-rooted – of the communal creation of theatrical endeavours on sometimes massive scales, drawing on the energies and skills of the community, or communities, of the city. This reaches back to the performance of medieval pageants such as the Mystery Play cycle by local guilds, a tradition revived on large scales up to the present day. Recent community productions in the city, over roughly the last decade, have engaged sometimes 500 or more participants as performers, backstage crew, costume makers and in many more roles, with a professionally-authored script tackling a local historical narrative such as the building of the railway through York, or key local figures in the Suffrage movement.
In recent research I’ve aimed to interrogate the structures and energies of such work. Having seen all of the large-scale productions mounted by the York Theatre Royal and its partners under the banner of ‘community theatre’ since 2011, I became interested by its challenges, benefits, and assumptions. In a recently submitted journal article, I looked at the ‘economies of participation’ of the work, in terms of the productions’ structures, the interactions between paid and unpaid expertise, and the funding opportunities opened up by the promise of ‘community’. In interviewing the professional theatre-makers involved, as well as community participants, I found that certain concepts, hopes, and concerns arose, and I set out to probe these further in my recent York Impact Accelerator Fund facilitated project, ‘Possible futures for a radically open large-scale community theatre’.
That project opened the invitation to ten theatre-makers with experience of community and participatory theatre work to imagine a ‘radically open community theatre’ on a large scale. I adopted an open research methodology, first speaking to each contributor in a one-to-one Zoom call and eliciting the questions that were foremost on their mind in a free-form conversation arranged around the broad question
What questions should we be asking about community theatre at the moment?
I then circulated anonymised provocations deriving from these conversations. These took the form of questions or challenges to assumptions around community theatre and openness, such as
How/when/where do we listen to community participants?
What is the structure provided to participants?
What is the positioning of the trained professionals; where and how does trained professionalism meet untrained participant?
What are the rhythms of community theatre work?
Are we working from the people or from the place?
What are the forms and what are the ethics of this work?
How is power wielded in the process and outside it?
(and many more).
The final stage of the project saw the contributors coming together in larger groups to pick up the provocations which spoke to them and share practice, thinking, and possibilities with each other.
The results were incredibly rich conversations to which I can’t do justice here. But the key findings will feed into my plans for a further, practice-based project involving the modelling of radically open large-scale theatre.
Its key aims will be to:
Use repeated, reiterated processes of looping, listening and feedback to facilitate broad community contributions from early in the project and throughout
Ensure that there are clear pathways into the work – and onwards from it – for community participants
Embrace flux
Break down into smaller ‘missions’ to enable participation at whatever level is possible and practicable for each participant
Reach out to existing groups within the community to hand over responsibility for sub-‘missions’ within the project – the contemporary equivalent of ‘guilds’, perhaps.
Lastly, this practitioner-led project has also alerted me to some challenges of radical openness.
Failure has to be an option (for participants, for makers, for researchers)
All participants will have a different measure of ‘success’, and so all must be ready for the outcome(s) to be unlike what they imagined.
‘Radical openness’ is against ‘the industry’
Or rather, it’s against the metrics used by the industry to assess the people and institutions making the work. Is there any way round this?
The limits of ‘radical openness’?
If we are ‘radically open’ in community work, what happens when we encounter mindsets, views, statements that are to us problematic, unethical, or even violent or exclusionary?
Community theatre productions only survive and thrive because of strong networks of engaged and impassioned individuals. If you’d like to talk – or do something – about community theatre at any scale, please drop me a line!
Discuss this or any of the other conference contributions by joining our Google Group, Place and Community. You will need a Google account to join the group. Feel free to comment under the relevant heading, or to start a new topic.