ART IS CHANGE: Strategies & Skills for Activist Artists & Cultural Organizers

What happens when a tiny city-state with tight control becomes a hub for community-driven, arts-based transformation?

Meet ArtsWok, a Singapore-based organization helping people talk about the hardest things—grief, inequality, identity, and even death—with art as the medium and hope as the mission

In a place known more for order than outspokenness, how do artists create room for deep conversation and community healing? In this episode, ArtsWok co-founder Su-Lin Ngiam takes us inside the intricate work of bridging Singapore’s diverse communities—whether that’s confronting mortality in a high-rise courtyard or staging inclusive youth theater across cultural divides. Her work invites us to reimagine activism not as confrontation, but as creative facilitation rooted in care.

Listen in to hear:

• How ArtsWok uses everything from inflatable theaters to site-specific installations to hold space for taboo topics in the heart of tightly regulated Singapore.
• Why conversations about death—like in their Both Sides Now project—are actually powerful doorways to deeper, more connected lives.
• What it means to be an “intermediary” in art, navigating across sectors, beliefs, and disciplines to build trust, spark dialogue, and catalyze change

Tune in now to hear how Su-Lin and ArtsWok are turning art into a tool for civic dialogue, human connection, and societal renewal—one courageous conversation at a time.

Delicious Quotes

What does the ArtsWok Collaborative do?

I like to say that we're agents of hope. That we're really here to inject hope in society, or at least we try to, and it's about the bridging difference be it between people or ideas or uncomfortable topics.

How do your very public arts practices advance your issue-based community work?

…we want it to be out there where people can see, they can hear --- really bringing a taboo issue out into the open, making what's invisible, visible, unheard, heard. And the arts are great for doing that and creating spaces that can do that

What is Go-Li?

It's (Drama Box’s) inflatable theater … we have used that structure in our projects as well, … It's tour-able, so you can bring it to different communities, and you pop up and cause you're not allowed to be there permanently, then you deflate the structure, and you move on. And it becomes some kind of an icon as well.

People recognize it, and “Oh, okay, these guys are here. The artists are here.” And it's about creating safe space as well because it's open, but it's covered, but yet you can walk in and out so you can have conversations about difficult things or people can be vulnerable.

What is Both Sides Now?

...we have presented this project for seven years. …essentially, we're out there engaging community saying, "Have you thought about death?" …it's an important part of living to think about that. In fact, it's very much two sides of the same coin. …how we live our lives will determine how we end. So, it's really all quite related, but of course, it can be quite taboo, and it's a painful topic. Loss, in general, is hard to talk about, but I think that's something we really need to talk about more as societies.

 

What role does negotiation play in the cultural life of Singapore?

We are artists. We are here to question and provoke. And having said that, we have things like censorship in Singapore in terms of, so, all our scripts, plays, have to be submitted for a license. … there is a process of negotiation that, as artists, we then undergo with the state or with authorities, and it's that process of dialogue. And whether or not we choose to, to then, adapt our place or our work or choose another creative way to talk about it or present it. That's up to the artists, But I think what is meaningful is that process of negotiation and how we negotiate, and that impacts the way we practice, and it makes us more creative in a way. Then it is about finding the vocabularies and being patient. That change takes time.

 

Transcript

Bill Cleveland: New Year's 2014 in Singapore, the year of the Horse

What is Singapore, a city-state, a very small, very well-off multi-ethnic country, an unlikely nexus of community arts innovation? For those, like me, who know the place from some personal experience and some very fine Singaporean friends, it's all of those with a promise of much, much more. And that promise, for me, has been personified by one of those friends I mentioned. 

I met Su-Lin Ngiam at an international community arts conference In the Spring of 2010 hosted by the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission. She was there with her long-time collaborator Ko Siew Huey. In that encounter, I came to know one of the most striking characteristics of Singapore's notable capacity to punch far above its weight. Which simply translates as "learning is sacrosanct" and "knowledge is power."

The country's dramatic rise from a post-WWII, post-colonial basket case to global economic power is certainly a success story fueled by incredible discipline and a belief that Singapore's greatest asset is its people. But, the Lion City, as it is sometimes called it, does have a sketchy side. Like the US, Singapore is classified as a "flawed democracy" in the Economist Magazine's well-respected Democracy Index. One aspect of this means that Singapore keeps a pretty tight hand on internal criticism.  

Nevertheless, over the past decade and a half, it has spawned a robust community of artists who are very committed to nurturing the incredibly wide range of Singapore's stories.

Su-Lin heads an arts-based community development organization called ArtsWok, whose work she describes as being "agents of hope." That agency has made an indelible mark on the Singapore community in dozens of neighborhoods and venues. She shared the ArtsWok story with me in the Spring of 2021, just as the Covid cobwebs were beginning to melt.  

This is Change the Story / Change the World: A Chronicle of art and community transformation. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Part 1: Making Space in the Wok 

BC: [00:00:00] Okay. Hello, this morning.

Su-Lin Ngiam: [00:00:02] I think it's way too early for you. Isn't it?

BC: [00:00:04] Actually, I normally wake up at that time. To do my writing,

S-L N: [00:00:08] you have coffee, right?

BC: [00:00:09] I do. Yes, I'm going to be jumping up and down here. Yeah. I'm just gonna dive in with my questions. My understanding is that Singapore has handled the world pandemic catastrophe better than most. Is that a true thing?

S-L N: [00:00:25] I guess if you're looking at it, in terms of numbers, then yeah. We have a fairly low infection rate and very few deaths compared to many countries. So in that sense, yes. But we did have a situation with the migrant workers and the dormitories here. About 105,000 were infected because of the kind of living arrangements, the virus spread really fast.

So that was our crisis. It was contained to a particular kind of population or demographic. But it also surfaced a lot of issues with regards to how we how we treat our migrant workers, their living conditions, and so on and so forth.

So yeah.

BC: [00:01:03] so I remember when I was there, that was one of the just beneath the surface issues that was there. And as has happened all over the world, the stress test of the pandemic has surfaced. The cracks in society, the places that aren't, aren't working as well as they should. My first question is really one of self-definition. You've been at this work for the past seven years. Very intensely. So when you're sitting across the table from people who are new to Arts Wok, how do you describe your work in the world?

S-L N: [00:01:42] So we would generally say that we're intermediaries. So that's the word that we use. We work in the field of art space, community development, so I'm ABCD as you know it. And essentially, we're here to bridge people, ideas, resources; a lot of the work is about facilitation and bridge-building.

And Apart from that, we also do creative producing work. So, we actually design projects and programs with communities, with stakeholders. We implement them with artists, and then we look at evaluating them. In a nutshell, that's what we do, but it doesn't sound very Romantic, or it's not.

So I guess it really depends on who I'm meeting. But I like to say that we're agents of hope that we're really here to inject hope in society, or at least we try to, and it's about. The bridging difference be it between people or ideas or uncomfortable topics.

And essentially, I think without hope, we can't survive; we can't progress. We can't, actualize and I think we, we need a lot of that right now in our world. And it's hard work. It's difficult work. So, self-care becomes crucial as well, so yeah, I guess if you look at the work itself, we're intermediaries, we're producers, we're doing this because we want to create a more hopeful society,

BC: [00:03:01] So you work with a broad range of constituencies. Could you describe your community?

S-L N: [00:03:07] primarily, we work with a lot of artists and creatives designers. They are the core of our practice, and who we engage with the most then, of course, depends on what kinds of work we're doing. So, if it's with a direct geographical base community, for example, then we work with a residential community.

We also work with issue-based stuff. So, like a project, we do call it both sites. Now we look at end-of-life and seeding the importance of having end-of-life conversations and planning. So, then the community is much larger it's anyone in Singapore. But of course, then you have the health care system.

You have the social services; you have policymakers and funders. So, it really cuts across the entire ecosystem. It really depends on what the program or the project is about where our interests are

BC: [00:03:58] so one of the things, a sort of a picture that I have that people who are not familiar with Singapore It might find enlightening is when you talk about geography, which is quite small. And actually, it goes vertical because so many people live in what we would call public housing, but which is basically all, almost all housing in Singapore. The people of Singapore basically live in high rise apartments

S-L N: [00:04:25] Yup.

BC: [00:04:26] That's a different landscape.

S-L N: [00:04:27] And sometimes that makes it harder to do work in the communities only because when it's high rise and is vertical, then in terms of, how you can use space or how you can design those sorts of interactions kind of changes because we don't have a lot of public space, even within a residential community, we have parks and all of that, but it's quite dense.

And so sometimes it's hard for us to find suitable spaces, to do our public engagements because we genuinely do installations. And this is a certain scale to what we do because we want to evoke curiosity. And when you want to invite larger groups of people, you need space. And sometimes that becomes a challenge.

But I guess it's about thinking creatively then about how to engage vertical communities versus, horizontally and everyone can see each other. And so, it's just a different approach to the work. Yeah.

BC: [00:05:15] It brings to mind. And I'm wondering when I was there. There was a project that had produced a pop-up arts venue. It was a blow-up venue. Is that still there? Is that still being in use?

S-L N: [00:05:28] Do you remember what it was called? Was it called Go-Li?

BC: [00:05:31] Yes, I think so.

S-L N: [00:05:32] Yeah. Yeah. It's their inflatable theater that they got specially made by. I'm designing this in the UK. It was the collaboration. It's still around. It's currently deflated because they're not really supposed to be doing large-scale public engagements at this point in time.

But yeah, Drama Box are close collaborators. In fact, we present the end-of-life project, Both Sides Now, together, and this has been for seven years. And we have used that structure in our projects as well, but. They use it for other work that they do. That's an excellent idea, yeah. Cause limited space. It's tour-able, so you can bring it to different communities, and you pop up and cause you're not allowed to be there permanently, then you deflate the structure, and you move on. And it becomes some kind of an icon as well.

People recognize it, and Oh, okay. These guys are here. The artists are here, and it's about creating safe space as well because it's open, but it's covered, but yet you can walk in and out so you can have conversations about difficult things or people can be vulnerable.

So that's really nice. Yeah.

BC: [00:06:28] So, just a statistic, how many people can fit into that and to Go-Li

S-L N: [00:06:34] That's a good question. They have three; I think the smallest one we fit about 60 to 80 and then the largest one I think goes up to about 150 200.

BC: [00:06:44] Yeah. It's an extraordinary thing. You're probably used to it, but I think there are probably many artists listening, mouth thinking. Ah, So I'll make sure that all your contact information will be. Available at the end of this podcast so that we can put people in touch with you who are interested in more information.

As you said, seven years before that, you were doing interesting things as well. What is the path of your journey from an inquisitive, creative person to doing what you're doing now? --- in essence, running, at least, what I see as the preeminent arts-based community development organization in Singapore, right?

S-L N: [00:07:24] Thanks, Bill. I'll accept that. Yeah, the journey. I come from a family where my parents are educators and social workers. So that, that's like the family I was born into, and that's really influenced my beliefs, my value system and just seeing what it means to have a higher purpose, with one's life and giving back to one's community, and realizing that one has the agency to make a difference, no matter how small. But even more powerful with others. So, that's really influenced me.

I have to say also, growing up; I've been part of uniform groups. So, I think you guys have that in the US, the (Girl) Guides and the Boy Scouts. Yep. Yep. So, I've always been part of some kind of community. So, I was in the Brownies as a kid, then I've gone to the Gold's Brigade. And that, so, this idea about again, being part of a community where you learn and grow together and you do life, but you also give back, and like your life is a service, right? So that's influenced me.

I guess a big turning point also was, realizing my sexual orientation as a gay person, and I'm in Singapore, that's still criminalized. So, in, in terms of our penal code, sex between two men is still a crime. Nothing mentioned about two women, but nevertheless, it's still largely frowned upon. And we have strong religious groups here, conservative, who don't support that. So even though there's the law, but the government, our courts say that they won't prosecute, but nevertheless, the law being there already says a lot, and it does play on people's minds, and basically you're seen as illegal in that sense, even though you're not prosecuted.

And so, my family is Christian, and I was I'm a Christian myself. And I think a big part of my journey was reconciling that right. Being gay and being Christian. And what does that mean? Why I have to hide a part of myself. So that's really influenced this idea about the importance of bridging difference of being able to Really encounter someone else and be open and nonjudgmental, .and to listen deeply.

And how do we celebrate that diversity, not just tolerate it? And then, how do we work together? How do we collaborate, and how do we sit with that tension, or the discomfort, but yet seek something higher, or transcend ourselves, so to speak? But anyway, that, that path led me to do theological studies, and counseling, and all of that.

So, after graduation, I worked in the arts for about six to eight years doing company management and arts management. But then, I went on to do theological studies and counseling. And, that part of my life for three years was very much about reconciling my faith, my sexual orientation, who I am, and how do I be coherent? And how can that, then, help me serve?  I guess when there's more coherence, you can do better work. You're not afraid; you're doing something about your fear. So, then I worked in the only LGBTQ church in Singapore for another about two to almost three years after I graduated from theological college. And that was really rewarding. But then, I found that limiting because when you do work from your position on religion, sometimes more doors close than open. And I think, also being an LGBTQ church in a kind of society like Singapore, it's hard as well.

People don't really give you the time of day, or they don't take you as seriously. And I always wanted it to work. And the LGBTQ community is very important to me. I also want to look at a whole range of issues and communities.

And if saying, I'm the pastor of the Free Community Church. It is going to close more doors than open them. Then that's not really the position from which I'm going to work. So, I moved on, and that's when I started ArtsWok. And this was with Huie, who you've met as well, Bill. So, she's currently on our board, but when we started ArtsWok, we were both running the organization.

And we've grown over the years from two. We are now a team of five, and you have interns and trainings for about eight of us at this point in time. But yeah,...

CSCW EP 24: David O'Fallon - Power Plays

Please know that this episode contains descriptions of war that include violence and psychological trauma. We endeavor to do our best to engage these hard stories with care and respect.

Please also be aware that there is a lot of hope, healing and optimism contained herein. We hope you will join us whenever you are willing and able.

Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

Of what use are the arts in these turbulent times?

I think one of the most powerful technologies we have is to actually be in the presence of another person. ...We could go on about how many friends you have on Facebook, how many things you posted on YouTube, how many hits on Instagram and so on, it takes a different kind of courage to be in the room with the person, sharing your story, or listening carefully, looking somebody in the eye, there's a physical presence that you must deal with, and that for me has always been the power particularly of theater,...

Why humanities and vets?

But if you've been in a room with men and women, who've been not all it in combat, but just in service in this almost invisible war, that's still going on, as you and I are talking today and they're not seen as fully human or they think once with a fly over at a football game or something yeah, the power of literature of storytelling of theater of music of creation is unbelievable. it's deep and it's strong and its essential. You want to go back to basics. You asked about, story and in some ways these men and women live the power of story.

What is the value of stories in this hard boiled cynical world?

So, I think the struggle has always been who gets to tell your story. Do you believe you can tell your own story? And a lot of people start out by saying, I ain't got nothing to say. I got no story to tell. I don't do anything. Who am I? So that's where all of us who tried to work in the arts world have had to create a vessel if you will, and the structures of support and encouragement, so that in fact, a person can say," I got this poem I wrote, I've been keeping it underneath my underwear drawer. Maybe I'll say it out loud." And they do, and they discover a voice.

Why are new stories particularly important now?

...the fact is the world is changing and we have dominant stories right now, some of which are being told by genuinely evil people that denigrate others, that build walls and shut people out, and hurt children in cages along the border, because they're not seen fit to enter our country. Who's telling that story? Who gets to tell that story? And there are many voices trying to tell another different story, and I'm going to be very blunt right here. I think those who are wishing and working to create a nation that's based on patriarchal white nationalism, they will fail. That world is impossible, but they can do a great deal of harm as they push that narrative,

CSCW EP 24: David O'Fallon - Power Plays Transcript

Bill Cleveland: David O'Fallon builds things. Theater sets, theater companies, 12-foot puppets, visionary art schools for teen artists and community musicians, theater programs for veterans from the Afghanistan and Vietnam wars, and more. The through line for David's wonderfully twisty journey is a couple of simple, but powerful questions.

What is the story you want to tell? and how can it be shaped and shared with your community? Which of course are also the central questions we ask all of our guests.

Please know that this episode contains descriptions of war that include violence and psychological trauma. We endeavor to do our best to engage these hard stories with care and respect.

Please also be aware that there is a lot of hope, healing and optimism contained herein. We hope you will join us whenever you are willing and able.

This is Change the Story, Change the World, a Chronicle of Art and Community Transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland.

 

Part One: Relations.

BC: So, I'll just begin with the foundation setting, which is, your work spans many decades as does mine, and over that time you have done many things, and however you want to describe it, describe your work in the world.

David O’Fallon: Yeah. Thank you. It's a great question. I think my work in the world is trying to be a person who actively imagines and creates the narratives that keep us together and take us forward, rather than those that just tell us how screwed up everything is, how bad off we are and why we can't get along. So the bottom line is always looking for connections and relationships and bridge building, and every setting that I've been in.

BC: What would be a concrete version of that?

DO: I'll give a couple of stories that go with that. So, I am in graduate school at Temple University in Philadelphia, and my wife, Ann and I are living at the corner of Broad and Allegheny, which if anybody knows Philly, it's North Philly. At some point I discovered, so I'm appreciative of the work we're doing at Temple, I went there to work with a particular guy, Arthur Wagner, who had a way of looking at theater because my background is in theater, creating and acting and directing. [So], I walked down broad street one day to discover the Freedom Theater, which is an all black theater company, and I walked down the basement steps to discover the director of the theater, the guy who was keeping it all together, and they basically said, is there anything at all that I can do here? Because I don't want only to be within the confines of temple university and academia. He looked me up and down this kind of a younger than white guy and said maybe can you build stuff? And I said yeah, I can build sets and stuff. So, I sawed lumber and built sets, and then they had me involved in improvisations where I always got to be the Philly cop. ‘Cause the cops were white guys and they said, we kinda like you, but you're not mean enough to be a Philly cop. So, I ended up being in shows and directing shows at the freedom theater in Philadelphia as the only white guy involved at all.

After a while, Ann and I moved up to Germantown a little further North and we're going to church called the first United Methodist church of Germantown which had its own issues, and we invited in black theater companies to co-create productions with. The first United Methodist church in Germantown. So, connecting, bridge building, people working together. The point was working together by creating work, doing theater, building things, sharing stories, collaborating, that was the work, it always has been the work, If you will, so that's one concrete example.

BC: Yeah. So actually, I have a question for you about work. We live in an increasingly abstract world not just abstract in concepts and ideas, but also even in the means by which we communicate in the way in which we disseminate our stories.

The reason I'm asking you this question is because I've had similar experiences of recognizing that the closer you are to literally putting the shovel in the soil together, the closer you can come to the combination of trust and truth that is essential for any relationship to get built. Is that your sense, is that a core belief that you have in your work?

DO: I think it is, and I think one of the most powerful technologies we have Bill is to actually be in the presence of another person. And to your point about abstractions, we could go on about how many friends you have on Facebook, how many things you posted on YouTube, how many hits on Instagram and so on, it takes a different kind of courage to be in the room with the person, sharing your story, or listening carefully, looking somebody in the eye, there's a physical presence that you must deal with, and that for me has always been the power particularly of theater, but of many other art forms in which you have to be present to each other.

So that, and encourage, and I think, hanging out in the performing arts world, which is my home base led to other things, different groups and encounter groups of one kind or another that asked for, or a similar kind of courage of a physical presence with each other and being open to another person.

BC: There's something akin to what I would call old school, spiritual practice in what you described. Literally, a congregation or a group of people being together, the laying on of hands, the sense of brotherhood and sisterhood that humans needed in order to survive for most of human history.

DO: And we still need it. And I'll share another story about these connections; and this is a very tangible story. So, I recently left being the president of the Minnesota Humanities Center. And so, when. I took the position. They said, “What is your definition of the humanities?” And I said, “I don't have one, and I won't spend any time on it because that's a big academic question.” I said, “I'm coming to you, the Humanities Center, because I really care about how we get along in the world and how we connect with each other.”

But here's the concrete example of that. My first board meeting, this was in Minnesota, so it's November. So it's cold and a young woman walks into the boardroom in a puffy winter coat with her arms crossed in front of her and says, “yeah, I, like I'm all for the humanities center and I get it, we should speak for those who have been marginalized and left out, and we should make sure that every voice gets heard, but I want to know new-president, what do you think about the veterans voice?” And I said, “absolutely. We are in the longest war in our history, and it's fought by the fewest number of people”, and she took off her puffy winter coat and she said, “okay, I'm going to stay on the board”. That was a woman named Corinda Horton, who was a combat veteran from Desert Storm.

BC: Wow.

DO: And we went on then to create a Veterans Voices Program at the Center by first meeting with veterans to say, “is there anything that we can do that would actually matter to you, because there's a thousand veterans’ programs” and they basically said in various ways, “we want to be treated as a full human”. One of them said to me, “if one more person says, "Thanks for your service", I'm going to deck them because they have no idea. They have no idea what you asked me to do, and I want to be very personal because this is a story that I carry with me”.

So we were having the usual kind of meeting that, Bill you've been through. large pieces of post-it notes on the wall, and markers, and it’s a designing, thinking, planning, meeting in a conference room and they're all veterans except one or two of us.

And one of the guys in the corner, a man heavily tattooed, is bouncing around and swaying back and forth and people go over to them and say, “you doing okay? How are you doing?” And he says, “yeah, I'm okay. I'm here. I'm okay. That was day one. Day two, we always had a good breakfast, so I walk into the breakfast meeting the next morning and Richard is there and I say, “Hey Schmidty”, which was his sort of nickname, “Schmidty”. I stick out my hand. “I'm really glad you're here. I didn't know if you'd be coming back.” He says, “I'm not shaking your hand”, and he gave me this bear hug that I thought would crack my spine he said he's an Afghanistan combat vet who was Medivac-ed out. And he said, “You never go into battle without your battle buddy. Never. And I'm back now. And I got different battles, and now the humanities are my battle buddy, and I trust what you're doing here.”

And that program grew and grew with an authenticity, and I hired veterans to run it. And there were still people I think there might still be people at the humanities center who don't get it. “Why are we connecting the humanities with veterans?” But if you've been in a room with men and women, who've been not all it in combat, but just in service in this almost invisible war, that's still going on, as you and I are talking today and they're not seen as fully human or they think once with a fly over at a football game or something yeah, the power of literature of storytelling of theater of music of creation is unbelievable. it's deep and it's strong and its essential. You want to go back to basics. You asked about, story and in some ways these men and women live the power of story.

BC: So, David Talk about some of the specific aspects of that program that got designed with those veterans?

DO: A couple of things happened in the program. The key one is probably that we created a particular approach to theater in which these men and women helped to tell and shape their own story, with an arc to it, like, “why did you join up? Where were you?

What was going on? What were the promises made to you when you signed up and then what did you go through? What did you experience? And now you're out, and what has that been like? How has the transition affected them?” And they’d perform in the black box at the Guthrie, and in sites and cities around Minnesota, each telling their own stories. So, they're not quote unquote acting. They're saying, this is my story, and one man, I'll just use his first name Richard told the story of being in combat in Afghanistan and the convoys could only run at night. And they're out running at night and he's in an armored vehicle and he's manning the 50-caliber machine gun, and it's after curfew. So, no civilian should be on the road, but there's a car behind the convoy. So, Richard tells his crew chief. "There's a guy back there with headlights", and the guy says basically "Give them a little warning shot." He did, and the car just kept coming. "Well give them another one." And the car just kept coming.

Richard said, "What am I going to do? "And the guy said, "Take them out. "So, Richard did, and the car flipped over when it, because the ditch, the convoy stopped, they went and it was a mom, and dad, and two kids trying to get home at curfew.

Now Richard had never told that story until he's telling it in public. Here in a theater coach and understanding people sitting there. Richard said, I came home, and I stood on the Third Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi with a six pack, just thinking to hell with it. I got nothing. What am I here for? But he said, “I'm here tonight. So, I obviously didn't do that”.

Then after all the stories have been told, and each person is now standing on the stage, you can imagine there's six vets there. Some go back to the Vietnam era. Some are right now, men and women. And so, a man in the audience near the end says “what do you want from us? What can we do?” And Richard says, “I want you to think about what you're asking us to do”. So, there's another connection made. and Richard just got married a week or so ago.

BC: Wow. What a wonderful thing!

DO: Yeah, I'm really happy to say. And his life hasn’t been easy, and Schmidty's life hasn’t been easy, and we're not making it easy for him, even though there's all kinds of public praise for veterans and so forth. But again, connections, relationship and being in the room with Corinda Horton, from Desert Storm, or Richard and Schmidty from the war right now.

 

Part Two: Original Stories.

BC: So, one of the things that has really marked your entire life is this relationship to theater and performance, and you just described a powerful moment. What is it about theater, the practice, its history, people's involvement in it, professionals nonprofessionals, what is it about theater that is deep enough for people like the veterans you just described to employ it, use it, take it seriously, and obviously benefit from it? What's going on there?

DO: I think there's a bunch of things and I think they're important to where we are right now and a culture and a climate as well. In that particular instance, what was powerful were men and women shaping their own story, coming to grips with their own personal narrative and then having the courage, and it took a lot of courage to put that out there in public. I think almost every woman had a story of sexual exploitation or being challenged. So, to share that in public. So the point is I am shaping my own life through shaping this story.

As a young man, I was lucky to get into academic theater early. I was teaching in college when I was like two years out of college. I was always drawn to the creation of original work, and that's one thing that took me up to Northern Vermont work with Bread and Puppet Theater, which was a formative experience because that's all-original work, being created on the spot, with Peter Schuman and the gang up there. And I think the challenge has always been to discover the way that theater can articulate the stories of people who might not be represented the 44th time that you performed Twelfth Night, or how many Hamlets have you seen? And I love that. I go to those plays they're powerful. But for me, the performance has always been part and parcel with whose story is being told in what venue, how can it be shared? How can we shape it? And that of course led me back to Minneapolis, to a job where I helped found a theater that is still going 45 years later, that always is creating original work. Every story that we do is coming up from, you could say below over from the side or some other way sometimes informed by other works, but most often about people trying to speak their own story into the great noise of our time.

 BC: That company was the 45-year track record is the world-renowned Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theater, whose work is very much influenced by bread and puppet, and whose annual Mayday parade and festival is a beloved twin cities institution.

BC: Most people aren't really familiar with theater that is tapping into the stories of the communities in which the theater is being made. What is that in particular? When in fact you are, as theater makers, both witness and steward, of an evolving and sometimes a very tenuous community story?

DO: Yeah, let's expand this beyond theater for a moment because whether you are the mural makers in Philadelphia, which has this incredible mural tradition (Mural Arts Program) Those are all original. They're not copying somebody else's work, whether they've got Martin Luther King on the wall, or Frederick Douglas on the wall, or the neighborhood kids on the wall, the murals and Philly are original work, and here's one thing they have in common with theater. They're created by groups....

Episode 23: Alice Lovelace - A Peaceful DisrupterMusic Attribution

Variations on a theme 1 » The Rush (w/ drum) - Variations 1 (c) by PodcastAC

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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work. If not, see Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

What is "This Poem" really about?

This poem is a cultural hybrid Travelin' everywhereBelongin' nowhereIrresponsible, Irreverent And totally irrelevant

What do you mean by Peaceful Disrupter?

I am never happy with the status quo. So, I'm always looking for ways to disrupt the status quo and to move it in a more progressive [way] or [by] empowering those who I see are being left behind.And that has to happen a lot, they have to be those who make other people uncomfortable, so that in their discomfort they actually deeply contemplate change. Because when we are comfortable, we don't contemplate change.... I'm a peaceful disruptor. I don't get loud. I don't, I definitely look for opportunities to shift power and to shift the conversation,

What does "asking permission" mean in a classroom?

When I walk into a classroom, the first thing I say to my class is I asked permission to be there. And often the teachers don't understand that, but I will say to the students, “this is your community, and I am an interloper, and other adults have made a decision that I should be here, but the rightful decision-makers are you because you were the one who had the power to make this a success or to make it a failure”. So, I always ask their permission.

How can you fight the power of the false narrative?

I've never forgot the lesson of. Standing up to bullies, not getting into the stories people are telling about you, ...the moment that you try to speak to that story, all it's going to do is keep that story spinning. So, I would never address it.

Alice Lovelace: This Poem is for reading only after I'm dead, as the weight of the words could kill

This poem is full of blood, fornication, guts, and guns

This poem hates nationalists, sexists, racists, factionalists and fundamentalists of all ilk's 

However, this poem encourages creative lies when those lies are in line with this poem’s politics 

This poem, This poem, This poem is about starvation in Ethiopia, tribal warfare in Rwanda, ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, oil workers striking in Nigeria, starvation, re-classification, indoctrination, stagnation, and the return of the colonialists to oversee our freedom

This poem, This poem, This poem is about moving forward but you goin' nowhere, you goin' nowhere, you goin' nowhere

Bill Cleveland:  Well, the first time I laid eyes and ears on Alice Lovelace, she was standing in bright blue lights on a stage in Atlanta, Georgia. She was a diminutive presence in a delicate white dress, who, from the second she began to speak, literally took over the theater.

AL: This poem is about arming for peace

While withholding food until those ungodly hordes Recognize the salvation of Capitalists ideals 

This poem is about the salvation of Russia...Not

The unification of Europe...Not

The liberation of Africa...Not 

This poem shits on other poems

This poem is about psychobabble posing as Art

And Art so fuckin' pure it offends

This poem is about dropping the bombs on Iraq for border aggressions

While patting the Serbs on the back

About boycotting Cuba 'cause they won't be like us

While rewarding China 'cause they won't be like us 

This poem advocates shitting on the Queen's English and the Queen

This poem sanctions the shooting of Career politicians on sight

This poem is a cultural hybrid Travelin' everywhere

Belongin' nowhere

Irresponsible               Irreverent And totally irrelevant

This poem is

About Jesus prostitutes

Mt. Sinai

swindlers

Jerusalem

junkies

Trashin' the airwave Foulin' up my system Pissin' on my poverty

This poem is about

About gettin' a fix on the problems Without gettin' your

hands dirty

About Klansmen giving out free ammunition

To convicted felons to protest gun control

About withholding abortion rights to teach those

Unwed teenage welfare cheats a lesson in humility

BC: Well, we weren't referring to it as spoken word back then, but as far as I was concerned, at that moment, in that space, it was THE word. And that word was commanding, no grabbing my attention as though the lyrics to that Screaming Jay Hawkins song were coming true. “I Put a Spell on You”

AL: This poem is about the need

To write poetry while the people

Starve and imagine your words feeding the masses

When in reality, man you just you movin' 'n groovin

Goin' nowhere

Movin' n' grovin' Goin'

no where

Movin' n' grovin'

Goin'                   Goin'                    Goin'

Goin'                   Gone

 

BC: But, since then we've become friends, colleagues, collaborators. I have to say. That spell that power to teach the moment to help you see life's vexing puzzle pieces in a new way that reveals something hot, something that will feed you and those you love. Well, that power is still there. If you don't believe me, then just listen up.

This is Change the Story, Change the World, A Chronicle of Art and Community Transformation. My name is Bill Cleveland.

BC: Alice and I held our conversation over two days in early 2021. We started with me as the guest on her new podcast, from the Arts Exchange in Atlanta. […] Then, we zoomed on over here to The Center for the Study of Art and Community to record this episode.

 

Part One: Organizing is a Tool of Culture.

BC: Hey, Alice Lovelace.

AL: Oh, there you are

BC: I see you. You haven't aged a bit since yesterday.

AL: Thank God.

BC: Yeah, I want to thank you for just a marvelous conversation, and I just I'm excited that you're doing this show. Tell me a little bit about the show before we start into our regular interview. What, where did come from?

AL:  So doing the Arts Exchange and Atlanta, so it was an organization that I helped to found back in 83, 84. We are still going strong. Actually, I retired, went back on the board and sold the building and Grant Park, bought a building in East Point, renovated it and moved us in there.

Once the. virus hit, we had to go with, everything online. And so, they came to me a couple months ago and asked me what I do a podcast, because we'd been doing some little conversations, but they thought that this might build a build on that audience and expand it.

And so, I said, sure I'll do the podcast.

BC: I don't know why they pick a person that's shy as you to do it, though.

{laughter…}

AL: Yeah, I have to hold back, my enthusiasm sometimes.

BC: And I actually, I found the same thing. I miss being with my brothers and sisters so badly, and it's just a breath of fresh air to be able to have conversations with people about things other than how bad it is

AL: Amen. And the fact that with this medium, they can be anywhere, like you said, in the country or in the world, and that really expands the pallet. It's great. It is, I'm looking forward to reaching out to a lot of people. Some I know, and some I don't know.

BC: Absolutely. Right. Yeah, absolutely. Let me begin. It's interesting. I have a good friend named Sandy Agustin and she was a principal over there at intermediate arts in Minneapolis.

She's a wonderful artist and she was one of the first people I interviewed, and I said, “Sandy Do you have a street name?” She says “yeah, I got to handle” And I said, “so is it connected to your work?” She said, “Oh yeah, absolutely. They call me the navigator.”

So, Alice if you had one or if you do have one, what would your handle be? What would your street name be?

AL: It's not a street name is one that I only use discreetly, but I think it's one that really defines how I move. And that is, I am a disruptor.

BC: Okay. You want to say more about that and what that means?

AL: Yeah. Yeah. I think a lot of people take that in a negative way, but I am never happy with the status quo. So, I'm always looking for ways to disrupt the status quo and to move it in a more progressive [way] or [by] empowering those who I see are being left behind.

And that has to happen a lot, they have to be those who make other people uncomfortable so that in their discomfort they actually deeply contemplate change. Because when we are comfortable, we don't contemplate change.

So, I know that I am a disruptor. I'm a peaceful disruptor. I don't get loud. I don't, I definitely look for opportunities to shift power and to shift the conversation,

BC: The good trouble, nudge, poke, I'm not going away. This story will not disappear. Let's handle it in the best way possible. You know what it reminds me of… I think about you're a poet, you're an artist. You spend time with yourself. And my guess is a part of your practice is self-disruption.

AL: Yes. Yes. I'm always, I am hypercritical of myself, and in particularly if I've been in a situation, I always go back and I have to ask why did you do that? Why'd you ask that question? Why did you think that was necessary? And yes…

BC: I'm always in the place. Where, when I get self-critical, it's usually like bill, I'm sorry, you have more imagination than that, but you got to get going right?

AL: I think I'm always trying to make sure that what I've done wasn't out of destruction. That it was out of some sense of a movement forward. And if I find myself having said something destructive, I try to say, you can't address it that way. The next time you have to moderate this, so I try to get better at it the next time. So that maybe I get some positive changes out of it.

BC: Yeah. So, for people who don't know Alice Lovelace as a disruptor, what are your tools and how do you put them to use?

AL: I'm an organizer first and foremost. I'm an organizer, and I'm a cultural worker and organizing is a tool of cultural work. Art is a tool of cultural work. These are the tools that I use to move society in different ways. I think people would be most surprised at breadth of the way that I work.

Most people know me as an arts and education, teacher for 35 years traveling the country teaching in jails, schools, churches, senior citizen homes. Anywhere that that they invite me. But then I'm also an organizer. So, I was the national lead staff organizer for the First United States Social Forum. Coordinated and did all the logistics for that. That was 11 locations, 15,000 people in attendance, 2,500 workshops. And I was the head organizer for all of that, that pulled it off and made it happen.

But to me, all of this work is the same work. Even running the arts exchange, managing the sale, managing the purchase of the new building, overseeing the renovations, all of that is a part of that cultural work of building culture, strengthening culture, as a means of strengthening art. And I always remember that these two are intimately connected. So I'm always aware of the cultural environment that I'm in, and what my art can do in that cultural environment. And the role that I can play, and sometimes it's a supportive role, and sometimes if I don't see the leadership that will lead us to success, I will step in.

BC: So, one of your other tools that is one of my favorites things that you do is you are an extraordinary writer. The first moment that I met you was seeing you take over a stage and blowback the eyelids of the people in the audience with your spoken word. Could you talk a bit about your artistry and how that works?

AL: Again, it came out of organizing. I first started writing poetry when I slipped into a really serious depression. But I was only writing for myself. One of the things that helped me when I began to emerge out of it was going to teach at an Episcopal church. They had an afterschool program for youth, and it was the very first time I ever did that. But I stepped in there and I said, I want to volunteer, and I started teaching a poetry class for young people and watching them grow. It helped me understand that writing was all I wanted to do that my depression was not so much a mental depression, as it was not satisfying my own inner self. And from that point forward that said, I will never deny my voice. And I would never deny myself that opportunity, but I never called myself a poet. I actually took great Umbrage to people calling me a poet. I didn't not think it was an honorific.

I am in the oral tradition, and I come out of the oral tradition. I never would publish my poems for took Toni Cade Bambara to finally push me, and push me, to make me write poems down and publish them I thought a poem should be brand new for every audience that every audience deserves to hear something that was crafted for them, and to be between me and them. And know if you weren't there in that audience, then you couldn't share that experience, and I didn't want you to have that experience.

But I began to morph over the years and more and more write down what I was writing and accepted that position. And then when I started teaching in the state arts programs, I definitely embraced it.

BC: Tell me, you weren't born a poet, and you weren’t be born an organizer or maybe you were, but what was the path that led you to knowing that, that was your purpose on this earth is to do those things?

AL: I see it's two little stories. One was, I was born in St. Louis and I had the fortune of wonderful parents. I come from a very large family. My mother was my father's second wife. My father had 17 children. I was his 13th child. But we lived in a neighborhood, and directly across the street from my house, a half a block to my left was my elementary school directly in front of my house was the huge city recreation center, and to the right of that was the high school. Our church was two blocks away and this was an extraordinary and supportive community.

That community center I learned tap dance. Rumba, Samba, I took ballet, I learned modern dance. We had a big Peruvian loom. I learned how to make rugs on a loom. I learned how to crochet. I took acting classes. I traveled the city during the summer doing a theater at other community centers. And so, I actually thought everybody grew up like that. I thought everybody had this opportunity. I never called it art. It was just what we did. And I sang, and I was in talent shows, and that had an extraordinary impact on my not putting barriers on my art. Like I work with visual artists, I work with dancers, and I cross all kinds of lines in art because that's the way it was brought up.

But then when it came to being a writer in my own home, my mother was from Arkansas, only child, very hard life and she did not approve of idleness. So, to sit and write in her eyes was to be idle.

So, we had a walk-in closet, [and] I used to put on my coat and pretend I was going outdoors to play, go to the hallway, sneak down to the closet and all the way in the back of that closet, behind all the coats, I had a little table, and I had my notes, books and paper, and that's where I would go and write.

So, it was a really weird thing in public I was okay to do all of these artistic things. But at home, it was seen as an idleness. And I think that's where my own conflicts of accepting myself as an artist came from.

BC: What was the name of that neighborhood?

AL: I lived in Mill Creek. The first urban renewal project in the nation. The Bay Shaun Community Center was right across the street from my house. I'll never forget it an extraordinary childhood.

BC: It's interesting, the...

Episode 22: Bob Leonard - The Continuing Evolution of the HorseThreshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

What is the artist's role in the altered and uncertain world we are entering?

…there is a human, passion for justice, and it would seem that it's hard to get…as human beings, we rely on the stories that we tell each other to keep our sense of direction. I don't mean down a road, but where's North. … And we understand ourselves through our stories, and that includes that passion for justice. It's not an abstract, … They know when it's something is not just. ...And that struggle is enormously dependent on the stories that we tell ourselves about that, and artists are the people who do that.

How has Alternate Roots manifested the struggle and evolution of American democracy?

This was in the spirit of the times, both in terms of the, from my point of view, the American revolution continuing, but also the times were about finding out what democracy can do in the face of oppression. Whether we're talking about women's rights or civil rights or Vietnam war, there were a lot of people who were trying to figure out new ways of understanding the paradigm of democracy and democratic decision-making.So, we decided that the board was going to be everybody. It was not going to be representative governance. We were going to be a participatory governance, and what's absolutely really astonishing Bill, is that that still is the case. 45 years later, we have a board of 200 people, and it is functioning well.

Is there a community arts, story telling aesthetic?

And that can have all kinds of permutations and experimentations, with, with the aesthetic. Does it have to be told in a particular aesthetic? The commercial aesthetic of East Tennessee is Dolly Parton and the explosion of the stereotypes of a mountain people in East Tennessee, but that isn't necessarily the required aesthetic. You have to learn what the aesthetic is from the audience, as opposed to thinking what's the commercial version that will get the dollar. You're listening different things when you do that. There is what artists at Roots we're doing and have been doing that for now, for, several decades. And then roadside is a wonderful example of that.

What does the evolution of the horse have to do with the art of possibility?

I really liked the, the image of the horse, which in the age of the dinosaur, the horse was the size of a mouse. It was a tiny little creature and, things turned upside down. I don't know whether a comment hit the earth or something, but things turned upside down and the horse emerged over the course of a long time, and no one would have thought that little thing that might've been a sort of a shrew or a mole or something would become what the horse is.


Transcript

Bill Cleveland: You know, I like to think of all the people I've had the privilege to speak with on this podcast as threads of a massive woven story fabric. A vibrating weave of bright and colorful threads, with thick and thin fibers, warping, woofing, twisted and bound together. so strong and tight, that if you try to coax, to pull, to yank one from another that whole thing will lock tight, resisting all force because there is not one strand, not one story that is not held by the rest.

Bob Leonard's story, today's story, is one of those caught up in that stubborn and infinite weave -- a crisscross of dialogue and music, lights and dancing, serendipity and surprise. Bound up with the layers of people and narratives that form the creative community fabric he’s fostered and served through his work In the theater of change.

Bob and I have known each other forever, but I'll be damned if I can remember where it was that we actually met, maybe in Massachusetts, or DC, maybe at a Roots thing, maybe in a previous life. That said, this exchange held deep in the COVID swamps of 2020 allowed us to add yet another chapter to the conversation that we started way back then, wherever and whenever that was. I think I can speak for both of us when I say that we're happy you will be joining us.

This is Change The story Change the World, A Chronicle of Art and Community Transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland. 

 

Part One: Duck Fat, Dirt, and Stumps

BC: Mr. Leonard, I have had the enormous privilege of connecting with many of my colleagues in this way over the past year, and every single time, all different twists and turns and stories and anecdotes and perceptions about the world show up that are marvelously surprising and energizing. I have an incredible sort of festival of rejoicing over the people I'm privileged to work with, and you're one of them.

So let me begin by asking you the simplest, most complex question, which is just describe, what you do in the world. What's your gig?

 Bob Leonard: I think I, make theater, to bring people together. I like bringing people together, and theater is a means to do that in a funny sort of way. I've gotten myself into a full haul, a long life of making theater. The processes and the making of the theater, seem to me to be needing to be grounded in the drawing together of people in in a place where they could hear each other and where they could. Here someone else.

BC: And so, when you do that, what makes it worthwhile a good thing?

 BL: Well, sometimes people erupt into a kind of, tangible, shared emotional moment or series of moments, and can get up and sing and dance together without anybody telling them what to do, or how to do it, or why they should do it. They just… it happens.

People […] in some simple level, people laugh together. That's a moment of breath breathing together. That's important in our human experience. So that's in the constructs of telling a story to get people to laugh and cry together, but there's also the breaking beyond the story. One of the great times in my life was a moment when the show finished, and the audience got up on the stage and danced. There was a transferal of the event into the people who were there, and it was just the celebration. That's in a kind of an immediate thing. I think about getting people together, in longer frames than just have a night. I've been working for a long time with the, ideas that came forward with a group of people to make Alternate Roots. And the coming together, when you do it right there is not about the momentary. It's about how an idea of, justice and, and, cooperative human, relationship can grow, and go through challenges that we didn't anticipate, or we might've anticipated, but thought we could duck and then found out we can't duck.

BC: So, Bob. You’ve been un-ducking these hard issues. Are questions for most of your life through theater? How did you come to this life path? 

BL: I, played making characters with my friends when I was in grade school and younger. I'd like to put a towel on my head and parade around as a kind of circus character. We practiced, pratfalls, and telling stupid jokes to each other. So, there was something in me about performing that I really did. That's just something I was into.

When I was in high school, my high school did one play a year. It was always the same play. It was, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and I was in a boy’s school, and The Man Who Came to Dinner was done in a very carefully arranged partnership with the local girl’s school. And so, I wanted to be in the school play, but it was only for the seniors. So, I went through three years waiting to be in the school, play in my senior year they decided not to do that anymore.

I didn't get to be in the play, and I went away to summer work, down on Cape Cod, and I got a job washing pots in a fancy restaurant with 10 dozen ducks in big baking pans that I had to scrape every night. I was the only pot washer, and it was always a stack of pots by the time I get in of an evening, that was almost as tall as I was, and that's what I did all night long. It was pretty ugly work.

But it turns out that the wait staff and bus staff were all going to a music school. I think it was the, Massachusetts Conservatory of Music. But the students got a job to be at the waitstaff in this restaurant, and they ran a musical review in the evenings, under the tent with a piano bar, and they asked if I wanted to audition. I said, you bet! I jumped on it. So, then my first experience. Actually, being on stage was with all these, undergrad pre professional, musical theater performers, putting on adapted musicals, adapted to Cape Cod, with the lyrics and we'd go out and sing hoofers and dance and so on and put this musical revue together while I was scraping duck shit, duck fat out of the pot, and it made it somewhat more worthwhile.

BC: That's great.

BL: And, yeah, that's what I. That's what I found myself doing, but it, I couldn't not do it. It was there and I was hungry for it. I had no sense of a career. I didn't think of it as a profession or anything. It was just what I had to do.

BC: So, Bob was smitten. No, let's say bitten by the theater bug through his encounter with that duck fat and musicals in a tent on Cape Cod. That led him to doing plays in college and eventually a graduate degree in theater from Catholic University in Washington, DC.

While there, working at a small stage called the Washington Theater Club, run by a dedicated soul named Davey Marlon Jones he learned the hard way what life in the theater was all about. Namely produce well-known well-worn plays to attract enough people to pay the bills or do exciting new work on small stages by unknown geniuses like Lanford Wilson and starve. Responding to this frustrating reality, Bob's next move, which seemed kind of like a retreat at the time was actually a fortuitous detour.

BL: I stopped making theater and I started working with friends in the film industry, basic Washington DC, late sixties, early seventies film. But yeah, I was making more money carrying lighting cable around in a week than I made in a month as an equity stage manager

We were making the film with, David Wolper, a film called, They Killed the President. It was a made for TV film about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln as if there had been a live TV news at the time. So, the premise was there were cameras and stuff, and the president was coming out for the first time at the end of the war he went to the theater and so there was a news team there and he got shot. So, we were doing the setup in Georgetown and I was a production assistant and so we got truckloads of dirt and put dirt down on the streets in Georgetown and got these hollow trunks of trees and put them over the parking meters, so that we transformed streets of Georgetown back to mid 19th century. It takes a fair amount of work to get that done, and then you'd drive a carriage down the dirt street, and somebody gets out of the carriage and it goes up to housing goes in and that's the scene. But we've spent three days moving this dirt and doing all this stuff.

What became really interesting to me is that while we were moving dirt and putting stumps over parking meters, people stopped and watched, and they stayed, and they stayed. I was like, there's nothing happening yet. And so, they stay until the carriage came in, and the people get out of the carriage, and the cameras are rolling, and they walk cup into the house and go in the house, end of scene. And people have watched that moment of a fantasy without paying anything and staying late (they were on their lunch break) and they couldn't go away. And over at the Washington theater club, we couldn't get them to stay, even get there. What happened to me was that I realized theater doesn't have any windows or it's forgotten that it is a window. There's an incarcerated, club of people that go to the theater who are not looking through the theater out to the world, they're looking into the theater as if it's something that is a value in itself, just to have the ticket.

I had this really amazing epiphany of what people are interested in when we're just moving dirt around on the streets of Georgetown, and I didn't know where that was headed, but it was really overwhelming to me how brutally wrong Davy Marlon Jones was to be killing himself in that way, and not that I blamed him, it's just the distance between what was his dream and what was people's interest in getting together. We're so not connected.

BC: Is that where your theater company got born as the idea that people are where they are and so theater ought to be?

BL: Where people are that's right. I wanted to get more engaged with what I cared about just personally.

I told this story the other day. In the Theater Club, we were housed in a stable, had been a carriage house, and the stage manager's booth was in the hayloft over the stable. So, I could look down straight down onto the theater onto the stage, and the audience was in a sense, underneath me. It was an old building and not particularly, air airtight, and we were doing this show and there was a protest going on over at the Vietnam embassy against the war. We are doing the middle of this show and the tear gas starts to seep into the theater and we're going, “Oh my God”, and I, at the time I was like, why am I in here? Why am I not out there? I got a job. I got a family. I've got to take care, okay. We got to worry, and so stop the play. We can't do a play with tear gas. But that anomaly of being in something I thought was important, but then the thing that was important is outside inside the building, and I'm trying to figure out where am I, what am I doing?

BC: Part Two: Remembering the Revolution.

BL: So in the midst of trying to figure out how to make my life into the film world, I'm tending bar and I'm riding a motorcycle, taking deliveries from one place to another.

And somebody says something about the people's bicentennial commission, and Jeremy Rifkin, a man who has become quite a star in his own, as a public intellectual, had this quest that 1976 was an opportunity for American citizens to reacquaint themselves with the American revolution and what it means to be revolutionary. And that wonderful anecdote of FDR going to the daughters of the American revolution, doing a talk to them on one fancy day and started his talk, “my fellow revolutionaries” ... Those places where the, American aristocracy is not cognizant of its own. Heritage.

 So, Jeremy wanted to uplift all of that and turn things upside down. So, I went over there and said, I'd be happy to, to lick stamps or do whatever you're doing, and I had some, personal interest in the, Appalachian Frontier at the time of the revolution. How that is still defining of people, there’s the East Coast City, and then there's the East Coast Mountain people. And they're really very different people, all up and down the coast not just a one part like up in Maine or in upstate New York.

So, Jeremy, said, what are you doing? I said, I'm tending bar and I'm theater maker, but I'm looking at film. He said, you'd do theater. I said, yeah, he said, would you write a play about the American revolution? and I said, oh my God, I'll give it a shot. And I just started; it was crazy. I found some actors and we played around with improvisation, and the idea of stock characters. I’m not the traditional European Del Arte, Comedia Del Arte characters, but on the premise of that, looking what are the stock characters of American history, American culture.

And I got into Pecos Bill and I got into, Yankee Doodle, and I got into Miss Liberty and I got into a big daddy, corporate structure and big mama corporate structure. And off we went, and a friend of mine caught the fever and wrote a script for us, Michael Christopher. And we did this piece called AmeriComedia.

And, it had started on the back of a pickup truck that we took down to Lafayette square in front of the White House, and people liked it and we had a good time and we played on the mall and then developed it with Michael into a full-length play and got a school bus and we started touring the East Coast, and all along I was going where the people were that didn’t have a theater. I was going to, union halls and churches and high schools, gyms, and wherever people were interested in a story about American history, American revolution, three years before, 1976.

And so, we had, six or eight months of touring from here to there and I learned about the Highlander Center in Tennessee.

BC : For those of you who are not familiar with the Highlander Center, it's a relatively small organization in Tennessee that has had an enormous impact on the American social and political landscape. At its heart, it's really a training and support center for grassroots community organizers. But also, a movement hotspot that has played a seminal role in the development and growth of both America's labor and civil rights movements, providing training for many activists, including members of the student nonviolent coordinating committee, Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and John Lewis.

Originally named the Highlander Folk School by its founder, Myles Horton. The center has always regarded movement work as encompassing the social political and cultural aspects of community life. Now when it's 88th year Highlander, despite the burning of its executive officers under suspicious circumstances in 2019 continues its work from its facility in New Market, Tennessee.

BL: And I found myself at Highlander and, I discovered that there was a group of artists, extraordinary people, John McCutcheon, among them, who were choosing to live in the communities of Appalachia, in order to, connect with their music and get their music connected with what was happening in Appalachia around the strip mining and union, work with the coal, brown lung and black lung, and corporate ownership of common land.

And these were artists who were like me, but they were doing it. They weren't thinking about it. They were doing it and making their music and their work in the...

Justin Laing: - Taking Back The LandJustin Laing

Before starting Hillombo in 2017, Justin worked as a Senior Program Officer of Arts & Culture at The Heinz Endowments for more than a decade. His work focused on small and midsized arts organizations, out-of-school time arts education, and Black arts organizations, with a particular interest in participatory grantmaking. He came to philanthropy having worked for ten years as the Assistant Director of Nego Gato, Inc, an Afro Brazilian Music, Dance, and Martial Arts company where he taught, performed, and ran the day-to-day operations. Justin has a BA in Black Studies from the University of Pittsburgh and a Masters Degree in Public Management from Carnegie Mellon University.

Justin serves as the co-chair of ArtsinHD, an arts planning and creation process in Pittsburgh’s Hill District to support the neighborhood’s master plan and mark the neighborhood as a place for liberatory Black culture. Justin is the son of Susan and Clarence Laing, the father of Kufere, Etana, and Adeyemi Laing, and a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

Threshold Questions And Delicious Quotes

What does "taking back the land mean?

the idea ... was ...from a person named Amilcar Cabral. This idea that you work in small territories. [...] you try to take back the land, like square mile by square mile. So, I was working in one major place called the Hill District... And culture was a critical piece to liberate our minds and the way that European culture oppressed black people was through this indoctrination of its art, its culture is everything is being superior. And so, culture had to be part of the strategy.

You talk about working constructively with the tensions that are present in many organizations. What does this entail?

So, one of the ways that I've tried to do that is by naming some of these frameworks, whether it's white supremacy, culture, what fragility, white privilege, and like you said, trying to bring that into the organization so that, that can be part of the official speak. Because again, going back to that black studies beginning, there was a whole lot of language that wasn't allowed that I didn't see being taken advantage of the nonprofit arts sector at all.

You see racism and capitalism as intrinsically connected in our society. How does this play out in your work with nonprofit arts organizations?

...we're supposed to be the bravest ones, the creatives... and I've been starting to see, the class contradictions battle inside an organization. Cause you're raising issues that people have different interests in and I think that’s, that's a bit of the tension that you're facing, one thing I've been trying to understand more is the intersections of patriarchy, capitalism, racism inside organizations. And to the extent that we are talking about racism, there's some level of tension. I think the extent that we include capitalism in that, there's even more tension about that.

What is the meta-message of a Euro-centric culture?

...all of the things that are happening when you go into an orchestra performance. And the way that you step into space and you engage the regal-ness of it, and the carpet, and the chandelier's and everything is sending a message that you are now in sacred space. And I think if you take this idea of ideology, that is its own aggression, Transcript

Bill Cleveland: [00:00:00] Hey there. Ponder, if you will, a few unlikely juxtapositions: Capoeira the Brazilian martial arts, spiritual and dance practice, Karl Marx, The Pittsburgh Penguins. How about the Heinz Endowments, white supremacy anti-racism, and the Minnesota Orchestra?

If you're curious, keep listening. This is Change the Story, Change the World, a Chronicle of Art and Community Transformation. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Now, Justin Laing is a pioneer of sorts in that he helps arts and philanthropic organizations examine their place In the systems that perpetuate structural racism in our country. In our conversation with him, I liken this to wrestling with a tiger. Which is probably unfair to tigers, given their beauty and endangered status. Nonetheless, Justin has taken on a potent and dangerous force in his life's work. His ability to do this well, has as much to do with his courage as it does his unique capacity to help the people in the organizations he works with accept the inescapable link between owning the hard truths of their histories, and fulfilling the promises and ideals that embody their missions.

At the end of the day, Justin, like many of our guests, is a creative change agent. And like them, he brings an interesting mix of skills, experiences, and sensibilities to the task.

We hear about all that and more in our conversation, which took place shortly after the historic 2020 election.

Part One: Hillombo

So, let me begin with my first more basic question, which is, when you think about your path in the world, particularly right now, what is it that, that you do?

What's your work as you see it?

Justin Laing: [00:01:59] I think ultimately my work is about trying to live my highest purpose. And so that's still always being, revealed to me more and understanding more about that as I go, and then in terms of some of the things that I'm doing now, my work is about trying to partner and work with people around the ways that culture reproduces oppression, the ways that we can use it to disrupt, ways we can use it to engage with it, to create steps towards something that our much more proud to be a part of, and that's the work that I'm trying to figure out.

BC: [00:02:38] And given your history beginning working with Nego Gato, how did you come to that, and where do you see the question of culture and anti-racist work coming together?

 JL: [00:02:54] So I would say I really came to Capoeira out of, the black studies tradition. So, I was a black studies major at the University of Pittsburgh and had some really important professors there who were also artists, Dennis Brutus, who's a really great poet out of South Africa, and Rob Penny, who's a poet, a playwright out of the Hill district. And then other teachers who are educators like Dr. Barbara Sizemore. And so I was influenced to see education and art and culture all as connected in the work I wanted, to do. And I was always surprised by how much information there was at the university that felt like it'd be really useful, but it was really not in the general public, and that seemed just so designed, that you'd have this plethora of information and it was as though it didn't exist, or it wasn't well known. And I grew up in a house where this was all also totally unknown when I was a teenager, a gentleman named Peter Claire gave me a book called There is a River by Vincent Harding, which really changed my whole understanding of history and all these things. I did not know. It was shocking to me around our histories of black people and the connection between various different pieces.

So, I was with a group that was trying to create an African cultural center at the University of Pittsburgh. We weren't successful in that, but the group stayed together, and when I came across, Capoeira due to a friend of mine named Shaka, I thought, oh, this would be great for me to learn personally. And this really is a connection that I'm trying to stay in more as well, which is around gender and masculinity. Cause they're real men can fight, which I could and was afraid to do. So, like a martial art, like this was going to really shore me up, so I was going to do this and I was going to get it all done at one time

 And so, I decided to start doing this capoeira but then I would also bring it to other people could learn from it and they could join it and I asked Gato, “Oh, Can I go take us back in Pittsburgh.” And I just assumed that I could, because Pittsburgh had a thousand dojo, no, it's not there, but if you organize people, I'll come.

So, then I thought, oh, this could be one of the things that the village for an African culture center does, and it would also be a way that I would learn this Capoeira, so it became this part of our programming and the idea there was again, take it from a person named Amilcar Cabral.

 This idea that you work in small territories. You work in [...] you try to take back the land, like square mile by square mile. So, I was working in one major place, like called the Hill District and I stayed there and I still, my office is still there. And culture was a critical piece to liberate our minds and the way that European culture oppressed black people was through this indoctrination of its art, its culture is everything is being superior. And so, culture had to be part of the strategy. And with the idea that Capoeira's story was also thinking you could embody, and it would also say that you could engage with people on it. You didn't have to talk it, but you could do it. That is how I got interested in and started working in Capoeira and began doing little demonstrations with the group and doing classes. And that's how I saw those things as connected.

BC: [00:05:59] So now you have a contemporary practice, with your organization Hillombo and yeah. Do those roots still speak to your work?

JL: [00:06:08] They do well for sure in the terms of, the name Hillombo. Hillombo is taken as a merger of two words, Chilombo and the Hill district, the Chilombo’s being these places that Africans escaped and built these freer communities in Brazil, some lasting a hundred years in the midst of the Portuguese colonizing and enslaving in Brazil.

So, the idea was that this company would be still interested in that same idea. So, it's still in the same neighborhood that I was talking about. And it's still trying to take on the role of arts in marketing the Hill District as a place of black liberatory culture, and we're doing the planning process for that, and that's still there.

So, I'm doing that work now, and that, so I would say there's still a... you can see a line through there to that. And then, what's changed is as I was working with Nego Gato and ran into a ceiling. Both in terms of some of the relationships in the organization, but then also in terms of money, and then went to go work for the Heinz endowments and in that ended up working more clearly for a predominantly white organization, and although I can, I'll say, I think when you work in the arts, in the nonprofit arts, You may have your own company, but I still think you still work for philanthropy, even when you have your own, you know what I'm saying?

So I think I worked closely for them, but I still think I worked for them even when I was running an organization in part, just because of the influence that they have on the choice that we make. And now I would say that where there's the difference I think is that now I work with many more predominantly white arts organizations on things like anti-racism and other people might call it sometimes DEI work and that work I think is different, and I think that's related to the economy of our art sector.

BC: [00:07:57] So say more about what I call the three-legged stool, which is the foundation, the organization, and the audience or the community.

 JL: [00:08:07] I just think that if you look at the work that Holly Sidford, as done over the last eight or so years and see who has money in the art sector, to hire people like myself, it's predominantly white organizations. So, I think that has an influence on where I end up working. You know what I mean?

And so...

BC: [00:08:27] So, one of the things you talk about- I've gone through... I like your blog. Yeah, some blogs are I guess what I would call is too shiny. I feel like you're talking to me, so

JL: [00:08:41] Oh good. I appreciate that. Thanks, Bill

 BC: [00:08:44] Part Two Wrestling with Tigers.

00:08:48] So, you talk about bringing frames like white fragility, white supremacy, and critical race theory into the real-life mechanism of a nonprofit or a foundation into the boardroom, where the human beings who hold the influence and power actually in it viscerally. The image that came to my mind was a tiger and a tail. And maybe there's a capoeira metaphor for the way you have to work in that environment in order to do something other than give people a pass cause they went through the workshop or feel insulted. Something in between that gives people an opportunity to actually calm the tiger maybe.

JL: [00:09:33] Yeah. is the tiger in this case here, is this tiger-like, like racial capitalist part or something like that, or something?

BC: [00:09:39] Power influence. I don't need to change, so why are you here?

JL: [00:09:43] Yeah, that's for sure. I think if you, a few thoughts about that, I've definitely been interested in this adaptive leadership framework. I'm feeling like that has some really valuable ways of working and I just did a shoutout to Eric Martin, and he has a book out now, Your Leadership Moment.

When I was working at Heinz, I had a chance to spend some time being a part of a group that was trying to think through the adaptive leadership model, and one of its core ideas is exactly how I think you were offering it to me, which is there's this top level of tension that one can create and a lower level of tension. And below it no one pays attention and above it, the larger system will shut down the work. And so, you're trying to find that level of tension.

So, one of the ways that I've tried to do that is by naming some of these frameworks, whether it's white supremacy, culture, what fragility, white privilege, and like you said, trying to bring that into the organization so that, that can be part of the official speak. Because again, going back to that black studies beginning, there was a whole lot of language that wasn't allowed that I didn't see being taken advantage of the nonprofit arts sector at all.

It was as though no one was even aware, which of course we are aware, we're just ignoring. And usually, you're partnering with somebody who feels the same way. So, I would say that's also part of that issue is that I'm not alone in that. There's a number of people who, I think, who feel similarly, and I think where I end up going is where someone's (saying) “I could use another partner. I think this way too, but I'm somewhat isolated in my organization, and I could use someone who could work with me, maybe bring some credibility to assist.” But that's ultimately what I find I end up doing is I end up partnering with people who have this, just to stay with the tiger analogy for a second. I think that they're also working on that.

 BC: [00:11:31] But that boardroom, often the reason they want you there is cause they want you to sit next to them in that boardroom. And there's a lot of people around the table who are going, “What's this about?”

JL: [00:11:43] Yeah. Yeah. And I'll tell you that this, go back again to again, to the things that we're not allowed to talk about and things we're not allowed to say.

And we're supposed to be the bravest ones, the creatives... and I've been starting to see, the class contradictions battle inside an organization. Cause you're raising issues that people have different interests in and I think that’s, that's a bit of the tension that you're facing, one thing I've been trying to understand more is the intersections of patriarchy, capitalism, racism inside organizations. And to the extent that we are talking about racism, there's some level of tension. I think the extent that we include capitalism in that, there's even more tension about that.

BC: [00:12:30] Oh yeah, especially in a foundation, right?

JL: [00:12:33] Yes. At this point I don't do as much work in foundations anymore actually. My work has actually moved. When I first left the (Heinz) Endowments that's primarily where I was working. But I'm not working in that many foundations anymore. Actually, I'm mainly working with arts organization. So, that probably says something about that drift.

BC: [00:12:50] So I'm going to ask you to tell a story. But before I do that, I was thinking about your work. And I've been, the people who came to mind is a kind of interesting cast of characters. There's a thing in the New York times Magazine, where somebody gets asked, “Who do you want to have dinner with?” And the cast of characters that came to mind when I was thinking about you were James McBride and Octavia Butler.  

JL: [00:13:13] Is the author Color of Water?

BC: [00:13:14] Yeah, and then the book I just finished, which is The Good Lord Bird, and here are artists who are story storytellers, and they're taking on the same things you talked about that we're not supposed to talk about. But they bring them through characters, through drama, through humor, through a narrative, [and] through conflict. And actually, another that came to mind, Ta Nehisi Coates who just tried his hand at fiction. And, having heard him talk about it, for a particular reason, because there are certain ways you can say things in fiction that are harder in the “sitting around the board room” conversation.

So the question is, is there a central role to...

Ponder, if you will, a few unlikely juxtapositions: Capoeira the Brazilian martial arts, spiritual and dance practice, Karl Marx, and The Pittsburgh Penguins. How about the Heinz Endowments, white supremacy anti-racism, and the Minnesota Orchestra? If you're curious, keep listening to Change the Story, Change the World

Episode 20 : Xavier DphrepaulezzFantastic Negrito / Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? REDUX

On March 14th our friend and Change the Story guest Xavier Dephrepaulezz, also known as Fantastic Negrito will hear if he has garnered his 3rd Grammy in 5 years for his 2020 release Have you Lost Your Mind Yet.

To help nudge the stars into alignment for Xavier we are re-broadcasting our Episode 6 conversation with him. This Episode not only includes great music and, of course, FANTASTIC stories, but also, an inspiring dialogue on next steps for the coming community revival.

Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes:

What is the danger of scapegoating?

Well, of course, that's the biggest lie ever sold, not told. There should be a class on that. That is how every civilization has controlled other nations and its populace, from Genghis Khan. The Chinese say Genghis Khan was the bad guy that’s going to get us (he actually did get you). You know that. Yet the Romans did it. You know, everybody does. We do it.

Is music a change agent?

Music's a change agent, film is a change agent, art is a change agent, a bakery's a change agent, a coffeehouse is a change agent, a conversation is a change agent. They're all change agents, but the most important change agent is in your heart. That's the thing that changes the world. Change your heart and change the world.

What do white folks and black folks need to talk about?

But we got to at some point talk to each other. I want to do, a town hall like this. And I want the white people to stand the fuck up and say, you know what? I'm kind of scared of you guys. We need that shit, and the black people; don't you don’t call the person a racist.

What's next for Oakland?

What I'm doing right now is trying to build this hotel and this whole all these blocks in the California hotel, boutique hotel. The first African American town.Links

Have you Lost Your Mind Yet: Fantastic Negrito's latest album

A Letter to Fear: YouTube link to a cut from Xavier's second album, Please Don't Be Dead. which won the 2019 Grammy for Best Contemporary Blues Album.

The Suit that Won't Come Off. : YouTube link to a cut from Please Don't Be Dead.

Watts Prophets: Legendary west coast pioneers of the new music form with ancient roots, that has come to be called rap. Amde Hamilton, Otis O'Solomon, and Richard Dedeaux first met at the Watts Writers Workshop. Fusing music with jazz and funk roots, and rapid-fire, spoken-word poetry, they created a sound has deeply influenced the course of music and poetry in the US and the world. They released two albums, 1969's The Black Voices: On the Streets in Watts and 1971's Rappin' Black in a White World, which established a strong tendency toward social commentary and a reputation for militancy. (See also: Art & Upheaval, W. Cleveland, NYU Press, Chapters 11-13)

Native American Community Development Institute: A Minneapolis based community deveopment organization that was "founded on the belief that all American Indian people have a place, purpose and a future strengthened by sustainable community development. NACDI initiates projects that benefit the Native community, often in partnership with other Indigenous-led organizations."

Transcript

Bill Cleveland:  It's early 2015, and I'm sitting in my living room watching the rain and wind turn my windows into a drip collage of streaking grays and greens. The phone rings, its daughter, Heather. As usual, she's quick. She says, “I just shot you a text with a link. Just watch and listen and I'll call you later”.

It was a YouTube page with the NPR logo on a frozen frame of four musicians crammed into what looked like an abandoned freight elevator behind a small makeshift desk. As I move to click, I'm thinking, “Desk? Oh, yeah, tiny desk.” Then this hit me. 

Music plays

I'm knocked out. This was a one mike, one take video with the pulsing power of a locomotive. That tall, skinny guy up front with the voice that stretches like a rubber band says, “Get through the day, don't drown.” But I'm drowning --- in a good way--- in the music. 

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story Change the World. I'm Bill Cleveland.

Part One: Griot

Heather tells me his name is Xavier. XD lives down the street from Heather, with his wife and kids, and from time to time, their families hang out. I thank her for the gift of connection. Since winning the tiny desk, things have more than taken off for Examiner, who goes by Fantastic Negrito on stage. Two Grammys for best contemporary blues albums in 2016 and 2018 have fueled non-stop global touring and an international fan base. 

It's also given Xavier a platform as a change maker in his beloved hometown of Oakland, California. Over the past few years, Xavier and I have connected over both music and a shared passion for the power of imagination and story to make a difference for struggling people and communities. Xavier's own story exemplifies this belief and commitment. One of 14 children, Xavier, grew up with an obvious musical bent and a seemingly smooth road to musical notoriet. But a near fatal car crash that put him in a three-week coma, and left him with a disfigured hand, provided a hardscrabble detour that has spawned the birth of Fantastic Negrito’s one of a kind explosion of 21st century roots music.

We met together at his studio a few weeks before the pandemic tilt. Actually, I was just realizing the last time we were together, you were doing the same thing for the second album as you're doing for the third. So, I'm going to fire away with some questions and look, Xavier. Yes. What is it you do in the world?

Xavier Dphrepaulezz: I feel like I serve as a healer. I feel like I serve as a person in the community that has something to contribute to the narrative, that has something to contribute to the human saga. I feel like I'm an artist and musician. I tell stories that I hope are helpful to people. My new record is called Have You Lost Your Mind Yet? And a lot of it is based on people. My other albums were based on this big thing that I'm trying to fight the system, proliferation of pills, and last days of Oakland’s gentrification, and this big thing that's happening. But this record is about people, and it's the hardest record I've ever made because it's not something big that you're fighting, that you're imagining is your problem, your nemesis. It's the people, right? The community. It's the engineer you're working with. It's your buddy. It's yourself. So, I write stories about people, places, and things, and hope that they are contributing then medicinal to people's lives. 

BC: So, you have told your life's story many times eloquently. But, there are many musicians who would not articulate their work in the way that you just did. Talk to me how you came to that definition of your work.

XD: Well, through a lot of failure. Did a lot of trials, jubilation, doubt, crime. Yeah, a lot of really negative things and overcoming a lot of obstacles. You know there's going to be obstacles, but the problem is, how do we deal with it? You know, I mean. So, I think I've arrived here especially. Have you lost your mind yet? Because, you know, we're now in this period man, we're just getting all this information, and I don't know if we're really meant to handle all this information, but I think people are there's record levels of anxiety and mental illness. It's not the mental illness of people walking down the street talking to themselves. Those people are probably actually OK, because in living in this insane video game world that we're living in, where we're justifying who we are based on, how many views do you have? How many likes you have? Well, how many followers do you have? We're now validating ourselves based on those statistics, which are really quite irrelevant because how many followers did Hitler have? He had a lot of. Yes, he did. How many followers did Michael Jackson have? And he and he got on the floor. Yes. You know, I mean, so how many followers in Prince that many followers get to the younger generation? How many followers did Juice World have? The guy who died, Twenty-one years old, riding in his own parade with 70 pounds of marijuana and he overdoses on Promethazine, dizzying or whatever that is. I mean, heck, out of that answers a question. 

BC: No, it does, and actually, I mean, the wit the way you describe it is that you've gone from the from the big story, the broad story, the universal story here, the obvious confrontations that we're having on a regular basis on the front page of the newspaper, and now you're looking, I mean, in essence…

XD: Now I’m looking at you.

BC: Yes. And you're also… what you're doing, is you're going hyper local…

XD: I like that because then the ball's in your court.

BC: Yeah, well, it's also touched. You can touch and feel and see. So, here's a question related to that. At the end of the day, what is it that you want to have happen as a result of your work?

XD: What I would love to have happen is to help bring about some balance, because I think that in the end is what it's all about. I'm a parent, I'm a member of this human community, and I would like to do what I think human beings feel most fulfilled. When they contribute, and have a voice, and hopefully help make a difference, and hopefully all the things that have not stopped me because there's been a lot of things that were supposed to, I can now use them as a means to teach our youth, and that's I think that's what this life is. It's about we live, we get beat up, we go through it, we go through, and then we're older than we can help. The others come, and we can make that road easier.

BC: There's a word for that. You know, Griot that is adapted by many cultures who have basically recognized that in their traditions, the older you get, the more you might have to pass on to one who is younger.

 XD: Well, you're more valuable, but, yes, you know, I don't think we do that here in the weather. Well, I think that that's you know, you got to live outside of the box if you want to be successful in America. Sure. It's a great country, but I’ll tell you what, you better live outside the box here.

BC: So, in in your work, how do you know when the thing you just described, which is making a contribution and bringing potentially some balance? How do you know when that's happening?

 XD: I know it's happening when I don't fear the kids walking down the street, because I know I've done my part and you can feel the vibration because we fear these kids, these kids that come in, they look scary now that they sag and all that. You know, I feel like when I feel kind of comfortable, I feel like, you know, this is something much bigger than all this stuff that's happening, and I know I've done my part where I can look them in the eye I like this. I'm doing my part. I'm not scared of you, I love you, and I'm here for you. You understand? I've said and I know it when I can look in the mirror. I know it. I can sleep at night when I don't have a guilty conscience. I know it when I'm not judging people who haven't been as fortunate as I am, which is a quite popular thing to do these days. Yeah and I'm the hardest person I've got to face every day here. So long as I know that I'm doing it right. You know, I'm on asshole in the room, you know, and I've got to get past this dude and make him make the right decision. But that's how it is here. I don't fear these so-called predators on the streets. 

BC: So, when you're in the music, do you see the visceral evidence of this kind of change in front of you?

 XD: Well, I don't think I see it. I think I feel it. The feeling one thing about music or creativity is you feel it because it's you're channeling into these… This is…I didn't do nothing. I need to say that I ain't done nothing. These seeds are planted a long time ago. I come from a whole long line of people man. that laid this down way before me. And I didn’t even know all of ‘em. People laid this shit down, I've said it before in Black Panthers laid it down. The Hells Angels laid it down. Whether you like them or not, they laid it down. The Grateful Dead laid it down. Sly laid it down, you know Too $hort laid it down. The guy at Cal Berkeley in the 80s who got me off the street and had me boxing and laid it down. The people that came here in the 30s from the Dust Bowl, they laid down, the Chinese people that came to build railroads. This has been getting laid down for us for so long. And then you could connect with those vibrations. Then you can feel your purpose and can feel life happening and when you touch it, that you're in pretty good shape. Cause there's a lot of protection in that context. 

BC: So, the image that comes into my mind is an archaeologist going through layers and layers and layers of stories, of stories layered on top of one another, not emerging from nowhere.

XD: From nowhere. That's bullshit. People make that up are insane. 

BC: But they're entrepreneurs. 

 XD: Yeah, you're right there. I just had an engineer I'm working with is from Argentina and he just said that this morning. He said there's a lot of things imposed on us that are people who want to make a lot of money. Isn't this young Argentinean dude? It's the universe. But we know, therefore, we can't get out of our own fucking way. There's this fear because I'm scared of you and you kind of scared of me, and you come from here, and I come from there, and they tell us “you’ve got to watch out for these black people”, and “hey man, the white people are trying to kill you” and “you getting the flu shot. Oh, no, don’t do that”, “immunization, oh no those white people, they are coming to get you”, “hey the Mexicans are coming” […] You got a lot of that shit, you got a lot of that shit. And that's a bunch of fucking bullshit. 

BC: It is. 

XD: Excuse my language.

BC: No, no, no. 

XD: It really is, and so we got to fight that shit. Yes. And that shit is us. Yes. I got to look in the mirror. I got to go, man. I got to say have you then your mind, I’ve got to do that. Because when we can do that, when I can talk to you and look at you and shake your hand, when I can have dinner with you…How come can can’t have dinner? Why? Because they go “oh fuck, I’ve got to clean this, oh shit. Listen, I got to text this, and I got to do this. Oh shit. Wait, how many likes do I have…” And we don't even talk to each other. We don't look at each other.

BC: So, here's an interesting thing to think about. The human species evolved as a as a mechanism for cooperation. That's how we're wired.

XD: It's how we are wired. 

BC: It is how we survived. As we become more isolated into the world of likes. Which is not a relationship. 

XD It's slavery. It's called voluntary slavery. 

BC: It is the tyranny of comfort and pseudo information and pseudo relationships. 

XD: Pseudo information is the word, because it is not information.

My dad was like, there's no television in his African accent, “you can not watch television, you read the book”. So I've read books for hours laying there, fucking reading books and I got to know some stuff through it. But now it “Siri, tell me, what's the capital of Uzbekistan. You kno, Pakistan. You know, I mean, it's I think that's bullshit. It's not knowledge. So then let's talk about Uzbekistan. You can’t. Who are they? How they become? you know. I mean, you know, there's no reason. You said it. Pseudo information. 

BC: And they have children. They love each other. They have families. They're struggling with the exact same question. How do I make my family safe and how do I thrive in the world?

 XD: Can I tell you man, last year I had six continents, and I can't tell you how real that is. It's a real. The same thing. Same. 

Part Two: A Letter to Fear

BC: Your songs are stories. Okay, so can I just have mentioned some of your stories here. So, who is Benny Walker? 

XD: It's actually my uncle Benny, who is a notorious… It’s my grandmother's brother, so that’s called my granduncle. After that, whatever his grandmother brother, he's a tall good-looking dude, mulatto, looking to from deep southern Virginia. Those are the summers I used to spend in deep southern Virginia, which really gave me a lot of my sound later. But Uncle Benny was a slick dude, and man he liked the ladies, liked to drink painted on mustache. Yeah, he was his character. Very quiet, very soft spoken. He moved up to Harlem and was doing all kinds of stuff there. Owned a hotel in Harlem. He was doing all kinds of deals on the side. So, Uncle Benny, you know I got all these people, characters that I grew up with. You couldn't write this dude into a movie. They wouldn't believe.

The greatest hater of all time. He talked to Grandma like, I was in shit like this boy...

Episode 19: Mary Cohen - Freeing Silenced VoicesThreshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

How can singing a song help change the mind and the heart?

...the thing about singing that's really valuable for me at least is it's embodied. We're using our breath. We're using our voice. We're using our ears. We're feeling the vibrations in our bodies. So being able to do that with other people is super- it can be powerful. One of the students in the peace building class last spring shared such an insightful comment. She said, if you're in there singing together with your eyes closed, we don't know which voice is going to be walking out of the [00:31:00] prison at the end of the rehearsal, in which voices be staying in the prison.

What is ubuntu, and how does it relate to prison choir work?

Ubuntu Is that beautiful concept from South Africa, meaning a lot of things, a person as a person through other people. Desmond Tutu defined it as, "my humanity is inextricably bound with your humanity". ...But we need to know who we are and be at peace with ourselves in order to step forward and find our sense of common humanity with others...you can only imagine a choir has songs with lyrics and some of those lyrics may resonate with one person and not so much with someone else, particularly if it's songs that have some kind of a religious connection. However, if we [00:12:00] follow deeply the idea of Ubuntu, we ideally can sing these songs because we're looking at our relationship with the larger communal body when we're singing together.

What do the Oakdale Prison, the Soweto Gospel Choir, and the TV show Friends have in common?

I found a song called How Shall We Come Together by ... Maggie Wheeler. Do you know Maggie? ... on the TV show Friends, Maggie played the role of Janice. The character that would go "oh my God", that's Maggie! ...So, I contact Maggie completely out of the blue to ask permission to use her song. And after a series of conversations, Maggie's like "Mary, you want to use my song in a prison with the Soweto gospel choir? I'm coming to Iowa".

How can a prison choir contribute to prison abolition, to excarceration?

You know, we have 3,144 different stories of prison growth, one for every County. So this imagination that the abolition thinkers are requiring of us needs to [00:34:00] happen at a very local level, and the way that I've tried to apply it through the building class I've started, and through the work we do with the choir is that local space of creating the healing needs to happen internally, each person developing a sense of inner peace building. That's the project, the primary project we do in this class, and in the Oakdale Choir, we've actually done it these 10 years through the writing exchange changes where the choir members write reflective components and they share it with one another and that broadens their awareness of what people are experiencing, what their stories are related to each choir season, the songs we're doing, the original songs that have been created.Transcript

Bill Cleveland: [00:00:00] I'm curious, is there something more to singing than just voices moving the melody and the words out into the world? Can the simple act of singing a song together, turn a deeply feared "other" into an "us"? Mary Cohen thinks so, actually, she knows, so because she's been doing just that for 11 years at Iowa's Oakdale Prison.

This is Change the Story, Change the World, a chronicle of art and community transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland.

As you're probably aware the us has one of the world's highest COVID death rates. Sadly, we also bear the distinction of the highest per capita prisoner rate, by far, leaving Turkmenistan, Russia, and China in the dust. The enormity of our prison population, we have a little over 4% of the globe's people in 25% of its prisoners, [00:01:00] make the hidden in plain sight, “what prison problem," attitude of many Americans, hard to fathom.

But not really, because when you look a little harder and check out which communities are most effected by mass incarceration, the undeniable fact is the two thirds of the us prison population are people of color. In Iowa. Where the population is 90% Caucasian. Their per capita incarceration rate for blacks is nine times that of whites.

If there ever was a perfect storm for building an us versus them society, well, that's it. Mary Cohen knows this and has dedicated herself to helping heal this horrible wound. This is no mean task, of course. So, it's a good thing that she's a dynamo, and takes her work inside very seriously as a musician, as an educator and as a scholar. Suffice it to say her prison work is not a side gig. But as daunting as it is, [00:02:00] it's not a heavy lift either. This is because, in addition to being a talented artist, she's a joyful force of nature. But don't take my word for it because she tells it best.

Part One: Finding Ubunto

Hello, Hello

Mary Cohen: here I am. I'm here. I how's Bill today?

BC: Doing good. Good.

MC: [00:02:27] By the way, I'll show you one little picture since I'm changing my backdrop. This is what the Oakdale choir looks like. So, we have the purple shirts are the outside singers, green shirts inside singers, and this is a concert we had in the prison gym back when we got together and sang, in the same room.

Hi. how are you today?

BC: [00:02:54] Well, it used to be, that was a pro forma question. These days it's a [00:03:00] book, Mary, thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. And so our goal here is just to add your story to the other stories that are being collected in the growing basket of Change the Story, Change the World.

So, I'm going to begin by asking you the simple question that often is complicated, and that is what is it you do in the world?

MC: [00:03:28] That is a simple and complicated question. I think I'm evolving in my answer to that question all the time, especially now. A simple answer might be connecting people and allowing people to express themselves.

BC: [00:03:44] And, connection. By what means, Mary?

MC: [00:03:48] Great question. So, connection through group singing, movement, self-expression, song writing, writing exchanges; sometimes as simple [00:04:00] as I know, 'person a' in Ireland doing this activity, and I know this 'person who's basically is in Canada now. They both are so similar. I think they should meet each other, and I'll send an introductory email. I love doing that kind of thing, and I feel like I'm doing that quite a lot.

The larger connection, to be super specific to career is I'm working on a book. The current draft of the book title is Freeing Silenced Voices: Music Making in US Prisons

Many times, when people hear about the idea of music in prisons, the default thought is, "Oh, great. A program inside a prison. A program to help people who are incarcerated deal with their time". And maybe that is part of what we're doing as Beth said, when you interviewed Beth, we are about transforming the broader society. So when I say connection, it's connecting people who are not in prison to realize we have more in common with people in prison, [00:05:00] than not in common. So how can we do that? Good question. I don't know. we're trying.

BC: [00:05:06] But that picture you showed, which had yellow and purple t-shirts, which designated people from the outside and people from the inside, which is unique in a lot of the work that happens in prison. Art making, as a way for people inside and outside to find common ground. Often, it's an outside instructor or teacher and everybody else is an insider. Talk a little bit about that connective tissue that you build in that choir space?

Absolutely!

MC: [00:05:41] First of all, I want to give credit to amazing woman named Elvira Voth. At age 70. Elvira began the East Hills singers in 1995, and in 2002, I was reading the Sunday arts page in Kansas City on notice that the East Hill singers were performing a few miles from my house. And I went to one at a Lutheran [00:06:00] church just out of curiosity, I had friends involved arts in prisons in Kansas. And what she does is she had a group of outside volunteers come the day of the concert to meet a group of men in custody at the Lansing minimum security prison in Kansas. To see the two groups together and think about the philosophy and the general idea of a group of people that have been accused of committing a crime, singing in unison and harmony with people from that community was just... [it] really blew me away. When I decided to earn my PhD at the university of Kansas from 2003 to seven, I spent a lot of time in prison, literally and figuratively examining her project. So coming to the University of Kansas and researching to prepare to start the Oakdale choir, I followed her model.

So to get back to your question, what is it about that connectivity? It was amazing Bill, the first three weeks of the [00:07:00] project in 2009, when the choir began we've always had a reflective writing exchange in addition to singing together and songwriting together. Three weeks into the season, one of the inside singers he said, "being in prison is especially hard for a lot of people because there is so much negativism. I've learned through our practices and meeting people from the outside world that we are human."

 The fact that these people have come in has developed a sense of his self-esteem, with both worthiness and competence. So, I did one research study that examined that because if your self-esteem is only based on competence, and then you don't feel successful at a particular skill, that's not going to help. And if you only feel self-esteem from a sense of worthiness, there's a parallel between narcissism and just [00:08:00] problematic behavior. So, this project has allowed the men in the prison and to find that sense of self-esteem of worthiness and competence both.

And the connections are combined, both the outside and the inside singers, they're all volunteers, but all the people together, basically created our own communal body. By singing together, and the project started in 2009, so this would have been our 25th season because we had three seasons in 2009 and then two seasons every year after that.

I just want to acknowledge and express my gratitude to you, Bill, because you probably remember what I came to Iowa in 2007 and eight, we had a phone call trying to figure out how do I do this? What's the way to make this work? I've shared this with other people, your brilliant suggestion of “Mary don't build a summer camp, build a village.” I took that to heart. And the other thing I want to thank you for one of your articles that you wrote, In the eighties, the article was called Common Sense and Common [00:09:00] Ground: Survival Skills for Artists Going into Institutions. For the first four years of the Oakdale Choir, I had the outside volunteers read that article prior to coming in, to learn how to build them mutually respectful relationships with the people in the prison.

BC: [00:09:15] Thanks for that, Mary, and it's interesting ... When I talk to people that are intensely involved in a practice like you is all of the relationships that are necessary for this to occur in the community that you build so that the end result-- beautiful music and working hard to blend different perspectives, different stories, different voices, together in a way that transcends the significant differences that exist. And actually one thing that I noticed that we haven't common also is this idea of Ubuntu could you [00:10:00] talk about that? I think it's related to what you mentioned in terms of connection.

MC: [00:10:04] Absolutely. Ubuntu Is that beautiful concept from South Africa, meaning a lot of things, a person as a person through other people. Desmond Tutu defined it as, "my humanity is inextricably bound with your humanity". In fact, Kathy Roma in Ohio, she's named one of her choirs Ubuntu. She's been leading prison choirs for over 30 years.

So ubuntu though, I think definitely comes to the idea that we were talking about before, about connection, and that until we can start learning more healing approaches to conflict management, I don't feel like our job's done. We have so many unjust practices in our U.S. prison systems, plural 3,144, one for every County in the country. [00:11:00] So problematic, and the idea that African worldview of our common humanity and learning, and I think it's more than just humanity, it's Gaia, the connection we have with all living creatures in our relationship to mother earth. But we need to know who we are and be at peace with ourselves in order to step forward and find our sense of common humanity with others.

BC: [00:11:28] I am because you are.

MC: [00:11:30] Yeah, that's beautiful. We have a little short one-page article about Ubuntu that everybody, inside and outside singers alike are required to read before they joined the choir, and we talk about it. It's also helped a lot when we were in a situation, you can only imagine a choir has songs with lyrics and some of those lyrics may resonate with one person and not so much with someone else, particularly if it's songs that have some kind of a religious connection. However, if we [00:12:00] follow deeply the idea of Ubuntu, we ideally can sing these songs because we're looking at our relationship with the larger communal body when we're singing together.

BC: [00:12:12] One of the interesting things about my work is that it has led me down some garden paths, also some rabbit holes, and actually some very enlightening places. One of them is evolutionary psychology, in which there's a growing thesis that humans made what we call art before we had language, and that it was likely, vocal.

I have a story in my head that the first miracle was when two voices came together, or maybe three, and created, harmony, and that once people tasted that delicious thing, they couldn't not do it, [and] then it [00:13:00] did two things. It created, beauty in the world that was codependent, and it intrinsically, physically, psychologically, and spiritually connected those voices. And there wasn't a whole lot of debate. It just happened. So when I think about your choir, I'm thinking that you are many eons beyond that moment. You are replicating that same miracle in the same spirit and with the same power that existed way back then.

MC: [00:13:33] I love that idea of beauty being codependent. That's like a beautiful illustration of Ubuntu through voice. Connecting and singing together and making that connection and whether or not it's unison, dissonance, not even tuned together. We have some, we have some healing to do in the profession of music education. We need to acknowledge [...]. I tell you [00:14:00] this morning in my research, by the way, I read the last chapter of the book, Art in Other Places, I've got the copy right here, and wow! The person you interviewed Rebecca Rice. What she described with theater was so empowering, all answers are right.

There are a couple music approaches that have that music for people is one music for people has a guideline. There are no wrong notes, every note lives with every other note in the universe. So, your story of voices connecting together. That's when we have the space. Boy, and there's another beautiful podcast, angel Kyodo Williams interview with Krista Tippett. Angel Kyodo Williams has that beautiful message of the idea of love creating a space that we can make that loving connection with others that have different views than us, and so [00:15:00] again, back to that symbolism of voices coming together, whether they're in unison and connecting slightly dissonant, or some kind of a harmony creating the space for that to happen. And I'd come back to that idea of music education. I am a believer currently we have some healing to do, and that we need to realize there are multiple ways of making music that are more healing, more empowering of everyone.

There's so many times that. We've grown up as musicians, music teachers have said, that's the right way to do it. That's the wrong way to do it. I'm still, in progress here, and we hear that the choice we made was the wrong choice in a, in an artistic space. That's dis empowering in a way that can be really harmful and hurtful. Given the need for healing and wellness right now with COVID [00:16:00] and with all of the outcomes of COVID, I think there's a vital need for music and educators, maybe other arts facilitators to empower.

By the way, speaking of arts facilitators that empower. My colleague at Boston University, Andre de Quadros, has created a brilliant program at two Massachusetts prisons called Empowering Song. It's a brilliant model of this, and it's going to be a highlight of chapter six of the book because he's done it. He uses Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed, as a theoretical framework for what he's doing and it's just so amazing. So, I'm happy that there are some samples and ideas and examples of music educators following a more empowering approach to teaching.

BC: [00:16:51] Well, connecting dots. my colleague, Sandy, Augustin....

MC: [00:16:55] Did she interview? because I think I heard hers too where you talked about Augusta Boal...

[00:17:00] Yes.

BC: [00:17:00] And it's, there's a fairly common through line among and between people in lots of different disciplines that is this. Democratized idea of an art form that is not just led d irected, but in fact is a manifestation of the collective and Boal personified that in his practice along with Palo Freire and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, just the idea that this is collective work.

Part Two Finding Joy.

So I'm going to segue now, one of the questions, probably the most important question for a podcast called Change the Story, Change the World is there a story that rises up for you that really encompasses or personifies what it is [00:18:00] that you're up to, and particularly this idea of altering the trajectory of a person's story or...

CSCW EP 18: Ben Fink – A Communist Jew from the Northeast – Chapter 2Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

As a self described "communist Jew from the Northeast, what kind of hostility did you encounter in coal country?

Honestly, the most hostility I got was from some of the liberals who are like, this is our way of doing things and we have this way of doing activism, and this way of doing community development, and this way of, who we relate to and who we don't relate to and blah, blah, blah.

How can traditional hymn singing help build trust?

And, you know what I have been told that a lot of ice was broken at some of these events. When I got up in front of the room, I didn't need a mic cause I'm loud, and I was able to line out, Poor Wayfaring Stranger, or What Wonderous Love is This, ... and that became my identity to a lot of people. I was the shape note guy. I was the guy who could come in and lead a sing and, line out of him. And it just, it broke down some walls.

What is Performing Our Future?

Yeah. So, Performing Our Future began as a community-based research project to figure out how can people tell their stories, communities that have long resisted, systematic, organized exploitation, how those communities can collectively tell their own stories, connected to building their own power connected, to creating their own and do so in coalition with each other, both locally, as well as nationally.

"What is the difference between cooking and catering?"

As Gwen said, we never done cater and we just done cooking. What's the difference between catering and cooking? The difference is what our economist friend Fluney Hutchinson calls, bounded imagination. Cooking is something you do for yourself and your neighbors to survive. Catering is something that you can do to add value and create jobs.And in this case, jobs for neighbors that were coming back from incarceration and addiction and serve in the armed forces overseas, with various kinds of trauma who were really having trouble finding other jobs.

How did culture figure in the Letcher County organizing effort?

A central building block was a play that roadside theater made alongside these folks, and with these folks, sharing their stories, developing this grip, performing in it called the future of Letcher County, which is literally people of all ages, ideologies backgrounds, debating about the political, cultural and economic future of Letcher County.We've now performed this, actually performed in West Baltimore just before the pandemic hit. It was... I'll tell you what happened was, I heard somebody in the audience say "I didn't know, white people dealt with that stuff too "
Transcript

Ben Fink: What is a thing that this group of people likes to do together or cares about, and it's not just cares about, but also wants to make together like that act of making things together and owning what we make. It's so central to the work, because when you make something together, then you are changing that story because you now have a story of, we built this we have added to our world in a way that is deeply meaningful of both of us. From that foundation. It is really hard to dehumanize someone. You can disagree, you can be pissed. You can have all sorts of, all sorts of conflict, right?

Bill Cleveland: That was Ben Fink talking about how important the simple act of “making things together” is to creating trust in communities that have a history of being exploited and betrayed. In our last episode we learned how Ben, an activist theater worker and community organizer from the northeast came work for an arts-based community development organization called Appalshop, in Letcher County Kentucky. We also heard about how his hands-on approach to building partnerships panned out in his collaboration with a Trump loving, ex-coal miner, volunteer fire chief producing bluegrass concerts in the firehouse, and bringing solar energy into the heart of coal country. In this second episode with Ben, we hear more stories that confound easy us vs. them stereotypes about Appalachia and Appalshop’s work in other communities across the country.

This is Change the Story / Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. I’m Bill Cleveland.

Part 3: Lining Out

BC: So Ben...

BF: yeah.

 BC: Be a dramaturge here and take me into this beautiful, physical place that you spent your five years and place it geographically and talk about it in terms of,, the rich culture that you've found when you're there.

BF: Yeah. Before I do just want to say that I spent my first two to three years there really intensely. And then I spent the final years literally living on the road, building partnerships across divides, and so that, so we get to the point where we do have a van load at East Kentucky, and it's coming to the middle of Penn, North and West Baltimore.

And so, I'll focus on East Kentucky for the moment. Because I hear you asking that, but I think it's really important. For people to understand that even in this really deep and granular and local work that we'll be talking about, there was always the outward facing component. We were always thinking about how do we, not only tell our stories to others and other places, but also invite them in from the very start.

But, East Kentucky, I'd never set foot there before I interviewed at the Apple shop, I knew about it only through, media and all the other ways professional class, white guy growing up in West Hartford, Connecticut hears about a place like that. And I thought about beautiful mountains and beautiful music and terrible politics.

[When} I get there, what I find are some of the most open-minded people I've ever met and a lot, yeah. People that disagree with me in terms of, national consumer politics. But a lot of people who are as devoted to their place and their land and their neighbors as any people I'd ever met anywhere, if not more. But these are people who welcomed me in as a communist Jew, from the Northeast, and joked about it and invited me into their homes.

Since then, I have invited so many people down to the coal fields, and their reactions have been the same, that there are people who fundamentally are about hospitality and are about building their community and have had a lot of history with people, screwing them over and that has hit hard. There is a lot of distrust, a lot of inherent distrust, but that distrust has still never overshadowed the love. They are people that fundamentally lead from love and loving each other, and loving the place where they live, and that was not something I was fully prepared for, but, I kept seeing it again and again, and I'd meet people and they'd introduce me to their neighbors, and they'd introduced me to their neighbors, and I think they for a while waiting for me to get scared and run away, or waiting for me to pull up or waiting for me to impose some kind of program, and I don't blame them for any of that because that's the experience they've had for a lot of people. But nowhere in that was a hostility. Honestly, the most hostility I got was from some of the liberals who are like, can, we're this is our way of doing things and we have this way of doing activism, and this way of doing community development, and this way of, who we relate to and who we don't relate to and blah, blah, blah.

With good mentorship from my colleagues at Roadside, I said, "no, I'm not going to deal with that".

I asked one of the old guards early on "what's the limit, of who roadside we'll work with? Who do we not work with?" And the response was the question is where do you stand on organized exploitation?

If you are for organized exploitation, the intentional taking of value from people who create it, we're probably not going to work with you, but if you are against organized exploitation, we're good to work with. You turns out pretty much everybody is against organized exploitation because it's pretty much 0.1% that's doing it. So, within that framework, we were able to understand each other pretty quick.

BC: I was wondering, how did the cultural aspect show up in your work with your neighbors in East Kentucky?

BF: The other thing I would say, which is not trivial is I was surprised how many of their favorite old songs that I knew. I'm a shape note him singer, sacred, harp gospel, all that stuff. I've done it for many years.

And, you know what I have been told that a lot of ice was broken at some of these events. When I got up in front of the room, I didn't need a mic cause I'm loud, and I was able to line out, Poor Wayfaring Stranger, or What Wonderous Love is This, where in a lot of these old hymns, that again, I told them I was a communist Jew from the Northeast that was not claiming to be an old, regular Baptist or anything like that. But there was just a sense of, okay, you get us on some basic level and we started regular shape note singings and Letcher County, but are still going on. There's a long history of it there, but there was no kind of regular activity and that became my identity to a lot of people. I was the shape note guy. I was the guy who could come in and lead a sing and, line out of him. And it just, it broke down some walls.

BC: And it's called respect. You shared a common cultural experience that you loved, which is powerful.

BF: Yeah.

BC: Powerful.,

BF: Because people unite based on what they share.

BC: Exactly.

BF: Talk about difference, find out what you share. No, two human beings on God's green earth would ever become friends because of what they don't have in common. Right now, once you get to know each other, based on what you do have in common than you realize the richness and diversity of other people's experience, and that adds to it, but the kernel is what you share.

BC: Yep. Can you reach back into your portfolio of I'm sure, a thousand stories and it, is there an experience that you had, during that time that really personifies what you've, what you feel you were doing together with your neighbors?

BF: Sure. I'll tell a story in Ms. Gwen Johnson, one of my most beloved allies and friends to this day. Gwen grew up in the coal camp of Hemphill, Kentucky, in Letcher County and pretty much everybody in your family of coal miners, including her former husband. [She] didn't know how to read till she was an adult, learned alongside her kids, ended up getting a master's and is now doing early childhood program administration through the University of Kentucky.

But, you talk with Gwen and it is so clear that her accountability is to her neighbors. Gwen showed up at actually at that first Bluegrass concert that we did at the firehouse that I was telling you about, because she heard that "there was going to be a guy there and he had some money".

'Cause my title for the majority of my time, there was lead organizer of the Performing our Future Project, but when I first came on, my original title was creative placemaking project manager. I was there to manage some grants.

But  I am not a grant project manager. I'm a, I'm an organizer. If you want somebody to, administer programs, give away the money and then, we're done, then, hire somebody else. I will fully make sure these deliverables happen, but we're going to do it through building up a base that's going to continue and who knows where it's going to go.

So, I had started talking with people I've met about, we had this pot of money for partnership funds that we'd use to for instance, finance this Bluegrass concert at the firehouse and it wasn't a grant, I was super clear about that. It wasn't a mini grant, three grants, sub grants. It was a partnership contribution. We're writing you this check; you spend it however you want. We're just also attaching a basic agreement with it saying, "Hey, we both agreed., We want this concert to happen". We want these things to happen. And so we'd done that, and it was actually one of the, one of the firemen at the firehouse has said, "Hey, Gwen, you got to get over here. There's this guy with some money". And shortly after I'd lined out Poor Wayfaring Stranger there, Gwen comes up to me and says, " Hey, can we talk?", and I'd heard about her too. And so I said, yeah, let's find time to talk. So we share a lot of stories, find out what's going on with her. and the stories were hard, right? She is living with her mother, who was in her eighties because when she wasn't living with her mother, Other people in the family would come to the house and take advantage of her in order to feed their meth addictions.

 This stuff is real, and that's important to say. There's a lot of talk about asset-based developments and, I've said, you gotta start with what you've got and what you share, but you got to take the problem seriously. And so Gwen was telling me this story about how the community center her mother helped to found, and that she was running in a closed down in school and her coal camp ; they were, under threat and running out of money 'cause the coal severance tax money stopped along with the coal mining. And I could have, at that moment, asked her "what do you need and how can we help you?" That's the typical nonprofit move. Thank God I had some better mentorship, by that point, and what I asked instead was "what are you looking to build and how can we build it together?"

 A few years later, the Black Sheep Brick Oven Bakery and Catering Company opened, in a community where they'd never had a caters before.

As Gwen said, we never done cater and we just done cooking. What's the difference between catering and cooking? The difference is what our economist friend Fluney Hutchinson calls, bounded imagination. Cooking is something you do for yourself and your neighbors to survive. Catering is something that you can do to add value and create jobs.

And in this case, jobs for neighbors that were coming back from incarceration and addiction and serve in the armed forces overseas, with various kinds of trauma who were really having trouble finding other jobs, but Black Sheet Bakery and Catering Company has taken them in continues to take them in, not without hardship, not without trouble. And Gwen was also one of the people who was most staunchly pro coal and anti-environmentalist. I heard her talk at a County government meeting one time at a fellow, a nonprofit liberal was there with me and Oh boy, freaked him out. It's Whoa, boy, she's talking about that.

But she was first in line to get solar panels. Cause she knew and she actually canvas the miners in her community and said, “What do you think about this guys? Is this anti-coal”? And they said, “Honey, train's gone out on coal. We got to do what we can to survive, and if this is going to help us, and if this is going to help, this community center keep its doors open.”

BC: Yeah. And that personifies what you were talking about before. Really changing the story together. Grounded in the things that matter most of the people in the community.

BF: And that's another lesson I've learned doing this work, places like that, community center, places like that, volunteer fire department, the places that are of buy-in for communities in their full diversity, these are the places that we have got to invest in and strengthen.

They're always there. They're constantly under threat, but they're always there. And when we say meet people where they're at, and when we say work with communities, that's what we mean, work with what we call community centers of power, where people gather to imagine and build together. And I do mean community is in their full diversity. So Gwen is as Hemphill as it gets, but she's constantly, fighting with her neighbors. They all come in, she said, no, I'm putting up this, LGBT acceptance sign, I'm putting up this Black Lives Matter sign and her learning over the past years in working with more people from more places now she's offering articles for Art Place America about Appalachian solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

The values were always there, but she didn't have the language to articulate them in a way that made sense to the nonprofit industrial complex. That's part of the leadership development that we do. We work to identify when we say community leaders, we're talking about people like her. We're talking about people who their neighbors look to it's usually not the people and the positions of power. And a community leader is also somebody whose first accountability is to their neighbors. I ask this question all the time with people and institutions, who is your accountability too? Because a lot of us, our accountability is to our colleagues, other people in our field to funders that are funding as to inner city area organizations, we look for the people whose fundamental accountability is to their neighbors, and that is Gwen. She is accountable to them, and she pushes them in uncomfortable ways.

Likewise, Gwen and I built a strong relationship where we are accountable to each other and we push each other. And Gwen has become a voice, on all sorts of different scales meeting with regional and national foundations, being part of the Art Place America assembly for the allocation of the last of their creative placemaking funds. She is on the steering committee of The National Performing our Future Coalition, where she is working closely alongside

CSCW EP 17: Ben Fink – A Communist Jew from the Northeast – Chapter 1 Threshold Questions and Delicious Quotes

What defines the work of Appalshop and Performing our Future?

The work is creating the conditions, for people in communities to tell their own stories, build their own power, and create their own wealth, and doing it really intensely locally rooted in local traditions and local values

What is the difference between community engagement and working with your neighbor?

...What I'll usually say, I come in, I'm supposed to talk to a group about community engagement. First thing you got to know, fuck community engagement. And then they say, oh, what do you mean? Ben now, how do you describe your work if you don't talk about community engagement? I said, "I work with my neighbors". Sometimes my neighbors are across the street. Sometimes my neighbors are across the country. We are neighbors. We are living together and we're going to work together. Does that mean we're all the same? Hell no. What community is composed of all people that are the same.

How can working with your neighbor help change a community's story?

...that act of making things together and owning what we make. It's so central to the work, because when you make something together, then you are changing that story, because you now have a story of, "we built this we have added to our world in a way that is deeply meaningful of both of us." From that foundation. It is really hard to dehumanize someone.Transcript

So, where do I start. I think I start by asking your help. by joining in a little song. This may seem crazy on a podcast – but here is the lyric:  

We who believe in freedom cannot rest.

Before we sing it, please take a moment to ponder what these words mean to YOU, in your life, or in your work,

OK here we go. Here is the beat ………and the melody.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest. 

Now you: We who believe in freedom cannot rest.  

Again: We who believe in freedom cannot rest.

If you actually did sing while listening here … Give yourself a hand.  

So, what have we just done: In a little over a minute we have manifested the three human behaviors that many believe have most contributed to survival and proliferation of the human species. They also happen to be three of the THINGS, that artists are particularly good at making happen in the world. So, what are they? 

First, if we were in a group, what we just did would have captured and focused the attention of those folks. If you are not alone, you may have had that experience just now. Of course, this singing thing is not new. In fact, our singing here, was a reprise of one of the first strategies that our early ancestors used maybe 100,000 years ago to capture and focus the attention of the tribe to support what we now call ----building community,

Now next Beyond focusing attention, our singing together also provided a very simple and direct way of connecting our heads and our hearts — inside, individually, and with each other. This visceral, bodily connecting, is no small thing This is because we humans need nudges like these to begin forging the bonds, the trust we all need to join with others outside of our families and kinship circles to work together. There are no cultures that do not sing.

Music…. A Wayfaring Stranger

And finally our singing connected OUR STORIES: if we were singing these words together at the same place and time with others, like the members of the Indian Bottom Old Regular Baptist Church you hear in the background, singing A Wayfaring Stranger, we would have added one more tiny layer to the growing web of stories that we spin together every day to define our community—in this case a congregation in Letcher County Kentucky whose faith and hymn singing and sense of mutual support are viscerally connected to the stories they make and share together.

Now, a bonus, those ten words we sang have also connected you and your stories to the extraordinary life of Ella Baker. Ella’s words are memorialized in the line you sang from “Ella’s Song” by Bernice Johnson Reagon, who worked with Ella at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early days of the civil rights movement.

Bernice went on to found the extraordinary acapella group Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Ella became a prominent player in the civil rights struggle. She was also a contrarian of sorts, in that she felt that the hierarchical leadership model of the church-based civil rights movement was, largely undemocratic and unaccountable  

The reason that I share Ella’s story with you today is that her belief in bottom up, community accountable, leadership very much informs the story you are about to hear.

This is Change the Story / Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. My name is Bill Cleveland.

 Our guest for our next two episodes is, Ben Fink, who sometimes introduces himself as a "communist Jew from the northeast". In it we will hear about a theater company called Roadside, a community building project called Performing Our Future, and a culturally centered economic development initiative called Culture Hub all of which operate under the auspices of a mother ship known as Appalshop. From its home in Whitesburg Kentucky, Appalshop has been a powerful agent of arts-based, community driven social change in Appalachia for the past 50 years. It would take 10 episodes to just scratch the surface of the full Appalshop story and they tell it best. So if you want to know more go to Appalshop.org. That’s A p p a l shop.org. or find the link in this episode’s show notes.

Speaking of Appalshop, Ben, who recently left his position there wants to make it clear that he is sharing his own unique perspective here and not that of any of the organizations mentioned in our talk,

Now on to Mr. Fink

Part 1: Finding Roadside

Bill Cleveland: [00:00:00] Yeah. So, Ben, how are you doing?

Ben Fink: [00:00:03] I'm all over the place. I left Roadside after almost five years, and I'm living in a new place doing different work and just feeling general whiplash, and just not entirely figuring out where I belong in the world. But I imagine a lot of people are feeling that right now.

BC: [00:00:22] Did you, imagine yourself spending five years?

BF: [00:00:25] I was hired on a two-year contract and the work continued to grow an, I was continuing to learn. So, I, I chose to stay.

 BC: [00:00:36] This podcast is fairly new. Conversations with fellow travelers in the world of art and community development, and organizing, and activism. And the podcast follows on in a path that I've been on my entire, life, which is to tell the stories of, heroes and heroines that I encounter in my work. So, you're one of them Mr. Fink

BF: [00:01:02] I will, I'll take that as a compliment.

BC: [00:01:06] So when you show up at a Thanksgiving, gathering what do you describe your work as?

BF: [00:01:12] The work is creating the conditions, for people in communities to tell their own stories, build their own power, and create their own wealth, and doing it really intensely locally rooted in local traditions and local values, and then as people build that collective power wealth story on a local level create opportunities for them to recognize that other communities that they may never have met before hey may even have been told, are their enemies, that they are doing the same work and they can do that work together.

BC: [00:01:53] What is the the story of how you came to be in a position to be doing what you just described?

BF: [00:01:59] Yeah, so two things to know about me. One is that I grew up in a household with a lawyer and former Planned Parenthood, social worker for a mother, and a political journalist for a father. And so the idea that anything I did was going to be divorced from a serious grounding in political context. It just didn't even register as a possibility in my childhood. I remember when I would go to elementary school and students and even teachers would say, "oh, I don't really follow politics" and it just didn't make sense to me. Because that's just the world, that's just the most important and exciting parts of the world.

And then the other thing is partially for maybe for that reason, I had trouble making friends growing up. But what I was really good at is getting on stage and I was a singer and a theater maker and. I didn't get cast in high school plays. So I started directing and doing dramaturgy and analysis and all that. I was the smart ass that directed The Cradle Will Rock as a student directed high school production at 17. And so, I was on my way toward doing political theater, Agitprop theater. Theater with a justice and liberation lens. And as I got more into doing that, I discovered that some of the most important work was being done in participatory traditions, where we weren't telling people what to think, but working with them and learning together.

BC: [00:04:02] So, did you find that participatory theater was a more respectful way of working? With communities?

BF: [00:04:10] A lot in those participatory traditions. And I'm thinking about theater of the oppressed and playback theater and a lot of educational theater. There was a kind of what I might call sadomasochism in the communities that practiced them, because we were always very worried about our privilege and very worried about the ways that, oh, we could never reach the community.

And there was a fundamental divide between us and the community. Which meant that we were not recognizing ourselves as part of the community. That as much as we were trying hard to, check our privilege we still fundamentally saw ourselves being above the community, trying to administer something onto them, or just as bad below the community, just trying to selflessly help. And neither of those things produced very good politics, or good art, or good feelings. The small number of people that I met in that world that were actually taking themselves and their stories and their power and their contributions equally seriously to those they were working side-by-side, were all people that came out of the tradition of populism. And by populism, I don't mean demagoguery and racism and xenophobia. That's pseudo populism that it's got a long history too. I mean the actual tradition of people coming together in their communities, standing proud in their traditions to create together and own what they make.

Which is deeply political, both in the micro sense of we are building something together, and we are insisting on our rights to create together, and to own what we make. And then also macro political, because of course there will always be the exploiters that are coming in to try to plunder that Commonwealth, and to take away what we have made from us, and generally the way that they do that is by sewing divisions among us and there's obviously a long history of that too.

So in discovering the people that have that analysis and we're working in it, and I'm talking about theater makers, I'm talking about organizers, I'm talking about teachers. Those were the people that I realized, okay, these are the people I want to work with. Not only because. They were doing the most effective work and making change, but also because in working that way, we could all act with dignity, and it was directly through working with those people that I encountered, roadside theater. Which absolutely comes out of that tradition with roots in the civil rights movement.

BC: [00:07:26] So, when was this, when did you cross paths with roadside?

BF: [00:07:32] We ended up working together when roadside was in New York city in 2015. Doing a play off Broadway in collaboration with our long-time colleagues at Pregones Theater, a Puerto Rican theater company in the Bronx.

I was working in New Jersey at the time and ended up working with them on that production. And then a few months later, I got a text saying, "hey, there's this job open doing this art and community development stuff" or creative placemaking as they were calling it, and would I be interested in applying and potentially moving to the rural coalfields of East Kentucky?

Honestly, I didn't hesitate for very long because I knew that is where I needed to go in order to keep doing this kind of work in this legacy and continue to learn it, and hone it, and practice it, and grow it. So that's how I got here.

BC: [00:08:29] And, as you said, you signed a two-year contract, you stayed for five years. When I visited you...

BF: [00:08:36] yes.

BC: [00:08:36]...it was so clear to me that, that condition that you talked about, which is the pulling back of the us-them, and the sense of, we have a show to put on here, here's a story to tell who's going to do what it felt very much like you were part and parcel of a community that had discovered its voice, and that you were in it, deeply in it. So, could you talk about what you encountered when you first began to, find your feet. Discover what was going on?

BF: [00:09:09] Absolutely. So first, just to say I was invited in, and that's actually a really important point to make. Because again, there is so much handwringing in the art community development, social justice organizing field about, "oh, how do we as outsiders do this?" It's one of these things that Roadside is very clear on, which is we go where we are invited. Period. And likewise, I went to East Kentucky because I was invited there. Did that mean? Yeah, everyone was super happy that I was there? Of course not, but I was invited there, and that's really important.

Part 2: “Working with My Neighbors”

BC: [00:09:50] So, how do you go from being a fresh face newcomer in Eastern Kentucky to a five-year relationship?

BF: [00:10:02] We work in reciprocal relationships of trust over a long term with the people that invite us places, and so I came down there. I had basically no relationships, the relationships with the people at roadside was about it. So the first thing I did was show up. I just showed up everywhere I could.

And if there was a community meeting, I was there. If there was an event, I was there. If there was a concert or a square dance or a punk show or whatever was going on, I just showed up and I watched, and I participated, and that ended up being probably the most important thing I ever did. So often we get stuck talking to each other, being in our bubble, whether it be a class bubble or a profession bubble or a workplace bubble, but just showing up. I made a rough pact that I wouldn't spend more than two days a week in the office for any length of time, I'm going to be out there, both attending events and then also meeting people. ThIs is really part of the basic work of organizing, which is one-to-one relational meetings, and spending time hearing people's stories, and then the other important point is sharing my own story when asked. Again, when asked, because I ask people for meetings, I'm generally interested in them. I don't want to be so cocky to think they necessarily want to hear a lot from me. But they got to hear a little bit for me, because again, the point is I'm here and I'm not pretending not to be. And I would routinely in a first meeting drop in a reference to myself as a communist Jew from the Northeast. The farther right someone is, the more likely I was to do it, or at least the farther, I suspected that person to be. And their reaction was inevitably exactly the same as yours Bill. It was like a moment of what? And then they laughed. And then we laughed together, and what that demonstrated is this is not bullshit. I am claiming and owning who I am, and what I'm about. And for most, people in a community, that's what they're looking for.

BC: [00:12:35] The real story, an authentic engagement that just respected them enough not to pretend...

BF: [00:12:42] Yeah, a thing that I noticed [...] so years later, one of my very beloved colleagues who I've done a ton of work with, [who] is a former strip mine boss turned, volunteer fire chief, who is all sorts of right-wing, loves him. some Donald Trump thinks global warming is a hoax, not so sure about COVID-19 either. All of those things. And we met exactly the way that just talked about meeting and we shared stories for a couple of hours. And by the end of it, we were working together, and we were working together on his terms. I felt because I found out what he wants to do right now. He wants to have bluegrass concerts at his firehouse. It's got nothing to do with politics or culture, war, and he's he wants to make his firehouse, a place where his community can gather and wants to gather. And this is something I didn't have to in any way, deceive demure in order to say yes, that's awesome.

BC: [00:13:50] Let's do that. That's how you build trust.

BF: [00:13:52] Two years later, we're working on a solar energy project nd he is advocating with his fellow Republicans to stop this bill that would have made it harder for rooftop, solar energy to happen in Kentucky. Because, and again, not because he'd become a convert to the green new deal, but