Community-Engaged Theater Process Summary

Community-Engaged Theater Process Summary
-- based on Cornerstone Theater Company’s community collaboration method; quotations are from Cornerstone Theater Company Community Collaboration Handbook: a method.

It’s Artist Led – build an artistic team to lead the project

“The artistic process for our community collaborations is artist driven. In other words, a production’s aesthetics are largely generated and certainly guided by the professional artists rather than the community participants. This does not mean that community members are left out of the process. Our collaborative partnerships are deeply valued and community input profoundly enriches the art. However, the artists’ contributions to the project are their artistic skills, insights and points of view. They are responsible for decisions about the art and the art-making, including casting, design, and script choices.”

Get to Know the Community/Build Community Partnerships

“Community Partners are vital to meeting other community members. They introduce us to people who will become new project advocates and participants, and these new people will in turn introduce us to other new people, and so on. As the number of community members we meet increases, so does the diversity.”

“Although the purpose of a community collaboration is the creation of a work of art, the hearing and telling of stories can have tremendous significance for community identity. In the sense that communities know themselves by their stories, storytelling often has the power to clarify and even strengthen community identity.”

“Mutual Mentorship – the entire research process is based on the premise that the community participants are teaching us so that we may build upon and create from that knowledge. The more that the professionals and the community learn from each other, the more the script can attentively give voice to the community’s most integral issues.”

Develop the Script

Script may be adaptation of an existing text or an original play. Playwright and other members of the artistic leadership team gather stories from community members for script development through Story Circles, Workshops that involve theater and writing exercise, one-on-one interviews, questionnaires and discussion sessions. When a draft script is ready one or more community readings of the script are held, gathering feedback from the community using Liz Lehrmann’s Critical Response Process.

Casting

“The most effective way to get people to audition is to talk to them, one at a time.”
“Every stranger is an auditioner you haven’t met”
“Invite people to audition. Initiate conversations with people walking by. Tell them about the project in general, and extend the invitation to audition. Encourage every community member to audition for the show.”

This method includes 2-5 professional actors performing side by side with community performers. (In the West Side Community Theater Project we plan to use 2 professional actors).

“The audition process should be positive, affirming, joyful, and fun for the people auditioning.”

“Often the main audition is done using unrelated text, sometimes a random sentence from a newspaper. The auditioners are asked to read that sentence several times, each time with a different intention. For example: read the sentence as if it makes you angry, or like it’s a bit of gossip, or as if it’s the funniest thin you’ve ever heard, etc.”

Director, playwright and music director/composer are present during auditions and consult in casting decisions.



Rehearsals

“The key is to learn while you teach, and value what community-based artists bring in terms of experience and knowledge of the community – life experience, really. Remember that their life experiences are just as valuable as the theatrical skills we are teaching them.”

“A community collaboration is a professional play involving first-time actors. This paradox often requires a great deal of flexibility from stage management.”

“Creating an artistically innovative professional production with frist-time artists is a paradox that must be embraced. This embrace is needed at every poin in the process, bt nowhere is it so necessary as in the rehearsal room.”