Institute Keynote address:
"Art and Imagination in Community Arts"
Julie Salverson

I would like to start with poetry. The unstable image, the invitation to imagine. "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there". Words from a poet, William Carlos Williams. I fell in love with art as a child. I grew up and wanted others to know this language, this difficult place of desire and danger, this invitation to imagine. This language for the inexpressible.

My work in community arts started, appropriately enough, where I now live, in Kingston in 1975. I was a Queen's student, although not a very happy one. To be honest, I felt quite lost in the rare air of the university, so I tried to get off campus, and with some friends brought a play to a place called Ongwanada Hospital. We performed for adults who had mental and physical difficulties. That day, after we had done the play, the woman who ran the hospital came backstage and told us there had been a mistake, "a whole floor of people were left behind" she said. Could we do the play again, please? Well, we did...and this time the audience who had seen it before, who had initially been very quiet, reacted hugely all through. They knew what was coming. They knew the new members of the audience DIDN'T know. They were very excited. I wondered, what could we do to create a play that had this kind of impact on an audience the first time? That experience made me wonder what theatre might mean for audiences who don't usually get to see it. Of course I'd never heard of the term community arts, in fact wouldn't hear it for several years. My early twenties found me working in theatres across Canada and starting to feel a split between my late blooming political awareness - nourished by activity I saw outside, on city streets, at rallies and demonstrations - and my love for theatre - which I only saw 'inside' buildings, in theatres, concert halls, museums. I became involved in the peace and solidarity movements, and I would go from a rehearsal in a mainstage theatre to a community organizing meeting and think: "wouldn't art be a useful way to help this process of learning to live together in neighbourhoods? I started imagining how this could look. I wanted to make theatre in community centres, to - as I put it then - "get the untold stories told". I was very lucky in l981 to get a Canada Council Explorations grant to develop a play for an audience who was mentally disabled. You have to understand, I knew nothing. I just had an idea - based on this earlier experience in Kingston, at the hospital - an idea that I would meet people, get to know them, write a play for them. I found my way to two teachers in Toronto who worked in what were then segregated schools. These teachers ran a Thursday night drama group for young people. The meeting with one of them, a woman named Marion Kirkwood, changed my entire life. What happened was this. She told me she ran a group doing plays, like The Music Man, Sound of Music. Could I come and do workshops with them in drama, I asked? Why? She asked. Well, I want to get to know them, and then write a play for them. Oh, she said. And who will perform the play? Well, actors, I said. Oh. Could anyone else perform the play, she asked? It was an entire new idea to me. Oh. THEY could perform the play.

I met with the group for a number of Thursday nights...it was a disaster. I tried improvisation exercises, the people were very tolerant, I was so anxious and nervous I started getting a sick stomach regularly on Tuesdays, in anticipation of this disastrous experiment. But then one Thursday, all that changed. .One evening while we were sitting in a circle getting started, a man arrived late. He was in his early forties, David was his name. He always wore a cowboy hat and carried a lasso. He'd gotten lost on the subway and wanted to talk about it. I let him. Then, for some reason, I turned to the rest of the group and asked, "has anyone else ever gotten lost?" Everybody had, and the energy in the room exploded. So, I said, "well...why don't you get into three groups, one make a song, one a scene, and one a dance about what it's like to get lost?"...

That accident changed my life. It's a moment all of you know well. It describes the electricity that happens when people speak and are heard...and what we offer, as writers or dancers or musicians or painters...is another language for that speech. A language that shapes loss and love and hope into a form. And the images that take that language beyond the everyday, raise it to something that can make us all tremble, just a little...those are poetry. This is true whether the images are musical, visual, or theatrical. And our job as artists is to seek out, find, and name them. Of course, it isn't quite that simple. There are things like who, and why, and when, and where...historical frameworks, cultural frameworks, ethical frameworks... I'll get to some of that in a moment.

At Second Look, we learned a lot, had growing pains, had successes and failures. It wasn't easy. Nobody from the community organizations quite knew what we were doing. We didn't quite know what we were doing! On the one end of the spectrum were the funders. They were confused...was this education? Was it social work? Was it therapy? No, no, we insisted...it was theatre. Then who should pay for it? The idea that an artistic enterprise would cross over many territories was confusing in a social environment that drew lines and labeled things and considered that any involvement in "communities" must be about helping, and fixing....what we might call a medical model to being neighbourhoods. Is there a social problem? Is there an educational problem? Who is being helped? Are you social workers? Are you therapists? Isn't it possible, we would say, that people have strength and humour and pain and problems, and joys, and loves, all tied up together? Isn't it possible that the sum of these things is stories that belong on stages not only in the theatres, but also in community centres, in public places? The stories of people in our neighbourhoods, in our cities, people we pass by every day and never see. What would it mean to us as communities, if these stories were told, if these experiences - seen through the lens of painting, of music, of dance, photography, theatre -, became part of how we understand art and culture? It's hard to imagine now, but in the early 80's you had to really persuade most arts organizations to give you a grant that involved communities..most thought that kind of work was education, or social work. In Toronto, the Toronto Arts council was a notable exception, as were the churches, interestingly enough. The churches had seen how art and politics are not so separate in other cultures. Now, by the way, I think the balance has tipped the other way...you have to make the argument not for community, but for art. We are still polarized. However, back to Second Look in 1981. We worked collectively...god help us...and we made it to those community centres - Regent Park, Central Neighbourhood House, Scadding Court - and developed plays with sole support moms, with young people about Aids, about dealing with welfare and the street, about racism. Lots of issues. And what happened - to me - was I got very tired of the kind of theatre we were making. Because the issues took over the art.

At the end of the eighties, exhausted, I left Canada for a bit, wanting to learn how other people negotiated this interesting mix of life and art. I went to New York to visit a psychiatric ward where actors were doing writing projects with patients. The company - including Susan Sarandon - were having a hard time with the doctors. The doctor's wanted 'reports' about what happened, to put on patient's charts. No, said the actors. What happens here is private. It's an artistic process with people, not a medical process with patients. I learned from that. Then I came here, to Vancouver, where I spent a couple of years with Headlines Theatre. I went to England, and even a rejuvenating stint with Welfare State International and the celebratory adventures of their very politically astute community arts didn't help . I'd reached a stalemate. For almost fifteen years I had learned a lot, from popular education, from Paulo Friere and his work with literacy in Brazil, from liberation theology , from development education, most of all from everyone I'd worked with trying to discover this thing called popular theatre, called community arts...but still I was tiring of the need to argue for art.

Now, at that time, when I ran into my own wall, I thought that this thing about art was my problem. I had been busy trying to make the revolution, but I had gotten lonely for the theatre. I still thought it was a choice I, personally, had to make, I still thought that art had to take a back seat to community development, to social change...that art was (as honor ford smith, founder of Sistren and now living in Toronto, has described theatre for development in Jamaica) to "sugar the pill of the more serious business of education". But over the next ten years..spent mostly writing, and teaching writing, sometimes in community projects...sometimes in schools ... over this time I re-discovered poetry, and theatre, and realized that what I'd thought was my personal taste...wondering, "is the form beautiful, political, powerful, edgy"...this was actually a matter of ethics. And, it was a cultural problem. A societal problem. Much bigger than 'just me'. Where do we see this? I asked my acting class this week how many of them have to argue with their families, or their roommates, that studying drama is a worthwhile thing to do in university? Almost all of them raised their hands, and then exploded into frustrated discussion. Now, this is interesting, art, theatre, being marginalized in the university. Because of course the university - the intellect, really, the passionate pursuit of ideas, knowledge, and particularly conceptual knowledge - is also marginalized. Neither art nor knowledge matters unless they produce or sell something, or serve a purpose. If they do, then they have a place.

I recently asked the director of a community centre who is supporting a new arts program, "why are you bringing in the artists?" "Because it's a fun and easy way to get the message across and because there's money for it" she said. Fun and easy. Hmm. Art, in our culture, including the culture of most of the community organizations we work with, is a frill at worst, at best it is what writer Jeanette Winterson calls "a foreign city." And, in mainstream Canadian culture at least, education, politics, and art, are still painfully split. I believe it is up to us whether we accept that split, feed into it, or whether we repair it. In the early eighties w hen I met people from Nicaragua, or Zimbabwe, or South Africa, who were working as artists and educators in popular movements, I missed a very important point. In many of the cultures where popular education was developed, art and politics are not separate.. I now think that a great deal of us who cut our community and popular arts teeth on the popular education movement of the 70's in Canada made the mistake of taking the organizing tools, the exercises, the processes, but missing the glue that held them together. That glue was culture, art, beauty, humanity, sensuality, the vitality of how we live and how we make meaning. Art. Which was, of course, where I started, and has been the place I have had to return.

It is crucial, for me, to make the connection between art, and ethics. I came to this connection partly by going back to school, having time to look beyond my sphere of understanding, doing graduate work, and learning about how people struggle through the difficulty of building memorials, creating public memory, translating testimony...things I realized I was doing in my community based theatre work. Most of my experience has been with survivors of violence, and this focus certainly shapes my remarks today. However, whatever experiences the people we work with want to explore, express, communicate, the question I want to raise is this: what could the connections be between the form of the art that gets created and the degree of respect and complexity afforded to the stories that get told? I'm going to now speak very briefly about a couple of particular projects and how they speak to this.

First, something I call "the lie of the literal. Art is a language for imagining different futures, experiencing the past and the present from other angles, and learning to live. I did a play with refugees in Toronto in the late 1980's called "Are The Birds In Canada The Same". This was also made into a video. The participants were from a number of countries, all artists, all displaced, all survivors of violence. Most participants found it a valuable experience...but one man did not. He performed himself in the play we developed...a play I wrote, from the discussions and improvisations carried out...and he found himself plagued by nightmares and, essentially, re-traumatized by the experience. We don't like to talk about this kind of thing...the mistakes. What happened during this project prompted me to ask a number of questions. When I learned more about trauma, and how it operates, and the importance of working through trauma, not recycling it melancholically...I realized that the structure of our process had not allowed this man a chance to work through, but only to repeat. Slippery stuff, and there are no formulas here, but this experience led me to coin the phrase "the lie of the literal". Let me read just a short paragraph from an essay I've written about this:

"I am proposing an alternate approach to popular theatre practices (particularly in respect to how such practices engage and represent personal narratives) that speaks a story not as a fixed, knowable finite thing, but as an open one that changes and carries with it the possibility of reformings and retellings. "Risky stories", stories of emergency and violation, need to be constructed in such a way that the subtleties of damage, hope, and the "not nameable" can be performed. I am not suggesting a theatre which privileges the aesthetic over the material, the "look" of a theatre piece or story over the urgency of its conveyed meaning. I am suggesting that if the overly symbolic is the evasive, the overly literal is the lie." 1

Theatre is not real life...when we reproduce the real life story..in the name of authenticity, of material evidence, of telling the story "correctly"...we often reduce it. People who work with trauma survivors will tell you that the importance of telling a story and having it witnessed is crucial to living with loss...but also critical is having a form outside oneself to 'step into' that allows someone who has experienced trauma to 'see it' outside of herself...So, when I work with people who are vulnerable, or survivors...I work with the imagination, the invention, the image to step into...not the "real story".

My second point is related to the first, this idea of a too literal telling of a story that reduces it's complexity, and, in a way, its dignity, and can run the risk of focusing more on pain than on agency. This time, though, I'm talking about what I call an aesthetic of injury in arts projects with survivors of violence. Let me give you an example.

Not long ago I saw a performance piece that was advertised as being about teenagers in crisis. The show was developed with young people who have experienced crisis, was performed by students and professionals, and was written and staged by a team of artists. Before I attended the performance a woman I know saw the piece, and I asked her about it. She paused. "It's politically incorrect, really, not to like a show like that." "I know, but tell me anyway", I said. Her remarks - as a mother of a teenage boy - were very interesting. First, she said it seemed to her strange that the performers were all so gorgeous. "Gorgeous bodies writhing about in agony on stage", she said. And, "it's kind of passive aggressive. I'm not sure it is so good for my son to be in touch with how he hurts, this way". Also of interest to my friend was a kind of call and answer she observed in the talkback session afterwards: "A person says 'I suffered this too', and everyone claps." "Confession", I said. "Baptist church healing ritual", she said.

Then I saw the show myself. It seemed oddly familiar. Then I read in the program notes that the play had been developed through a series of theatre workshops based on the theatre of the oppressed processes. These workshops typically begin by asking participants for images of individual violation and building a play through an analysis of those moments, looking for ways to make change in people's lives. What unfolded before me - to my extreme discomfort - was a morality play. It had all the relevant theatre of the oppressed tropes: authenticity, confession, oppressors. According to the production, teen problems are caused by divorce, stupid parents or ignorant teachers. There were no intelligent adults and few resourceful young people. Only the lost and the losing. Going down, and proud of it, they seemed to declare. The show displayed little complexity of content or theatrical execution. Instead, several accomplished artists seemed to be shackled by the workshop, silenced by the enthusiasm of their encounter with these vibrant teenage sufferers. It seemed to me that a theatrical form I helped develop had become a genre I now deeply distrust. I told my friend afterwards, "I feel like someone who helped develop a drug and now thinks it is dangerous."

Or is it? Drugs are powerful. Sometimes they ease the pain. Is this eroticized anguish, or a stage in the process of bearing witness? Arrested melancholy, or what Melanie Klein calls the "depressive position" that is a key moment of infantile experience in the process of mourning? I don't want to be cute. Yes, I think there is damage done by this work, or at the very least, a distressing poverty of approach when the very real existence of oppression is interpreted to mean reproducing the polarity of good guy/bad guy in the language of victim and oppressor. What this looks like in practice is a crude acting out of two sides of the same coin: on the one hand, an almost hysterical adoration of the victim, on the other a passive sarcastic kind of irony that keeps any real feeling at bay. If the question posed to the young people at the start of the above process was "tell us about your lives", clearly a vast spectrum of their energies and desires could find no place within the narrow framework of this performance. But I want to be careful. I want to remember how important it is to respect the mechanisms by which people survive loss. The ways they find to live with pain.
Playwright Daniel David Moses, in both his creative and critical writings, challenges the limits of tragic mimesis (or tragic forms of representing stories). As Moses puts it:

"One of the words that always comes up in Native gatherings, and particularly among Native artists, is that it is part of our jobs as Native artists to help people heal . . . To me it sounds as if this [white] guilt is the opposite thing: it seems that you don't want to heal, you want to keep the wound. In romanticism you're dancing around a wound. You have these great desires, these great idealistic possibilities, and then they're cut down and things end in death and it's very sad and beautiful. I've seen the attraction of it ... but it strikes me as really sick." (cited in Appleford:1993:22, Canadian Theatre Review #77).

Moses is talking about contemporary mainstream theatre, but his comments apply to what I consider an aesthetic of injury within theatre for social change in English Canada. I suggest that a preoccupation with the experience of loss and a privileging of trauma as a mode of knowledge - both in popular theatre practice and in witnessing and trauma literature - provides an essential yet limiting framework which fixes testimony within a discourse of loss and the tragic, and often presumes testifying to be a monologue not a dialogue. I am beginning to suspect that theatre can offer something here to trauma theory. After all, the interpretation of the act of survival is an act of representation. Which notions of mimesis, of translation, of performance, inform how we live and represent surviving? Can such representations be more than the burden of loss as an absent presence?

The last postcard, a point about the relationship between politics and art. In 1958, in England, drama critic Kenneth Tynan accused Romanian absurdist playwright Eugene Ionesco of separating art from the world, and leading audiences up a blind alley with an "escape from realism" that led nowhere except to "art as a world of its own, answerable to none but it's own laws". Ionesco responded by saying that ideological art is inferior to the doctrine it claims to demonstrate, and that if anything needs demystifying it is our ideologies. He says Tynan is making a false distinction between realism and non-realism and is talking in fact about "only one plane of reality, the 'social plane', which seems to me to be the most external, in other words, the most superficial". The absence of ideology, Ionesco says, "does not mean the absence of ideas: on the contrary, it fertilizes them". Ionesco is suggesting, I think, that bad art is bad politics...and, that distinctions in style - realism is 'real life and serious', the absurd or comedic is 'frivolous' - are false dichotomies. I want to suggest the same about the ways in which we classify art, in particular "community arts". I say this because what I've discovered, working with a number of you here in this room over the years, working now on an opera that is about the atom bomb and involves research on every level - the professional arts world, the people of Deline, North West Territories (where uranium was mined), the activists in Port Hope Ontario (where it was refined), researchers in New Mexico (where the Manhattan Project tested the bomb), Hiroshima and Nagasaki: this project is about art, and politics, and history, and communities . It is related to poetry workshops I do with Ruth Howard and the people at Davenport Perth Community Centre in Toronto. It is related to the oral histories my students at Queen's University perform with World War Two Veterans. It's a funny line we draw when we call something community arts.. It's a strange thing we do, separating art from life, and forcing it into categories. But, we have the category, and I am going to wind up by telling you some of the things I love about community arts projects, and some of the things I hate.

First, a purely selfish thing. I love how challenged I am by working with people who have no preconceptions about art. In my daily life, I write plays, and essays, and I teach, and I love doing these things. When I work in the professional world of the theatre, or the university, I can hide behind my role. Obviously I don't always do this...obviously if I don't offer myself to my students, my writing, there won't be much of value in my work. But hiding is possible. In my experience, when I meet a group of people who are not familiar with plays, or writing and who are willing - or wanting - to tell their stories in some way with my assistance - when I do that I can't hide. I have to be myself. Such a simple thing, but far too easy to avoid. It's like when you go to a new place, and you're outside the familiar. Outside familiar roles, nobody knows you, and, perhaps, you find out things about yourself. Your strengths, your limits. How well you listen, how often you don't. How much there is to learn. Community arts projects not only bring people together from different worlds, they get them working together to create something new. In this world of mass produced entertainment and commodity culture, everything available in duplicate at Wal Mart, creating something new is a precious, powerful and terribly important thing.

What else do I love? I love how excited an old man, Henry, gets when he writes a poem, and listens to the potent silence when he reads it aloud to a group of strangers at a workshop. The hush that falls over the group. The murmurs. I did that, I made them feel that, he thinks.

I love when people who have been fighting about how to keep their children safe in their neighbourhood sew together over a community centre table and find out they all love the colour red. And when a group of people who all love the colour red sew together over a community centre table and find out they can join a coalition trying to keep their children safe. And they join, and they bring their strong red banner. I love that.

I hate when I am at a political conference, and it is going on all day, and at the break one of the organizers asks me "can you do some theatre for an icebreaker, so we can all relax a bit". Theatre as an icebreaker. I hate that.

Or I hate when I'm meeting with the executive of a union who has gotten a grant to work with me on an 'artist in the workplace' project, and the executive tells me that any pages in the script that aren't clearly "union issues" should be cut. Before showing to any union audience, because he knows, because he "loves theatre". In fact he loves it so much he'd like to take the scenes home and re-write them. This valuing of my labour by someone working for labour...I hate that.

Or when I get a call from a community centre asking me to put some kind of play together about international women's day, and then gives me a list of issues that the play needs to "address". I hate that. And when International women's day is two weeks away and the person on the phone tells me to "just make sure they have fun"...I hate that even more.

Am I against fun? Am I against issues? Hardly. So what's the problem? The problem is that throwing an exercise or a play together on the fly is an insult to everyone, but most of all an insult to the terrible beauty and staggering potential that art offers, should we be willing to meet her on her terms. The problem is that the world is a confusing and scary place, and we need every ounce of imagination we can muster, together with the skills to put that imagination into form. This is as true for my old man, Henry, writing his poem as it is for Margaret Atwood writing her next book. I always remember some painter telling me, in elementary school, if you want to paint learn to hold a brush. And then learn to look. Art. The problem is that the word art has become a dirty word. I understand why, we all know about elitism and the arts as a marketplace but that is not what anyone in this room is trying to do. We have gotten so tangled in trying to NOT be elitist that we have thrown out the proberbial baby with the bathwater. The child lives. Her name is art. I want her to come back. I looked art up in the dictionary, because maybe we've forgotten what it is. I had. When I was in my twenties, in the early eighties when I started Second Look Community Arts Resource, I said theatre was a tool. I hate that too. So what did the dictionary say? "a human creative skill or its application". This is what I think my job is, when I work with people who haven't chosen to make their lives about art, but want art in their lives. To introduce skills, a language, another way to speak. Another way to look. That's why I'd called the company that...Second Look. By the way, we called ourselves facilitators in Second Look and I hate that too. We wanted to pretend we all knew the same things. That's ridiculous. We all knew the same, sort of, about life, but Henry did not know how to speak his poem to the back of an auditorium until I showed him how to open his throat. If you are an artist, and someone in a group hires you to show them how to use a paintbrush, then for god's sakes show them. Otherwise it is you who are making art this big mystery, this special elitist thing. Hiding our skills as artists is paternalistic and really a way to make ourselves special. We also did a lot of collective creation in Second Look and I want to say a word about that. Collective creation is a misnomer. Creating collaboratively is about people sharing and shaping the details of their dreams, their accidents, their longings. This brings debate and friction and excitement and, perhaps, discovery. And it's only good - meaning rewarding, challenging, questioning - when it's hard work. Even if that hard work only lasts thirty minutes. You don't get substance by hauling words and images out of people crudely and quickly, and you don't get it by telling artists to follow your ideas of what issue is currently relevant. Trust them, trust the artists and the people, let them dig deeply and play with their world, and they will surprise you and themselves. That's their job.

Writer Jeanette Winterson says that "art has deep and difficult eyes...art is a foreign city, and we deceive ourselves when we think it is familiar. No one is surprised that a foreign city follows its own customs and speaks its own language. Only a boor would ignore both and blame his defaulting on the place. Every day this happens to the artist and to art." Learn to hold a brush. Let someone teach you. Teach someone. Learn to look differently. Art is a language. Respect it, however little or much you engage in it, do it fully. And give painters and sculptors and musicians and writers and designers and actors and all these people who devote their lives to a craft...give them the respect you would give an athlete, or a physician, or a teacher, or a builder, any serious worker...anyone who has spent time and energy and heart on doing this thing in the world. Learn its language, just a little. It will give you back tenfold.

1 I've written about this in several places, including "Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre, and The Lie of the Literal", Theatre Topics, September 1996, The John Hopkins University Press; and, "The Art of Witness In Popular Theatre", Canadian Theatre Review, No. 90 Spring 1997, Editor Edward Little.