Community Performance

This group aims to allow its participants to share information, to network, and to exchange creative energies.
The group emerges out of questions such as these (adapted from the community/performance conference, June 2004, Bryant University):
- What is the efficacy of arts interventions in building communities?
- What are the present and future roles of the arts in our social projects?
- Are there separate aesthetics of community arts?
- What are the relations between performance theory and practice?
- What communities are being served/serve themselves?
- What factors hinder or further collaboration, dissemination, organization, and sharing?
- What are the relationships between activism and action, between performance and the performative, between the artistic and art?
- What are the practices of transformation and transgression in our contemporary cultural scene?
- What are the shapes, the smells, the scenes, the people and the places of politics?

In our workgroup, we can find ways to address these questions, and we can begin to discuss the kaleidoscope of issues that arise from the two terms, community and performance. Both of these terms are open-ended, and neither describe a specific political project. Notions of 'community' can be deeply exclusionary and reactionary as well as core concepts in empowerment struggles, and 'performance' can refer to repressive, liberatory, destabilizing and consolidating activities and acts alike. And yet, many of the activities emerging in the activities of PSi members interested in these terms share certain features. Community arts, environmental arts and civil rights performance projects often foreground concepts such as democratic or collaborative practices, everyday life, the local and the private as spaces of agency, engagement with dominant stereotypes, the merging of educative and creative aims, and the respect for multiple voices. But the histories of art practices show that these features do not exempt community arts from co-option and commodification.

Other important issues we might discuss (and, potentially, intervene in) include the relative positioning of community arts in the value scheme of the art market and arts funding bodies. Funding schemes can often provide problems for art workers in these fields, who might find themselves on the sidelines, and need appropriate networks and language to educate funders and critics.

As we begin to weave our net of concepts, bodies and voices in this workgroup, definitions of community performance will multiply, and I hope that the nodal points of thoughts and actions will converge on that problematic realm, the politics of arts, and artists' space in the community.

It is my hope (and it might well be that we might decide to change this as this group constitutes itself) that one significant aspect of workgroup meetings will be an attention to different means of communication, participation and community-building. I hope that our meetings will be less characterized by paper giving, but by other embodied modes of making contact: hybrids of papers, performances, and workshop modes of delivery can be experimented with, and can enrich our sharings.

To join, contact the workgroup coordinator: petra@umich.edu

Petra Kuppers
Associate Professor, English Department
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 USA

Artistic Director of The Olimpias Performance Research Projects
www.olimpias.net