Dramaturging Personal Narratives: Who am I and Where is Here?

First published in the UK in 2015 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2015 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2015 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

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Cover image: Judith Rudakoff

Author photo: Christopher Gentile

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Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-419-9

ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-420-5

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Dramaturging Personal Narratives: Who am I and Where is Here?

Section One: The Ashley Plays

The Ashley Plays: The Basics

Chapter 1: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa I (2002)

Chapter 2: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa II (2006)

Chapter 3: Ashley Lives in Cape Town, South Africa III (2006)

Chapter 4: Ashley Lives in Iqaluit, Canada (2006)

Chapter 5: Ashley Lives in Namma Bhoomi, India (2008)

Chapter 6: Ashley Lives in Whitehorse, Canada (2008)

Section Two: The Virtual Ashley Plays

The Virtual Ashley Plays: The Basics

Chapter 1: Ashley Lives in Canada, Iran, South Africa, and United Kingdom (2007)

Chapter 2: Ashley Lives in Cuba, Canada, and USA (2007)

Chapter 3: Ashley lives in Cameroon, Jamaica, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, and South Africa (2008)

Chapter 4: Common Ground Forum: Talking ABOUT Ashley and Talking AS Ashley (2007)

Section Three: Photobiography

Photobiography: The Basics

Chapter 1: Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada and Khayelitsha Township, South Africa (2007)

Chapter 2: Whitehorse, Canada (2010)

Section Four: Roots/Routes Journeys to Home

Roots/Routes Journeys to Home: The Basics

Chapter 1: Journey I: Geoffrey Hyland, South Africa (2008)

Chapter 2: Journey II: Mfundo Tshazibane, South Africa (2007)

Chapter 3: Journey III: Mercedes Bravo, Cuba (2008)

Chapter 4: Journey IV: Jolene Arreak, Canada (2007)

Appendix: 35 Sample Lomogram images

Acknowledgements

This book reflects the contribution and support of many participants, collaborators, and volunteers.

I would like to thank Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for a generous grant under the auspices of their Research-Creation Program which funded Common Plants: Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality from 2006 to 2009, and York University’s Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies for funding the services of my graduate student assistants, Diana Reis and Sara d’Agostino. I am very grateful to Tim Hampton, Chris Alfonso, and Kevin Haghighat of the Faculty of Fine Arts, York University, for their work updating the video links on the Common Plants website, which are referred to many times in this book.

I would also like to thank the following York University theatre students who offered thoughtful comments, attentive proof-reading, and general encouragement throughout the writing and revising of this book: Shawna Blain, Tyler Graham, and Spencer Schunk. Further, I am grateful to Amy Bowman, Serena Dessen, and J. Paul Halferty who read early drafts of the Introduction, and to Brian Fawcett, whose input made my writing more readable.

In addition to their participation in some of the projects I discuss in the book, I want to acknowledge the importance of the detailed documentary reports contributed by Nisha Ahuja, Mark Fleishman, Andrew Houston, Mandla Mbothwe, Myles Warren, and Belarie Zatzman. I also appreciate the important photographic and video documentation by Nisha Ahuja, Andrew Cheng, Jayeshekar Madapadi, Fabienne Tessier, Myles Warren, and Belarie Zatzman.

The staff at Intellect Books are a pleasure to work with, and I appreciate their ongoing support and enthusiasm for my projects. In particular, I would like to thank May Yao and Claire Organ, and, as well, to mention the extraordinary dedication to innovation and quality in publishing of the late Masoud Yazdani.

Finally, I must specifically acknowledge the participation of all the contributors to the projects chronicled in this book: their commitment, courage, and creativity are at the heart of the work.

Introduction

Dramaturging Personal Narratives: Who am I and Where is Here?

Iam hyphenated: I work as an academic-artist, documentarian-practitioner in theatre-dance within this culture-that culture. I live in one of the most diverse cities in the world, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.¹ I teach playwriting and developmental dramaturgy at York University, where the student population of over 55,000 reflects the city’s wide range of cultures. The pedagogy and the resulting projects in my courses are a result of and reaction to my theoretical, academic study of theatre as well as my practical experience. My academic training has provided me with the skills to incorporate my field work into an educational setting, both as practical work and in a theoretical context. Over the past two decades, I have undertaken developmental dramaturgy on three continents. My projects are often site-specific, culturally diverse, and multidisciplinary. Much of my dramaturgy practice has focussed on eliciting personal narratives and providing people with the opportunity and tools to tell their own stories.

International literary criticism icon Northrop Frye wrote, It seems to me that Canadian sensibility has been profoundly disturbed, not so much by our famous problem of identity, important as that is, as by a series of paradoxes in what confronts that identity. It is less perplexed by the question ‘Who am I?’ than by some such riddle as ‘Where is here?’² This challenge—how and where to root the self and/or to identify home—is one grappled with by displaced, exiled, colonized, othered, or disenfranchised people the world over. Dramaturging personal narratives has helped me to understand more about this fraught relationship between personal and cultural identity.

The developmental dramaturgy I practice often begins with an investigation into how people perceive self, home, and homeland and how they inter-relate these concepts. My dramaturgical methods involve prompting personal narratives, sometimes provoking those narratives through a variety of pretexts and constructed projects. I try to ensure that all participants find ways and means of expressing their histories and experiences that are unique to their lives, yet are accessible and understandable to as far-reaching and diverse an audience or readership as possible. No matter what their socio-economic or political status, for many participants the voicing or enacting of personal narratives (and the realization that these individual stories can be universally affective) is empowering. As well, recognizing similarity within difference has been illuminating for both contributors and viewers.

For the record, I am neither an anthropologist nor an ethnographer: I am a dramaturg who facilitates the creation and development of artistic projects. If important outcomes such as social engagement or individual healing are by-products of the work generated, so much the better.

Further, while most of my practice has and continues to be situated in performative forms of artistic creation, some of my engagements with the development of new work have encompassed non-performative projects which either stood on their own or fueled later theatrical work. In this book, I focus on how the dramaturgical process was applied in a variety of forms, styles, and genres emanating from personal narratives. Sometimes I use the term dramaturgy to describe what I do in non-theatrical projects. This is a conscious and considered choice: dramatic narrative can be found in a series of photographs or a poem as well as in a play.

The relationship between source and artistic creation shapes my dramaturgical practice. I use unconventional methodologies to encourage responses from artists, community members, and students from a multitude of cultures (I use culture to refer —but not exclusively—to geographical origin, ethnicity, socio-economic situation).

People often ask me about dealing with difference and how I approach working creatively in geographically distant places with people whose lives are culturally distinct from each other’s, from mine, and/or with individuals whose life experiences are radically different from mine. This is my answer:

Whenever I enter a room, I enter as myself. That sounds simplistic, but represents a complex principle. I carry personal history. I see through a particular set of filters. I am an educated, white, Jewish woman who was born in Canada, a country with great resources, natural and otherwise. I was the first in my immediate family to graduate from high school and go on to higher education, but I come from a world of privilege, despite challenges, where choice exists, as do the possibilities of change and betterment.

Whenever I enter a room, I admit what I don’t know in that context. I also claim what I do know.

In workshops involving difference, in the initial stages, I don’t offer, but wait to be asked; I don’t take, I wait to be given. I have learned to engage and be part of the group, but I never pretend that difference doesn’t exist. In so doing, I have, mostly, escaped the trap of creating otherness.

I also have learned, gradually, to accept the discomfort of difference. This experience should never get easier, but the uneasiness should become familiar and educative.

One of the ways I cope with being different (not just feeling, but being different) is to find or acknowledge something that gives the sensation of belonging.

For example, I have worked extensively with Cuban artists in Cuba, mostly during the 1990s, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union (which resulted in the loss of Cuba’s primary source of foreign trade, aid, and capital). This difficult time was euphemistically labeled as the Special Period in Peace Time by the Cuban government. My first trip in 1992 was a result of circumstance: I was invited to participate in an informal cultural delegation of North Americans by organizers who knew me only by reputation. I spoke no Spanish at the time. We arrived at the old, decrepit Varadero Airport with this group, and the fixer (the person shepherding our group, a North American who was trying to build a business based on cultural exchanges between North America and Cuba) began to lead us through the throngs of travelers and airport personnel. Suddenly, a small AfroCuban woman (I stand five feet tall … she was smaller than I) appeared out of the crowd and flung herself at me, hugging me with a passion not usually offered to strangers, declaiming in a loud voice. I felt no threat, so I didn’t extricate myself from her embrace. I looked to our guide, waiting for him to translate, and he just shook his head in wonder and explained, She’s saying ‘Welcome. Welcome home. We’ve been waiting so long. What took you so long to get here? We’ve been waiting for you to get here.’ And then the woman let me go with one more squeeze and disappeared back into the crowd. Did she mistake me for someone else? I’ll never know. But in the crowded, smoky, dank airport, for a few moments, I experienced a sensation of familiarity. The place was unfamiliar, and yet, as a result of her genuine if misplaced warmth, I felt as if I belonged.

This experience and my subsequent dramaturgy sessions with artists in Cuba coincided with the start of my exploration of the meaning of home. I discovered through our workshops that for many Cubans I encountered, home was not a parcel of owned land and/or buildings: home had been internalized. Government prohibition regarding ownership of land or property led to home being represented by a cherished memory of a smell, a taste, a sound or a song that evoked family in a geographical location. Place provided a context for people.

In the process and creative work detailed in the following chapters, the investigation into what home means is always present, sometimes overtly and other times in more oblique ways.

The Projects and Processes

The work documented in this book represents selected projects in contexts that have impacted upon my dramaturgical process. Some projects resulted in artistic engagement without common languages or shared mythic or cultural references. This challenge necessitated exploration of alternate modes of communication. As well, participants had to draw upon experiential understanding of the creative power of archetypal iconography and values.

Chapters in this book reflect the unique requirements of each version of a particular project. The Basics at the beginning of each section delineate the method applied. As with any creative projects, variables such as time, place, context, and the nature and needs of participants determined the actual shape of the applied process and its outcome. Projects were also developed over different durations of time. As such, the documentation format and content of each chapter varies to reflect this diversity. Further, to maintain authenticity, throughout this book, when I quote from samples of participants’ written work, I have not edited the material. These examples include Ashley cycle texts, entries on the Common Ground Forum,³ or any other original work. The writing appears here in print the way it was submitted by each participant, and as a result, sometimes includes grammatical or typographical errors and inconsistencies. Very early versions of some of the material that developed into chapters in this book appear on the website of a project I conceived and facilitated called Common Plants, either as reports or field notes. I will discuss this project below.

The form of this book also mirrors my pedagogy and dramaturgical process in that I demonstrate how to accomplish projects, I offer examples of the outcome, and I comment on the themes that reverberate throughout the work. I do not engage in theoretical analysis, as I am focussed on exploring the practical application of process. I do not cite the work of other dramaturgs or scholars to validate or contextualize my own. This is not a book, to paraphrase an esteemed colleague, about this and that, but rather about this. Others may choose to analyze the material presented in this book in alternative context or situate the work in a theoretical framework. I have also decided not to offer discussions about the nature of dramaturgy, as there are books available which do this admirably.

In this book you will find, in each section and in each chapter, examination of an individualized version of a process that resulted in a unique creative project. Each project offers its own specific lessons and readers should decide how to evolve the methods and projects to suit their own needs and those of their constituencies. In short, the goal of this book is to introduce the principles of my methods, to demonstrate the process in action, and to show creative outcome in order to stimulate readers to generate their own versions of the projects.

As to the question of the target readership for this book, my intention is to appeal to as broad a constituency as possible, including professional and community based artists who work in a wide variety of genres, scholars from creative fields, and both students and teachers at all levels of education who are interested in learning more about generating, developing, and disseminating creative work inspired by personal narratives.

Much of the documented work was made possible by Common Plants: Cross Pollinations in Hybrid Reality, a multidisciplinary, transcultural⁴ research-creation project funded by Canada’s Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). I conceived and led this project as principle investigator from 2006 to 2009. Common Plants cultivated the following principles:

• Creative resources reside within the self;

• We must exercise our own voices, within our own context;

• To affect change, we must identify and articulate who we are, where we are and how we relate to our landscape;

• We must engage with and speak to those outside of our context for our message to be heard;

• Listening is as important as speaking.

• This project lives in a garden, where cross-pollination is vital to survival: art is the last line of defense in the war against cultural obliteration.

Many of the examples I will refer to may be viewed in their entirety on the project’s dedicated website (www.yorku.ca/gardens.)⁵

Common Plants applied my transcultural dramaturgical methods to groups of participants located in geographically distant places such as South Africa and Iqaluit, Nunavut in Canada’s Far North. These participants were a mixture of professional artists, students, and community members. I invited contributions from as diverse a group of people as I was able to, drawing on my professional and academic networks for recommendations. Over the three years of the project, participants lived or were born in North America, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East, India, and Africa. Some participants were newcomers to the country they live in and others were second or third generation citizens. In North America, some participants lived in the United States and others across Canada, from Iqaluit in Nunavut, the eastern High Arctic to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory in the North West and points in between. Some project participants lived in large urban centres (Toronto, Chicago, and Cape Town) while others were from rural areas (Namma Bhoomi, India, and a farm outside Regina, Saskatchewan), or remote areas (Pond Inlet and Resolute Bay, Nunavut). Still others were in transit (several participants were youth living in shelters in Toronto, one originally from Cameroon, another from Iran). Even within the geographical boundaries of a location, participants did not always experience the same relationship to their landscape, and this was reflected in the artistic work they generated. All of the participants, in some way, grappled with difficult relations to and definitions of home. All contributors, through written or orally transmitted informed consent protocols, agreed to participate in the project or projects being undertaken, and to the subsequent publication of research and creative outcome. Participants were, through this protocol, also offered the option of anonymous participation, which some chose. Throughout any engagement with marginalized groups or members of any vulnerable sector, strict attention was paid to ethical oversight. Further, there was constant monitoring of the relationships between participants and dramaturgy personnel by the host organizations.

In some cases, the processes and artistic results and the participants were also linked in networks of experience through the Internet. Participants could view each other’s uploaded work, some of which had been created simultaneously in different locations, as well as interact on the website’s Common Ground Forum, to discuss the work in more general ways. Some participants also posted regularly on personal blogs in the website’s BLOGarden.

An important goal of Common Plants was to see if my dramaturgy methods and tools were transferable: could other dramatugs use them successfully? Could they do so in cultural contexts which were not the same as my own? To that end, Dr. Mark Fleishman, both a professor of theatre at University of Cape Town (UCT) and artistic director of Magnet Theatre, was involved in generating significant amounts of creative work over several years.⁶ Fleishman had already studied my dramaturgy methods when I was a Visiting Scholar at UCT in 2002 and was very familiar with the work in theory and in practice. During this time, he also observed the development and production of an iteration of The Ashley Plays (a non-linear, thematically linked cycle of site-specific original plays that offers a framework for expressing the personal through a common, collaboratively created character named Ashley).⁷

In dialogue with Fleishman, I was able to further articulate core research questions that would continue to evolve with each different group and each new project. These questions included: What is home? Where is home? Is home a place or a state of mind? Is home where you are or where you come from? How many homes do you have? As with most artistic investigation, these questions often led to more questions rather than to answers.

In another set of informal field tests to see how my methods would transfer and be applied by someone else, I involved Community Arts worker Nisha Ahuja,⁸ who contributed to several major Common Plants projects as dramaturg, notably with former child labourers in rural India’s Namma Bhoomi⁹ collective and with students at Toronto’s Central Technical High School.¹⁰

Through the use of videotaped and photographed geographical sites, environmental soundscapes,¹¹ human body soundmaps of home (created by Cape Town participants working with Fleishman, these were sets of expressive sounds made vocally and by using the body that evoked participants’ memories of home.),¹² the public online Common Ground Forum, the BLOGarden, and other tools, the Common Plants project aimed to offer participants cross pollination: juxtaposing, intersecting, and inventing the individualized world of each performance, viewed through the artist participants’ specific experiential and cultural filters in a hybrid, global context. Many participants living in parts of the world that shared little to no cultural references were overly dependent on Internet access, listened to the same popular American music, adopted the same fashion codes, spoke or texted on the same cellphones, and referred to the same contemporary iconography. They also shared a curiosity about the rest of the world and a need to know that their immediate concerns and daily challenges were not theirs alone.

This sharing of work was not without problems which went far beyond the challenge of working across five time zones. While the South African participants had Internet access, even short videos of less than five minutes took up to a day to download. The Indian participants living in a rural community had no Internet access at all. To address the South African downloading issue, the project moved from video to photography, sound, and text work, which was easier to access. The website was copied onto a DVD and dramaturg Ahuja, who had video-recorded The Ashley Plays in Namma Bhoomi, was asked to send the project to her participants: not an ideal solution. While the participation from this group was limited to their time working with Ahuja and creating their live performance cycle, the work is nonetheless important in its exploration of individual identity within a microcosmic cultural context.

Throughout the work undertaken, despite all good intentions, some of the participants felt disenfranchised and othered by virtue of culture, race, or economic disparity (Cuban and Indian participants in particular). Some found it challenging to acknowledge belonging to a place, as citizens with rights, responsibilities, and privileges because they carried a history and heritage of oppression or disadvantage (specifically some of the South African and Iranian participants). Some participants who were born in Cape Town, Tel Aviv, and Teheran in times of turmoil and realignment of power at all levels worked to express their need to reclaim citizenship and connection to cities they no longer inhabited. Some participants living in exile who were funded to revisit their former home found that cities and towns that looked familiar from a distance no longer offered a stabilizing foundation. Participants from a diversity of locations felt the same deep sadness and the fear that they would never again feel at home in a place they identified as lost forever. In an attempt to re-establish the feeling and memory of home, they clung to remembered and reclaimed images and objects that evoked sense memory of taste, smell, touch, and sound. This is where the challenging dramaturgical work began, following trails inward to the memories and forging new pathways outward, by encouraging the telling of the stories.

But first, I will provide context for how (and where) some of my dramaturgical methods for working with personal narratives germinated.

The Garden/El Jardin in Cuba

My developmental dramaturgical practice began to evolve during almost a decade of intermittent work I undertook with Cuba’s Teatro Escambray. Teatro Escambray was founded in 1968 in Havana by a group of professional actors who decided to leave the city and abandon their careers performing in classics and contemporary work from the Western canon, in order to create a residential collective that was mandated to produce new work about current socio-political issues in the country.¹³ Between 1992 and 2000, I dramaturged theatre workshops with this group that usually included North Americans (students, artists, academics) and took place over one to two-week residencies at their colony, La Macagua, high in the isolated Central Mountain District of Cuba. In 1998, I was declared an Honourary Member of the collective.

During the workshops, the North American and Cuban participants often lacked a common language and shared few cultural references.¹⁴ The American blockade of goods, services, and free flow of information had, at that time, only been slightly infiltrated by the tourist trade. During one of these residencies, Diana, the eight-year-old granddaughter of one of the senior actors, asked me where I had learned my English. From my parents, I answered her in Spanish, and she paused, looked at me quizzically and asked, And where did your parents learn their English? For Diana, who had been born in a small village near the colony and had spent her entire life in a remote, boundaried environment in a country where communication or travel, internally and externally, were extremely limited, the notion of anyone speaking a language other than Spanish as their primary language was inconceivable. This small part of the country was, to Diana, the entire world.

Some of the North Americans who participated in the workshops were similarly unfamiliar with cultural practices other than their own. Some of the Cubans had never met a foreigner. During most of these workshops, the common experience of theatre-making, as well as daily social interaction (communal meals, late night parties, informal musical jam sessions, and short trips in the company’s worn-out, unreliable tour bus¹⁵ to local points of interest) provided a means for enabling active cultural exchanges.

As Teatro Escambray went through changes of personnel, new challenges emerged as the level of professionalism and experience lessened. With each successive workshop, more and more of the senior founding members of Teatro Escambray retired or left the group. Additionally, many of the intermediate level group members, those with formal theatre training from Cuba’s Instituto Superior de Arte, had also moved on, emigrating to Spanish-speaking countries in Europe and Central or South America with the hope of finding a more economically stable life, or moving to Havana to try to break into the Cuban television or film industries. Towards the end of our active association, I perceived a need to establish an exercise that would create a collaborative performance activity without assuming theatre training. The exercise still had to take into account the lack of common language or cultural background, but without the bridge of theatre experience.

To this end, I conceived and initiated The Garden/El Jardin, an interactive installation that was created twice, February 18, 1999 and February 15, 2000, on the first or second night of a week-long programme, with a group of approximately forty Cuban and North American participants each time. All of the Cuban participants and all but one of the North Americans took part both times. One goal of this creative performance activity was for participants to interpret and express an aspect of home and to communicate that aspect to the other participants. Another goal of the project was to find ways of identifying the familiar within the unfamiliar and in so doing, to create a sense of community.

Each North American participant who chose to join the project was tasked, before travelling to Cuba, with bringing an object to plant in The Garden, and to prepare a short, spoken text—a fragment of poetry, a story, a song lyric, a statement—to contextualize their object and address the questions How and why is this object representative of you and of your life? and How does this object represent home?

The Garden took place in Teatro Escambray’s small black box studio theatre after dinner.¹⁶ We began by forming a large circle. With a member of Teatro Escambray, I moved from person to person, both of us asking each person "What would you like to plant in The Garden? ¿Que quieres plantar en el jardin?" Participants then moved to the centre of the circle, planted their object, and spoke or read their prepared text.

The objects planted by the Cubans in Year One included a bag of sea shells containing specimens from each of the primary beaches in Cuba, a piece of camouflage-patterned fabric cut from the parachute of a dead soldier found lying on the beach after the battle known in North America as the Bay of Pigs Invasion (and in Cuba, known as the Caribbean Crisis), a roughly hewn wooden flute, a small red flower tied to a feather, and a dried seed pod from a ceiba tree, which is sacred in the AfroCuban belief system.

In Year Two, the Cubans planted a greater proportion of photographs than objects, including images of rehearsals and of themselves as children, the latter contextualized with lyrical written descriptions of their relationship to the place or event depicted and how it related to them in the present.

In Year One, the North Americans, mostly Canadian, offered jewellery, cassette tapes of contemporary popular North American music, small religious and cultural icons, and descriptive explanations of what these were. These included a statue of the Indian god Shiva Nataraj and a stone from an island off the coast of Portugal. As these objects were planted in The Garden, explanations of what they represented were read aloud from prepared texts. In the North American group, the languages spoken reflected a range of national and ethnic diversity which surprised the Cubans.

Figure 1: Members of Teatro Escambray examine The Garden/El Jardin. Photo credit: Judith Rudakoff.

Even though participants from the two groups did not, for the most part, understand each other’s texts, the objects and their significance to each participant was apparent. These were representations of home, and recognizing that resulted in a shared sense of the familiar.

In Year Two, the North Americans emphasized written text, and brought fewer personal objects, instead opting to plant poetic, written declarations of personal, national, and cultural identity. One Canadian also planted a page of study notes taken during their previous workshop at La Macagua, in effect discarding the carefully transcribed vocabulary lists and translated phrases in recognition of the alternate forms of communication that were occurring. In this iteration of the exercise, the texts, regardless of the language in which they had been written, represented home. With a sense of community already established, the Cuban and North American groups accepted each other’s planted objects without needing to understand their specific meanings. The act of planting something that represented home and self was enough to re-establish the familiarity of the year before.

After each participant had planted something in The Garden, we broke out of the circular formation and explored each other’s objects and texts, alone and in groups, asking questions, offering comments. We did this verbally (even when there was no common language), using tone of voice, inflection, and facial expression to convey meaning as clearly as possible, and other times using