Development of the School

a report written June 24, 2019 and June 2021

I’m a New Orleans based artist who has been living and working in various creative fields since 2006. I was born in northeastern Louisiana and raised in small parishes throughout my childhood. The cultural atmosphere I grew up in was what one might expect of small Southern towns: politically conservative, racially segregated, oriented around the Christian church, football, fast food, and shopping malls. However, as the son of two choir teachers, I found myself living in a musical and artistic culture within the broader Southern culture. The process of creating music with friends and strangers instilled a different set of values in me and a different way of relating to people. 

Singing in choirs gave me the opportunity to travel to distant American cities and meet others who lived in contexts very different from my own. What we often shared was a curiosity about the other as well as a focused experience of making art together under the direction of passionate teachers. This communal experience was paired later with an obsessive desire to immerse myself in the streams of world cinema history and absorb from those films all of the knowledge, style, craft, and perspective that I could. 

By growing up in a primarily homogenous culture but also experiencing a range of lifestyles and cultures outside of my own, I learned to appreciate and be enriched by an expanded landscape of influences. After graduating with a film studies degree from the University of New Orleans, I spent some years working in the film industry during a time when Hollywood studios had been lured to New Orleans through tax incentives. I took away many valuable lessons from this work but felt that I existed in a bubble where filmmaking and film watching was the only world that existed. My experience left me craving an environment where I could share ideas and energy with collaborators and create projects that were driven less by financial motivation and more by artistic experimentation. I began hosting travelers and regularly visiting countries overseas in an effort to foster connections with people from other cultures. The benefits of this outward reaching work were numerous.

Slowly an inspired tribe was formed that worked together on collaborative projects and multidisciplinary events. Our community was centered around a specific space in a specific neighborhood and towards the end of our time in that space, my ambition for what could be done there began to expand. I had experienced the fulfilling process of creating work with a engaged group of invested artists but wondered how we might be able to reach more people beyond our own friends circles and art scene. Any project that included new faces, whether as collaborators or as audience members, felt immediately more meaningful. 

I’ve come to prefer being in situations where I am surrounded by people whose expertise and experience vary wildly from my own and this one of the attitudes that has driven my interest in the work that we call “community engaged.” I’ve personally experienced this in a mostly art-centric contexts in groups that are primarily composed of dancers, musicians, writers, sculptors, etc. When knowledge is shared across these disciplines there is greater potential for a more complex work. As I think about my future as an artist and community member, I am excited at the possibility of being in situations where the diversity of voices continues to expand. I would like to see more open platforms available a range of voices and more opportunities for these voices to come into contact with one another. I believe this will make for not only more interesting artwork in fields that are plagued by homogeneity, but could also lead to broader social progress between disparate communities. 

Within the Mellon Program we experience this on a small scale as our cohorts are made up of students with unique areas of research that often don’t find chances to overlap. Life as a graduate student can often feel like being trapped in a specialized bubble so it can be a boost to engage with colleagues who are immersed in and passionate about something I know nothing or very little about. At its core, this process of collective collaboration and sharing has a great potential in cultivating individual creativity and understanding. 

As scholars we are in a position of generating new knowledge that can benefit our own specific fields. Integrating a community-engaged approach to this knowledge sharing requires that we open our work to communities from the outset, keeping in mind the wider ramifications that our discoveries might impact.

The field of theatre-making is inherently bound up with communities and the question of the nature of the relationship between the spectator and the performance is an important point of departure. My own graduate work is often focused on technical problems and questions about set design and aesthetics. Working through the Mellon Program has brought a line of questioning into my own creative process that starts early on and continues as I shape work with collaborators: Who are we making this piece for? Who do we imagine the audience is? Is its content relevant to the issues our communities are facing? Who do we want the audience to be and why? How can we bring the work to new audiences or bring new audiences to the work?

Foundational Scholarship

As a theatre maker and visual artist, my practice often begins with nothing: a blank space, raw material, or humans in a room. Slowly elements are introduced, associations start coming up, an atmosphere develops, and a form begins to emerge out of the chaos. We work with what we’ve got and follow the directions that excite us. This work is always collaborative in nature and benefits most when ideas are shared in an open and receptive environment. In studying myriad examples of artists and groups who make performances collaboratively, I’ve come across many methods whose practices and philosophies can be translated into the broader realm of community engagement and partnership across organizations. 

There are a growing number of theatre and dance companies who devise work in a way that is more democratic than the traditional-hierarchical methods of working. To varying degrees, these works are built from and depend on the contributions of the performers involved. Most share in common a sole director who has the final say on creative decisions although some employ a more collective direction process. Of the artists and companies I’ve studied, these work in ways that could be said to be democratic and highly collaborative: The Wooster Group, Complicite, Pig Iron Theater, Tectonic Theater Project, Augusto Boal, Odin Teatret, Robert Lepage, Pina Bausch, Ariane Mnouchkine, and Mabou Mimes to name a few. 

One of the early articles that began to lay a groundwork for my thinking about community engagement was an article by John Kretzmann and John McKnight called Building Communities from the Inside Out: A Path Toward Finding and Mobilizing a Community's Assets. They make an argument for the idea that every neighborhood possesses a range of assets unique to it and that before organizations implement new initiatives or programs to benefit these communities they should identify, connect, and mobilize these assets. This helps establish a relationship based in trust and mutual understanding that aims to nurture a communities capacities rather than work from a a perspective that centers on deficiencies. “All historic evidence indicates that significant community development takes place only when local community people are committed to investing themselves and their resources in the effort. […] communities are never built from the top down or from the outside in.” Part of the lesson to be learned here is one of language; being intentional and aware of the implications of using certain terms and phrases when framing the work. 

Projects that work from a negative starting point may run into trouble when the community they’re engaged with begin to question the way that they are being described. The work of James Saltmarsh has also been informative when thinking about this question of syntax. Saltmarsh led a panel conversation at the 2017 Imagining America conference titled We Have A Language Problem—the dialogue circled around systemic questions of language and tracked the evolution of how the terms around community engagement have developed. Much of the problems discussed in this session were beyond my understanding but in its simplicity the title of the session has remained with me when doing this work.

In this way, the poetic writing of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Felix Guattari have also contributed to the development of my thinking about social practice. Their method of creating concepts that link metaphysical ideas to common and even banal processes in nature and modern life is carried out in a exuberantly unpredictable writing style that suggest a myriad of associations and offers itself for use in a variety of linguistic arguments. Their concepts and terminology, although somewhat obscure to those who don’t read their books, offer themselves as highly useful ways of expressing forward thinking social, political, and philosophical ideas.

In New Orleans, the Free Southern Theatre is one of the earliest examples of a community engaged performance organization. Their work, led for many years by John O’Neil, was created in the community for which it served. It was exhibited in spaces that community members were comfortable and familiar with, told stories that were recognizable and relevant to them, and used local actors and non-actors in the productions themselves. The subject matter of the work was concerned with the culture and wellness of its audience and addressed political, social, and economic realities of the time. The theater reflected back to it’s community who it was so that they could celebrate as well as better understand themselves. This might be the common goal of a community artist/facilitator: to bring into the light what has been hidden and build on it’s strengths.

At the same time that the Free Southern Theater was making work in New Orleans, a similarly minded, socially activist arts group in Whitesburg, Kentucky began making work with and for it’s secluded community in the Appalachian Hills. This company, known as Appalshop developed over the years as a cultural hub for the region and eventually expanded its activities to include a local radio station, arts center, and media institute. What is now an expanded network of creativity and local culture began as a theatre project by Dudley Cocke known as the Roadside Theater which traveled around Kentucky and the United States touring the stories of its town’s peoples. 

This model of community engaged theatre making is investigated in the work of Jan Cohen-Cruz whose book Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States was a valuable resource as I researched the various ways that arts organizations of the past have thought about their roles within their communities. 

Before my studies at Tulane I spent three years growing an artistic community and haphazard arts organization that instinctively extended its reach into as many performance styles, genres, and communities that it could. Our guiding vision was to realize a diverse community and arts space that made work which spoke to a wide array of concerns and interests. The academic investigations I have carried out with support from the Mellon Fellowship have given me the opportunity to deepen this knowledge and lay the groundwork for a growing a burgeoning not-for-profit organization into a robust supporter of the local arts scene. With the Beaubourg Theater, I hope to initiate programs that will nurture new and emerging artists, help them develop work, and present it at a professional level. We aim to build on the socially minded work of activist-artists such as John O’Neill and Dudley Cocke and encourage methods that favor democratic inclusion and equity. We hope to give unheard voices of New Orleans a platform to express themselves and share their truths.

Public Scholarship

The Beaubourg Theatre & Arts organization is emerging in New Orleans as an institution that aims to address a gap in services and support for young and emerging artists. With a brick and mortar building in the Central Business District of New Orleans, Beaubourg is uniquely placed at a geographic site where many of the cities overlapping communities often converge. The mission of Beaubourg is to present, commission and facilitate artists’ work for a diverse audience whom we aim to reflect. Beaubourg develops new works with emerging artists, forges collaborations across disciplines, presents local and visiting artists with professional technical support, and engages youth and adults with a range of classes, training, and other educational programming.

In our first year as an active arts organization in the city, we have planned to offer a range of programs free of charge with some fiscal support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The goal of these programs is to strengthen the existing artist communities and create new ones. Our first initiative is an artist-in-residency program wherein we will give four artists or groups a month of rehearsal time in the Beaubourg space along with financial support of up to $700, project mentorship with a local artist, and marketing support for projects that result in a public presentation. This year long program will be an exploratory trial out of which we will develop a long term residency program by capturing feedback collected from the artists and administration during and after each residency period. We will employ qualitative methods such as written reflection, video and audio recordings and field notes. Much of this documentation will also be available via a journal blog on our website. 

Along with this program we will also be offering a season of free classes and workshops geared towards artists, movers, and thinkers of all kinds. As part of this three month program, all attendees will be able to participate on a pay-what-you-can basis. To help subsidize these free classes, Beaubourg will offer teachers a small stipend for their work along with any money that is made from participant donations. After soliciting teachers through personal networks and an open call process, we will create a 90 day class and workshop schedule that can be found on our website and through publicly posted flyers and posters. 

Our website is currently being designed with YEP Design Works, a program of the Youth Empowerment Project in Central City. Along with branding materials, we are also being working with the creative youth of YEP to create the flyers, posters, and a detailed brochure with information about class times, descriptions, and teacher bios. These brochures will include a comment card that can be mailed to our address which asks what types of arts programming and educational opportunities people would like to see from us. As we continue to shape and clarify our organization’s mission and activities, this early feedback will be an invaluable resource as we begin to analyze the positive and negative impacts of our efforts. 

The website for the organization is being designed in a way which will record its activities as well as be an up to date source for happenings at the venue. The website will contain a catalogue of video and writing that document the working process of artists in residence as well as selections from their presented work. Artists will be asked to contribute to the content of the site as it relates to communicating the goals of their project and artistic activities. Through this we aim to establish a general knowledge of these early career artists through their own words as well as photo and video of their process. For an emerging artist, such thorough representation of their work online is an important step along the way to future opportunity and legitimacy.

Further support will be directed towards research for a data platform that can help us analyze and communicate with our organization’s community. Crucial to an arts organizations success is effective marketing and understanding of who their supporters are. Following the completion of both programs in the Winter, we will analyze all of our collected data and take the next steps in establishing long term programs to best nurture the lesser heard voices and lesser seen bodies of artists in New Orleans.

Our aim with the free class series is to bring in a diverse range of participants and teachers and begin building a supportive family of artists and audience at Beaubourg. By thinking of our venue as a public space where a variety of neighbors and community members can meet, we aim to promote interaction and collaboration through engaged programming. At the same time we will begin the work of establishing a large data reserve of our growing community so that we may better understand the patterns that explain interests and values. By identifying the assets that already exist in our communities’ artists and teachers, we can facilitate significant development within our community by giving them a place to thrive and grow. The free class program is an opportunity for local teachers to continue sharing their practices as well as experiment with new class models and meet new students. 

Both the residency prototype and the free class series will be developed and finalized over the Summer of 2019 with implementation in August. It is our hope that the models for both programs can be replicated by us or others and produce valuable results that merit further funding. With clear and interesting documentation of artists’ processes, we hope to encourage future artists and audiences to engage with Beaubourg and help shape its place and impact within New Orleans.

Community Engagement & Partnership

When I first began looking for an organization or group to partner with I had in mind creating a project that would span around 3 months and involve a series of pedagogical encounters between various New Orleans based teachers or artists and a small group of people interested in learning about various methods of making performance. I initially sought out groups which had clear social missions but no programming or opportunities that resembled this project. 

During my first year as a fellow I reached out to many local organizations and in doing so slowly refined my project as I talked more about it. Through dialogues and emails I began to create a more defined structure for how it would work including a timeline for the workshops and a team of collaborators who would be leading them. The goal of this project was to find a diverse group of participants interested in mining their own lives through a series of creative explorations over many weeks, resulting eventually in a presentation of the material by some of the participants and teachers. I looked at various community groups around the country which have pioneered this type of work including the Cornerstone Theater Company in Los Angeles and Roadside Theater in Kentucky as well as other performance related social projects like Anne Basting’s Penelope Project focused on engaging communities affected by Alzheimers. The groups I had been researching were often what Dudley Cocke refers to as “grassroots theater” companies which emerge from the ground up, grounded in specific local issues, arising from within a community itself. Cocke and the articulation of his mission was often a guide for me: 

“The traditional and indigenous are valued for their ability to help us maintain continuity with the past, respond to the present, and prepare for the future. Presentation of the work is made in partnership with community organizations. It is linked to the struggles for cultural, social, economic, and political equity for all people.”

Finding partners and coordinating with them proved to be a challenge, due either to the fact that the project itself was not clearly defined enough or that it was too defined and didn’t necessarily offer something valuable to the organizations. During this period I learned how important listening and asking questions is in the early stages of a community partnership. I had been working to shape a project that I could sell partners on rather than ask them what it was I might be able to do for them.

Towards the end of that first year, I contacted local theatre maker Bennet Kirschner, whom I had collaborated with previously, and asked for his advice. He had a few ideas for organizations I might contact then suggested I reach out to David Williams, a mutual friend and actor who had been in the process of renovating an old building in the Central Business District with the aim of creating a performance venue. I then called David and had a two hour discussion where we shared ideas for dream projects. It was then I first learned what his vision for the theatre he called Beaubourg would be and found a partner with goals that aligned with my own. 

From here I began to reconceive of my project as a specific collaboration with Beaubourg. I had shared my original concept for the workshops series but eventually began to ask David what he thought Beaubourg would need; he told me that his vision of the space was an open venue where a variety of programming could take place that represented and included the voices of many different communities. In conceiving of a place that would belong to everyone, we began to look at organizations around the United States that successfully nurtured their communities through their programming and a strong mission. 

We talked about the impact that Free Southern Theatre had on its community as well as Appalshop in Whitesburg, Kentucky. We asked ourselves which communities this space would serve and who might it benefit. David was adamant that he wanted the place to belong to everyone, that it not be known as David’s theater but a community space where a broad range of activities might take place on any given day or night of the week.

We also both expressed our understanding that a city with a vibrant arts culture needed places where young artists are nurtured and given opportunities to exhibit work at a high level of production. Having lived in New Orleans for many years (David, 26, and me, 13), we both felt that New Orleans was currently lacking in this way compared to other cities which are known for their rich cultures of performance. This need became a touchstone for us in thinking about how to shape the identity of Beaubourg within the New Orleans arts scene. 

By about a month later (May 2018), we had come up with a handful of ideas for how to build a diverse community around the Beaubourg space and support the artistic explorations of young, emerging artists living in New Orleans. Over the next three months we emailed regularly with questions and propositions for the other relating to the growing list of ideas. From early on we had a mutual trust in the other and I felt that we had separate skills which would complement in a partnership. Together we wrote a memorandum of understanding that we felt comfortable with and agreed to share many responsibilities related to the project. We talked openly and specifically about money allocation and what expectations would be when it came to the project budget. Our collaboration has been very harmonious up to now and I feel hopeful that I can become an effective member of the organization as it continues to grow.

As the second year of my Mellon project (the first year of my collaboration with Beaubourg) would progress, the theatre itself became more of a reality. The building began receiving proper certifications and construction stages were completed. The theatre is comprised of two adjacent buildings and includes, in it’s front, a small cafe and meeting space and, in the back, a bar and outdoor patio. the performance venue shares a wall with the outdoor patio and doors that connect the two spaces. The construction and business plan of the bar and cafe were being coordinated by David and his sister alongside the work of developing the theater. Because of these multiple projects happening simultaneously, deadlines related to the Mellon project were often pushed back. I feel very invested in the success of the Beaubourg project and it’s mission of creating an inclusive space for different kinds of expression. 

In the fall of 2019, we will launch the artist in residence prototype program as well as the free class series. This, along with other, works in progress showings supported by the Mellon grant will be part of the organizations effort to open itself up as a place where membership feels available to many community members. We hope to use these open programs to engage new audiences and test programming to see what the community wants. We also hope these initiatives will leave a positive impact and give emerging artists in New Orleans opportunities to work and present themselves in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise be able.

Covid Update, June 2021

Roughly a year ago on May 20, 2020, ten individuals who had taken on prior teaching roles with the school began a process of collectively examining the inner workings of our educational platform up to that point. Co-founder David Williams and myself, Christopher Givens, invited current and former teachers to join us as we began to reimagine our model in the context of Covid-19. This volunteer group first set out to co-organize a virtual semester of course offerings and gradually began to widen the scope of our meetings to include broader questions about what our next steps as an organization should be.

Between May of 2020 and September of 2020, this group of organizers met regularly, often twice a week, to discuss a wide range of items related to the school. This period was an excellent opportunity for us at the school to reassess and plan for a sustainable future. Our evolving agenda included issues related to the school’s mission, the model of its free education platform, its organizational structure, and its vision for the future.

At this point in the pandemic, the volunteer organizers felt that developing a virtual semester and discussing the school's workings had provided a much needed source of purpose during a time when many of us felt lost or adrift. The group also stated clearly that the workload they had taken on for free would not have been possible in “normal” circumstances. The important issue of fair compensation for future organizers and administrators was seen as one of the top priorities going forward. Without such long-term support, the school would not be able to function on passion alone as it had previously.

Through these months of explorative conversations on our school’s future, it’s become clear that what our school needs the most at this juncture is a committed organizer with an incomparable love of learning and experimentation. The primary responsibilities of such an administrative organizer at this time includes the following:

• ●  Charting the course for the School’s future in dialogue with its mission and vision

• ●  Publishing open calls for teachers

• ●  Managing the teacher application process

• ●  Reviewing applications and interviewing teachers

• ●  Conducting orientation for incoming teachers

• ●  Scheduling classes with teachers & hosting venues

• ●  Creating teacher agreements, contracts, and class procedures

• ●  Communicating with hosting venues

• ●  Managing social media / publicity for classes

• ●  Managing class registration

• ●  Managing class reviews / teacher feedback

• ●  Developing on-going relationships with partner institutions

• ●  Coordinating fundraising events

• ●  Communicating with our grant writer

• ●  Developing and funding a staff of administrators and organizers
  

  A crucial member of our volunteer organizing team was a local educator named Andrea Heard who David and I had met at Beaubourg’s Midwinter Works. Andrea and I both participated in a panel consisting of local educators and organizers who were creating programs that employed new ways of learning. We were inspired by Andrea’s thinking through the unique problems of New Orleans educators and immediately saw a kinship in her innovative approach.

  Andrea is a native of New Orleans and an educator of 11 years. After leaving traditional education, she began her own educational consulting firm which provides professional development for teachers and instructional coaches, works to write and revise curriculums, and specializes in the organizational management of schools, non-profits, and businesses. She earned a Master of Arts from Xavier University in 2016 with a concentration in Curriculum and Instructor/Teacher Leadership. She is connected to the city's pulse on education but believes non-traditional educational programming is what fills in the gaps.

  Our next step as a school is to find on-going funding that will allow us to employ Andrea as the school’s head administrator. This position gives her an active role in every element of course offerings and make her the most instrumental force behind elevating the school to its next stage. Her background in pedagogy enables us to develop teacher training for new and first time educators which we see as a fundamental asset of the school. We want to establish our school as the-place-to-go to prototype new learnings and empower anyone to share their knowledge and research with academic integrity. She has an intimate knowledge of the school, an enthusiasm for its mission, and a clear set of strategies to set it on a path to sustainability.

The school is at a critical point. Our work to this moment has been received more broadly and enthusiastically than we ever dreamed. Our emails include a steady drip of former students and eager future ones asking when are you back? When can I sign up? The school has grown faster and stronger than we planned and David and I are unable to meet its needs alone. It is time for the school to stand on its own legs and exercise muscles of its own. Andrea is the ideal candidate to steer this vessel toward its new horizon.

This need for an administrator, to undergird the work of our faculty and student body, does not stop here. A head of school will allow us to further our work this next year not as an end in itself, but as a step toward where we know we are headed: establishing a robust free school of the south that brings practitioners far and wide to exchange both the latest thinking and the oldest practices; a school to probe the possible and pollinate tomorrow. In five years, we aim to have a schoolhouse like the city’s never seen, where Andrea is not the only staff member, but leading a small universe of thinkers and organizers helping lead the way in troubleshooting the future.