AMERICAN THEATRE: In January 2020, Jan was sitting at the New York Reserve Bank of New York, in an audience of 400 people, for a three-hour presentation on “Transforming Community Development Through Arts and Culture.” Being there was uncanny, as someone who has been on the ground with socially engaged art practitioners, scholars, and teachers for over half a century. For Jan was struck by how little people knew about what each other had accomplished.
2 comments:
I’ve already put this book on my list of books to read. I truly appreciate the goal of this book: to bring together similar experiences of socially engaged performance without flattening or minimizing the complexity of each individual story. Oftentimes, when such large labels like “socially engaged” are used, the end product combines all stories of marginalized people into one narrowly defined perspective that, particularly in the case of race, caters to white folks tendency to lump all racial minorities together into one marginalized group, rather than a myriad of complex stories and communities. I particularly appreciate the way that the article broke the book down and thoroughly explained why they organized the book the way they did. It is so good to hear that the authors used the interviews and folks they talked to to guide the way they presented their work, rather than boxing the interviews into a structure that they had pre-determined.
I was really interested, both in the excerpts of the book as well as the idea the book presented in the article. I think that the idea of socially engaged performance art spoke a lot to me and the kind of work that I love seeing get done. In reading this article, I definitely have decided that I really want to put a book that this article was written about on my list of books to read. I think that it did a really good job of handling a subject with a lot of intricacies and nuances in a very clear but conscientious way that allowed everyone to be able to tell their individual stories in the individual ways that they wanted to tell their stories, whilst also being able to amalgamate all of these stories of all of these amazing people and artists.
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