Why do you do community engaged work as part of your scholarship, teaching or creative work?

As a performing artist, I have always been led by curiosity and wonder. I am at the point in my life where I am not as curious about how to be understood as an artist as I am with understanding what is relevant and alive for a given community through performance. I wonder how performance can support deeper understanding within communities and advance them in their aims. I am curious about what participatory community performance can uniquely unleash within a community. I love what a sprinkle of fun does to a gathering. Embodied investment and creative exploration into community-identified concerns can yield fascinating results and have reverberating impacts. I am interested in performance as a tool for community engagement, especially in regard to issues of resilience, energy, gender, and climate. As a scholar and a practitioner, I actually can’t advance in my work without doing it in communities. I rely on praxis-- the application of theory into practice. My discipline is one that is temporally alive and needs living, breathing, engaged participants for it to exist. I can only generate scholarship from experience. Yet I am led by the belief that I do not learn from experiences alone, but rather, I learn from reflecting on experiences. As the saying goes, praxis makes perfect.

Reflect on your particular experience and journey as a scholar. How has your experience shaped your beliefs and practices?

I graduated with my PhD eight months pregnant. Mothering was a job I loved and one in which I cut my teeth as an activist, scholar, teacher, and performing artist. I began to teach as an adjunct directly following the birth of my first child. Soon after the birth of my second child, I co-founded what became an international organization, Mothers Acting Up (MAU), to mobilize mothers to move from concern to action on issues facing the world’s children. MAU was inherently theatrical, featuring Mother’s Days parades with mothers on stilts and reenactments of Julia Ward Howe’s original Mother’s Day declaration. I remained prolific as a performer creating original work that I eventually joined with my work with MAU. It was here that I began my focus of using theatre as a tool for women to empower their voices for civic participation. This work became the subject of much of my scholarship. Nearly fourteen years later, I am still continuing this line of research and creative work, now with a focus on young women’s and youth voices. In my commitment to women from under-resourced communities, I got hooked on issues of energy access as essential for sustainable development, and the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable communities. 

I feel like I’ve progressed along a pretty winding road in many ways, not a well-established paved road. That has made for some wonderful encounters, the retracing of steps, limited vision ahead at times, and collaboration with many different types of people from various disciplines and experiences. I’ve been so grateful for the excellent partners along the way and the opportunity afforded me as a professor of CU since 2008 to partner with international leaders in my areas of interest. In practice, I never stop asking the most destabilizing questions possible-- is this still the best method forward? Is this subject relevant? Are my methods effective? Is it appropriate for me to be doing this here? It can be maddening at times to continually be practicing deep questioning in such mercurial times, but it is the only way forward I trust. If it takes longer, that’s okay. I want to do good work that authentically results in positive social change.

How do you integrate your community work into your research, teaching and creative work?

My community work is inextricably linked to my scholarship and creative work. What is still developing for me is that I am learning how to integrate my community work into my teaching. The challenge is often the size of the class. How do you provide an experience that works towards a class’s learning objectives in a meaningful way without overly taxing the time and resources of your community partner? Setting up a learning situation in which your students are all challenged and engaged is tough to balance with what a community partner might gain from student involvement. I’ve had the most success with smaller, upper-division courses in which I can provide generous mentoring in the development of individual or group projects. In my Performance for Resilience course, students secured community partners with whom they worked to identify a need that applied performance could address and completed the design for a public sharing in collaboration with BoCo Strong, Boulder County’s network for resilience. One student created a skit about locally-sourced food for the Farmer’s Market. Another group used theatre workshops in the prisons to help reduce recidivism (these were graduate students who already had a working relationship with the local prison). With my Comedy: A Performance Study course, we conducted a comedy games workshop with clients of the Mental Health Partners in their facility and all had a terrific time. The success of these efforts has relied on my long-term relationships built up over years of community engagement and volunteering. Frankly, it took years to gain the trust of many within the mental health community, but with that trust, I have been allowed to bring multiple student groups to their facility to share performance-based work. This has been successful when I have involved students in the culture of that partner organization. Before we came to do a workshop, two student representatives attended the weekly staff and client meeting to present the idea for our workshop and get buy-in. The day of our workshop, we arrived early to the Mental Health Partners building and ate lunch with folks there in the cafeteria.

Establishing good community partnerships is based on an investment of time, clear intentions, shared values, approaches, and passions. I recommend instructors get a firm grounding with a community before bringing in their students, and then being slow and modest in making promises of how their student might add value to achieving a community goal. Even with the enthusiasm generated between new partnerships, under promise, over deliver so that you do not mislead your community partner and possibly misuse their precious resources, time, or trust.

How do you balance the demands and work of community partnerships with the demands and work of academia? In other words, what are some strategies you use, what are you learning about balancing the demands of each domain?

I remember early on in my career at CU I had a meeting with Dr. Bernard Amadei, who founded Engineers Without Borders, and him saying, “try to make it so you have one job.” At the time I was balancing a non-profit organization I had co-founded (Mothers Acting Up), parenting, creative work, and teaching. It has taken me years, and I am still working towards this goal, but I have tried to create one job for myself. My focus has shifted some since that meeting with Bernard, but I really have intentionally braided together the many threads of my life. I include my family in my travels and production work that I do internationally. I include my creative work into my courses. What I do and what I study is who I am. I do not feel a division between my personal and my professional life. Acknowledging that has helped me to organically develop work that is inclusive of my lived reality. A former colleague and friend once said that women most often pretend not to be mothers in their professional lives. I bring my gifts hard-earned from mothering into my role as director of graduate studies for Theatre and into my teaching. Arriving as a mother in many of the communities in which I have conducted field work has meant that I have been welcomed into a more intimate realm of that community through our shared experiences. All of my children have taken active roles in the applied performance work I have done and are, I believe, better people for it.

Good match-making at the onset can go a long way. Ensure that your community partner truly values your methods (and that you value theirs). For me, that means partnering with groups that believe in the power of performance and the arts to bring people together to work through issues that they deem to be important. Set everyone up for success before you even begin by being honest and discerning in forming your partnerships. 

What is your experience with / thoughts on / plan for tenure?  

As a person doing engaged public work in performance on women’s issues, I got tenure just by the hair on my chinny chin chin. I reached my single-authored research monograph across the finish line at the eleventh hour in order to secure this job that I so love and treasure. My case points to the need for explicit language within departmental promotion and tenure guidelines for assessing publicly engaged transdisciplinary creative work (see http://imaginingamerica.org/initiatives/tenure-promotion/). An international, generously funded, two-year tour of an original one-woman production and an accompanying workshop that was monitored and evaluated by a non-profit organization was given no weight in my review. Publications by feminist presses don’t seem to have been given much value. I believe the challenge was that my work did not fit into the established assessment methods for my discipline. Although that process was painful and discouraging, I actually am grateful that I had to write that book for tenure, Theatre for Women’s Participation in Sustainable Development as it forced me to more deeply examine the intent and impact of my work. When doing publicly engaged work, the urgency of the immediate needs we face in the field can keep practitioners from taking personal time out to write and publish about the work. What I have learned is that taking that time to generate scholarship from my works supports deep analysis and critical reflection necessary for doing good work. As my friend William Ryerson with the Population Media Center said to me about the urgency of the challenges facing our world, “we’re in a hurry, so let’s take our time."

Regarding this work (engaged scholarship), what kind of mentorship do you received and how do you mentor others? Any advice for others who are interested in this work?

Honestly, I’ve been grateful to receive a rather unlikely mentorship in my trajectory. Dr. Larry Frey in the CU Department of Communication admired my work using theatre as a tool for women to participate in community adoption of clean-burning cookstoves in rural areas of Panama and Guatemala. He invited me to contribute a chapter to an edited book entitled Teaching Communication Activism: Communication Education for Social Justice and mentored me through writing in a social sciences format for this now award-winning publication. Another mentor was Dr. Barbara Farhar, a social scientist who was a senior analyst for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and who specialized in the nexus of clean energy development, poverty, and gender. She invited me to present on my work at the World Renewable Energy Forum, which put me in community with international leaders working in this field. This in turn resulted in invitations to work in India with the Appropriate Rural Technology Institute and to participate in working groups at United Nations conferences. I advise getting active at conferences that overlap with your passions. Ask accomplished leaders whose work you admire to meet with you and to share guidance and advice. I had to work hard as a theatre artist to become proficient at writing in these formats for my work to be included, but those who believed in the value of the work have been generous in supporting me along the way. 
 
In my own practice, by generous mentoring, I mean guidance that is one-on-one and that takes the time to consider the nuances of a project’s given issue, participants, and parameters. Community engaged work is always so richly nuanced in wonderful and sensitive ways. Anticipating these kinds of considerations can help to pave the way for much more successful and useful collaborations. This summer I co-hosted a Women’s Energy Party in the Roaring Fork Valley in Colorado, a two-day participatory creative gathering of women committed to telling a new clean energy story with their lives and in their communities. This was a project of publicly engaged research and creative work through Inside the Greenhouse, a CU initiative that uses creativity to retell the stories of climate. Four CU students came with me and one Inside the Greenhouse CU alumni hosted this gathering with many local women on her family farm. We prepared for weeks before, with me mentoring two of the students in planning out the short documentary films they would be making of it. Another graduate student in Theatre assisted in facilitation, so we met multiple times before leaving and consulted with each other consistently throughout our rich time together with the women.

In the days following the event, we worked together to write thick description of how each of our activities was experienced by the participants for use in our future publishing on this experience. Even now, months later, I am still working with the student creating the films to revise their first few drafts of their films to pull out the essential aspects of the experience. Another undergraduate Environmental Studies major who participated is now doing an independent study with me to facilitate another version of the Women’s Energy Party through Inside the Greenhouse for a group of young Jewish women, with the intent of intertwining Jewish spirituality into the message of environmental stewardship inherent in the design of the Women’s Energy Party. Our hope is to publish an article on the Women’s Energy Party design concept after this next iteration, including this ENVS undergrad, the graduate student who attended the first session, and me as co-authors.

I share the story of this one event to bear witness to how much mentoring can be involved in supporting student involvement in community engaged work. What also becomes evident is that students have a lot of agency and room for their own creative expression within this community engaged work. Supporting that is one of the greatest joys in my job. I also believe that I can most effectively teach how to do community engaged creative work and research by doing this with my students in real time with actual communities.