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“Do you need help?”: Dialogics of Change in Community-Based Theatre

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2016

Sonja Arsham Kuftinec
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Extract

It was a hot, sweaty day in Newport News, Virginia, in 1986. Cornerstone Theater's designer, Lynn Jeffries, was building a set for the company's first community-based production, Our Town, cast in part with local participants. Three kids rode up on bikes and drawled, “What y'all doin’?” Jeffries responded that they were building a set for a play, noting that she felt like she was “speaking Chinese.” The boys sat for several more minutes. “Do you need help?” And that, according to Jeffries, was “where it all kicked in.”

Type
Essays: On the Theatre & Social Change
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 419 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016 

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References

Endnotes

1. Oral history of Cornerstone, transcriptions from audiotapes, Los Angeles, June 1994, tape 2, transcript, 20. Housed in Cornerstone's office, Los Angeles, California.

2. Ibid., tape 3, transcript, 10.

3. Ibid. Alison Carey adds, “The women didn't want the men to know [about the language they used]”; e-mail to the author, 29 December 2001.

4. No author, no title, Cornerstone Newsletter 1.1 (1987): 1.

5. Sonja Arsham Kuftinec, Theatre, Facilitation, and Nation Formation in the Balkans and Middle East (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).

6. I was cocreator and codirector of this piece.

7. In his self-published essay “Lihish'tah'weel,” Ricardo Levins Morales tells the story of Eqbal Ahmad, a veteran of the Algerian revolution. Speaking to members of the PLO in 1968, Ahmad “suggested that the principle task of a liberation movement—whether armed or not—was to ‘out-legitimize’ its opponent” through dramatizing the colonizing society's central contradictions until that society “can no longer bear the strain.” “Lihish'tah'weel: The Dystopia Principle and the Strategic Basis for a Just Peace in Palestine,” unpublished essay, 2007, 6, http://collectiveliberation.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/Lihishtaweel_Justice_Judaism_Levins_Morales.pdf, accessed 18 April 2016.

8. Jill Dolan, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 2.