Rethinking Power, Rethinking Theater: A conversation between Lani Guinier and Anna Deavere Smith

The Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue is a project started by Anna Deavere Smith and funded in large part by the Ford Foundation to investigate new ways that artists can make works that deal with social issues and new ways that audiences can interact with artists. Its first phase was created as a three-summer workshop, held at Harvard University during the summers of 1998-2000. Dozens of artists participated, while a local, diverse "core audience" attended every event in the course of the three summers and became as integral to the development of the institute as the artists themselves. Scholars from the Harvard community, such as Lani Guinier, also participated in the projects, symposia, and audience discussions over all three years. Theater asked Smith and Guinier to reflect on the results of the institute's investigations.

ANNA DEAVERE SMITH Let's talk a little bit about the possibility of the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue to find a way of having a coherent conversation about values in our country, because it's not going to happen in journalism, and it's not going to happen in politics.

LANI GUINIER The other important issue in terms of values is the tension, or fundamental contradiction, between the values that we claim to hold near and dear--family, community, charity, democracy--and the present overvaluing of "the market as God," a sort of market fundamentalism. Is theater a way of exposing or exploring that contradiction? Was the institute a place for exploring that contradiction? Or is theater captured by that contradiction, as journalism is?

SMITH It certainly is captured by the contradiction, but cannot, at this point, make the kind of money that the mass media can. And there may be some value in this limitation. I wanted to have an institute because I was disturbed by the extent to which the theater was limited, in terms of who I could reach, but after the institute, I have to say that may be a virtue, because the bigger you are broadcast, the more compromises you face.

GUINIER What I'm asking, Anna--and this is really a question to you about theater in particular: Is theater, either the theater in our imagination or the actual emotional or psychological connections that we make in theater, specially equipped to bring people together on a smaller, local scale in ways that enable us to then explore those contradictions? What I worry about is whether the language of audience development has both the potential to be democratic, to be a robust vehicle for engaging citizens in either dialogue or activism, or does it have the potential to just bring people as spectators to watch a performance.

SMITH "Is theater specially located in our imagination?" is one kind of question; whether it's meant to bring people in to watch a spectacle is another. I think in our imaginations it represents, primarily, a house for contradictions and extremes, the same way dreams do because it's in images and it's in language, and it is a kind of mimesis and all that stuff.

So, I think it has an incredible ability to disturb us and inspire us, but that's quite separate from what happens to theater inasmuch as it is caught in the same problem of everything else, which is that the market, as you say, is God, or the market is the medium, and the only way, almost, to move information and ideas is in the market.

GUINIER Right, and the market is not a medium of exchange, although that's the illusion or the hype. The market is actually a medium of domination, a vehicle for some people to control or dominate other people, as opposed to the more conventional image of a marketplace as a bazaar, where you have individual vendors showing their wares. A bazaar is a place...