Making Space (Literally) for Social Change through Community-Based Theatre—from Soup Kitchen to City Hall

Empty space, according to Peter Brook, is the prerequisite for all theatre. But when working in a soup kitchen, it can be a scarce commodity. Indeed, on the Saturday morning in September 2009 when I walked with members of the Minneapolis-based, homeless-housed zAmya Theatre Project into Catholic Charities Branch III (now the Catholic Charities Opportunity Center) in downtown Minneapolis, it was hard to imagine a space more full—of people; of furniture; of drinking coffee and reading newspapers and playing games and socializing; of talking and yelling and clanging of cups and silverware and chairs; of smells of food and coffee and bodies; of harsh fluorescent light. "Empty space," in such a venue, was not so much a starting point as a goal: zAmya had come here to turn this space, however momentarily, into a performance venue—more specifically, a performance venue that would further the mission of zAmya's parent organization: "ending homelessness."

Clearly, a tall order—and a remarkably common one. The need to make "empty" spaces out of "full" ones—that is, to create performance spaces in highly varied and often difficult-to-control environments, and often very quickly—is commonplace for practitioners of community-based theatre for social change. Equally commonplace, appropriately enough, is the ongoing critical dialogue about space creation among practitioners and scholars alike. Formulations include (but are not limited to) "liberatory space," emphasizing the role of a space in overcoming external oppressions; "safe space," a space free of internal dangers; "spaces of empowerment," in which inhabitants prepare to work against external opponents; and "democratic space," in which egalitarian ideals of discourse are practiced and perpetuated.

But how, concretely, to make these spaces? The extant dialogue is very valuable in imagining places to work toward, but tends to lack a theoretically informed yet practically minded discussion of how to get there. How can goals such as liberation, safety, empowerment, and democracy be realized by, say, a group of Minneapolis-area homeless and housed actors entering a space such as Catholic Charities Branch III? Or, in the same city a few months earlier, by an international group of Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners entering Minneapolis City Hall? These questions—the big abstract ones, as experienced and played out in two very concrete and different cases—are the focus of what follows. A detailed discussion of each case and its social, historical, and theoretical context points us toward some general principles of effective space-creation in community-based theatre for social change.

A note on my research method. I attended and participated in both of these events, before I had any intention of writing about them. My decision to commit these experiences to paper came during the following year, as I reflected upon and discussed them with fellow participants, some of whose own thoughts will appear here. My methodology, then, became a hybrid of participant-observation, backwards-mapping, semi-structured interviews, and theoretically informed personal reflection. I find justification for this approach in the work of Paulo Freire and his conception of praxis—action-reflection—in which practice and theory (and practitioners and theorists) perpetually reinforce and transform one another and are, in the final analysis, inseparable parts of a single whole. Action tests and transforms theory, and theory tests and transforms action.

Emptying Space in Theory and Practice

Here is one key piece of theory stated upfront: space, and specific spaces, are actively (and continuously) created, not passively inhabited. This is not always easy to grasp: "to speak of 'producing' space sounds bizarre," admits theorist and tactician Henri Lefebvre, "so great is the sway still held by the idea that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it" (15). But the experience of zAmya performers at Catholic Charities on the morning of Saturday, 26 September 2009 helps make it intelligible—and Lefebvre's theory, in turn, will make it possible to better understand and apply the lessons of zAmya's practice.

Since zAmya needed empty space to do theatre at Catholic Charities, they had to make it, actively and intentionally...