Not So Special Vehicles

NOT SO SPECIAL VEHICLES Anna Deavere Smith Thefollowing keynote address was deliveredat a conference of the Associationfor Theatre in HigherEducationin Philadelphia,Pennsylvania, on August 4, 1993. NOT SO SPECIAL VEHICLES In the last two years, I have visited the sites of two urban upheavals and have created theatre about them. Although I have been examining race riots, or what are called uprisings or social explosions by some, I am oddly more apprehensive about making this speech than I was about heading for Los Angeles this time last year, and walking around South Central, where the uprising occurred. I am apprehensive, because after spending these two years in the field, I am very aware of the vast ground between the world of urban battle and the world of theatre and of higher education. I worry that I am out of touch with you. At the same time, I am committed to helping theatre and theatre education which is vibrant, less isolated, more responsible to and aware of the public. The ATHE brochure describes our predicament in this way: Many of us are out of work. Many of us who have jobs are wondering how we can justify teaching so many students for professions in which there is so little readily available, consistently and adequately paid work. That is a pretty humbling analysis. Yet humility is the very soil of an artist's work. Being a part of a Theatre department, at Stanford University, that was almost completely eliminated two years ago, I also know how vulnerable we are. How can we turn this vulnerability and this humility, which can be the very assets of an artist's work, into the seeds of the future? I am actually optimistic, and feel that in some way the generation that enters theatre now, is better off than my generation was. When I entered the profession in 1975, there was very little vulnerability and very little humility in the theatre that I saw. As we begin to imagine the future, there are ethnic, generational, class, and gender gaps to transcend. Today I will be talking about new ways to work in those gaps and E 77 about how we might try to re-evaluate the way we integrate ourselves into academia, into popular culture, into communities and into society at large. I will be talking about new ways to look at being "in" our differences, and I will be talking about the development of skills. First of all, I believe that skills for theatre cannot be developed inside of theatre or in academia alone. Most of my work is with actors and playwrights. However, I am also beginning to see how crucial it is for non-commercial theatres in particular to find new kinds of skills in the audience development departments. Let me address that first. I have attended two of the Theatre Communications Group's workshop/retreats on diversity. We seem to go round and round about how to diversify audiences. In ATHE as well, members have worked to try to change the composition of the organization, and it's been a hard battle. All you have to do to see that we're in for some tough work is to look at the graduate student population at the conference. When I was here two years ago, I attended the Women's Pre-Convention, which is a group that has spoken about diversifying ever since it began in the 70s. The last time I was here, 40 per cent of those who attended were graduate students. They were all white. I was standing just outside the meeting room one evening, and Kay Carney and Beverly Byers Pevitts walked past, peeped into the room, and said to me, "What happened? It didn't used to be this bad." Kay and Beverly are among those who began the Women's Pre-Convention, and to their eyes, by 1991, it had gone backwards in terms of diversity. Common sense stepped into my idealism and told me that if all the graduate students were white, the future of the organization was clear. Although my colleagues talked about diversity at the conference, particularly in terms of curriculum, something inhibited...