Every Girl's a Hero: Reevaluating the Ethics of University/Community Partnerships

Introduction

In spring 2015, approximately forty MFA and undergraduate students from the University of Washington School of Drama and I embarked on a yearlong community-based performance (CBP) project.¹ Our guides through the endeavor were award-winning performance duo PearlDamour (director Katie Pearl and Pulitzer-honoree playwright Lisa D'amour) and their associate Ashley Sparks. We were charged with observing and building a relationship with an organization in the community surrounding our university, the University District (U District), and then devising a performance piece reflecting that community back to itself.² While the neighborhood is home to individuals of varied socioeconomic standing, this project evolved to focus on homeless adults and teens as well as intravenous drug users living in the U District and the service organizations addressing their needs. Students voted to work with three local organizations: the Elizabeth Gregory Home (EGH), a drop-in day center and transitional housing facility for homeless women; ROOTS (Rising Out of the Shadows), a young adult overnight shelter; and the People's Harm Reduction Alliance (PHRA), a peer-run organization that promotes safer drug use through a needle-distribution program. My cohort worked exclusively with the EGH. Each cohort performed their devised piece for their community partner in their location, and then the three pieces were woven together into a play titled Skies Over Seattle and performed for the public in a conventional theatre space (fig. 1).

While transformative for the university participants and seemingly the community members as well, this project exposed some of the ethical complexities involved in such partnerships. During a devising session with my fellow theatre students, we watched video-recorded interviews of EGH clients. At the same time, an actor was changing her clothes near where the images were being projected. We were all surprised and moved when part of the projection showed up on her back, which we incorporated in our final performance piece, Every Girl's a Hero. Projecting women's faces on set pieces and textiles and playing their recorded voices created the recurring motif of community-building through small acts of kindness. But this moment was also symbolic of our approach to community-engaged work. Because the homeless women we met did not live lives that corresponded with our rehearsal schedule, we felt we could only include them in our piece as video or audio recordings. But if we had changed our conception of the timeline and structure for devising a theatre piece, we could have grown their participation to be more multidimensional. Both Pearl and Sparks noted that the strict schedule of the UW MFA programs frustrated and stymied students' ability to build rapport with community partners. For example, the prime hours for working with the ROOT community were during the evenings, but MFA students had rehearsals during that time. These students could not change their schedule to one that best suited their community partner (Sparks) (fig. 2).

Fig 1.

Postcard for Skies Over Seattle, designed by Katrina Earnst (2016). (Source: Courtesy of the University of Washington School of Drama.)

This experience was the most inspirational and gratifying aspect of my graduate education, but did my expanded education take place on the figurative backs of these women? Did we truly create a partnership with these vulnerable populations that was equally valuable to all parties? What would it look like to do so? The inevitable imbalance of power in university and community partnerships is well documented (Dolgon et al. 163–64). My interest is in how artists, students, and universities can be nimbler in their approach to art-making to bolster collaborative partnerships where community members experience agency and authorship.

Early practitioners of service learning and community engagement cite "critical reflection" as the necessary component for moving civic action beyond the realm of volunteerism (ibid. 3). In this essay, I interrogate the U District project to assess its impact as what PearlD'amour called a "community-engagement experiment." Utilizing my own participant observations as well as post-production interviews, I attempt to ascertain a pedagogical...