Cultural Democracy: The Arts, Community, and the Public Purpose

3. Presentation and Participation

Franco-American accordionist Dickie Morneau plays for dancers at Biddeford High School. Photo by Tonee Harbert. 3 Presentation and Participation At an Irish community meeting, I pressed the assembled activists to define what their culture required to sustain itself locally. “We need access to the best Irish artists,” said one woman. “Our children don’t even have the opportunity to reject their heritage,” she moaned. “They get to see so little of it, they have no basis to make a comparison!” I had heard this before —an internal imperative that is echoed in nearly every ethnic community in America. “We need to put on a big show,” insisted another participant. “Most people in Maine don’t even know we’re here. Our culture feels invisible most of the time.” This, too, is the overwhelming perception of minority communities from coast to coast. They disappear under the deluge of the mainstream. These two poles—the need for internal cultural development and the desire to demonstrate ethnic vitality to the rest of the world—are the hubs around which cultural democracy turns. One is aimed at insiders and is Presentation and Participation / 63 all about participation; the other is directed externally and involves public presentation. There is substantial crossover between the two realms, as insider participants become the subject of presentations, but each embodies a unique set of characteristics. Communities, their audiences, and the cultural facilitators who catalyze their interactions stand to benefit from a clear understanding of the processes of participation and presentation. Both are important, necessary, and largely assumed without examination by all parties. During the last quarter of the twentieth century, a branch of anthropology called performance studies uncovered many of the implicit assumptions present during the realization of any cultural event. From random encounters on street corners to majestic religious rituals or the grand opera, our experiences are culturally patterned. They all also share some degree of adherence to an abstract set of rules governing the performative process: events are prepared, begin, unfold over time in a fashion that is culturally determined, and end, having created variable levels of emotional experience for those in attendance, both performers and audience. These experiences can vary greatly in their intensity and meaning, but they are predicated on a complex interaction of environmental, political, social, technological, theatrical, and aesthetic referents, penetrating each participant’s cultural frame. To understand what happens in the course of any sort of performance, it is important to consider the dynamic play of these various elements and how they combine to create the event. Eurocentric scholars have generally focused their attention regarding performance theory on the event itself, the show that is of paramount importance within the Western aesthetic framework. But in many cultures, performance is merely the residue of a process of far-reaching community involvement; preparations for the big ceremony can carry more content than their actualization as performance. Theorist Richard Schechner points out that the performative process contains substantially more than just the obvious public component. “[E]very performance event,” he states, “is part of a systematic sequence of occurrences. Performance includes six or seven phases: training, rehearsal, warm-up, the performance, cooldown , and aftermath. Not all performances in all cultures contain all these phases—but finding out what is emphasized and what is omitted is very instructive. For example, codified traditional performances—kutiyattam and noh, for example—demand extensive training but little or no rehearsal. . . . But where newness is prized, where performers are expected to be able to play a number of different kinds of roles, training is less important than intense ad hoc workshops and rehearsals to develop the 64 / Cultural Democracy idiosyncratic quality of each individual production. The cool-down and aftermath phases of performance are also very important. Aftermath can be a slow unfolding process involving how performances are evaluated, how the experience of performing is used by the community. . . . Cooldown is more immediate, dealing with knitting the performers back into the fabric of ordinary life. . . . In America, many performers, after a strenuous show, will go out to eat, drink and talk—often boisterously. Someone who doesn’t know performers wonders at how much energy they have left. But these celebratory bouts are not really ‘after the theatre’ but part of it—a way of cooling down, of reintegrating into ordinary social life.”1 In many performances, from the beginning, a psychic gap separates the performers from the public...