Part of DIALOGUE: Artists at the White House
Published: Issue 1, Summer 2009
Interview by JASMINE MAHMOUD

DUDLEY COCKE is the director of Roadside Theater (which won the Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre on May 17, 2009), a Virginia-based theater that creates new works to tell the stories of the Appalachian people. Cocke is also a stage director, teacher, writer, media producer and longtime arts activist.

At the May 12th meeting was there any push for an Arts Czar or a Department of the Arts? It was definitely named.

What was the reaction to that suggestion from the White House staffers? Kareem Dale said he was aware that people, including Quincy Jones, had been promoting the idea, but he didn’t know of any action presently being taken. He added that he didn’t always hear everything.

During the May 12th meeting, what was most memorable about the talk with the officials? There are a couple of things. First, I appreciated that the officials we spoke with had only been in Washington for a hundred days. Second, they did understand that the beltway bubble was inevitably encircling them and that it would require constant effort on their part not to become its prisoner. That was important, at least conceptually. The challenge for any administration is to stay connected to the people, and, of course, this should be especially important for the Obama administration whose victory sprang from—and, I would argue, whose effectiveness will depend on—an active, committed grassroots.

One of the takeaways: no one we met with on either occasion seemed to grasp fully how effective teams of grassroots community organizers and community-rooted artists can be when it comes to community problem solving and community revitalization. There didn’t seem to be anyone at the White House, at least among those with whom we spoke, who had a visceral grasp of how successful this artist-organizer combination can be. It appears there’s a knowledge gap among the staff, and I was advocating they recognize it and close it in the second hundred days.

Do you think they got that point that the White House lacks, but needs someone with arts activism and arts advocacy experience? I think you can get it conceptually, but until you’ve lived the practice, it is just another concept—just another political point of view. I’d like to see them hire someone who has this grassroots experience. I felt in some ways I could get this message to President Obama easier than I could to the folks we were talking with because of his community-organizing experience. He knows first-hand the power of half of the equation that I’m describing. To introduce the artist part, I would say, “Mr. President, think back to the civil rights movement when artists and grassroots culture played such a powerful role. The civil rights movement in the South was— in some ways—a singing movement, for it was song that held us together in spirit and resolve.”

That’s a really great point, that social movements have been won, in large part, through the arts. I think the officials heard us, but whether they’ll move to bring somebody in who really has the knowledge—I don’t know. But I think that’s what needs to happen. We were making the point that artists can be involved in all sorts of rebuilding and revitalization efforts, whether it is education or health or the environment or the economy. But, again, the key pairing for me is artists working with organizers. Which is something I’ve done before, for example, in the Central Valley of California, where we found the pairing very complementary. In fundamental ways, community organizers understand grassroots artists better than the arts establishment does.

Why do you think that the pairing of artists and community organizers works so well? If the artists are grassroots artists, they share with organizers a common base in community and an understanding of, and respect for, community dynamics. The organizers are, of course, much more directed at action and outcome, while the artists typically bring imaginative process and aesthetics to the partnership. It’s an effective combination, appealing to the humanity we share.  Both Roadside Theater and organizers emphasize community narrative. Mostly, we work with organizers with some training in the Saul Alinsky school—for example, the Industrial Areas Foundation. If you were an organizer coming into my community, you would spend some months just hearing people’s stories. When the stories converged around particular local problems and issues, you would bring everyone together to share their perspective. The organizing strategy would emerge from the collective analysis of the issue. Artists are adept at surfacing community assets and bringing them to the organizing equation.

Our plays draw on our Appalachian Scots-Irish and Native American story-telling traditions. They are narrative based, and we’ve developed a formal story circle methodology, which we often use to develop the plays and, in turn, to help the communities where they are performed to develop themselves. For example, we’ve made a series of plays with Junebug Productions in New Orleans, which started as the Free Southern Theater, the cultural arm of SNNC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee] during the civil rights movement. One play, in particular, was about the history of race and class in the rural South—it was a musical—and right after the performances we went into story circles with the audience. Cueing off the play, they were invited to tell stories about race and class in their community.  The frankness and fun of the performance gave a kind of permission, and the community stories got very deep, very fast. Like community organizers, we work with community story.

I wanted to talk with you about Rocco Landesman. Can you go more in depth about your opinions on him. Also, what ideally would you want from the NEA head? I don’t know him, and I have no idea what path he is going to take. So far, the Obama appointments have been a reach to veterans—for example, usual suspects from the Clinton administration. So I’ve been wondering, where are the fresh ideas and the new energy going to come from? I understand the country is in a crisis—when you go into heart surgery you want somebody who has done the surgery a bunch of times. You don’t have a year to bring somebody along. So I’ve rationalized their major appointments to date.

But in the arts, they didn’t have a crisis, and they could have taken time to find somebody who had much more experience, not as a Broadway producer and theater owner, but bringing together community organizers and community artists. They are really a different group of people from those who are putting on Broadway plays and directing regional theaters. It’s a different mind-set. Incidentally, the nonprofit regional theater audience and commercial Broadway audience, measured by income and education, are within a percentage point or two of each other; which means that 81% - 82% are white, and they’re from the top 15% economically. It’s a very narrow audience.

One of the questions I was asking, “How did we, who serve the majority of Americans, get stuck with minority arts status?” It’s a total flip, Alice through the looking glass. In its national touring, Roadside, for example, reaches a broad cross-section of the American people. We know this based on six consecutive years of surveys of our audience by an independent firm. There’s some history here. Roadside and its larger entity, Appalshop, got started during the War on Poverty—we began as a federal job-training program in the arts. We were the only rural member of the federal program and the only white one. All of our early connections were with urban, so-called inner-city minority organizations, and the spirit of those founding collaborations continue to this day.  From the beginning, we were connected to audiences who were not receiving their fair share of arts support. I assume Chairman Landesman is a thoughtful guy, but my point is the one poet Marianne Moore made, “People don’t like what they don’t understand.” I was hoping they would appoint someone who understood our field from personal experience.

Changing gears a bit. How has the recession caused you to re-think how Roadside Theater operates? It’s a very good question. For many of us, the recession began twelve years ago. It is an unreported story and a gap in our history of the democratic arts movement in the U.S. I think two big things happened. In 1997, the National Endowment for the Arts and its leader, Jane Alexander, caved into the relentless right-wing pressure, which began with the launch of the culture wars in 1981 and got rid of all the NEA’s discipline programs. In place of dozens of programs, they substituted a few broad themes, like creation and presentation. The NEA had a Folk Arts Program and, equally important for many of us, the Expansion Arts Program, which was a legacy of the civil rights movement. Both programs were focused on expanding participation, on including the majority of Americans as audiences and as art makers. The leaders of the Expansion Arts and Folk Arts programs, A. B. Spellman and Bess Lomax Hawes, respectively, were thoughtful leaders who really helped the rest of the federal agency begin to understand the gifts offered by traditional artists and other artists in inner city and rural communities

When the discipline programs disappeared, a lot of the particular knowledge, which existed among program staff became lost. Also, organizations like ours now could only submit one application. Roadside Theater and Appalshop typically had been receiving annual support from a dozen different discipline programs. After 1997, we lost 90% of our federal funding. Equally damaging for Roadside and other touring companies, the NEA Arts Presenting Program collapsed, which in turn devastated national touring of new and experimental plays.

During the Clinton Administration, the NEA lost any credibility. It no longer had a bully pulpit, and private foundations, for the most part, went off on their own idiosyncratic, private ways. Prior to then, private funders were taking some of their lead from the NEA. Like the Justice Department’s key role in advancing social justice during the civil rights movement, the NEA had been pointing the way to cultural democracy.

For grassroots organizations, the recession began in 1997, and, for their economically poor- and lower- and middle-class communities, the punishment began in 1981 with Reaganomics. The widening wealth gap, incarceration rates, and a host of other social indicators bear this out. Now, across the country, communities have lost their sense of efficacy, of being able to control their future, to give their children and grandchildren a better life. Civic virtue is in short supply. This is the type of re-building which artists and organizers can lead from the bottom-up. We always felt good about competing for public money, because it was taxpayer’s money, and who were we trying to serve but the majority of the people.

That’s a really good point. When the 1997 recession happened, and now with the economic downturn, what was, and what is your outreach to your local, state or national politicians? We have people on staff with responsibility to connect with our politicians. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to prevent the 1997 change at the NEA. It was a done deal before we understood the consequences.

As I mentioned, the NEA change was part of the Culture Wars, which were launched by far-right conservatives during the Reagan administration. The Culture Wars coincide with the rise of hyper-capitalism. In fact, Jack Tchen gave the keynote paper at the June 2006 national “Voices” conference. Tchen’s thesis resonates with Karl Polyani’s argument in his 1944 scholarly tome, “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time.”  Polyani’s research showed that whenever a society embedded its intellectual, spiritual and emotional life in its economy, rather than placing its economy within its culture, that society, whether industrial or pre-industrial, invariably went into decline. In short hand, when profit is encouraged by policy to trump people, social decay ensues. In our “Voices” organizing workshops, we ask participants to test this hypothesis in light of their local experience.

Back to the May 12th meeting, were there any partnerships  that arose among attendees? At a national meeting years ago, somebody asked me where had I been hiding out. “I’m still at the bus stop, waiting for the Poor People’s March on Washington,” I said. King’s assassination led to an even more fractured progressive democratic movement, when, in fact, his analysis was making a powerful popular case about the relationship of war, race, and class and its negative effect on all of us, including the few who believed their fate was not joined to the rest of humanity. With his murder, everyone seemed to retreat into their own little corner. This meant that every year there was less and less meta-analysis of the historical moment we shared. Looks like a lot of nonprofit artists got lost in their own worlds, making their art less relevant to the majority of Americans. Our May 12th group of 65 was diverse, including organizers and public intellectuals, as well as artists. We hope that our reunion signals the re-start of a national conversation about local problems and national aspirations, a conversation in which everyone is invited to come together in the center of the ring to debate the best ways to build a sustainable and more just future. The center needs to be a place for Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and all the rest of us.  TAP