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Creating Community
Based Dialogue PAGE 2 Squeegee was a Forum Theatre production created and performed by street youth and produced by Headlines in 1999 at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver and on Rogers Community Cable TV throughout the Lower Mainland of British Columbia and Southern Vancouver Island. This project began in a very personal moment. I was at home relaxing in the evening. Five times my telephone rang, up until 10:30 at night. Each call was from a different corporation trying to sell me something I didn't want. The next day as I drove to work, I stopped at a red light where squeegee kids work. (Squeegeeing - cleaning the windshields of cars stopped at red lights - has become a way for street people, usually youth, to earn subsistence without having to beg, steal, or prostitute themselves.) Something in my head exploded: the previous night my privacy had been invaded five times by people who wanted my money, and because they represented legitimate businesses this invasion was perfectly legal. These youth were engaging in a very similar act, except that it was illegal. The City of Vancouver had recently followed other cities across North America in clamping down on people in poverty by criminalizing squeegeeing, panhandling and busking. What then is illegal? I wondered. Certainly not trying to sell me something I don't want. What has become illegal is being poor and in my face. Bad for tourism. Uncomfortable for people with loose change in their pockets. Unfortunate, considering that since signing the Free Trade Agreement with the United States (according to the The Toronto Globe and Mail of December 16, 2000), the percentage of children living in poverty in Canada has risen from 12% to just under 20%. I started making calls to anti-poverty and youth agencies. I wanted to know if they thought a theatre production on these issues would be of value. Excited, they agreed to work with us. A year later, after raising about $90,000 and recruiting 18 street youth who would all be paid real salaries and provided with housing (and a full-time counselor beginning two weeks prior to the project and ending two weeks after), a production team to act as mentors and a community co-ordinator who had lived in the street himself, we embarked on a creation process investigating issues of criminalization of youth. As with all of Headlines' projects, fundraising is a very important part of the work. Part of the company's philosophy is that in doing community-empowerment and development work, we should not exploit people. There is no escaping that we live in a capitalist culture. People need money to live, for shelter, for food. Headlines takes on the task of raising enough funds for projects to pay people well; almost always above union minimums. The money validates their work, buys time for them to focus, and sometimes makes other things possible for them once the project is over. In my experience, this is rare in the arts. Artists are supposed to be poor, right? Especially artists who do issue-based work. If you are committed, who needs to be paid? Fundraising also starts to develop a network. In order to fundraise effectively, we must show in practical terms that a broad sector of the community supports the project. We need meaningful letters of support that offer real services and partnerships. In order for organizations to want to do this, they must be stakeholders in the project - we really do have to be working on it together. These invaluable partnerships must be dialogues, not monologues: it is not enough for the community organizations to be supporting our work; we also need to be actively supporting their work. As a professional, producing theatre company with a broad network, we have skills to share they might not possess, such as the ability to write effective press releases, access to current media lists, knowledge of others doing similar work, volunteer lists and the ability to translate issues into artistic images. Working in a community-development model means the arts organization must not function in an isolated way. Before starting work, the Community Co-ordinator and I interviewed all of the participants. We had slots for up to 20 people: all who wanted to be in the workshop were accepted so long as they were street youth and would commit to being there all the time. Those who wanted to be in the play also had to do some improvisational work with me. I was looking for an ability to "play" in the moment and aiming for as diverse a group as possible. Casting decisions were made before the workshop, because I feel that turning a workshop into an audition creates a negative, competitive dynamic. Creation began with a week-long TFL workshop with all of the youth, the counselor and members of the design team. The workshop's purpose was not to develop material for the play, but to till the soil out of which the play would grow. We spent a week using various games, exercises and a Polaroid camera, making images and improvisations, many of which led to deep conversations about various aspects of our topic, "criminalization of youth." Together we discovered the reasons the young people had left home, their desires, their internal struggles, triumphs, and defeats. Having fled abusive situations at home, almost all had hoped (believed) they would not end up in the street. Once they had, a scenario of limiting options began to unfold, exposing the holes in social services in the city and the ironies of living somewhere that keeps getting voted one of the best places in the world to live. Vancouver is also a global destination point for sex with children and "ground zero" for the heroin trade in North America. The sense that emerged from the workshop was that it is easy to say there should not be kids in the streets in Vancouver, but there they are. Given that fact, what can we do to try to create safety? Criminalizing the activities through which they can earn money for food pushes them inexorably into prostitution. This became the journey of the play. Our task was not to tell one participant's story, but through artistic invention to tell the story of all the participants. Once the workshop was over, the cast and production team had ten days to create a 20-minute play that would be the centre of a two-hour Forum Theatre event, running in a mainstream theatre and broadcast live on television. Months earlier we had launched a graphics competition in the street. The winner was paid for the rights to use her graphic in the play poster and also enlisted in a mentoring program with our graphic-arts team to produce the poster. Likewise, some of the workshop participants teamed up with our set designer to create the physical home for the production. Throughout the project, the youth learned real skills, working on a project that had meaning for them and getting paid for it! The very hard work with the cast started after the workshop. We all felt a huge responsibility to honor the work of the larger group. Cast members faced other issues, too. Suddenly, they had money. Their friends all knew they had money. They also had safe housing. Potentially, it was party time. But in fact, having been given responsibility in an honorable way, they reacted with tremendous integrity. The young participants showed up for work at 9 A.M. almost every morning, and we worked eight-hour days, six days a week. They were very deeply invested. Some of their social workers were astonished. Together we created a simple and theatrically elegant story, told with very rough language and images. It did not shy away from the violence in their lives. "Reality" (the central character's name) flees an abusive home and ends up, very briefly, in the street. She is 15. Discovered by the police, she is sent into foster care, runs away and ends up back in the street. There she must prove herself to the others, who immediately start to steal her possessions. She is "rescued" by Freddy. They become squeegee partners and have encounters with the police in which their squeegees and skateboard are confiscated, they are harassed for panhandling and they get beaten to the point where Freddy should go to the hospital to treat his broken rib. Not wanting to deal with any institution, they decide instead that they need money for drugs. Food and services are hard to get. Heroin, which temporarily eliminates both hunger and cold, isn't. The group (including Freddy) gangs up on Reality, coercing her to work as a prostitute in order to get enough money. The play ends with her on a street corner, waiting for her first customer, having been betrayed by her "family" once again. The play is straight out of the headlines: as I write this portion, today's news (June 15, 2001) reports that police have charged a 16-year-old boy with living off prostitution. The broadcaster reported the two girls he was "supervising" were both 13. All three lived on the street. Part of my role in the Squeegee development process was to help the group make the best theatre possible under the circumstances. There is controversy in this field over an approach that values artistic quality. I have heard on numerous occassions that it is unrealistic to expect people who are not trained actors to give solid performances - that I am setting people up for failure - asking too much of them. I believe strongly that to allow the theatre to be less than it can be is an abrogation of the facilitator's or Joker's responsibility to the community. Why? Because art is transformative in a way that didactic lectures are not. I believe that change is motivated from the heart, not the head. Theatre is a powerful tool because it communicates with our hearts. One reason group members engage so deeply and work so hard is that they know the potential exists to create real change. Those of us with leadership roles in these moments must do all we can do to help them make the best art possible under the circumstances. The Squeegee Forum Theatre events were raucous nights. Entry for street youth was free, and they came in large numbers because, I believe, they felt the project spoke with their voice. Audiences were always a mix of street youth, Headlines' socially conscious supporters and unsuspecting middle- and upper-class theatre-goers coming to see a play that had a good "buzz." Although all were invited, only one of the City politicians attended, but there were people from the justice system including judges and heads of non-governmental organizations. There was true dialogue through the forums held each night, where the cast showed a remarkable generosity of spirit. Through the production, the "idea" of street youth was redefined for many who saw the play or the telecast and who encountered articles and media coverage about the project. They saw these youth - almost always portrayed as "trouble" - being responsible, articulate, genuine, involved. I believe this even small shift in public opinion translates into less hostility in the streets. I have, of course, only anecdotal evidence. For instance: While waiting in a grocery checkout line, I encountered a woman who had seen the production on television. She told me about how her reactions to street-youth had changed. No longer able to ignore them, she tried to help them financially when she could and, perhaps more significantly, now found that she engaged them in dialogue. This is one woman. Through the television broadcast aproximately 50,000 people saw the play. There were also other ways to effect change: taking a cue from Boal's "Legislative Theatre," we attached a lawyer to the project. She was at every performance, recording the interventions from the audience. She then created a report of recommendations based on those interventions, designed to go to Vancouver City Council. Unfortunately, having refused to attend the production, Council members also refused to read the document. The report did circulate, though, to community organizations that do support work in the street; it has affected the delivery of street services in the city. The report can be accessed on our website, at the URL at the end of this chapter. There are many reasons to do a project like this. One is to affect public opinion; another is to affect structural policy. Another is for the effect it has on the participants themselves. When I write about the generosity of spirit of the cast, I am thinking about something complex: these are children who have learned to survive in the street. Often, they are of above-average intelligence, seeing the world around them with tragic clarity, but they do not have the support to help them cope with what they see. They end up marginalized and cynical. Through the workshop and Forum Theatre process, participants must hone a different kind of skill: learning to listen to others on the stage in a new way - to make space for opposing views, to centre in a character and from that centreed place to be able to analyze each improvisation audience members have brought into their world and to respond, adapting as appropriate, while not compromising their safety or the integrity of their characters. Rehearsing and honing these skills in the theatre leads to being able to use the skills in real life. The theatre really is a revolutionary rehearsal. The youth in this project were (and still are) very impressed with themselves and each other regarding the work they did. They really "got it." Some of them transformed before my eyes, taking charge of their characters, performing the plays, and responding in the forums with inspiring honesty. What happened with the participants? As of October 27, 2001, one is just finishing art school. Two took their earnings and moved to the other side of the country where no one knew them and they hoped to start a new life. One decided to move back home. Another has been in and out of detox, struggling with a heroin addiction. Yet another is working as a street youth advocate with a social service agency. The Squeegee project reveals
something about globalization and community development. Globalization
shows its effects in various ways. Some of them are "global"
in the sense of of trade agreements and environmental protocols;
while some are local, affecting communities, neighborhoods, the
streets, people's everyday lives. Our responses to globalization
must therefore be varied.
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