Civic Imagination + Ensembles: Questions and Answers
What can ensembles bring to civic partnerships?
In June 2024, Sherrine Azab from A Host of People, Tiff Beatty from the National Public Housing Museum, and ashley sparks hosted a workshop at the Theater Communications Group Conference
Our 75-minute workshop wasn’t enough time to answer all the questions folks had about Housing, Ensembles, and Civic Imagination. Here are responses* to the questions that surfaced.
*We invited Tiff to respond but Tiff is busy being a rockstar and opening up the National Public Housing Museum in early 2025.
How is the art as important as every other aspect when you do this type of work?
sparks: The art isn’t separate from the engagement. Our care in crafting a performance is imbued with our values of radical hospitality and collective participation. We intentionally take a long time to make the art because building relationships and meaningful engagement takes time. We enter the rehearsal room two years into a series of dramaturgical, creative, community, and political conversations. I’m not saying we are fine wine, but in our art, you can see different notes of influence that trace back to the engagement.
What would become possible if your engagement work had the same level of craft as your art?
Sherrine: The quality of the art is always crucial. That is how you respect the collaboration, the partners’ interlocking missions, and the truth of the work you’ve come together to make. Art is the vehicle through which an audience receives complex policy information. It is not just framing emotional issues as stories but how -- and how well -- you tell the story that matters.
This can be done in various ways and measured across multiple scales. A Host of People talks a lot about a project being “right-sized.” You have to look at all of the contributing factors concerning the project. Practical things like: what is the budget and timeline? More importantly, who is the ideal audience, and what is the most important thing you and your partners want the audience to walk away with? Is there a direct action for audience members to take? From there, you can start to make artistic choices that support those goals and fit the circumstances. And, almost without fail, creativity kicks in. I firmly believe that you can create quality art of any size and scale, but you have to direct your audience to witness it in an accurate context.
In the case of A Host of People’s work, Dot’s Home Live!, the finished product looked different because it had a different creative process from the rest of our shows, which were devised and more experimental. But Dot’s Home Live! had a particular purpose and source material that lent itself to a specific style, size, and scope. I think we executed it well, and, importantly, our partners agreed.
The partners (Detroit Action, PowerSwitch Action, and Rise-Home Stories) and I met every week for six months, working together to ensure a holistic design for the process and the presentation. From the start, it was always imagined to be a two-part event. Part One, the show. Part Two was a discussion with the audience, and our partners led that. Part Two of the evening featured experts in housing issues, both in Detroit and nationally, as well as community members who talked about their personal experiences with housing injustice. The partners articulated clear actions that audience members could take after they left the theater. Having community members, experts, artists, and audiences all in conversation with one another made the entire event more cohesive, impactful, and—dare I say—artful.
How does your work translate to policy?
sparks: Our work doesn’t translate into direct policy… yet! It translates policy jargon into pop culture and makes the technical accessible. Our art and engagement are invitations for audience/stakeholder/participants to learn more about policy issues. We’re blending popular education techniques with pop culture to ignite imagination that can inform individual and collective civic participation.
In The Most Beautiful Home…Maybe we include local pressing policy issues in the script. This raises awareness. In some places, we had people tabling in the lobby. In other cities, we sent follow-up emails to attendees to raise awareness about particular campaigns. We haven’t worked directly with a campaign, but that’s one of our goals.
“We were also able to offer political education to an intergenerational crowd and continue engaging decision-makers on our issues.” Joanna Velazquez
Sherrine: According to Joanna Velazquez, Detroit Action’s Campaigns Manager, the production of Dot’s Home Live! was a significant moment in their strategy to pass a Reform Ordinance through the City Council. She said this when I asked about the impact of the production.
“The Reform Ordinance passed through several strategically planned public meetings where community members could speak truth to power and ask direct questions to decision-makers and elected officials. Dot’s Home Live! served as a key moment in our strategy because not only did it allow us to keep the cadence of publicizing our housing crisis, but we were also able to offer political education to an intergenerational crowd and continue engaging decision-makers on our issues. Since the reform ordinance's passing, we have challenged over 23,000 overassessed homes and stopped any owner-occupied foreclosures. While there are more housing fights to win, passing this ordinance has created stability and just a bit more housing security that Detroiters did not have before.”
Who is the audience for your work?
sparks: Our audience varies per project. First, it’s policymakers, housing advocates, planners, and city staff. Then it’s folks who have a housing story (which is everyone). Our next project focuses on senior affordable housing, caregivers, and faith leaders for our engagement efforts.
We desire to weave arts and culture into policy spaces, so we spend our time building engagement relationships there. The art uses humor and popular culture to make it accessible to a wide range of audiences.
Sherrine: The audience for Dot’s Home Live! was pretty specific. In Detroit and on tour in Chicago and Nashville, we let the partner organizations take the lead on the first phase of invitations, inviting their members and targets (people with the power and influence to make a change, especially in support of the partner's strategy). Then we filled in with our company members’ families and friends, and finally, our A Host of People audience. Because Dot’s Home Live! was primarily made to serve the partners, it was vital that they curate the audience to fit their desired outcomes. But it is potent to have a mix of audience members from the community most impacted by the issue — in this case, housing justice — those working towards making change and folks who may be considered a more “theater-going” audience. This is how we build out all of our communities as well as solidarity, allyship, and audiences.
What are the logistical steps to getting “new folks” plugged into actions / campaigns/ policy work after the event?
Sherrine: This isn’t what we do. We create art that helps people find their way to action. When we are fortunate enough to partner with organizations whose work we support, we leave this work up to them. There are many roles within movement work. We consider ourselves a support role. We take the lead in creating art for social change and hope to illuminate a path for our audience to take action.
sparks: We’ve tried various things: Teach-ins, community tours, Future Forums, advocates tabling at the show, etc. For our next project, we will have an Advocate-in-Residence who will help us build a policy guide that accompanies the show and a series of engagement events that people can join. We are deep in the process of figuring this out.
How do you track audience change/growth post-show? Any long-term engagement with audience members?
sparks: Because of capacity and having primarily been touring artists, we haven’t tracked long-term engagement with audience members. We are focused on going deeper with a handful of partners in different locations around the country. We follow up with partners and return to some touring sites for ongoing programming.
What is the balance of individual project / partnership versus staff / organization sustainability over time?
Sherrine: First and foremost, you need to ensure your organization has the capacity for the project. A Host of People is a devising company, and we don’t produce a season of plays, so we have more flexibility when it comes to what we produce and when. When working with a partner on a new project, I think the main thing is that you have to negotiate between multiple considerations for each other's needs, especially timeline, capacity, and expectations. The only way to do this is through open and honest communication. If unexpected opportunities with projects arise after the initial partnership has concluded, you must maintain that same level of openness. Everyone can get very excited about projects having a further life. And, everyone needs to be on the same page about the time and resources required to make those opportunities happen.
sparks: We are a time and project-based company and aren’t focused on long-term organizational sustainability. Our budget contracts and expands based on where we are in the production/engagement cycle. We want to sustain a handful of projects, share our methodology, and demonstrate ways for the arts to support advocacy efforts. The non-profit structure is the container for us to do that.
I don’t know that we have balance right now because we are very small. We strive to be more strategic in making partnership choices to help us with our long-range project goals.
How do you approach partners to make them interested in your work if they weren’t already?
sparks: We use the following reasons: “We’re writing a play, can we interview you?” “We need to learn about XYZ policy. Would you be willing to chat with us for 30 minutes?”
The art is the excuse to kickstart a relationship. We are genuinely interested in their expertise. We need it to ensure the content we create is accurate. Frequently, our relationships begin while we are in the research phase of our work. We then keep inviting those folks to things and share works-in-process with them.
Almost always we bring people cookies. People are game to chat when you bring treats.
Sherrine: At this point, for all of the projects in which the partnership is central, those opportunities have come to us due to our reputation and past engagement with this type of work. Organizations have seen our work, been directed to us by others, or were doing their own research and thought we would be value-aligned. This has worked well for us. Not just because it is an easier path but also with non-art organizations, it is essential to have buy-in and belief in arts and culture as an organizing and movement-building strategy. They need to want to work with the arts, which is very different from being convinced.
The good news is that the visibility around this type of work has been growing! More organizers and non-arts organizations are seeing examples of these types of partnerships. If you are making the initial approach, they may already have context for this type of collaboration. But if you aren’t sure if they do, I suggest bringing some relatable examples to your initial conversation.
What is the relationship between hyper-local, regional, national, and global housing issues? How much of the specialized info does an artist need to know?
Sherrine: Because everyone on this planet should have access to housing, there is an undeniable relationship between these circles of distance/scope. Although each place and scale is different, there are many similarities and a lot to be learned from each other. For example, the story-sharing between our Detroit company members and the audiences in Nashville was so engaging because it felt like an exchange of ideas and experiences.
Christina Rosales, Housing and Land Justice Director for PowerSwitch Action and our lead partner on this project, contextualized housing issues not just on a national scale but internationally during our post-show conversations with the audiences on tour in Chicago and Nashville. She recently took a group of activists abroad to learn about different public housing models working in other countries that might be adapted to the U.S. context. This was an exciting extension of the conversation that also activated all of our imaginations to go beyond what we know and be inspired by what is possible.
sparks: How much an artist needs to know depends on the depth of the art. We read many white papers because our ideas must be rooted in data to be taken seriously in the housing space. We want audiences to come away more informed about policy which means we have to understand enough to translate a complex idea into digestible and entertaining art.
Mark and I have been itinerant artists for the majority of our careers. As artists, we’ve worked on multiple national organizing projects like the Network of Ensemble Theaters or the Network of Energy Water and Health in Affordable Buildings. We enjoy working at a particular scale that is ambitious in scope. By examining the root causes of housing challenges, we see the relationship between hyper-local, regional, national, and global housing issues are similar. Racialized capitalism, real estate profit over people, and corporate greed. As artists, we need to know a certain amount of specialized information to ensure the accuracy of our content and ideas.
For example, in Arizona, residents of Mesa were interested in discussing rent control at the City level. However, Rent Control (local or otherwise) is prohibited at the State level. We learned this in conversation with state advocates and then found ourselves breaking the bad news to locals in Mesa. We could have included the local desire in the show, but it wouldn’t have been accurate or set up the community for a realistic conversation.
As ensemble theater makers, we are skilled at partnerships. There are a variety of different ways projects can manifest. Give yourself time to build partnership. You don’t have to be the expert in (insert issue). Listen and learn from your partners in order to build trust.
“Time + Learning + Trusted Partnership = the space for imagination and values to co-create beautiful things.”