Phil Chang's List: MNM697

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  Listen Up: Sojourn Theatre's Lessons in Community Dialogue
• Community-based artists have long talked about including all voices in their projects for social change. But in the last decade, "inclusion" has taken on a new, more broadly democratic dimension. The bravest of community artists, in facilitating their communities' public voices, are willing and eager to let anybody speak.
• "Witness Our Schools," a play based on interviews throughout the state that aimed to stimulate and encourage community dialogue about current challenges that confront Oregon's public schools.
• The company's goals for "Witness Our Schools" were to present a performance piece about education that would describe what's happening inside Oregon schools, personify the issues, personalize the voices, clarify existing values and validate and reveal the wide diversity of community opinions in an atmosphere of mutual respect. They also wanted to "reveal the arts as part of the civic solution."
• "Witness Our Schools" began in March 2004 with interviews at high schools in Portland, Hermiston and Coos Bay as well as city and county government sites and State Legislature and Department of Education sites.
• What was interesting for the festival audience was Sojourn's groundbreaking method of community building and community activism that includes all voices and all sides of the debate. This kind of broad inclusion can be controversial for arts professionals, most of whom can be assumed to range politically from liberal to radically libertarian. We usually assume "inclusion" means an effort to incorporate the voices of marginalized groups, but not necessarily the voices of the already empowered or the political right. But true inclusion means presenting all opinions, including those of the "other side."

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