Capacity and Labor in Collaborations with Individuals in Community-Based Theatre

Have you ever found yourself in a community where you felt a disjointed sense of belonging? Perhaps you felt energized by your close relationships and invigorated by the rituals practiced by the whole group, but you also felt harmed by policies, procedures, or actions of people in power? These questions lie at the crux of my project, Wholly Communion. Wholly Communion used theatre and creative drama to imagine more compassionate communities—both faith-based and not—with people who left evangelical Christian spaces. During this project, which began in August 2022 and held its final performance in March 2023, my engagement with disenfranchised former evangelicals presented a unique challenge for artistic community partnership, and it led me to reframe the way I collaborate with individual community stakeholders. This experience gave me a continuum of collaboration structures for community-based artists seeking to partner with individuals. By sharing it, I hope to invite artists like myself to more directly consider the labor they ask of individual community partners. 

My Intended Partners

To create Wholly Communion, I sought collaboration with people who left faith communities characterized by Christian nationalism and/or white evangelicalism. While I personally spent a couple decades in these faith communities and have since left them to navigate my faith and identity in different Christian faith traditions, I wanted to collaborate with community members with different perspectives on this topic, and I hoped to directly foster community in the theatremaking process. I sought individuals who “left” these traditions for a range of alternatives, from leaving religion entirely to joining a Christian faith community not characterized by these ideas.

To define these ideas, I used Andrew Whitehead and Samuel Perry’s definition of Christian nationalism as “a cultural framework—a collection of myths, traditions, symbols, narratives, and value systems—that idealizes and advocates a fusion of Christianity with American civic life.” I created my own sociological (rather than religious) definition of white evangelicalism as an ideology that uses selective biblical literalism to reinforce and divinely legitimize United States capitalism and systemic oppressions. As the project continued, I gradually moved away from using Christian nationalism (a less commonly known term at the time) and instead relied on colloquial ideas around being a “former evangelical.” I will use this term moving forward.

The Process of Creating Wholly Communion

Initially, I tried to recruit former evangelicals who did not identify as artists to participate artistically in a months-long devising process. As the devising leader, I planned to introduce external sources and invite personal experiences of people on the team to create an interactive play on the general concept of compassionate community. Despite several recruitment tactics and some interest, no one signed on to the project in this form—likely because of the time, effort, and vulnerability it requested.

From here, I pivoted to invite former evangelicals to participate in workshops around a character I named Donovan the Dino. The applied drama workshop invited participants to help Donovan plan his “Church Crisis Party.” Former evangelicals helped Donovan sort through his complicated feelings about his faith community by sharing their own ideas about the assets and obstacles of their own faith communities. Then, participants helped him plan elements of his party through activities like creating a party playlist of religious and pop songs that, to them, represent the ideal of a compassionate community. Attendees received a small gift card for participating. The main devising materials that emerged from these workshops were the lists of obstacles and assets, pictured below. The project also included a workshop with Christian (inclusive of evangelical and other traditions) pastors and educators.

As I moved into the devising process, I invited other artists to devise with me in a “drop-in” format. I set a weekly devising time and asked artists to join me whenever they could. I began with six weeks of dramaturgy where we unpacked the materials from the Dino workshops, considered concepts of compassion and community, and read sources related to evangelicalism and compassionate faith communities. Then, we began creating the performance. Eventually, four devising team members emerged as core participants. The five of us created a play about four characters with complex experiences in faith communities, and we recruited four actors for the production. Audiences encountered each character in a museum format, where they could interact with each character in a different room of their home and learn their story through multi-media artifacts such as a journal or a video of text messages. Audiences could also engage with general museum “installations” such as a paper chain of people who supported others through a difficult time.

Sometimes I can be guilty of romanticizing my art so much I forget that asking someone to collaborate on art, even if it involves fun or beneficial functions like community-building, still asks for labor and time.

Recognizing the Labor of Community Members

Wholly Communion showed me the importance of recognizing the labor that artists invite from community members. My initial proposal of recruiting a devising team of former evangelicals requested a high amount of time, trust, vulnerability, and work, and this presented major obstacles because most community members, however intrigued, did not have the resources to meet this ask. As an artist, sometimes I can be guilty of romanticizing my art so much I forget that asking someone to collaborate on art, even if it involves fun or beneficial functions like community-building, still asks for labor and time. Recognizing the labor that community members offer when they collaborate or lend their perspective to an artistic project gives me a clearer picture of our work together. It also allows me to move into other important questions, such as whether monetary compensation is appropriate and possible, how we can identify benefits that community members view as reciprocal, how to reduce unnecessary tasks that they might not be interested in, and more.

Democracy Takes Work

Going deeper, Wholly Communion also made me notice how prioritizing agency and democratic decision-making sometimes places more work onto partnering communities. I initially structured the project in a way that required high involvement from former evangelicals because I desired to include other perspectives, collective decision-making, and an artistic output that emerged from the group instead of my own artistic mind. I ran into an inconvenient truth: democracy takes time and effort to function successfully. Making collective decisions, sharing power, and having fruitful discussions requires time and labor from all parties involved. Furthermore, centering shared decision-making can unintentionally slip into outsourcing the labor of decision-making onto community members, who sometimes do not have enough context, experience, or expertise to make a fully informed decision.

Nevertheless, my view of democracy as a core value to my community arts practice—because of its value in promoting equity, responsiveness to the community, and effective artistic processes and outputs—led me to troubleshoot ways to integrate responsiveness and democratic participation in a more creative, strategic way. I primarily did this by removing the plan for community members to actually build the artistic output. My experience and vocation as a professional artist equip me to invest the most labor and time into the art making process, and I could instead invite democratic participation and responsiveness from community stakeholders through specific, intentional interactions that utilize their expertise and strengths. In Wholly Communion, I pivoted to a one-hour workshop, instead of a months-long artistic process, to uncover participants’ expertise about their former faith communities.

Democracy requires work of its participants.

This is not to say that more expansive democratic decision-making would not have worked with more time, trust, and access, or to say that the labor of democracy is not worthwhile. I also am not advocating for excluding community members from artistic processes simply because of the effort needed. Instead, I invite us to recognize that democracy requires work of its participants, and I offer that the time structure and history of trust influences the amount of democratic participation that can be integrated without straining trust or labor capacities.

Asking the question “How can I as an artist integrate democracy and agency—as core values of my own work in community arts—in a way that minimizes the labor put onto a community, while inviting collaboration, input, and leadership from these community members as it fits their interest, capacity, or willingness to engage in collaboration?” led me to develop a spectrum for structures of collaboration.

Structures of Collaborating with Individuals

In Theatre for Youth Third Space, Stephani Etheridge-Woodson presents a continuum adapted from Suzanne Morse for structures of collaboration when theatre for youth and community cultural development artists work in partnership with organizations. Based on a mixture of three factors—commitment of time, trust, and access—Etheridge-Woodson offers four categories that gradually increase in each of these commitments: coordination, cooperation, collaboration, and integration. This builds on Morse’s continuum (described by Etheridge-Woodson as coalition building, networking, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration), which focuses more on operations of civic organizations. On one end of the spectrum, Etheridge-Woodson offers “coordination,” where partners stay very separate in their operations, do not meet often, and mainly focus on immediate needs. In coordination, partners agree on their “placemaking approach and the impacts sought.” On the other end of the spectrum is “integration,” where collaboration becomes so close that the entities merge into one another.

Unlike Etheridge-Woodson’s and Morse’s continuums, though, Wholly Communion involved community work with individuals separated or even disenfranchised from a community organization. This distinction significantly alters the dynamics of collaboration and partnership because even the amount of time, access, and trust required at the lowest level of Etheridge-Woodson’s continuum requires higher capacity than my partners possessed as very loosely structured individuals. For example, Etheridge-Woodson’s coordination level requires the artist and community partner to agree together on the approach and desired outcomes of the project. While theoretically possible to strategize goals, tactics, and outcomes with a newly organized group of individual community members, this requires a high amount of time, trust, and access when partnering with individuals, and thus at a minimum it would need to be at the higher end of the spectrum for individual collaborations.

As I contemplated the different project structures I attempted to craft during Wholly Communion, I created a list of the “forms” of collaboration with individuals and placed them into a spectrum in order of how much time, trust, and labor they asked of the community members involved. At every step community members have a window to offer their insights and perspectives in a way that can shape the project. In creating each step of the spectrum, I considered two main factors: community stakeholders’ relationship to the artistic output and community members’ influence on directing the intended goals and outcomes of the broader project. Community member involvement in both factors increases across the spectrum:

• Creating and Consuming: An artist creates outputs and offers them for consumption by community members. In our age of over-consumption, consumption can often have a negative connotation, but here I present consumption neutrally as engaging the work of art as a spectator, no matter how passive or active. Audience consumption may lead to further action or partnership, or it could allow audiences the opportunity to offer feedback that later changes aspects of the project. In Wholly Communion, several individual stakeholders, including former evangelicals, engaged with my project through this lens by attending the final performance only. A few of them offered me feedback or told me how aspects of the performance resonated with their own experiences.
• Listening and Creating: An artist builds an artistic output based on listening to community members identify needs, concerns, ideas, dreams, etc. In this stage, listening occurs before artistic creation rather than in an iterative process. “Listening” could include gathering stories and perspectives from community members, interviewing researchers or experts in the play’s topic, having casual conversations or dialogues with stakeholders, and more. In Wholly Communion, I engaged in this collaboration form when I spoke with a few colleagues, artists, or mentors with personal stake in this project—either as Christian educators or as former evangelicals—and used that information to influence my initial project proposal.
• Iterating and Responding: This is a cyclical process in which an artist creates an output (partial or “complete”) and individual community stakeholders respond by offering feedback and additional insights, dreams, or concerns that emerge based on their engagement with the artistic output. Artists could set up small performances or play readings to allow stakeholders to respond, or they could be creative in how they set up and facilitate spaces for responding. In Wholly Communion, I used “Iterating and Responding” when I set up pilot sessions of the Donovan the Dino workshop and adapted the workshop based on feedback. If I were to redo the project, I might attempt to use “Iterating and Responding” as the key collaboration form with former evangelicals throughout my creative process. This would have allowed me as the artist to spend most of the time and energy creating the artistic output while still regularly adapting the output based on community member perspectives.
• Piecewise Collaborating: Individual stakeholders directly collaborate in creating artistic outputs with the artist, but only at key stages; the artist still drives the creation of the output and vision and execution of the broader project. The artist may still maintain a large portion of the labor of organizing and executing the broader arc of the output, but that distribution of time and effort could vary. In Wholly Communion, the devising process—particularly in the dramaturgy stages before four main collaborators emerged—approximated this form because I brought specific questions to explore with the group, but I also worked on the project independently between sessions.
• Converging: Individual stakeholders and the artist collaborate evenly on the execution of a single output or project. While the artist may envision the product independently or in collaboration with stakeholders, individual community members play a key role in shaping the output and adapting any initial proposal from the artist. In Wholly Communion, “Converging” is the form I offered in my initial proposal, where individual former evangelicals in the community would collaborate with me to create a piece of theatre to reflect their experiences. Furthermore, the second portion of the devising process became a “Converging” process, where the four artistic collaborators and I began to work on the product together and take more shared ownership of the output. Interestingly, “Converging” emerged after a month or two of “Piecewise Collaborating.”
• Collective Organizing: Individual stakeholders and the artist collaborate on the process of creating artistic outputs or change-making within or with the community. This involves greater sharing of vision-making than the “Converging” stage because community members have a larger role in determining the broader collaboration process, timeline, and more. In Wholly Communion, my initial proposal approached “Collective Organizing” when I proposed that devising team members would collaborate on determining the direction and goal of the devised work, but it did not fully arrive in this area because my own goal would still have played a strong influence in driving the process of collaborating and making shared decisions.

Naming these “forms” of collaborating and listing them in ascending order of required time, trust, and labor allowed me to see how I adapted throughout Wholly Communion based on the feedback of community members. As I look ahead to other artistic projects, this spectrum encourages me to consider what I ask of community members and what form best fits my artistic vision. I hope these reflections will also encourage other artists working on community projects with individual stakeholders.