Doing It For Us When We Do It In Community

Martin Boross: This is the fourth episode of Bridge Between Realities. The jumping board for our conversation today is artistic creations for and with the community and the involvement of non-professionals to the process of artistic creation.

We are in Bath, Maine, and we are going to have a conversation with Jeremy Eaton, director and visual artist, and Graham Griffith, an open-source public service media strategist and audio producer. They were both co-creators of Memory Bath.

Tara Khozein: Memory Bath was the culmination of a weeklong residency that brought multidisciplinary artists from around the region into a collaborative process of performative creation. Each member of the ad hoc ensemble brought a personal offering, a scene idea, or, as we called it, a seed idea relating to memory and remembrance, on the first day of working together. From these contributions, a chain of scenes emerged, a sequence in which musical compositions and images and choreography and more immersive moments came to life across the various spaces, hallways, nooks, and crannies of the Chocolate Church.

Martin: I would like to begin with a quote from a series of articles that I published in Hungary called Director’s Journal. These journals served as the springboard for the workshop residency series.

Non-professional participants, stakeholders, experts, activists, or community members entered the stage as guests, and the production must honor their presence with clarity and dignity. Their role is not to emulate actors but to embody their own truth and experiences, which validate the questions raised by the performance. What they bring is not artistic training, but lived experience and lived knowledge, perspectives formed through their work, struggles and everyday lives. For collaboration to be meaningful, it must offer them a safe and trusting environment, tailored to the needs where their voices carry weight and status. Their participation should never exploit pain or hardship, but transform it into shared reflection and dialogue. In this sense, they become the most important documents of the performance, contributing authenticity, urgency, and human depth. Their presence reminds us that theatre is not only representation, but also encounter, a space where expertise of life itself can take the stage.

Jeremy Eaton: Hi.

Martin: Hi.

Tara: Hi.

Jeremy: I’m Jeremy Eaton. I’m the art director at the Chocolate Church Art Center in Bath, Maine. I have been creating my own original theatre for the last twenty years. I’m a visual artist and a director, a former performer. So that perspective of having been one for about fifteen years really still influences my work. And specifically in my role at the Chocolate Church Art Center here in Bath, Maine, I am looking at creating as many doorways into the building in a symbolic sense so that people can access it in the way that makes the most sense for them. So hopefully there’s not one thing, one perspective on art or one voice on who’s making art, but rather as many kinds of porous entry points as possible for our hyperlocal community and then also our broader community, so that this is a place where people don’t only see art, but also make art. And hopefully at times the lines between those two worlds are porous.

Graham Griffith: Hi all. I’m GG. My given name is Graham Griffith, and my career has been mostly under the field or in the field of journalism, and I’m really working hard to rethink what I’ve actually done. And I think one of the framings that sticks with me that builds on what you were just saying, Jeremy, is that I like to be in the business of sense-making. And so, I think using journalism for the better part of twenty years and following the definition of journalism that I follow, which is helping people make sense of the increasingly complicated communities in which they live, full stop, has been an important guide for me in the practice.

And now we look at this moment, and we think about the attacks on that field. I would say the neutering of journalistic practice by maligned forces, but also by commercial forces. There’s a nice overlap with artistic communities as well, and I’m thinking about the responsibility that we’ve had in that space and in our own decline.

So, to be a little more specific, a lot of my work for twenty years was in daily news talk programming through public radio programs in the US, a few of which are programs that I had created myself. But really what I was doing was more like being a conductor of talent in an editorial room to try to figure out how do we actually help people in this moment when something that has happened that is really hard to understand or explain.

And so, I think, at this point, I’ve branched out also to be a strategist for people in how they tell their stories. And I’m much more interested now in working with the people who bring, off of what Martin was saying, who bring experience that is life experience. The expertise comes from the living and the learning. So I don’t diminish the academic experience, the work that people have done. We really need to value that. And we need to center the lived experience for that expertise as well.

Tara: So, I’m reminded of this morning during our feedback session, one of the other participants, Jenny Han, who’s an interdisciplinary performance-based artist, was telling us about some of her work with people that don’t do art as their central practice. And she said that she routinely feels like she gets more from them or learns more from them than she has to give. And I’m wondering if you had any experiences over this week that also resonate with that observation?

Jeremy: I had something that was a relearning, but I think that’s as valuable often as a first-time learning because if you need to relearn it, how well did you learn it the first time? I came across one of the participants who was very angry. And I was trying to understand the anger, because for a moment it was directed at me. And then what was said finally was, “I’ve never gotten a note before.”

And then I realized that this was a person who was really struggling with a well of hurt at feeling like they were being told that they were bad. And that was flabbergasting to me as a theatre artist because 50 percent of your life is taken up with getting notes. And it was really such an important, humbling in the best way, reminder that no matter how much things might appear simple or obvious, A, the well that each person has within them in their own experience they’re bringing to that minute and how much people understand and don’t understand what each person in the room thinks the process is and how if there’s ten people in a room, the dream is maybe to get to a cohesive understanding of process together. But there’s also ten processes happening that at times are trains that are kind of dodging each other on tracks.

So that was a really humbling learning this week because it would’ve never occurred to me even though I thought I kind of had a good sense of the people and who was in the room.

And this was from an artist, too. And then that also is just such a clear reminder of different art forms approach these, some art forms are truly individualistic pursuits, and some art forms are incredibly collaborative. And then also really moving to watch that person kind of go through a process and come out the other end of like, “Okay, we’re all fine.”

Graham: There are a couple of key takeaways that, one came from you, Tara, and it was reinforced by one of the performers, which is this idea of if you’re getting it wrong, lean in. Instead of, the phrasing might’ve been, better to be wrong and bold than right and timid.

Tara: Yeah. Wrong but strong.

Graham: Wrong but strong. Thank you. And that was really striking because we are in a space of carefulness too often in our practice as well. And even just in the practice of gathering, like we’re trying to relearn, I think or even learn, how do we gather at a time where so many of our interactions are digital and all id as opposed to process?

And so, recognizing that there are these moments in the practice where you have to, I would say, steer into the skid, as somebody who learned to drive in a snowy part of the country. Your impulse when you’re driving in the winter and you start to lose control of the car is to correct. And the right way to do it is to steer into the skid.

So, this was reinforced through a warmup practice with one of the artists where we were balancing sticks and trying to move around. And when I was doing this, again, this is a state of play. And yet as an unprofessional, as somebody who hasn’t done this sort of warmup work, this sort of physical warmup work of preparing this whole tool that is the whole body and the balance and the center, this was really striking for me because you’re holding the stick and you’re realizing when it starts to lean too far forward and you pull back quickly, the stick falls. And you lean into it, you steer into it. And this exercise came to reinforce this idea of going with the instinct, not overreacting to what might be a mistake.

Tara: Yeah, it occurs to me that making art has a lot of leeway in it. We’re not, especially the rehearsal process, we’re not operating on human bodies, we’re also not communicating yet to large groups of people. There’s space to be wrong without bad consequences. And it makes me wonder, how does coming into a space of art making where of course there are stakes, but there are very different and there may be more personal and emotional stakes. How does that space serve this community and how do you see yourself specifically doing that in the Art Lab, and how are you doing it? Because it’s obviously really happening, and some of our participants have spoken about the Art Lab and what you’re doing here with so much tenderness and excitement, and there are people in the audience last night that were talking about the role that it plays in their lives. You’re clearly really making an impact with this project, and I’m just wondering how that’s happening.

If I was to try to have a simple thesis, it would just be about trying to create as many noncommercial spaces around art making, because then we’re just not going to be thinking about it, we’ll just be doing it.

Jeremy: I think the most successful first ingredient of what’s authentic about the Art Lab is that I need it to exist. I’m not coming up with an intellectual idea of a service that other people need and then trying to give it to them. I made a space that I needed on a profound level and then other people who have on some base level the same need, although I think the reason we all need it is really different, are now able to find it. But I think that founding impulse is actually really probably one of the most impactful things in terms of anything that I’m doing.

And then I think the thing that, I came to it already having some sense of and then have learned a tremendous amount, because I just hit the one-year anniversary of starting it, is how much one has to get out of the way, which is simple but is an ongoing practice. And there’s even a tiny million little practical applications of that that I bump up against each time I’m there with the community. And then there’s also really big profound applications of that, but it’s making a thing and being like, “This is so deeply personal, and it’s me and I’m going to put it here in a public sphere, and then I’m going to walk away from it and let you do what you will.”

And I think people respond to that, and then that makes the second thing happen that is so impactful because, like, Megan, who was in this project, who’s been coming to the Art Lab since day one, practically, I don’t think she understands that she’s like my most important partner. I really don’t think she grasps that. And the reason she’s my most important partner is because she needs the Art Lab and she’s an outgoing person. And every single Wednesday night, without fail, she shows up with one to five people in tow.

So I don’t know that the Art Lab would have existed, especially in the winter months when it was cold and slow, if it hadn’t been her going around Bath and just scooping people up and bringing them in the door. And she doesn’t understand the impact of that. And what she’s doing is the same thing I did, which is, “I need this, so I’m going to make it happen. I’m going to believe in it, I’m going to pour my belief into it.”

And then she’s also getting out of the way when she walks in the door with the people. She’s not sitting them down and trying to dictate them through a big group activity. Those are the most successful things.

And maybe the third little ingredient I’ll throw in is that for the most part it’s a nonverbal space. There’s plenty of wonderful talking that happens and people even come to socialize and gab to their friend all night. But what I mean is the explanation is like five sentences and it’s on the wall, and that’s all we need to say about it. And I think for a lot of, definitely for me, but the feedback I’m getting is that for a lot of people, those spaces are really something a lot of people crave, I think. The premise is simple, so they get to do with it what they will, and they feel respected in that.

And also there’s just so much talking. I just feel like we’re in a very, the amount of language and words that one takes in on a daily basis, I think in life right now, much less really important, huge words that mean a lot and have a huge consequence, I think, can be a little overwhelming. So, I think it’s a space where you don’t ever have to explain what you’re doing. You don’t have to talk to anyone about what you’re doing. You can just do something.

Graham: You remind me of a quote from the event last night that was delightful, which is “A pine tree doesn’t have to think about how to pine tree.” And there’s a piece of this which is we know that people are born curious and creative, and so our society has shut that down for the vast majority of people. Lifelong learning is too often lost. And that is not a gift; it’s a right to that. And what I admire about what you’re describing is that you’re reminding us that we have that in us and you’re creating the space for that to happen.

Also, Megan’s parting words to me were, “I’ll see you at Art Lab.”

Martin: When it came to the idea of inner motivation, I really connected with what Jeremy had said earlier. At that point of the conversation, we were talking about what we personally can gain by inviting people with lived experience or non-professional performers who carry important kinds of knowledge into the creative process.

I bring them in because I want to get inspired, and maybe I can find a kind of inspiration from them that I couldn’t find in just simply working with actors. So, in that sense, that that’s a stimulative incentive that I provide to myself. I can really relate to this inner need, and it’s not a community act or it’s not charity or it’s not something for the greater good, it’s for satisfying my own interest and curiosity.

Jeremy: And they’re not mutually exclusive. It is that perfect intersection that I’m having that selfish impulse that’s about even just my own mental health. I need the Art Lab. It’s part of my mental health practice. And it’s also great that I get to execute a deeply held, I don’t even want to call it a political belief, it’s just like a human belief.

Tara: And could you just in a few sentences describe exactly what the Art Lab is?

Jeremy: Yeah, it’s an art studio that is open three days a week to the community, that being defined as any human who walks in the door. And everything in it is free. And I’m there as a visual artist to basically just make them feel welcome and then get out of the way so anyone can make anything. And if they want to partner, I will partner or teach simple skills, but it’s not a formal educational space. It’s really just a creative space that’s trying to help people make whatever they are dreaming up.

Martin: Can you tell a little bit more about these access points or entry points for the community to the Chocolate Church that you guys came up with or trying to deepen and create a model or practice?

Jeremy: So, number one was just that we didn’t come here and reinvent something out of scratch, or this has almost for fifty years been an art center. So, I think stage one was listening and seeing what people cared about and trying to start—and it’s not like there’s an arrival point with this—but to earn the trust of everyone that we’re not here to erase that just because we might be introducing other things.

And then kind of similar to making the Art Lab what it is, like Matthew, who’s done most of the programmatic stuff music-wise, he’s really just always on Spotify finding bands. And literally I’ll watch him love a song and pick up a phone, get on the internet and sleuth and call the person out of the blue. And an artist in Tennessee will be picking up the phone and being like, “Who are you, and how’d you get my number?”

And he’s like, “I love your sound. Do you want to come to Maine?” And he’s booked acts that way. And so, the point is, the overlap again is this is someone who loves music getting excited and therefore transmitting then walking up and down Main Street here or Front Street and being like, “Oh my gosh, this amazing group from Colombia is coming and you’ve never heard anything like this in the Chocolate Church.”

And people care about that enthusiasm. I think they’d rather go to something because somebody walked up to them at Cafe Creme and was all lit up about La Muchacha—which they’re like, “I don’t even know what that means”—rather than here’s a cohesive season programming. So again, it’s just based in trying to be ourselves and not be afraid of taking up space and programming the things that we think are really cool and exciting.

And then also wanting to push a little bit and be like, we’ve brought in a lot of acts in the coming year who weren’t singing in English, which is newer, not that that’s never happened here before, but that was an intentional choice. Or even Matthew, who’s Jewish, programming a few Klezmer bands and serving latkes. And I had people coming up to me the first time we did that and being like, “What is this mystery music? It’s so mysterious.”

They kept using the word mysterious, and I was like, “It’s Klezmer.” And they were like, “I’ve never heard of it.” And I was like, here’s my two-minute intro to Klezmer music. But that’s because there’s someone on the stage who just introduced it who’s like, “This was my grandpa’s favorite song.” It’s coming from a place of personal connection.

And then also just I think multiple times a week, Matthew is office doors open, and people will wander in and pitch things, and we take on as much of that as we can. So just listening to the things that, whether or not it’s our own taste, if somebody’s lit up about it and can help us figure out the logistics, then that’s really important. Ideally, it would feel like the whole community was programming a season, although that’s also impossible.

Tara: I’m wondering if we can shift a little to you as this being a sort of a new experience, and I’m wondering, because you also have done or have been involved in a kind of performance with live radio. And I’m wondering not just in the performative aspects of that, but also in other tools that you have as a journalist, if there were things that you were really easily able to transfer into this kind of work. And also if there were, I don’t know, any challenges that you came up against with material that felt really, really alien to you, or challenges that came alien to you.

Graham: So, the framing and phrasing I’ve been trying to use a lot and own is anytime my brain wants to go to Can we do this? and yes-and-no questions is the How might we do this? And so, when you talk about the completely crazy idea of a whole city, no matter how small it is, developing an event season, instead of saying, “Well, this wouldn’t work,” to say, “How might we do this?”

And that delivers a path towards something that isn’t exactly that something else. And so, with this kind, what you’ve created here, what you as the producer and you as the directors have created for me was, okay, how might we collaborate effectively with all of these different relationships, all these. There are very few dyadic relationships, so how do we do this? And then because I think the selfishness, we have to own our selfishness and connect it to the broad ideas.

The only way to actually, I do want to serve a greater good because my life is better if I’m nurturing a greater good. And if I figure out the simple things that I can do that lead towards a greater good, then the community’s experience is better.

And so, making sure these things are not an opposition but are kind of dancing with each other is really challenging, but worth the challenge. And so for me that was, how might I show up here? How might I present little seeds of “here’s a way that I could be helpful,” or plant those—or actually, it’s the wrong metaphor because there’s not enough time. How might I lay out little seedlings that people could come to and explore? And so, I was trying to be very conscious of moments of clauses, throwing little things in there and just seeing how people responded.

Tara: I felt also, I mean you were someone that, we didn’t do a lot of editing work or anything. We didn’t even see any of your text. It was always different. And we knew from the first time that you kind of told a story or spoke that you would be fine and that you would find a way to fit your story into the context of the whole piece.

And so, with other people, we had much more extensive kind of back and forths about text. And for you it was just kind of like, all right, GG’s going to find a way to make sense of all of these different themes. And even on the performance day, you told a story that we had never heard in that way or in that order. And I felt like you found these little ways of doing exactly that, even inside of the work, making connections for us and for the audience.

Graham: Thank you for saying that. In the process, all I was doing was trying to show up and say yes to things.

Martin: GG, can you tell us about your roles in this piece?

Graham: I felt like I was moving through the whole piece, and my opening role was to, I think in a way, be a warm-up act. And I mingled with the audience and pretended I was a semi-obnoxious cable news correspondent and asking people questions.

A good rhetorical question that is happening all the time that I’ve decided has a one-word answer is: “Well, what can we do about it?” And the answer is “Something.”

Tara: You had a great line, which was, I just overheard as people were entering in where you said something like, “We are the other news network,” or something.

Graham: MRBFD. The other one, or ask your grandma. And then I was doing a first-person story about my grandmother, who I only knew in a very physical sense because I existed when she existed, but her brain had left her, and she had a form of pre-senile dementia. And so, it’s a very traumatic, there’s a lot of family trauma from this experience, and I always longed to have a relationship with her. So, the cooking was, I was able to construct a narrative about wanting to cook with her off of a cookbook that the family had unearthed. And then I was back to, Thatcher Guy of MRBFD News and interviewing a seal as part of this week of this national correspondent.

Tara: Like a Navy SEAL or?

Graham: No, no, actually, I’m glad you asked: a harbor seal who would not give me her name. And it was a very complicated interview for Thatcher Guy. And it was also a move from that character to obnoxious to the beginning of listening.

Tara: And maybe just one final question for you guys. We’re curious about how a future might look where the labels that we use for professional artists and community members might be a little bit more blurred. And what might projects look like, particularly here at Chocolate Church where that isn’t made such a strict binary and where we can sort of shift and share knowledge more in the way that Martin talked about in the first quote?

Jeremy: I’m not going to end this with a long speech about capitalism, but I also can’t not acknowledge it because anyone I’ve ever heard, even aside from what’s in Webster’s Dictionary, just in the vernacular as a culture, we define professionalism by whether or not you’re paid. I think that’s the most basic definition. Is it your profession? And it’s not your profession if no one’s paying you to do it.

So, to me, the only way to transcend thinking about that is a cultural shift in which we’re not only tying art to commerce. And that happens, I think on a hyperlocal level. I’m trying to do my small part to make a stance for the divorce of art and commerce. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with, I mean, I’m a professional artist, so I’m not saying that everyone needs to. That’s why I’m saying I’m not going to give a long rant about capitalism because I think it’s obviously incredibly complex how we do and don’t participate in those systems. And it would be so easy for me to say a lot of big eloquent ideas right now about disengaging from a system, but also I have to feed my kids.

But I think maybe the truest or simplest thing I can say in my experience is just my approach is to try to create spaces where that’s not part of the conversation. So, we’re not thinking about it. To me, I think about dance as an art form I have very little connection to; in many ways, though, so much of my own practice is physical.

And this is going to sound like I’m disrespecting dance. I’m not disrespecting dance. It’s not something that I can really enjoy as a performance often except for a few experiences I’ve had of it. And I’ve always wondered that, what’s my hangup about dance? I’ve always felt kind of guilty. Am I anti-dance? What’s my issue? And then I remember once being like, “Oh, it’s because I think it’s something people do together.” It doesn’t make sense to me to watch people dance. I can only understand dance as a social, communal, cultural act. And again, my sister loves to see the ballet. She goes multiple times a year. It’s awesome. She gets something out of that.

But I just think about how we, it’s also, I think about blurring, remembering that all of these things were once culturally held, community held, things that people did. So, an audience member and a participant were, I think it was much more porous. Somebody was maybe more shy, so they were excited to watch; and somebody was more like, “I love being seen, so I’m going to tell the story.” But there wasn’t so much of a delineation of like, you are there for this, and I’m there for this. And I therefore know more than the story even about the story than you.

But if I was to try to have a simple thesis, it would just be about trying to create as many noncommercial spaces around art making, because then we’re just not going to be thinking about it, we’ll just be doing it. I don’t know how to do that yet though either. I’m not sitting on an answer, that’s I think probably what I’m going to be working on for the rest of my life.

Tara: It seems like you have a really good beginning to a proposition or a beginning to an answer with the Art Lab based on just some of the conversations I’ve had around that space.

Jeremy: I hope so. Yeah.

Graham: So, it is quite… the short answer to that is that it is about collective action and creating spaces where people gather and want to come back to those spaces because they felt good and they learned something. And I think this now requires us to note the things that Jeremy talking about. First of all, art, journalism, these are public goods. These should be shared spaces. They should be common goods. And they should be the common spaces.

And we can note the challenges and choose to not accept that they are reality. Rather, constructs and constructs become realities for families when food and health is priced. And yet if we own them as constructs rather than realities, then we’ll find ways to test them. And this week was that for some of us in the participation, it was moving past the reality into doing something. And the best creative processes I’ve ever witnessed or studied are attached to a big grand idea and have simple next steps.

And so, all we can do is figure out our next step. One of my steps currently is to decide there are no rhetorical questions, which pairs with a larger theme of, I’m annoying, I’m going to try to use that power for good and own my annoyance. And I can’t not be annoying. So if I’m going to be annoying, I’m going to plant time-lapse drugs in people, like, no rhetorical questions. If I think of a question and it’s rhetorical, I have to answer it myself. And when somebody asks a rhetorical question, if the space allows for it, I will say, “Let’s answer that.” So, a good rhetorical question that is happening all the time that I’ve decided has a one-word answer is: “Well, what can we do about it?” And the answer is “Something.”

Tara: Thank you for listening to Bridge Between Realities from Bath, Maine. Each episode focuses on a theme that was a core element of our workshop series. Other episodes focus on immersive theatre, the devising process, site-specific work, the ensemble model, and co-leadership.

Martin: This podcast is produced as a contribution to HowlRound Theatre Commons. You can find more episodes of this show and other HowlRound shows, very, very fine podcasts, including on noncommercial, open-source apps like Anytime Podcast Player and AntennaPod.

Tara: This project has been made possible thanks to the support of the Trust for Mutual Understanding. If you like this podcast, please share it with your friends.

Martin: You can find the transcript for this episode along with lots of other progressive and disruptive content on howlRound.com.