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Critical PerspectivesEssay AbstractsThe full collection of Critical Perspectives Essays can be purchased through the Americans for the Arts bookstore. The Dentalium Project, Dell’ Arte
Project Overview
The project had three components. A series of eight dialogues that occurred while the casino was under construction brought together city and Rancheria leaders and community members. A documentary video was shot over a year featuring five people who held different views on the casino. The civic dialogues and video process fueled the creation of a new play by Dell’Arte called Wild Card which shows Blue Lake 10 years in the future, following a full decade of changes sparked by the opening of the new casino. It features a local boy who has made the big-time returning to host a radio show. Notes on Wild Card
O’Quinn’s choice of detail serves to highlight the political and cultural issues at stake in the play that is set 10 years after the construction of the casino. A fictional president of the Blue Lake Chamber of Commerce welcomes the crowd: “Welcome to this carnival of commerce! Smells like a city to me!” “Between my music and my garden, I don’t have a lot of space to think about things like that,” intones a character with a line taken directly from the community dialogues that preceded the development of the play. O’Quinn supplies the context for the play and shows how Wild Card’s content and structure are responses to the community dialogue and the present historical moment in which it has taken shape. O’Quinn intersperses his “thick description” with cogent quotations from such sources as newspapers, politicians, Wild Card characters, as well as thoughts about the process from the playwright and director. Different groups that make up Blue Lake, including city council members and Unitarians, are made fun of in the play. But one group is obviously missing: “Why aren’t there any Indians in this show?” O’Quinn discusses how the play addresses the lack of Native American presence, and he adds a postscript about a new version of the play, called Wild Card 1.5, in which a local Native American actress has a role. O’Quinn concludes with a description of specific community changes that can be traced directly to the impact of the play. Regular meetings between the town and the Rancheria were established; previously uninvolved individuals sought participation in town government; and Dell’ Arte set up a scholarship fund for Native Americans interested in training with them in theater. “To save paradise they put up a parking lot”
Among reasons given for the Rancheria building the casino, he notes, was to fund efforts for tribal members to engage more fully in traditional customs and language. Surrounding the casino, he adds, was the largest parking lot in the county. While a small number of tribal members had taken part in the Dell’ Arte-initiated dialogues, no Rancheria official had invited non-Indian community opinion about their casino. Tribal chairwoman Arla Ramsey said this practice of nondialogue was nearly traditional in Blue Lake and worked both ways. To her memory, no local white official had ever paused before the start of an endeavor to ask: “I wonder what the Indians think?” In the context of this lack of communication about important issues, Wild Card skirted the issue of questioning the building of the casino, states Rooks. Rooks questions whether Native Americans have had an opportunity to question and discuss the possible effects of casinos on their cultures among themselves or with other groups. He notes that whenever a tribal government considers construction of a casino, “little if any formal dialogue is expended on the project’s civic and social impact.” Wild Card did not offer this opportunity, and in some ways continued this lack of serious dialogue about casinos and their cultural effects. The decision to build a casino was not fundamentally questioned in the project. Rooks examines the nature of “civic art” such as Wild Card when it isn’t prepared to take a chance to fully open up dialogue on a difficult issue. The reluctance to risk rejection or to anger a constituency may be an obstacle to effective civic dialogue. The Arts and Development: An Essential Tension
Lewis, a playwright and theater writer pursuing studies in cultural planning, goes on to examine community identity as a key factor in community development. He analyzes underlying tensions between art and development; he also discusses the potential for reconciliation of historical tensions between the community of Blue Lake and its neighboring Native American Rancheria (tensions were recently increased by the building of a casino on the reservation), and how The Dentalium Project addressed them. How The Dentalium Project “attempted to navigate those complexities can demonstrate some of the opportunities and pitfalls of the relationship between professional community-based arts and local development.” Lewis describes how the project resulted in increased civic involvement in Blue Lake, and in more communication between the town and the reservation. Lewis reasons that reconciliation between native and non-native communities requires more than any single civically engaged art project could contribute, but that at least through the arts we imagine what such a reconciliation might look like, contributing to the possibility of a new community identity. And if community identity is a key factor in development, Lewis concludes, it makes sense to consider how the arts make communities viable, rather than merely prosperous. A response to the essays
Fields discusses the difficulties of fostering open communication among people who had never been in the same room together. And yet he also provides evidence of the success of the dialogues, including increased communication between Blue Lake and the Rancheria. He describes how the dialogue process affected the theater product. Artistic choices were made so that the play would be as accessible as possible to engage people across the divisions of culture, beliefs, and opinions about the construction of the casino. These artistic choices include use of the outdoor amphitheater, the musical and radio show genres, and the use of comedy and satire. At the same time that choices were made to make the play accessible, Dell’Arte worked to achieve the highest level of artistic craft: We had a vigorous internal debate within the company about style and aesthetics on this project. After participating in one of the Animating Democracy learning exchanges, we saw that many people were approaching the work almost from a biographical or political point of view, emphasizing content over artistic style, and placing a priority on the design of dialogue over the creation of art. After much discussion we chose to take the opposite tack. We made this decision because of our knowledge of our own community—how we are perceived as artists within this community and the community’s expectation of our art—and because of our predilection to make sure that we entertain, not preach, to make the art provoke the questions. In the question of who leads the dance—the art or the dialogue—for us it was clearly the art. Fields concludes with a long discussion, perhaps an apologia, of the lack of a Native American presence in the play. He takes up this issue within a broader view of “theater of place,” viewing art as inseparable from the place and time in which it lives. The responsibility of a theater of place is not to have all the right answers to start with, but to face the difficult issues in life, and through that process, to learn and to grow. Fields notes that in the more recent reprisal of Wild Card, a Native American character is introduced, played by a local Native American actress. |
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