Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Chicago, November 16–18, 2001

Pam Korza
2001
Challenge Session: Northern Lakes Center for the Arts, The Water Issues Project
This session was part of the Animating Democracy Learning Exchange held in Chicago, November 2001. In this Challenge Session, one Lab project had the opportunity to put forward challenges they were encountering in their work and seek comment and feedback from peers to help them with the challenge.

Participants:

  • LaMoine MacLaughlin, Executive Director, Northern Lakes Center for the Arts
  • Laura Johnson, youth dialogue facilitator and project evaluator
  • Bridget Draxler, youth dialogue facilitator
  • Jane Johnson, Amery citizen and community partner


Project Summary
In 2001, the Northern Lakes Center for the Arts commissioned and produced a series of arts activities to frame community dialogues about issues of water usage and pollution related to growth and development, use of farm chemicals, and recreational use of local rivers and lakes in Amery, Wisconsin. 

The project was launched on Earth Day, April 2001. The Center presented videos on water issues in the region as well as a WPA-era film about the Mississippi River that provided an opportunity to compare historic and contemporary issues. 

Over the summer and fall months, an interdisciplinary set of arts events unfolded.

  • The Northern Lakes Writers’ Guild worked with author Anthony Bukoski to produce stories, poems, and essays about water and people’s relation to it for publication and local readings.
  • The Northern Lakes Theater Guild revived a production of Ibsen's “An Enemy of the People,” about water pollution and civic discourse, including an interactive Act 4 in which audience members participated in the play’s town meeting scene. 
  • Composer Layton James worked with the Northern Lakes Chamber Orchestra to produce and perform a new original work incorporating writings by noted naturalists and environmentalists, and Smetana's classical work, “The Moldau.” 
  • Photographer Jerry Boucher led the local photography club in a photography project related to the Appel River, creating work displayed in tandem with the concert. 
  • Sculptor Frank Stone, in collaboration with local artists and students, created a public fountain for Amery’s park. The fountain, which includes the form of a car battery, symbolizes the importance of water in daily life and calls attention to mercury as a prime contaminant of the water caused by discarding of batteries in the local waters. Its seasonal turning on and off will provide occasion for sustained dialogue about water related issues.

Arts activities were designed to generate multiple opportunities for public dialogue on water issues. The Center for the Arts worked with dialogue specialist, Pat Romney, who trained a corps of youth and adults in facilitation techniques, with special attention to ways to draw upon the unique opportunity each art form provided.  Amery Mayor Harvey Stower, highly regarded for initiating and engaging local citizens in public dialogue about other community issues, participated in facilitating civic dialogues along with these youth and adults.


Challenges
Northern Lakes Center identified several challenges faced and observations made both during this project and that could be anticipated in future efforts.

Challenge: How to effectively translate dialogue training into action

  • Credibility in youth facilitators: Youth facilitators felt they were not always taken seriously as facilitators due to their age. 
  • Relating the art to the issue: At first, conversations were often broad or the connections were tenuous.  Personalizing the connection to the art or to the issue often brought out a deeper level of discussion.
  • How much to structure the dialogues: The more highly structured dialogues more effectively allowed everyone to be included.  Less structure enabled greater flow in the conversation.
  • Getting people to stay for the dialogue: After sitting through a show, people want to go home.  The combination of the concert and photography exhibition was the most successful at retaining people for the dialogue.
  • Dialogue during an event is different than dialogue after. People could have dialogue while watching photographic exhibit. 

Challenge: Assessing the effectiveness of dialogue for the audience and in relation to the issue

Based on audience surveys distributed at three events including the play and concert, the Center discovered that:

  • People came to events to see the artistic event, not for the dialogue component.
  • There were differences in what people thought was the focus of the dialogue in which they participated.
  • Cheryl Yuen offered that there also needs to be clarity, for the audience’s sake, about the issue.  How is it framed?  Is it meaningful for the audience or stakeholders assembled?

Challenge: Developing a shared understanding of what is meant by dialogue and civic dialogue

Although the Center observed on some occasions that everyone participated in dialogue activities, not everyone believed that they had participated in civic dialogue. Interpreting this response leads to other questions:  Do people hold different ideas about what dialogue or civic dialogue is? Does it mean that the dialogue did not meet some people’s expectations in terms of civic focus? That dialogue was not really achieved? 

Sandy Augustin (Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis) wondered if literally naming the activity as “dialogue” would help people recognize it as such.  Daniel Banks called upon participants to use the Learning Exchange as an opportunity to further clarify how to name, frame, and format experiences and to be conscious of what the intent for dialogue is in each opportunity. “Not all post-show discussions are civic dialogue.” He added that part of the challenge is to create experiences that are not “imposing something on an audience, but rather presenting an audience with something it can buy into or buy out of.” 

Challenge: Including dialogue as an extension of artmaking

Enemy of the People shed light on Amery’s water issues even though the play did not precisely represent local, contemporary issues. The writers group, after having participated, wondered why there haven’t been more projects using the classics as a point of reference for dialogue. Northern Lakes Center for the Arts sees more opportunity to look for natural inspiration and connections within future art presentations for exploration of civic issues.

Challenge: How not to sacrifice art for dialogue and dialogue for art

  • Local partner organizations such as environmental groups often have a specific agenda, such as preservation of natural areas. MacLaughlin has been concerned that projects such as these can be perceived as propaganda if one point of view is promoted or is even perceived as having a platform.  Further, there is a chance that art can move toward propaganda. MacLaughlin sees that his job is “to make sure that the art doesn’t become secondary to any other concern. I see art as broadening and allowing for multiple perspectives. Propaganda is narrowing.”
  • Dialogue can be as creative as art. Northern Lakes was pleased to broaden its own understanding of approaches to dialogue through the range of creative techniques offered by consultant, Pat Romney. Romney added that the facilitation training itself was a dialogical process that served to build valuable relationships within the community.

Challenge: Dialogue is often presented as a one-shot deal. How do you deepen that experience? How do you include people with other points of view?

For the Center, dialogue meant “taking the person who normally doesn’t speak and drawing them out.”  MacLaughlin observed that some people might have participated if they had time to reflect on the issue. “There was no means for people to come back after a few days and to have dialogue after they thought about it.”

Gillian Eaton described how Flint Youth Theatre sandwiched its play about school violence between process drama workshops that both contributed to the play’s development and followed it up. “When (people who participated in the workshops) came to the play they saw themselves in it. They owned the play. The follow-up (process drama) sessions were much deeper. There was a fierce devotion to the piece and fierce audience promotion (of the play) outside of the normal channels.” In retrospect, Eaton beleives that, even with this extended process, the civic dialogue would have benefited from starting earlier and being sustained longer after the play.

Challenge: How to use dialogue in other contexts

The Center wishes to continue to put to good work its cultural resources to contribute to civic dialogue. Cheryl Yuen, Animating Democracy’s liaison to the Northern Lakes project, observed certain foundational practices that supported this effort toward positive results, and that will enable future arts-based civic dialogue work to continue and strengthen the role of cultural organizations in civic dialogue:

  • Allowing for organic evolution: Although the project had a clear framework, the Center remained flexible to changes, including the addition of the photography component and a shift from a singular facilitator (the Mayor) to building skill in a broader base of youth and adult facilitators in the community.
  • Stretching, experimenting, and broadening boundaries: Youth facilitators stretched their knowledge and skills and experimented with different techniques as they saw what worked and did not work in various different segments of project. Photographers who had never taken photos with a focus on a civic issue stretched, realizing as they had dialogue among themselves, that their effort  was to photograph the multidimensionality of the river.
  • Seizing opportunity: The advent of this project gave momentum to a group in town  involved in preserving the Appel River. There is now this group of people who feel great ownership and have taken leadership.