Convenings

Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Seattle, May 3–5, 2002

Case Sessions: Perseverance Theatre, Moby Dick

Presenters 

• Peter Dubois, Artistic Director
• Susan McInnis, Dialogue Coordinator
• Jeff Herrmann, Producing Director 

Background on the play and project
A statewide tour of Perseverance Theatre’s adaptation of Moby Dick in Barrow, Fairbanks, and Anchorage engaged a diverse citizenry in dialogue about contentious issues of subsistence rights, the urban-rural divide, and the struggle between economy and environment in Alaska.  By juxtaposing the Anglo-capitalist whaling traditions depicted in the novel with Native-subsistence traditions still practiced in Alaska, the production aimed to illuminate complex issues of the hybridization of Western and Native cultures that underlie current divisive issues.  Local and statewide partner organizations worked closely with Perseverance to help design and facilitate dialogues that frame issues most relevant to that community and offer formats that considered the norms of public dialogue and communication in that unique place.

• Original idea: interviews with whale hunters woven with Melville’s text, academic theory, Bob Dylan lyrics, and original writings by cast; later a playwright became involved in the process
• There are 5 indigenous cultures in Alaska, 3 of which are represented in the piece
• Structure of the piece:  The Head, The Ribs, The Tail – Melville’s story as the horizontal narrative, very simple, but with vertical dives – Alaskan cultures, issues, added material, etc.
• Performances were held in lots of different spaces, reflecting the communities – gym, theatre, etc.
• Showed a video clip based on an interview Peter Dubois did in Barrow with Dino, the head of the only Fortune 500 company in Alaska.  Clip from performance at Perseverance Theatre

Shifts in Dialogue Planning
“We had an excellent dialogue plan, but it fell apart.  My assumption was that our state trembles with these issues, but very seldom do we talk to each other about them – native to non-native, person to person.  Throughout the state there are the official people, the powerful people, who talk, and everyone else is silenced.”  - Susan McInnis

• Original plan was to use the media – radio as a very important means of communication in Alaska.  Envisioned experts speaking, people who can talk on these subjects deeply, from experience, using newspaper and radio to reach people,  then dialogue.
• Planned to purposefully involve leaders.  They wanted to know the agenda, the purpose, position, etc.  When the answer was open-ended, they bailed.  The “experts” were all very busy people, or wanted to go in their own directions
• Engaging sites – By phone, Susan told the story of how the production of Moby Dick came together, and the issues emerging.  After, people responded with their  ideas.  Examples:  native dancers accompanying the subsistence round table; a discussion about theatre; using story to validate the voices of youth (especially native youth) at a school;  Socrates cafés – finding an issue and using questions to explore it, in Anchorage and Fairbanks; Barrow – a traditional potluck with dancers. 
• No selection process for who would participate in the dialogues, open invitation.  No prerequisite.  Flyers in the program, ads in the paper, radio, and word of mouth.
• In retrospect, it’s good that these plans didn’t work.  Dialogue wouldn’t have happened.  What did happen was that we – people – talked to each other.  It did get on the radio and in the newspaper a little bit, but mostly it got individuals talking to individuals.
• At first it was perceived that Moby Dick was a white project, not a native project.  Took a while to build trust, for people to feel the project was “speaking on their ground.”  People were more open when they knew part of the cast was native. 

Multiple Perspectives and Revealing Assumptions
“We assumed Moby Dick was the story of a savage early capitalism.  Then one person said, ‘Oh that captain, he’s native.’   What?  Why?  ‘Because he has this personal relationship with the whale, like he’s hunting his god.’”  - Jeff Hermann

• Perspectives on whaling – Moby Dick is framed as a revenge story in Western culture, but in native culture, whaling is about community tradition
• 2 white female students went to live with a native community for 2 weeks, and went on a whaling – one girl was a vegan and animal rights activist before she went, and came back transformed.
• Hunting guides were very uncomfortable coming to the dialogues, because they assumed hunters would be looked down upon because the topic was subsistence.  The group discovered that the hunters have a relationship with the communities and they always leave meat or skins with the people.
• 2 elders in the community – one spoke passionately about having control over his own land, and drilling.  The other laid into him about ancestors and the implications of what he was saying. 
• In Barrow, a group of 30 people gathered to talk about stories and how they become legends.  This became the spring board for people to talk about Shamanism – a big topic because Shamans used to be sent to insane asylums for not converting to Christianity.  One woman from a church walked out.
• A conversation of whether art should take a position or not led to a discussion of Alaskan identity, and who’s an Alaskan and who isn’t.  Surfaced the assumption that if you look Native, you must be.
• What does it mean to be Alaskan?  A woman in a suit answered, Blueberries.  Because all the women and children go blueberry picking in a certain season.  Like a moose or a whale, the blueberries connect the community, the ancestors, the stories about picking.  She said, “This is subsistence to me – it is food, family, spirituality, everything.  It is how I stand on the earth.”  People knew each other more when they left.

Broad frame vs. taking a position – Open-ended approach
“The art has it’s own politic … I never go into my art trying to take a position.  Before I had a prejudice about civic dialogue because of my values in art – juxtaposition, complexity … But now I find that the art is the best way into the dialogue, for those same reasons.” – Peter Dubois

• At one of the Socrates Cafes, the group thought the piece should take a position.  “It was a great piece of art, but...” reaction. 
• A state senator was really bothered by the fact that the piece didn’t take a position on subsistence.  The open-ended-ness was a problem for some people because it wasn’t encouraging a debate. 
• Factions on both sides suspected that the Moby Dick performance would be against them.  But the piece just brought the issues out. 
• Whaling captains were worried about what Peter would do with the interview material.  They deal a lot with Greenpeace.  It took an elder agreeing to do an interview for others to agree.
• Didn’t go in with a set of questions.  The process and the questions were more organic.  Example:  What is subsistence?  Created openness for dialogue.
• The play happened before the ADI proposal.  When we created the piece, there was no intention, we just discovered that we were doing a [piece about these issues].  We did the opposite of San Diego Rep, instead of creating a play around an issue, we created a play and the issues emerged.
• Presenting more as gray matter than black and white is what draws the dialogue out.  People want you to take a position and tell them what they should think, but they really begin the discussion when there is space to agree with one character and disagree with another.  It’s a hard thing to sell, because it doesn’t translate as a sound-bite for the media.  I’m tickled by the idea of talking-story, or discourse, or dialogue as a way for people to place themselves on a continuum.  Allowing it to be nebulous, so that people can think. – Peter Dubois & Jeff Hermann

Story & Dialogue
“If you used the word dialogue in Barrow, nobody would go.  Stories invited people in.” – Abel Lopez, ADI Liaison

• Validity and power of the individual story, as it relates to and reveals the collective story
• A high school teacher suggested, “can they talk about themselves?  Especially the native kids, they don’t have a lot of self-respect.”  Asking the company to go in and talk about telling stories, what it meant to tell the stories of the whalers – to legitimize and model the value of telling their own stories
• The most successful moments in the dialogues were when people told stories, and the stories led into the dialogue.

Big vs. Small Gatherings
“The small ones rocked.” - Susan McInnis

• Dialogues were radically different in different places. 
• Barrow was like a big family dinner – very passionate, very familial.  An intergenerational mix – people were eating, babies were crying, arguments were happening, people were leaning into the issues in a very personal way. 
• In Anchorage, and bigger cities, it was more like people exchanging different perspectives, a more traditional “dialogue.”  For Anchorage group, people interfacing between the state and the oil companies

Learnings
“Growth by percolation, impact by subversion” – Susan McInnis

“There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to dialogue.  It can and should happen anywhere.  And it shouldn’t always be called dialogue.  Sometimes you need to call it something else – conversation, story.  It’s different in every community.  Every community has very specific ways of engaging a community, getting stories, etc.  The lesson is not, let’s do what we did in Barrow.  The lesson is:  Let’s re-invent the wheel again.”  – Peter Dubois

Post-Show Discussions

• Didn’t want to do them because they don’t get as deep.  No opportunity to let things settle. 
• Because this was a tour, when we separated the play and the dialogues, the artists and performers couldn’t be there.  It created a real separation between the art and the dialogue.  We erred too far in the other direction.
• In Anchorage, audience wanted the respond to the artists (who weren’t there); but then they got to the issues and forgot about the artist.  Would it have changed the dialogue if the artist had been there? 
• Barrow was great because it was mid-run.  Projects should think about:  What’s the intersection between the witnessing of the work, and the responses to the work?  Letting the audience stand at the intersection of the play and the issues.  Then come back, and have the dialogue.

Dialogue Planning

• Time – dialogues would have gotten more to disagreement if we had more time.  2 hours, two and a half, is not long enough. 
• In retrospect, would have focused tighter.  Just connecting one person to another takes a lot of money and work.  Wanting to do more of what we discovered by accident
• Difficulty of the words dialogue, interview – for what and for whom? 
• Peter – More help for the dialogue coordinator.  Assumption that Susan would be the expert on how everyone talks in every area of the state.  Recommend that projects have personnel support in every community, on the ground. 
• Susan – I would have loved to have had the help, but not the first time. Because I would have had my plan and stuck to it, and it would have been wrong.
  This is a very valuable question to come away with:  How do people in your community tell their story?
• Tuti Baker, ADI participant, Hawaii project – “The person in the community is the wheel that you don’t have to reinvent. You have to reinvent the event, but not the connection and values of the community.”

Institutional Capacity

• Buy-in – Dialogue, what?  Isn’t that what the education director does?  Or the marketing person?  Big learning curve on integrating making the play with everything else the organization was doing.
• Questions – What are we here to do?  To make art?  To have a social function?  Are we equipped to be doing dialogue?  Do we even want to?  We’re still struggling with what it means for us and our mission statement
• Network – Everybody knows everybody in Alaska.  This project helped us develop further, connecting us with great people.  Wish we had used that resource network more.  Hope we will continue to develop that.
• Capacity and becoming a state-wide theatre – For us, in a contained community of 30,000 with no roads in or out, the only way to grow is to grow outside our community.  We learned that the invitation is out there, and we do have the allies out there to do it.
• “I had to let go of  ‘let the work speak for itself, man.’ The idea that if you explain something you kill it.  I had to learn how to talk about it.  As an organization, we had to let go of all our planning, structures, mapping … Dialogue is hard and unpredictable.  We had to go with the flow.”  - Peter Dubois

Continuum Of World Views, Breaking Down The Binary

• “The whole 2 worlds idea – we need a new paradigm!  There may be two poles, and people are placed somewhere – but breaking down the black-and-whiteness of the issues ... I’m seeing it everywhere now, that there is a continuum.  That was huge for us.”  - Peter Dubois

Gains/Outcomes/Next Steps 
“Barrow was talking to me about Hit and Run scientists – people never come back.  Perseverance altered the perception of how people collect information and what is done with it.  Because the piece originated there and was brought back to the community, and engaged the community in what ADI calls dialogue...”  - Susan McInnis

• Socrates cafés – finding an issue and using questions to explore it, in Anchorage and Fairbanks.  People liked it so much, they’re happening every month now. 
• Impact on University of Alaska at Barrow – developing a theatre program, and cultural presence of native project. 
• Susan wants to create a subsistence roundtable in Fairbanks, go to the elders and ask how to reach kids through their stories
• At a potluck gathering, one whaling captain just announced a new institutional partnership… Now we’re going to take one of our festivals around the state, bringing it to Barrow and doing a radio play.
• Now we have a very strong relationship with Barrow – we’re doing the cannery project, about Filipino history in Alaska; now we’re perceived as being more prepared to do this project. 
• Perseverance has gained more gravitas.  In Juno, the gaze is very internal, and we are often the center of it.  Now we’re on the radar screen of the rest of the state, with the legislature.  The future of the organization lies in being a state-wide org.  This project has pushed us forward.
• Perception – It was revelatory for people in the state that an arts organization  could have something to say and some impact on really divisive issues.  Opened up another purpose for art, what an arts organization can do for the community.