April 19th, 2013, after just a few weeks from page to stage we were scheduled to present to the community, the production of, "Hoping for a Miracle." With a last minute cast change just about two hours before our audience arrived and one final run through, the students were ready. Admitting they were nervous, we squeezed in a last minute circle that included a go around of reflections, a final round of 'Pulse' and an energizing activity from Quenna. After that the doors to the gym were opened and we began:

Introductions, Community Agreements, & Warm Up Activity with the Audience

"Hoping for a Miracle" performance

Dialogue With the Audience: Quenna and I begin to 'joker' the story, asking for audience viewpoints to problematize the story and give analysis. Then audience is asked to consider what solutions and ideas they could offer.

Audience Begins to Intervene in Story: Audience is asked to get up and practice solutions, while actors in character engage with these solutions. (Community garden, community center, and gender based groups)  

Analysis-

I understand the role of facilitator as I’ve experienced it and I as

I’ve experienced positive and negative facilitation but what I suppose is most
different to me now in this role of joker is the unplanned, unexpected nature
of the work from the audience. Planning a discussion or leading a discussion
with a group contains, it must contain, unintended outcomes. Something that I have
come to conclude in this year, is that for much of the content we have studied in
theoretical praxis, is that it simply- makes sense to me. It makes sense not to
entirely plan everything and to ask participants what they think and what they
want. Its been that there are actually theories such as that of participatory
action research that exist to serve as guideposts of how to work and engage
with communities in a more fuller way, that have surprised and comforted me,
however sometimes the information hasn’t seemed relatively new information to
what just seems empirical to me. 

The role of the joker, the joker itself I suppose is perhaps a next step for me. I’ve dealt
with the unplanned, the open interpretation and open unexpectedness of a
project and felt the complexities that come with facilitation in the messaging
and the audience. I suppose this is what intrigues me about TO and the joker. I
continue to wonder can the joker reach in messaging, or acknowledgement or
provide awareness to an audience that is the ‘other’. I recollect various
incidents where the other was being problematized, while the other was present
in the room, such as talking about white privilege or racism with a mixed
audience of college students. Experiences such as these, in engaging
participants, determined and depended on the question, or the way in which I
suppose to spin webs that they could be related to through strings of intrigue
and personal reflective mirroring. What I have always been in search for as an
educator as a facilitator is how to better engage, how better to reach and pull
in participants on their own time to reflect to think, to be engaged.

TO (Theater of the Oppressed) for me, has provided many opportunities and avenues to seek out old seeds of thought and inquiry of how to better enter and work with groups, in the embodied, and
invitational aspect of the work. But I think one way how the joker calls to me,
is the trickster type that can play and toy to encourage those to come and play
and attempt. As a facilitator I always have facilitated to be able to reach the
‘back of the classroom’, this is where I have sat, I have always facilitated to
the me of the group, not in location of sitting but in demeanor and desire. I
was as a student and group participant very shy and quiet but desperately wanting
to get up and be involved. I was ‘stuck’ by memories and frightened thoughts
many having to do with voice. This is what I in a facilitating role attempted
to do, reach the kid all the way in the back who thinks he or she can, but
doesn’t. I think this is the same mantra that will guide me as joker. But what
does that look like? This year was much a new year for me, clowning, playing
games, these were all things I’ve participated in before, but never ‘on
spotlight’ and this year we had to be on spotlight, such as in Christine’s
class. I’ve known, as I was ‘that kid’ in the back of the class that I needed
to step out and practice, experiment, fall on my face, be laughed at, I
remember Christine saying, “You can’t do this work if you are not prepared to
be laughed at,” that statement was like dynamite for me, I immediately thought,
“I need to leave.” I had an exiting image of myself. I have known this year
that I needed to not just complete and ring myself out this year with this
program, not just because of my work, of what has come to be my work of
engaging with groups with youth and seeking more creative ways and means to do
this, but I needed to stay for myself. I needed to experience and engage for
myself. Of what I wanted to ask others to do I needed to do. I needed a greater
arsenal to use with groups and a greater arsenal of confidence and cracking at
my ego. So I attempted to step into engagement. Full engagement. I stepped out
of comfort area and into a zone I rarely rarely enter. I have a rule that I
don’t do anything with students that I haven’t done myself, and this rule is
what brought me to this program as well, since I had done all I had known to do
and all I had experienced in my work I need to experience more.

When entering into YJC, with Quenna, who was way more experienced in the work than I, which I was
happy to be paired with her, as for other reasons, such as our outer identities,
those we walk into a room with, I assumed might be helpful for us working at
the site with youth there. On the first day, although we were expecting to just
sit in, on the class we were asked by Guadalupe to create two skits with the
students. With students we had just met, who had just met us, and they were to
perform it at the action later that week! We were very much thrown in. What was
amazing was that these students even though they had just met us were offering
stories and sharing and were engaging and getting up and acting and creating
scenes. However when it came time on the day of the action, those that were
there did not want to participate.

I suppose perhaps I found ‘myself’ or ‘those in the back of the classroom’ who did participate,
who were amazing, but once the time came, said they couldn’t or did not want
to. I’m reminded of similar stories and attitudes with students at a summer art
program I worked in, who on Monday or earlier in the week said they would not
share their work out loud and perform, but towards of the week did. I was
amazed, and they were amazing. I recognized my fear as they had fear in them. I
know how much my fear held me back, of how much I allowed myself to be held
back by fears.

If I were to choose two words regarding my work in community and my growth process in
community it would: relationship and process. I would choose these words in
connection with YJC youth, our students, who allowed us to challenge them and
push them to raise up and be engaged, to allow themselves to be challenged. I
recognize how in community with my instructors and mentors and with my
colleagues in the program how both these concepts have affected me. In baby
steps, I suppose that is what TO can offer, baby steps, moving towards greater
and greater play, such as yelling and making animal sounds and moving around
like an animal. I had to build myself up through these activities, as I knew
that eventually I would be facilitating these activities with community. I
remember, when I felt a crack, a crack in the fear, in moving from fear, it was
at the Mashrika workshop, as we passed the zebra tail bracelet around by
introducing ourselves in one of three ways, either as sad, laughing, or as if
we had just eaten a hot chili pepper. It was one of the first times I
displayed, or played in a performative, ‘spotlight’ way. Eventually we tried it
we our Thursday performance group, as when we asked the students what they
wanted as warm up activities, they asked for acting activities. This time I was
more excited to do it and excited to witness the students. In doing this work
with youth there are layers of risk involved in entering and engaging and
opening up play in a very deconstructed way that moves away from the furthering
of the created façade that many youth, in particular urban youth, must build to
survive and maneuver themselves in their communities. The fact that many did
just this, in the submission and acceptance for this work of creating a
performance is what amazes me. I must step out of this thought to view the work
that Quenna and I did as we worked to build a surround that contributed to this
environment.

Our students had their own journeys this year, especially this semester, particularly with our
Thursday performance group as they self selected themselves to participate in
the performance project. There were some clear ties to past work with youth in
creating performance pieces, but this time it was an ensemble production with a
topic that had to be agreed upon and decided upon from all those involved. The
topics of personal narratives were similar, but this time, the narrative was
wider, about their community. The community is pretty ruptured; more so than in
most communities I’ve worked in, there wasn’t much bullshit that students at
YJC took.  Relationship and process is what I walk with from my time with students at YJC. Both these concepts and components are interdependent of each other. I feel I’m not completely sure
about the process of jokering a performance with community, as I only
participated and engaged in it once, but I witnessed it several times such as
with TELA with large groups of middle and fifth grade girls, but I do feel that
I have greatly participated in the process of helping students create a
performance. What had to occur with this process was time. There was stress and
a bit of frustration that Quenna and I felt when in late March there was still
not a story, when we presented at the Preview, the story was still not clear yet.
Larie had had strong views of creating a story of a single mother trying to
survive, with a daughter who is a prostitute and who becomes pregnant. Quenna,
was excellent in bringing in back to what we learned about TO, and reminded me
with her question to Larie, “Do you relate to this story?”,Larie personally
didn’t. When other stories came, Quenna would always bring it back to attention
of, “Does everyone relate to this story?” What eventually became the story,
contained remnants of all the stories, collectivity.

The dialogue and exchange culminated in the discussion and invitation to participate after the
performance. This was when Quenna and I had to be ‘on’ it felt to me like I had
to perform. I was nervous for the encuentro, not quite sure about how I would
‘perform,’ there was a part of me that just wanted to watch the students and be
proud of them, along with the teachers, community members, and one parent that
I knew was there. I was nervous, I didn’t quite know what would happen, what
suggestions or things the audience would say, and how so much of it seemed determined
by our invitation and navigation of the conversation. The unexpectedness of
this process, the evaluation of us, and this culmination was a bit nerve
wracking. The night before as Quenna and I prepared some questions for us to
use the next day, I realized, as we were stressing over it, that we survived
and maneuvered our time through all the challenges and struggles of YJC from
student inconsistency, to attendance, to drug use, to harsh attitudes and all
the times when an agenda was thrown out the window, we learned to be flexible,
to be malleable, to listen, to observe, to check for points of pushing and
challenging, and I exclaimed to Quenna, “We can do this. We go this.” 

I felt we had to take a big breath, before we started, once everyone sat down after the
performance, the students were sitting in a row they created on the side of the
audience. Quenna has always been good at asking the right questions at the
right time, the stepping in and stepping back that we’ve developed has been
crucial in our relationship. I’ve been very grateful in the opportunity I’ve
had working with Quenna. I’ve had some really positive partnerships with people
and have experienced some not so good ones, I quickly realized how she and I
would work together from just the first day by the ‘look’ that we gave each
other, on the day we were thrown in at YJC. “How do I move on? How can I get
this point across? Is this even important right now? Where are they at?” All of
these questions and others were asked at various points, even at the end of the
year right now, in my mind and in my psyche- on that first day at YJC, Quenna
and I would give the other person a look, the look asked and exclaimed any one
or a combination of all the above questions, the other person, whether it was I
or she, understood the questions engaged in the look and upon picking up that
moment of distress or uncertainty would step further in with an idea or make
some attempt to what was trying to be conducted.

           
The question that proceeded as we were tying to zoom out, was what systems occurred
that affected this family. I remember asking this question, and hearing
crickets, Quenna stepped in and asked if the question made sense, many people
said no, so she re-worded it. When I think about it now, I wonder how we could
have better worked with the audience that was mixed, of people from the
community, as Omar from Changing Ways and Michael one of the teachers from
Warrior circles there at YJC, and De’Andre’s mom who was sitting in the front,
to the community of USC that was also present to understand each other, or to
understand the experiences of the community, if the play did not do that fully
for the audience, although I think it did as it was the students themselves
that created it. I remember feeling hesitations from the audience; perhaps
because of this difference in group, there was hesitation I wonder? I don’t
know, I was so grateful to hear from Omar and to hear from Michael, and I was
grateful that the MFA students were participating as I recall one of the scenes
two of them did where they created a program that used drama and theater with
students and were demonstrating Columbian hypothesis with two youth from the
play. However I kept wanting to hear from from De’Andre’s mom, there was many
voices from men, and not many from women, particularly from women of the
community.         

 What these interventions and scenes offered that
was great was the ability to problematize them. When the two youths were in the
Columbian hypothesis activity, one was wearing green, the other blue, I stopped
and asked to the audience, “Could this really happen?” Omar said no, he understood
and spoke up about it and elaborated. What Michael came to talk about was the
need for men, men in the community to step in and be role models and intervene
with the boys that were doing what they had to do. I felt there were times when
in our jokering we zoomed out, but I feel we could have zoomed out more. I was
so intrigued by the conversations being had about men and fathers not being
present, from the perspective of my interests and my work I would have loved to
have played more with this had there been more time. What I felt most proud of
was in challenging the audience to create something if the  community
had money to do. What followed was simulations of various community responses.
Although it wasn’t real, it still allowed people to play with ideas, it allowed the
students to walk into an imaginary space as their characters and interact with
others, others who wanted to be there. The logistics of the planning weren’t
discussed but it was imagination, it was dreamed, and it was a chance to
problematize and ask questions. I was then grateful to have led co lead it and
experienced the process of jokering.

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