Toolkit for Community-Embedded Artistic Practice

Before community was a core part of my artistic practice, it saved my life. I first started writing plays on my way out of recovery housing. I lived in a recovery house for six months, after my fiancé died suddenly in 2016. I survived my early sobriety and my early grief because I was around people: people who were also in crisis, who were always game to go to a meeting when you needed one, who showed up for each other. And, people who relapsed, and died, and went back to prison.

As my life has restabilized, my writing process has evolved around community. When I write about recovery, I may be writing something close to my own experience—but my own experience was so filled with the people around me, and I need them in the process. When I write trans stories, I need rooms of trans actors, directors, writers, and readers to share with me what resonates and what might just be my own particular trans experience. This work has taken me into overlapping communities too: from the transitional housing of the recovery house to making theatre with people experiencing homelessness and films about returned citizens reentering society after being paroled from life sentences.

As my community has deepened, my work has grown. I spent three years in Austin, Texas developing two plays (The Tiny Banger and rain falls special on me) with over 150 people experiencing homelessness, through workshops, touring productions, readings on the street corner, and community dramaturgs. Since this time when I was essentially making up my own process, I’ve gained institutional support for my community-based work. I’m now finishing up a nine-month position as resident artist with Mission First Housing Group and coLAB Arts (funded by the National Endowment for the Arts), where I have made art alongside residents of two permanent supportive housing developments in Edison, New Jersey. Now, I am the artist-in-residence with Pathway Home, an initiative of Los Angeles County to ease transitions into interim housing for individuals in recreational vehicle (RV) encampments.

I now speak of my work as community-embedded artistic practice. This has emerged over years of trial and error. Today I’m sharing with you a toolkit—not of answers, because there are never clear answers in this kind of work. Instead, I’ll share with you a few questions you might ask if you’re considering inviting community members, especially from vulnerable populations, into your artistic practice.

Community-embedded artistic practice isn’t about checking off boxes of community engagement so I can justify my work. It’s about creating a product that is more relevant, more packed with insights, and a better translation of human experience.

Why Am I Here?

Community-embedded artistic practice isn’t about checking off boxes of community engagement so I can justify my work. It’s about creating a product that is more relevant, more packed with insights, and a better translation of human experience. I enter community spaces with my artistic practice to be changed and to evolve the work in ways I don’t know about yet.

People are going to ask you why you’re here. Come up with a real answer—not a good answer, but a real answer. If you are in a community space because you want to “help,” that’s not a real answer. Why do you want to help? If you are not a member of this community (for example, you’re handing out flyers at a soup kitchen but you don’t usually eat lunch there), why would you come to this space rather than any other?

You may discover a hard truth asking yourself this question. Maybe you do want to check a box, or feel good about yourself for being there, or be seen doing the work. You may discover that you are not the right person for your project or that your project is not responsive to the community.

For me, whenever someone asks me why I am in a houseless space, I share my background: that I lived in a recovery house for six months after my fiancé died, that many people there had come in from the street, that I had a few questions I was exploring (like how laws criminalizing unhoused people for the sake of “cleaning up the city” have impacted individuals, or what makes someone stop looking for housing).

I do not enter these spaces as a neutral observer: I try to be as open and vulnerable as I hope community members will be with me. That means being real about my motivations.

Where Do I Go?

Go where the people are—and expect to spend a hell of a lot of time there. I started in houseless spaces that centered writing: the street newspaper, which had 95 percent homeless writers, and the creative writing class at the city’s overnight shelter. I showed up to fold newspapers, chit chat, and share my own crappy poetry with the group (I am not a skilled poet).

I showed up consistently without an agenda, though if asked what I was doing there I would always share that I was a writer working on a play. People got to know me, and they saw me folding newspapers, and eventually they asked to hear more about my play. That turned into conversations, a desire to see pages, and eventually a reading on the corner outside city hall, where folks told me they felt most comfortable meeting. I showed up with a box of donuts and a stack of scripts, and we read through the play and discussed it.

Community embedding is more like making friends than assembling a focus group, especially in the beginning. You probably aren’t going to walk up to a random person, introduce yourself, and ask them to read your play. Relationships evolve over time. With this work, often a lot of time.

What Do I Really (Like, Really Really) Have to Offer?

Obviously, I believe in the transformative power of art. I believe there can be deep value for someone in being witnessed, having their story heard and maybe even told. I believe creating an archive of the lived experiences of humans who are too often forgotten is an act of justice.

However, I will not go up to someone and say: “Hey, want to tell me your story and maybe I’ll use it for an art project? That’s justice!”

Each person owns their story and owns their time. Sometimes that’s all they own! It absolutely does happen that people feel their negative experiences have value through talking with a storyteller, but that’s not guaranteed.

When I had questions about the relationship between prison gangs and street gangs, I called my friend Linda, who was fresh into housing out of the women’s shelter. She picked me up ten minutes after my call to run her catering drop-offs with her, and we listened to Michelle Branch and chatted about what she had experienced. At the end she said she was glad her knowledge could contribute to the work I was making.

For every Linda story, I have one of a person who was really not into what I was doing. Taking an easy “no” is a crucial part of community work. When a guy at the library saw me handing out flyers and called me a cunt under his breath, I didn’t give him a speech about the value of art. I just let him read his newspaper.

So, what do I know I have to offer? Snacks. Something to do when you’re bored on the street. A place to charge your phone. Those are valuable offers to someone who lives outdoors. If they get something out of the play or our discussion, that’s just gravy.

Who Am I Expecting?

There is no prototypical “community member.” Community-embedded practice might be social justice work, but that doesn’t make all community members “woke.”

In my daily life, there are two places I’m likely to run into someone with profoundly different beliefs than me (like, Trump supporter different): in the older generations of my family and in my community practice.

I might be entering a prison with values of abolition and liberation, but that doesn’t mean I won’t be setting up equipment with an incarcerated guy whose bracelet says “Keep Christ in Christmas.”

I believe that everyone deserves housing. So when I hear that one of the residents at the transitional house asked for a new case manager when he found out his was gay, do I stop giving him access to the arts programming that I’m there to deliver?

To be honest, this is something I’m still deeply in process with. I don’t have an answer here. I know that as a gay transgender man, I deserve to feel safe. I also know that you can’t kick people out of homeless spaces or prisons—that’s where people go when they get kicked out everywhere else. Refusing to engage with someone does not align with my values in these spaces. And yet.

I don’t have an insight on what to do in these situations at this point in my process. Let me know if you have one. But what I do mean to say is this: not everyone in prisons thinks they should be abolished. Not everyone who lives outside believes housing is a human right. Be ready for profound difference to emerge between you and the people you’re hoping to engage.

Who Am I With?

For me, community engagement is something that cannot be outsourced. It is something I must do myself as the project’s generative artist.

Now, I have been fortunate to work alongside brilliant people who specialize in community engagement, and these people can elevate the impact of the work astronomically. But the generative artist(s) must be involved. I am the one who has to gain people’s trust. Vulnerable populations need to see the person who invited them in the room and in leadership. They don’t want to be talking to an intern; they want to talk to the person in charge.

This means that institutional support can help, but it can also hurt. What is your community’s relationship to institutions in general and yours in particular? Many universities have extremely negative impacts on unhoused people, as the return of students can trigger sweeps where many people get arrested to be out of sight of students’ parents at drop-off. Saying you’re with a university, or with the city, may not help your relationships.

I am a white person. Whiteness amplifies whiteness: the more white people you have together as a homogenous group, the more you need to investigate why your group is only made of white people. When I did have institutional support and I brought two directors with me to a reading, we were read as a group of three white women. (Two of us were trans, and I did not identify as a woman, but that is how we were perceived.) Entering an unhoused space as three white women from a local theatre did not get us off to a good start.

If I don’t have lived experience in the community I’m writing about, having community members in positions of real power changes the game. Which brings us to:

How Am I Working?

Community-embedded process is not for writers who like to have complete control over their product. If you have a strong vision, and you don’t want it knocked off course no matter what, then this practice may not be a good fit for you. Your process is more aligned with the auteur, the archetypal genius.

As your writing process develops, a sub-community may form around your work. This is especially true if it enters production. I have always been transparent that I am the authority on the piece: I am not devising or writing as a collective. I am creating plays, and I am their sole author, and ultimately I will be the one deciding the narrative. What I do promise is to show up to hard conversations and to constantly evaluate and reevaluate my perspective based on feedback and new ideas. I won’t take every suggestion I hear, but I will always explain my thinking and further a conversation when I disagree.

With each project, I have found community members who have showed up to every reading, every open rehearsal, and every show. I have put these people in creative leadership. This is game-changing for forging relationships with more community members. I’ve made invitations at a soup kitchen alongside a one-eyed former Navy SEAL who lived outside and was working as our community dramaturg. I held a reading at a long-term addiction treatment center that was orchestrated by a person living there (of course, he was also my ex-boyfriend from my time in the recovery house—sometimes who is “inside” and “outside” of a community gets a little murky).

When you incorporate community members into the fabric of your project, you gain exponential trust. You must give them real power if you’re going to do this.

I have hired community members as consultants, dramaturgs, and executive producers. These people have given notes on scripts and film edits, provided insight to actors during rehearsal processes, and weighed in on questions of audience (one play’s highest impact was a touring production bringing people together after the soup kitchen; another was more impactful as advocacy, speaking to audiences without lived experience of homelessness in realism).

When you incorporate community members into the fabric of your project, you gain exponential trust. You must give them real power if you’re going to do this. Don’t bring tokens into your project and give them fake titles. That won’t help your cause one bit. If you empower community allies in your work, they will change the fabric of your work—in my opinion, for the better.

Community embedding is a deep practice. It should change you, and it should change the work. It’s right for artists who want that kind of transformation.

My process is always evolving, as I learn from other artists, from community members, and from the work itself. I hope these ideas give you a place to start, or at least questions to ask as you consider how your work might be part of a larger conversation and how it might be accountable to a community.