Contextualizing Crossing the Line

On March 18th, 2005, in Spokane, Washington, a mentally disabled citizen named Otto Zehm approached two women in a car at an ATM.  Because his speech was somewhat slurred and he did not appear “normal,” the women assumed that he was trying to rob them, and called 911 to report that “some guy came up to us…and he…was trying to get in our car…and he…walked off with…money [that he got] out of [the] ATM.” [1] The women followed him in their car, relaying his location and actions to the dispatcher, who directed police to the convenience store that he entered.  A surveillance video shows that inside the convenience store, the first officer to arrive on the scene approached Zehm with his baton raised, and when Zehm turned and saw the officer coming towards him, he retreated backward, with a 2-liter bottle of soda in his hand.  The officer then struck him several times with the baton and pulled him to the ground.  Six other officers arrived on the scene, and a 30-minute struggle ensued.  Zehm was hit with a tazer several times, and then hogtied and held on his stomach with two officers leaning on his upper body for the better part of fifteen minutes.  When medical personnel arrived, the officers asked for a mask to prevent Zehm from spitting on them.  A hard plastic mask with a dime-sized hole in the front was strapped to his face, and three minutes later Zehm stopped breathing.  He was given CPR and taken to a hospital.  He never regained consciousness, and died two days later. [2] It was later determined that he had not stolen any money, but had a recent paycheck in his wallet that he was probably trying to deposit. 

In the months that followed, the police department refused to release the surveillance video, and continued to deny any wrongdoing, officially claiming that “there is no indication that Mr. Zehm’s death is attributable to the force used by police officers.” [3] When the video was finally released, after the local paper threatened to sue the police department for withholding public records, the public was outraged.  Otto’s story became a lightning rod in our community.  It was not the first time the police were responsible for the death of a citizen, the first time they had tried to conceal evidence, or the first time they had lied to cover their tracks.  However, Otto’s story was especially [page 56] disconcerting for us.  He was a mentally ill citizen, part of a vulnerable population, and he had done nothing wrong.  People were angry, shocked, and scared.

Several questions were going through my head in the summer of 2007, as Otto’s case dragged on, two years later, without resolution or recompense. Who is responsible for policing the police?  How do we rebuild the trust that was so blatantly violated?  I was preparing to teach my Community Arts in Practice class, which was scheduled for the spring of 2008, when a recent theatre alumna contacted me with a request.  She was working at a non-profit law firm called the Center for Justice, with one of the key lawyers involved in a lawsuit against the city on behalf of Otto Zehm’s family, and she wanted to incorporate theatre into the Center’s advocacy work. [4] It seemed like a serendipitous opportunity.  My Community Arts class could take on the task of investigating issues of police misconduct and accountability, and devise a performance based on our findings.  I spent the rest of the summer and fall planning the project, and in the spring we began our work. 
           
The purpose of this paper is to describe our play, Crossing the Line: an investigation of the police, power and people, [5] and to extrapolate the lessons I’ve learned about devising community-based theatre with college students.  In particular, I propound that the practice of “hospitality” was an essential framework for the way in which our process and product developed, and for our development as Christian artist-scholars.

Practicing Hospitality

The same summer that I created the syllabus for the course, I was also reading about the concept of “radical hospitality.”  In Practicing our Faith: a way of life for a searching people, Ana Maria Pineda’s article “Hospitality” lays out a simple premise: we live in a society that is dominated by a fear of the “other,” and this fear results in separation and isolation.  Her solution to this problem is hospitality—“the practice of providing a space where the stranger is taken in and known as one who bears gifts.” [6] If we can engage in rituals of hospitality—by welcoming strangers, treating them as equal, and seeing them as “one who may teach us something out of the richness of experience different from our own”—then we can create more inclusive and effective communities. [7] Pineda’s essay was specifically applied to issues of immigration, but community-based work is inherently filled with moments in which artists are face-to-face with strangers. If we re-position these strangers such that they bear gifts, in addition to bringing needs, then we can more successfully accomplish our goal of creating performance with them instead of for them. 

[page 57] Further, in Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love, Father Daniel Homan and Lonni Collins Pratt contend that hospitality is “a spiritual practice, a way of becoming more human, a way of understanding yourself. Hospitality is both the answer to modern alienation and injustice and a path to a deeper spirituality.” [8] In addition to my belief that hospitality would be an important roadmap for how we would approach members of our community, I also felt it could be a way for my students and I to practice spirituality within our artistic discipline.  So many times I’ve watched students struggle to justify their passion for theatre in the face of critics who claim it is at best mere entertainment and at worst a foothold for sin, but in no way does it constitute a spiritual practice.  And in all honesty I have wrestled with those questions as well.  But if theatre can be the ritual by which we practice hospitality, then our artistic process also becomes a journey towards “deeper spirituality” in which we discover more about God, humanity and the world in which we live. 

Community-based Research and Community-based Theatre

In addition to offering an opportunity to practice hospitality, I hoped that the project would help students engage with a larger community.  In Community-Based Research and Higher Education, the multiple authors describe community-based research (or CBR) as “research that is conducted with and for, not on, members of a community.” [9] They emphasize the importance of partnerships between institutions of higher education and the communities within which they are located.  CBR projects aim to include the community partner at every stage of the research process.  The purpose of CBR is social change, and the measure of a successful CBR project is its ability to advance the social justice and social action agenda of the partnering community organization. 

Similarly, community-based theatre, or CBT, is defined perhaps most succinctly by Richard Owen Geer as “theatre of the people, by the people, and for the people.”  Geer believes that most American theatre (perhaps much like higher education) “is self-absorbed, as if it were a universe unto itself” because it “miss[es] the fact that its matrix and support is the community.”[10] That is, without the community, there is no theatre.  Again, partnership is key, and redefining the boundaries between audience and actor, subject and author, and expert and amateur, are all part of the process by which we create community-based theatre. [11]

[page 58] These systems share a distrust of mainstream forms and products, and a desire to re-focus our efforts on the actual needs of the communities that we inherently depend upon.  The visions espoused by both could be revolutionary for our modern theatre classrooms.  Ideally, theatre students could begin to see themselves as community-engaged citizens, and theatre as a viable tool for social change initiatives.  They could develop research skills and an aptitude for turning ideas into performance pieces.  They could learn important lessons about perspective and multivocality. 

There are also some obstacles. How much history and theory about community-based forms do the students need as a basis for a practical project? How do you invite the community into the classroom? How do you balance and prioritize the needs of the students and the needs of the partnering community organization? How do you fit it all into one semester? 

Regardless of my uncertainty, I forged ahead with assignments that required students to leave the confines of our campus, talk to people of varying backgrounds and perspectives, and think critically about authority and objectivity.  My premise was that they would hear the all the stories and realize there was a problem, then feel compelled to do something about it.  I was a bit naïve.  Luckily, there was a final piece of the puzzle that helped the students and I negotiate differences and devise a work that embraced diverse perspectives.

Creating Crossing the Line

For thirteen weeks, a dozen students and I met three times a week for a two-hour class. We set out to investigate, theatrically and intellectually, the questions:  “What should be the relationship between a police force and its citizenry?” and “What do we do when that relationship is somehow threatened or harmed?”  The intended outcome was a half-hour piece of theatre that we would perform at the end of the semester at a community-awareness event hosted by the Center for Justice.   I gave the students a number of assignments aimed at digging up information, discovering mixed perceptions, and looking at possible dramaturgical structures and devices.  They researched topics such as tazers and restraint devices, and conducted interviews and on-the-street polls.  They read numerous articles, briefs, transcripts, and essays, as well as three plays that were created with devising processes. [12] In class we spent part of our time discussing the readings and the experiences we were having, and part of our time exploring our findings theatrically.  In addition to ensemble-building activities, we used image work, improvisation forms, and free-write and partner-writing exercises to research our [page 59] questions. We worked with a choreographer to create pieces of movement that played with power dynamics, and then collectively choreographed two movement pieces. [13]

By the end of the semester, we achieved our goal.  Our 40-minute play was structured chronologically, as a series of investigations, with the title of each investigation announced at the beginning of each scene.  Our process and journey as a group of artists functioned as the meta-narrative.  Two moments from the work exemplify its style and structure.
           
One of the first scenes begins, “Day One—an investigation of solutions to problems we didn’t know existed.” It is set up like a conversation between the lawyer who came to talk with us and the students, but it is also interspersed with quotes from journal entries that the students wrote after the fact, so that while the audience is experiencing the lawyer’s presentation the way we experienced it, they are also hearing the way in which the students processed the information later on.  Later, in “An Investigation of Public Opinion,” we arranged quotes from the street polls that we conducted so that they showed contrast and variety, and the students performed them, as the “characters” of the people who spoke them, while moving in a rotational pattern through a series of chairs.  One student, acting as a student, spins around in the middle, trying to follow the chain of thought, frustrated by the constant movement and inability to nail down a universal answer.
           
Our play was a series of non-realistic scenes that used text, image and movement to show our findings, and that made our process transparent to the audience.  The students, our collaborators at the Center for Justice, and myself were pleased with the non-traditional structure of our final product, but it was not the way we had originally envisioned our show. Like most devising processes, ours had its ups and downs. What made this particular “reckoning and revising” process unique and formative was a framework of hospitality, especially in times of disagreement.

Lessons about authority and trust

In February 2008 the students and I began our journey together, and practicing hospitality immediately became a crucial part of our process.  Our partnering organization, The Center for Justice, was an ideal community partner for a number of reasons, but they also proved to be more of a stranger in our midst than I had anticipated.  Compared to the conservative Christian background of most of my students, the Center’s liberal, social justice vision articulated through a Zen Buddhist theology was foreign and suspect.  On the first day of class, the lawyer representing the Zehm family came to talk with my students about Otto’s story and the ongoing lawsuit, and she mentioned her meditation practice and trying to find inner balance before working towards community balance. Some of my students shifted uncomfortably in their seats.  During our next class period, they revealed their skepticism, claiming “this is only one side of the story” and “she’s kind of emotional, she can’t be very objective.”  On the one hand, I was pleased with their desire to have more information before forming concrete opinions, but I was [page 60] surprised at the attitude behind their criticism.  They seemed resistant to the basic premise that law enforcement in Spokane needed review and revision.  They didn’t believe her, or perhaps better said, they didn’t trust her authority on this subject. I wondered if they might have been better sold on the idea had it come in a more recognizable package—a sermon from a pastor, a lecture from a professor, an essay with footnotes and a works cited list. I don’t mean to intimate that my students are all narrow-minded or bigoted.  Rather, I mean to illustrate the fact that from the very first day of class the assumptions that we all brought to the project played a critical role in how our work would develop, and one of those assumptions had to do with authority—the authority of a policeman, the authority of the male voice, the authority of the written word, the authority of religious doctrine, and the authority of the professor.  Our individual beliefs about these sources of authority shaped the way in which we heard stories, read information, listened in the classroom, asked questions, and created theatrical images.  And these things, in turn, shaped our beliefs.

As the weeks went on, I realized we had a problem on our hands. The students were developing beliefs about law enforcement that were different from the beliefs of The Center for Justice, our partnering organization, our community collaborator. The Center was describing law enforcement issues from their point of view, presenting evidence to back up their claim, and proposing a number of possible solutions.  My students were saying, “We don’t choose to believe you.”  Our goal was to create a show that would be presented at an advocacy event that they were hosting.  We could not stand on stage and say “We don’t choose to believe you.” 

It got worse before it got better.  We put together an outline for the script, detailing what would happen in each scene (at this point we were thinking it would be a more traditional script with distinct characters and a plot line).  It was purposefully unclear about who the protagonists and who the antagonists were, blurring the line between good guys and bad guys, and included a monologue from a policeman’s point-of-view.  I presented our outline to the alum who had originally contacted me on behalf of the Center, and she responded: “How is this script different than any other script on this issue?  I think they are shying away from the issue.”  At this point I seriously considered dumping the project.  This wasn’t going to work; I couldn’t balance my obligations to our partner, my obligations to my students, and my obligations to my own personal beliefs.  There were just too many differences of opinion, ideology, and experience.  But after a sleepless night, I realized the point was not to surround myself with a safe insular layer of heterogeneous people and ideas (if such a thing is even possible).  The point was to invite “strangers with new stories” into our midst, create some dissonance, learn something, and be less afraid.

So, I thought, how can I practice hospitality in this moment?  Do I talk to the lead attorney at the Center and re-envision the final product?  If I do, I risk looking incompetent, disappointing them, and losing their trust.  Do I tell the students and invite them into the fray?  If I do, I risk looking incompetent, disappointing them, and losing their trust.  But in order to create a space for difference I couldn’t try to mask it; I had to bring attention to it.  These conversations were scary, particularly the one with the [page 61] students.  They wanted to quit or to sever the partnership.  They looked to me for an answer about how to proceed.  I reassured them that we would not put up a show we didn’t believe in.  They agreed to stay the course and recommitted themselves to examining different perspectives without judging or dismissing them.   Then I called the Center, and I tried to be totally honest.  “From my point of view, the students are having a hard time questioning the authority of police officers.  Their first attempt at a structure and story line is maybe not as hard hitting as you had hoped for.  But we want to keep trying.”  Her response blew me away.  She said, “I trust you.  Maybe we should have realized from the beginning that the students are nineteen and twenty-year-olds, and that they are just beginning a process of understanding how the world really works.  I trust that you will help them think critically and develop a show that is challenging and relevant.”  Her generosity was overwhelming and humbling; I realized that was hospitality.  I wasn’t sure who the “host” was and who the “guest” was anymore.  But I was convinced that mutual hospitality would be a key factor in our success.  

Lessons about perspective and ownership

Practicing hospitality shaped not only our process, but also the nature of our artistic product.  For the first day of class, I asked my students to write and share a journal entry that confessed their pre-existing beliefs about law enforcement and the evidence that those beliefs are founded upon.  One student announced to the group that his father was a police officer, and he was here to keep us all honest.  The student next to him contended that he had been harassed by police officers a number of times and had no respect for cops.  The conversation continued, with students laying bare their biases.  Once everyone had shared, one student asked, “So how are we going to do this, how will our show have a unified message?  Should we all just leave our biases at the door?”  I tried to craft a quick reply about how our differences were important and conflict is essential in good drama.  But another student had an even better, more hospitable answer—“We should just put our biases in the show.  Each person can say to the audience, ‘I have a bias’ and then state their original belief about law enforcement.”  The rest of the class immediately agreed. 

In the end, that is what we did.  Our show opened with one student standing center stage in a spotlight.  She framed our process and the performance with the opening line, “I don’t want to offend you—please, don’t misunderstand me.  I’m just trying to ask a question.”  Then the actors entered, one at a time, declaring their biases:

I’ve never been arrested. No one that I know has ever been arrested.  Is my opinion about the police even legitimate? 

I’m an actor.  I assume different characters.  And to do that I have to step inside their shoes.  I have to try to see from their point of view.  And you are asking me to remain objective? 

I want to like the police.  I want to believe that they are good and that as long as I follow the rules, I won’t ever get hurt.  But you [page 62] want me to question this belief, to admit that it is not true, and that innocent people have unjustly been attacked, hurt, even killed.  You want me to see that that could happen to me or to someone I love.  And that scares the shit out of me. 

My dad’s a cop.  I know most of the other cops on his force, because they eat dinner at our house all the time.  You are asking me to criticize a group of people I care deeply about. 

The rest of the script then follows this dramaturgical device, using our experiences and perspectives as the main events and characters. 

We decided to tell the story of a group of students who started with two questions, engaged in civic dialogue about those questions, and still had trouble deciding what to believe in the end.  To write that script, though, we had to adjust our vision from a play that is about someone else’s struggle with issues of authority (including police power) to a play that is about our struggle with issues of authority.  We had to accept a play that didn’t amass all our different perspectives and beliefs into a tidy summary, argument, and solution.  And in my opinion, it worked.  Their naïveté, their eagerness, their search, made for compelling theatrical material.  It reminded our audience that questioning and uncertainty are inherently a part of addressing big social problems.  If we had all the answers in the first place, we wouldn’t be in this situation.  But we don’t; in fact, we rarely even have all the questions.  So my students theatrically demonstrated the process by which they learned to hospitably ask questions and listen to varying answers.  They didn’t blame anyone but themselves for being too short-sighted, or too afraid, or too confused, or too different.  And that was hospitable to our audience.  Instead of shutting them out, it gave each of them the opportunity to bring their own gifts into the midst of this problem.  The door was open for further discussion, and a more inclusive dialogue about possible solutions. 

Conclusions

Our project far exceeded my expectations.  Because of the “hot-topic” nature of our show, we attracted some attention from the media, and two days before our performance we were on the front page of the local paper.  The Mayor and a number of city council people attended the event and literally lined up to talk to the students directly after the show.  We received a standing ovation and multiple invitations to work with other organizations.  It was a glorious night and, as I often find, the glory made us forget a lot of the painful parts of the process.  But I have to say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that a key factor in our success was a framework of hospitality and a determination to turn to it during moments of struggle.  And while I certainly can’t quantify the spiritual results of our work, I can point to elements of our process and our product that stretched and challenged us to reach outside of ourselves.   Acknowledging our differences, instead of trying to ignore them, created the kind of environment we needed in order to create something we would all be proud of.  Being honest about who we are and admitting our shortcomings, being comfortable with more questions than answers, and being [page 63] unashamed of a script that was largely self-centered led to a product that honored multiple perspectives and invited the audience to also share theirs.  In order to create, we had to be re-created. 

I still have a lot of questions about community-based theatre projects in higher education.  Is it really theatre of and by the community when the community simply informs the content, but doesn’t participate in the creation of the artistic product?  Is it good theatre training?  Won’t it get a little boring if we keep using a “journey narrative” as our dramaturgical structure?  But I offer the following words from two different students’ final journal entries as evidence that community-based research and theatre methodologies practiced within a framework of hospitality are a worthwhile endeavor as both theatre training and spiritual practice:

During the course, I got to see people voicing different opinions and actually listening to each other.  Not only that, but I witnessed opinions actually changing before my eyes.  Although my inclinations and assumptions, as well as life experiences, will ultimately shape the attitudes I hold, this class taught me how to see an issue from multiple perspectives. [14]

And from another student:

In the beginning I remember coming to class, excited to take a different kind of theatre class, but not knowing anything about the police problem in Spokane and in all honesty, not really caring. But now I am more in tune with problems of policing. In my first journal I talked about how I believe that if I am the good guy, the police will be on my side and there will be no problems.  Now I am more aware that life is not so black and white and I realize that I need to ask big questions, in order to contribute to a healthier community.  As our performance states, “Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m just trying to ask a question.”[15]

Endnotes

1. Shors, Benjamin. “Transcript of 911 call on Zehm released.” Spokesman Review 14 July 2006. 1 July 2008. <http://www.spokesmanreview.com/sections/zehm/?ID=140070>.
2. The Spokesman Review has a list of over 60 articles dealing with the Zehm case at <http://www.spokesmanreview.com/sections/zehm/>, including a link to the video footage from the surveillance camera inside the convenience store.  See especially, “Video Shows Zehm Backed Away” and “Police admit inaccurate account of fatal beating.”
3. Clouse, Thomas. “Timeline recounts statements by police officials in Zehm case.” Spokesman Review 18 July 2006.  1 July 2008.< http://www.spokesmanreview.com/sections/zehm/?ID=140638>.
4. See <www.cforjustice.org> for more information about the Center for Justice. 
5. Unpublished script; by Jessie Alexander, Morgan Feddes, Mark Frazier, Nikolas Hoback, Brooke Kiener, Heather Kirnak, Tim Langeloh, Jess Liles, Shawna Nordman, Scarlet Ponder, Lexi Scamehorn, Alex Smith, and Meghan Wescombe. 
6. Pineda, Ana Maria. “Hospitality.” Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People. Ed Dorothy C. Bass. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997) 29-42.
7. Ibid 38.
8. Homan, Daniel, and Lonni Collins Pratt. Radical Hospitality: Benedict’s Way of Love. (Brewster, MA: Paraclete: 2002) 5.
9. Strand, Kerry, et al. Community-Based Research and Higher Education.  (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003) xx.
10. Geer, Richard Owen.  “Of the People, By the People, and For the People: The Field of Community Performance.” The Citizen Artist: 20 Years of Art in the Public Arena. Ed. Linda Frye Burnham and Steven Durland. (Gardiner, NY: Critical P, 1998).
11. In her book, Local Acts, Jan Cohen-Cruz points to Geer’s definition as a “useful touchstone when it first circulated in the 1980’s” but also points out that it raises questions about the role of the artist/facilitator in this definition and a need to define who are “the people” that this kind of performance is supposedly of, by and for (2-3).  I agree with Cohen-Cruz and am also interested in these questions, but I find the succinctness and accessibility of this definition is useful for those who are first encountering or envisioning community-based performance and I use it as such a touchstone here. 
12. The plays included The Laramie Project, by Moises Kaufman and the members of Tectonic Theater Project, 9 Acts of Determination, by Michael Rohd and Sojourn Theatre, and The Wizdom of SpokOZ, an unpublished script that was created at Whitworth in 2003 with Norma Bowles and Fringe Benefits Theatre.  The plays were chosen for their content (all three address social issues) as well as their style and format.  The work of each of these companies has been a foundational part of my education in devising, and my devising practices are based on the methods these companies have created. 
13. Choreography for our production was lead by Jeannie Sibbett. 
14. Smith, Alex. Final paper. 18 May 2008.
15. Scamehorn, Alexandria. Final Paper. 18 May 2008.