Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T19:22:59.856Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Stop Staring, Start Seeing: Housed Spectatorship of Homeless Performers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 May 2011

DANI SNYDER-YOUNG
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Drawing on an idea of the theatrical event, this article sets out to analyse the interactions between the housed (audiences) and the homeless (performers), in order to understand the theatrical conventions, performance contexts and sociocultural conditions that make it possible to narrow the gap between the housed and homeless. Focusing on three performances of zAmya Theater Project's Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), I analyse theatre's capacity and its limits to build community and examine why different interpretive communities respond differently to the same staged moments.

Type
Articles
Information
Theatre Research International , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , July 2011 , pp. 163 - 173
Copyright
Copyright © International Federation for Theatre Research 2011

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1 Housed and Homeless (From the Very Same Cup), Corey Walton and the zAmya Theater Project, unpublished script. All references refer to Draft 3, Edit 4.

2 zAmya Theater Project is part of St Stephen's Human Services, a not-for-profit organization offering a variety of services and resources for homeless individuals including a shelter, programmes transitioning people into affordable housing, counselling and emergency services. zAmya's 2009 programming was funded, in part, by the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council through an appropriation by the Minnesota Legislature and COMPAS Community Art Program through a grant from the McKnight Foundation, and received additional support from Securian Financial and the United Way. Three-quarters of the performers in the production are homeless or formerly homeless. Performers are paid weekly throughout the rehearsal and performance run, and performances are presented each November as a week-long tour of hospitals, churches, schools and public sites. For an extended analysis of zAmya's creative process and institutional organization, see Rachel Chaves, ‘zAmya Theater Project: Toward an Intimacy of Social Change’, Community Arts Network, February 2008, and idem, ‘zAmya Theater Project: Toward an Intimacy of Social Change’, University of Minnesota dissertation, 2010.

3 Kuftinec, Sonja, ‘Staging the City with the Good People of New Haven’, Theatre Journal, 53, 2 (May 2001), pp. 197–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Dolan, Jill, Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theatre (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press), p. 2Google Scholar.

5 Schoenmakers, Henri and Tulloch, John, ‘From Audience Research to the Study of Theatrical Events: A Shift in Focus’, in Cremona, Vicki Ann, Eversmann, Peter, van Maanen, Hans, Sauter, Willmar and Tulloch, John, eds., Theatrical Events: Borders, Dynamics, Frames (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 15–25Google Scholar, here p. 15.

6 Lincoln, Yvonna and Guba, Egon, Naturalistic Inquiry (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1985)Google Scholar.

7 Willmar Sauter, ‘Introducing the Theatrical Event’, in Cremona et al., Theatrical Events, pp. 1–14, here p. 8–9.

8 Of the two hundred audience surveys returned at zAmya's 2009 performances, 94 per cent of respondents reported themselves to be housed.

9 Peter Eversmann, ‘Introduction to Part Two’, in Cremona et al., Theatrical Events, pp. 133–8, here p. 133. See also Sauter on performers and audience ‘playing together’, in ‘Introducing the Theatrical Event’, p. 11.

10 Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, Theatre in Co-communities: Articulating Power (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 5.

11 Kuftinec, ‘Staging the City’, p. 214.

12 Segre, Cesare, ‘A Contribution to the Semiotics of Theater’, Poetics Today, 1, 3 (1980), pp. 39–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 44.

13 Elam, Keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Fish, Stanley, ‘Interpreting the “Variorum”’, Critical Inquiry, 2, 3 (1976), pp. 465–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here p. 484.

15 Ibid., p. 483.

16 See, for example, Schrøder, Kim Christian, ‘Audience Semiotics, Interpretive Communities and the “Ethnographic Turn” in Media Research’, Media, Culture, & Society, 16 (1994), 337–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Interview with Melisa, November 2009.

18 Ibid.

19 About half the cast identifies that this is, indeed, their first play.

20 As a side note, two of the four housed performers in the production live far from Minneapolis, and spend on average two to four hours per day commuting to performances and gigs, crashing on friends’ couches when they can, and keeping sleeping bags and changes of clothing in the cars they ‘live’ in. These performers are, indeed, housed, but live a relatively nomadic lifestyle that, when one really asks, appears to fit into a ‘third’ category somewhere between traditionally housed and genuinely homeless.

21 Dordick, Gwendolyn A., Something to Lose: Personal Relations and Survival among New York's Homeless (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), pp. 10–11Google Scholar.

22 Rosenthal, Rob, Homeless in Paradise: A Map of the Terrain (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

23 Anthony Jackson and Shulamith Lev-Aladgem argue that aesthetic distance – the clear framework that the events onstage are not ‘everyday reality’ – is crucial for ‘allow[ing] us to see, to engage and to respond in ways that otherwise might not have been possible’. Anthony Jackson and Shulamith Lev-Aladgem, ‘Rethinking Audience Participation: Audiences in Alternative and Educational Theatre’, in Cremona et al., Theatrical Events, pp. 207–36, here p. 217.

24 Dolan, Utopia in Performance, pp. 170–1.