Boise City Arts Commission
Civic Dialogue in the Arts: Diversity and Access
Project Description
The Boise City Arts Commission (BCAC) presented a three-day Urban Bush Women (UBW) residency project featuring two company members leading variations of their Hair Party! The event was co-sponsored by Boise State University as part of its week-long 2002 Human Rights Celebration activities and set around Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday observance. It explored diversity issues and increased access-awareness in the arts. The Hair Party! is a hybrid performance piece that combines excerpts of HairStories, UBW's acclaimed dance/theater work, with dialogue practice to explore the power and politics of hair. Hair Parties encourage participants to re-examine closely held beliefs about themselves, society, class, race, gender, age, and individual beauty. Residency activities included two Hair Parties, diversity training sessions, and small-group discussions about diversity and access in the arts. One party targeted students and faculty at the university and one was for board and staff members of Boise's cultural organizations
The genesis for the project came out of the growing realization that the main constituents of the Boise City Arts Commission—artists and art organizations—had a limited understanding of handling access and diversity issues. The issue was reflected in their responses to the criteria of access and community involvement for the sub-grant program, the City Arts Fund. The project worked to help arts constituents develop a better understanding of access and diversity when planning their projects and seasons and applying for funding. The BCAC felt it was incumbent upon their organization as the grantor to provide experiential and meaningful training to engender successful applications. On another level, the BCAC also came to understand that ballet, philharmonic, Shakespeare, opera, and contemporary theater companies were experiencing disheartening challenges when attempting to recruit and retain artists of color. The commission hoped that the experience of civic dialogue about access and diversity would stimulate a more proactive and involved arts community. As the three-day residency progressed, it became clear that arts leaders throughout the community were in the very early stages of understanding the complexity of diversity issues in the community and that each individual would need to be proactive about making organizational change.
After the residency was complete, the BCAC created a Civic Dialogue Committee to more effectively change how the arts community in Boise, ID, manages issues of access and diversity. The Civic Dialogue Committee's charge has been to identify goals, strategies, and action steps in addressing the needs of the community in relation to those issues. The BCAC took advantage of a one-time funding opportunity with the Idaho Commission on the Arts and submitted a proposal to create an urban/rural learning cluster between the BCAC and McCall Arts & Humanities Council to use civic dialogue as a means to influence the aesthetics of original artwork in each community. The two organizations later developed a new project modeled after the Animating Democracy Initiative called
Building Community Bridges. In partnership, they sought to explore the question, "How do we, as the primary cultural agencies serving our communities, engage our local artists in meaningful artwork that results in civic dialogue addressing important community issues specific to each location?" In May 2003, the BCAC explored this question through catalyzing dialogue around the experience of being a Latino/Hispanic person in the Boise community.
Civic Engagement/Dialogue Activities
The structure of the Hair Party in Boise incorporated small- and large-group discussions and facilitated games interspersed with performance excerpts to explore issues like cultural identity, racism, and economics through examining African American hair. The Boise Hair Party also played a role in the development of the Urban Bush Women dance piece, HairStories. After the session, two of the dancers, Francine Sheffield and Wanjiru Kamuyu, observed, "The participants seemed to enjoy themselves and expressed how much they had learned in terms of African American hair. We all realized how all our hair stories, despite the cultural and ethnic differences between us, are similar in many ways. They seemed to enjoy the games we played with them as they helped to encourage them to engage in civic dialogue. The discussions were layered and exposed social issues on political, spiritual, and social levels using hair as an entry point."
Another part of the residency was a session hosted by the BCAC called
Civic Dialogue in the Arts: Access Diversity. The session targeted staff and board members of the BCAC and Boise arts organizations at an all-day workshop featuring diversity trainer Sam Byrd in the morning and the UBW Hair Party in the afternoon, with a wrap-up panel and discussion on the issues and possible action steps.
Also in relation to the Hair Party sessions, the BCAC organized a workshop called
Animating Democracy: The Artists' Challenge. The session came out of a need within the community for local artists to feel as though they could make a difference. During the session, artist leaders gained knowledge about how art consciously incorporates civic dialogue as part of an aesthetic strategy, and how the intersection of artistic imagination with the civic realm offers fertile ground for both aesthetic and programmatic innovation.
Information Sources
Boise City Arts Commission Civic Dialogue in the Arts: Diversity and Access Final Report, Animating Democracy: Urban Bush Women HairStories Final Report
