Bridges Don’t Make Themselves: Using Community-Based Theater to Reshape Relationships: Rethinking the Idea of Abundance in ABCD

Zechariah Lange

doi:10.3390/soc10030054

Abstract

Community-based theater has a variety of manifestations, and the plurality with which these manifestations are occurring is increasing. As such, the diversity and complexity derived from these social sites of public engagement requires further understanding. This article is based upon a multi-case study of two community-based theaters: one in Middle Appalachia, and the other on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Together these sites of performative expression are acting as social interventions for differing reasons within their respective contexts. Through intensive and communicative processes, the theaters provide examples of how co-created performances at the community level simultaneously catalyze relationships and alter how relationships are experienced to engage community members in discussion and performances. As a complex behavioral interaction, the two theaters simultaneously manifest dimensions of ‘abundance’, as well as expand upon normative conceptions of asset-based community development. Through process and contextual modeling, the work provides in-depth exploration to these interpersonal endeavors to assist in how socio-cultural differences as well as narrative reconstruction co-join to enact the individuality of identity across working groups as an overall discursive process.

Highlights

The transition from potential or imagined to actual in socio-cultural contexts implies the continuous construction of communication modalities, and the reinstitution of interpretation into action
As a cultural apparatus which manifests through co-created performances and participations, active work is sustained through community-based theater (CBT) to challenge and reconstruct corrosive cultural narratives [52]
The work of this article sought a deeper investigation on how community-based theater (CBT) in two rural communities function as methods of asset-based community development (ABCD) whilst simultaneously aligning themselves with an inclusive and critical orientation to complex socio-cultural realities

Summary

Introduction

The transition from potential or imagined to actual in socio-cultural contexts implies the continuous construction of communication modalities, and the reinstitution of interpretation into action. Block [4] describe a potential for human collaboration that transitions away from the isolating and inflammatory behavior of economic consumptive scarcity for the construction of relational ‘abundance’ Their perspective, in short, is that happiness and freedom cannot be solely purchased, and that social. ABCD was originally introduced by Kretzmann and McKnight [6] as a potential method of engaged social collaboration for citizens to create and share co-constructed opportunities at the neighborhood and community scales. One of the core tenets of ABCD, as outlined by McKnight and Block [4], is the transition from economic scarcity towards co-created relational ‘abundance’ at the neighborhood scale Building on this perspective, CBT has been suggested to be a cost-efficient praxis through which socio-cultural change can occur through constructed relationships and performances in a localized context [11,12]. This work asks the following: how do these two theaters within their situated praxes both create spaces and functions of asset-based community development, and spaces and functions of expressive change for participants and audiences?

Constructivist Embodied Methodology

Relearning to Learn

Emergent Community Ritual—Expanding the Definition of Blood in Appalachia

Resetting the Tone—Who Are the Insiders of a Community in the Old South?

Conclusions