Michael Rohd, Sojourn Theatre
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Innovator in Place
Michael Rohd, Sojourn Theatre
by Rebecca Sanborn Stone
Michael Rohd is founding artistic director of Sojourn Theatre in Portland, Oregon, an eight-year-old, multi-ethnic ensemble-based company committed to adventurous theater and community engagement. He is a 2005 recipient of Americans for the Arts’ Animating Democracy Exemplar Award and currently works as a Visiting Professor at Northwestern University. His work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller’s MAP Fund, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and arts councils in many states. He is the author of the book Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue.
Rebecca Sanborn Stone (RS): Many people think theater means Oklahoma, Cats or a high school production of Little Shop of Horrors. For those unfamiliar with Sojourn Theatre, how is your work different from those typical productions?
Michael Rohd Michael Rohd (MR): We are an ensemble-based company of ten artists. We don’t pick a show and then look for the right artist; we think about what are we interested in exploring next, and then we commit to spending at least a year—often more—on creating an original project together collaboratively. Our work falls in a container that is known as devised performance. We most often present our work in non-traditional venues, and we do a lot of site-specific work. So if we are doing a show about the justice system in America, we stage it in a courtroom. If we are doing a show about commerce in business, we stage it in a used car dealership. We often highly limit our audience size, because we’re interested in having an experience that involves connectivity and intimacy with our audience.
MR: We are very conscious, from marketing materials to the moment that somebody enters the parking lot, that everything we do is contributing to somebody’s experience of this particular event. In those instances when participation is heavily a part of the action of the piece, we sort of have a formula: first [the audience is] going to watch, and then they’re going to have moments of choosing and, finally, moments of doing.
For the performers it is really challenging because they have to not just perform, but host and facilitate and switch between those relationships with audience members on a dime. If you are working with [community] partners, as we often do in the civic arena, the relationship between the performers and their clients or customers or constituents then bleeds into an experience [people] may or may not expect if they come to a performance. So there are lots of different things that we have to be conscious of navigating.
RS: Much of your work originates when you go to a community to create a production, so a big part of your perspective comes from being an outsider and actually being in different places. How does that viewpoint influence your work?
RS: So in many cases it seems like you go into a community in order to help resolve or address some major conflict or major local issue.
MR: Or at least make a space for constituents to be in conversation in a creative, dynamic, different way. I hesitate to say we go in to solve things.
RS: For a lot of people it is a pretty knew idea that theater can play that role at all. What can theater do that typical forums and community processes can’t?
MR: I think that there are very few spaces in contemporary U.S. life where actual dialogue occurs, and where it does occur, it is very rare that people who are different from each other are in those spaces together. There are plenty of good civic engagement processes, but I think when you bring the potential of delight and surprise and performed conflict into public civic spaces, you have the opportunity to take a dialogue somewhere else. Through laughter people can have a different experience of a tough conversation. Through emotion people can open up or be brought to places of empathy.
RS: Can you give us an example of a community project you have worked on where your process had that deep impact?
MR: Yeah, I can give a bunch. The impact isn’t about gigantic legislative change; I think that is really, really rare. For me the [measures] are: Do the project and process and production build relationships that didn’t exist before? Do the process and the production build moments [when] people who are different from each other actually hear a different point of view in a different way? Do the process and production lead toward opportunities for alliances that might lead to action or ideas farther down the line?
I think I can point to the three years we spent on [a] public education project out in Oregon where we eventually performed at the State Capitol for the State House and Senate and had a Republican stand up on the floor of the Senate and say to his colleagues, “You all should go see this; it is the clearest elucidation of challenges we are facing in the state that I have ever seen across party lines.” I could point to the show we did with the [Portland, Oregon] Mayor’s office, One Day, in the Vision project. That was a really multi-ethnic, multi-class exploration of challenges Portland faces. I could point to Built last year, and going into Hartford, Connecticut and doing a performance at the Connecticut State Legislature and engaging Senators into a really interesting conversation about being parents, no matter what your party delineation. RS: Our readers are primarily coming from the field of planning and would be interested in how you used theater for the One Day project in Portland. How did that project come about? What did you add to Portland’s visionPDX process?
MR: Vision PDX started out of Mayor Tom Potter’s office in Portland back in 2005. We said that we would like to not make a show about what Portlanders want to see the City look like in the future; we would like to make a show about the challenges that Portland feels are between where we are now and an ideal vision.
We set out going through [reams of] data and doing our own interviews and community work. We created a piece about nine Portlanders in a 24-hour period in the City—one day—which was the name of the show. In this one day, every character faced a personal decision that was momentous and related to a large issue that the City was facing. There was a character who was a small business owner and her mother had mental health issues. Another was a young Ukrainian girl who was an immigrant, dealing with holding onto her culture versus fully assimilating into the culture at her school. [There was] an African American couple who were trying to decide if they should try to sell their house for a high price in their gentrifying neighborhood or stick it out. [There was] an African American policeman who was running for Mayor and the challenges he was facing between his core constituency and the larger political needs of running for office. We toured it to different neighborhoods, so for a month and-a-half every weekend, we were in a different quadrant of the city in a very different neighborhood, and the show just sold out. After each piece, I would facilitate a town hall dialogue with the audience. The actors would stay in character, and the audience would then ask questions to try to help them decide what they should do about the dilemma that they still had not resolved at the end of the play. Someone from the Mayor’s staff would be there transcribing the dialogue, [which] was sent to the visioning committee and became a part of the City’s actual vision plan. I was then asked to join the drafting committee to help write the final plan that got passed.
RS: Built is another of your performances that would interest our readers. It seems like Sojourn Theatre often takes on many of the most controversial issues for society today like social justice, violence, education, war. Land use and urban planning don’t usually rise to the same level of importance in the public mindset. So I’m curious about what attracted you to those issues.
MR: I feel like all the other issues that you just mentioned, in a way, are partly symptomatic of the giant issues, which are population growth, population change and infrastructures in communities. On two projects before [Built], we had been exploring the question, “Who are you responsible for?” I came across this statistic when I was working on the One Day Vision project, which was that in the next 30 to 40 years, the United States will go from 300 million people to 400 million people. The majority of that new 100 million people will be in the 12 largest and fastest growing urban areas, which include Portland. In the next 20 years it is estimated that [Portland] will double in size, and there is no workable plan for where even half those people are going to live.
I found that fascinating and sort of a prism to think about a lot of different issues that had to do with responsibility and equity and vision and structure, relationship of man to nature, density. So that led us to want to explore, and then simultaneously we got [an] invitation to make a piece down at the south waterfront in this new urban development. That really gave us a chance to reflect on those issues in a very concrete setting, or towering setting, I should say.
RS: On your website you describe Built as “a public conversation and a participatory civic planning adventure,” and it includes elements from a board game to tight rope walking to surveys and even giving the audience snacks. Can you describe what the show actually is—how those pieces fit together and what kind of an experience you were creating.
MR: It was staged in basically a condo show warehouse…big realty meets Ikea. [It had] constructed bedrooms and bathrooms and kitchens and living rooms and then large areas where there were projections of what this new urban condo development would look like 10, 20 years from now…. We thought it was a great place to construct this experience that would mix fiction and spectacle and actual conversation.
When you came into the event, you were given a tour of this space. Then you were invited to fill out questionnaires, and there was a really elaborate board game you played individually and then in a group of 6 and then in a group of 12, then as a full audience of 60. You had to think…if you could put your home in a new place, what would you want to live near and what would you not want to live near? Would you want to live near a grocery store? Would you want to live near a sewage treatment plant? Would you want to live near a homeless shelter? Would want to live near a pharmacy? You actually had to place things near and farther away from your house. The whole show moved between looking at those kinds of choices and decisions in relation to larger historical, economic contextual elements and actually asking you to keep thinking further and further about how you would negotiate your choices in relation to other people’s choices.
RS: Do you have any other interesting projects in the works this year?
MR: Yeah, Sojourn is working on a project called On the Table. It is going to use story and travel and technology and participation to create an event that happens simultaneously in Portland and in a small town 50 miles away from Portland, exploring the urban-rural divide in America. [Choruses] from both places [will] get on buses at the beginning of the day and go to the other place 50 miles away. The central gathering activity is food and eating around the table. The central question in the piece is: If place reveals values and identity, can a shared meal bridge more than physical distance? We are going to use web-based video conferencing to have both places together during the show even though they are 50 miles apart.
RS: Have you ever encountered any situation where there is significant resistance to bringing theater in?
MR: Yeah, plenty. There is always somebody who invites [us] and someone else who says, “This is stupid. Why are you doing this?” So you try to build relationships, you try to listen, ask a lot of questions, respect everyone—particularly people who are resistant—and just try to find your way in. Or not. We have had instances where somebody has invited us in, but people that we feel are necessary partners for the project are really not interested. We are not going to come here without you wanting us here. It’s not about forcing this kind of work on anybody. You need to have a diverse, invested core group of partners and leaders.
RS: What are the main ingredients for success when you start a project in a community?
MR: Partner building. Really exploring the intentions, expectations and assets on all sides. Brainstorming the potential roadblocks. Making meaningful contact and engagement an early priority to determine who [is needed on] the team and to establish a working process. Being thoughtful about the relationship of the art and accessibility to the involved population in ways that are satisfying for audiences and artists alike.
RS: There are probably many communities and organizations out there inspired and intrigued by the possibilities of this type of work. Can you generalize at all as to what type of communities or situations are the best for this type of theater?
MR: I think there are two interesting arenas or frames for this kind of work. One is a “bridge” project, which I identify simply as projects where groups of people or constituencies from different ideological places or different geographic places are attempting to come together around an issue where difference is really at the core.
The other one is where a community or organization or place is dealing with a complex issue and attempting to involve the public in a conversation, but the details of the facts or the processes seem really complex and un-sexy, and it’s hard to get people into a values-based conversation. I think this work can really help illuminate and clarify and personalize issues. [An example] of that is our public education project, where we had a 10-minute cabaret piece about taxation in the middle of the show.
RS: If communities or organizations out there would like to bring theater into their civic processes, what is the best way for them to start?
MR: They should start by calling us! And after they call us, [they should] also research the Animating Democracy website, where they can look at case studies of other projects. That will also take them to other arts organizations.
RS: Is there anything else that you would like to add?
MR: I have the fantasy that on the desk or on the computer monitor of every planner and staff member in a civic organization and every legislative office is a little saying: “Art-based civic dialogue.” Find out how to bring local artists into your process—not just for them, but because your process will benefit your ability to make spaces for dialogue and to bring different people to the table in dynamic ways and do more creative problem solving. All that will occur if you invest time and energy and a little bit of resources into bringing the arts into the conversation. [Don’t] just have arts be one of the things you discuss as part of a vital community—use it to help imagine a vital community.