"Based on" OR "Dictated by?"

“Community-based arts…” Yes, it’s a fascinating concept, but I’m thinking about how far we should or should not take it. I recall a quote I liked from the Cornerstone manual: “The voice of the community joins with and colors the voice of the writers,” or something like that. After we had our first meeting with the community and we got so much information and feedback, I was really excited. But I remember, after I started sifting through all the material we’d collected, I started to worry about how much to include.

On the one hand, the second part of this class title is “community-based arts.” We obviously have to have the community input in order to write the show; otherwise this would just be writing a play with all of our own ideas: the boring, ordinary way. While this class is a community in its own way, that would kind of defeat the purpose of the class to just use ourselves.

Yet, I don’t want the community to have too much control or influence either. We’ll obviously be using some of their words, the ELPs, etc. I understand if they want to edit some of that stuff. But if we show one of our community members some of our scenes we’ve been writing and they say “I don’t like that. You should change it so that Tom Brady says all the lines and the other people all leave the stage.” I want the power to reply, “No. This is our creation. Thank you for your input, but we make those kinds of decisions.”

Now, I don’t expect that to be a big issue with us. Firstly, I doubt most of our community members remember that this project actually exists and the others probably want us to have as much artistic freedom as possible. But besides that, with us being an official class writing a show for the Mainstage season, I feel like we have the final say about most everything.

But that does lead me into my next question which is, where is the line between community involvement and private composition is larger companies, like Cornerstone? They seems to be all about the community, so would they make a one-man show featuring Tom Brady? I hope not, there’s got to be some distinction between providing-information and making-art, but where does it fall? Which side has more power most of the time? Are there power struggles? What’ll happen if the community decides halfway through to shut out the company?

It sounds like a nearly impossible balancing act, but… How many communities would get that fervent over a play? Would most be kind of like ours? “Oh, that’s what you’re writing about? Why are you telling me?”