Dancing Trees at King's Fair
For synopsis, click on King's Fair Summary.

Matthews Park, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Sponsored by Seward Neighborhood Group
1999

The Project
The Dancing Trees project had two objectives:

• For the community: to provide opportunities for Seward neighborhood residents to experience themselves and others in new ways, using movement as a vehicle to build community; and
• For myself: to explore aesthetic and ethical issues of digital image-making in community art.

The structure of the project involved a three-part performance/installation created for King's Fair, a biennial community festival sponsored by Seward Neighborhood Group with roots dating back to the 1880s. The project included:

1. A series of movement workshops for 70 residents and workers in Seward Neighborhood. Workshops focused on areas of interest specific to four constituency groups: new mothers, youth, elders, and small business owners/workers.
   
   
2. An installation of 80 digital photographs from the movement workshops. The dangling images, hung like a clothesline in a grove of trees in Matthews Park, created a fictitious story of four diverse neighborhood constituencies all dancing together.
   
   
3. Improvisational performances at King's Fair during which I invited neighborhood residents to ask questions about the photographs, and danced my answers to each question (followed by a verbal translation of my body's response). I frequently use this practice to access and demonstrate the body as a way of knowing. Young people spontaneously joined the dancing until the grove of trees evolved from a performance space into a creative movement playground. The threshold between audience/performer became porous.

Click here for

Inquiries
In 1998 I had a baby and the geographic scale of my life immediately narrowed to the radius of a few blocks around my home in the Seward area of South Minneapolis. This sudden tightening of ties to my neighborhood was an unexpected outcome of new motherhood. I became curious about my relationship, as a dancing resident and home-based worker, to other residents and workers. The King's Fair Festival was an opportunity to explore movement interactions with my neighbors and to represent those interactions to the larger Seward community.

Another unexpected outcome of new parenthood was the introduction of documentary technology in my daily life, especially digital video (due to the high demand for images of the growing baby from long distance family and friends). Based on the images we sent, a cousin commented on "this remarkable baby who never seemed to cry." There is always a slippery ethical slope between documentation and the creation of illusory realities, but the slope is even steeper with digital imagery because the photo manipulation techniques are easy and endless. The King's Fair project was an opportunity to investigate applications of digital image technology to my work.

Challenges
How to balance two objectives: to build community, and to explore digital image-making? I strongly believe that interpersonal trust is an essential foundation for building community. Yet, the presence of any camera can instantly undermine trust, especially in a movement workshop, which is already an unfamiliar and vulnerable situation for many participants. In particular, the presence of a video camera and camera operator usually brings an awkward self-consciousness into the room. How could I represent the movement workshops to a larger community without diminishing the workshop experience for the participants?

I tried different strategies in each workshop to lower participants' self-consciousness around the video camera. These included:

• Establishing camera-free zones in the room for people who did not want to be videotaped;
• Operating the camera myself and literally dancing with the camera as a movement prop;
• Having a camera operator serve another, more familiar role (for example, a colleague brought my daughter to the youth workshop and switched back and forth between baby-sitting and videotaping);
• Explaining my reasons upfront for bringing the video camera;
• Soliciting written permission from each participant before a workshop began;
• Making the camera part of the curriculum; and
• Videotaping only five minutes and, later, collecting still images from whatever I randomly captured during those brief minutes.

By introducing a camera into these workshops, I unintentionally introduced a slew of ethical issues related to exploitation in community art-making. As I captured images of participants during the course of the project, I increasingly asked myself, "Who is benefiting more here – me or the participants? Am I using my neighbors as source material for the installation, which is essentially my own artistic vision?"

The presence of my video camera heightened my awareness of the common, but rarely acknowledged, truth that, in community art projects the lead artist is often the one who gains the most. For example, as lead artist, I am the one who gains material for the artwork (participants' stories and images); I am the one who decides how the stories and images will be displayed and contextualized; I am the one who adds the project to my résumé; I am the one who is being paid to be there; and I am the one the media attends to (unless I am able to redirect their attention).

What I Learned

• The three phases of Dancing Trees reflect three forms of community art interaction:
  1. The workshop phase was arts-based community building, that is, art-making with a goal of strengthening community.
  2. The installation phase was temporary public art, that is, impermanent artwork that happens in public space.
  3. The performance phase was community-engaged art; that is, art that actively engages community members.

Different forms of community art interaction (arts-based community building, public art or community-engaged art) often occur within a single project. Each form of interaction reflects different intentions and requires different roles, skills, and responsibilities.

• Dancing Trees demonstrated for me the importance of making clear choices about how I am interacting with the community. Role shifts can be very subtle and very significant. People are more likely to feel hurt, abused or exploited when an unconscious role shift takes place. I feel a responsibility to try to be clear about how I interact with community. When I am clear about my role and expectations, I am more likely to treat the people around me with respect.
  
  
• Dancing Trees would have been a stronger project with more community input in the design phase. Because I considered this a relatively small-scale project, I did not invest as much energy upfront to solicit design input from the community as I would have for a larger scale project. When the project shifted from the interactive workshop phase to the creation of a visual installation/performance, I was increasingly uncomfortable with using my neighbors' experiences in the workshops as the raw material for my own individual artistic expression. In the end I yearned for a collective forum to wrestle with me as I struggled with this and other ethical challenges presented by the project. I reconfirmed for myself that relationships are the essence of community artmaking.

Resolution
After this project I resolved to create design teams for the next community-based project, regardless of the scale of the project.