Rebecca Rice, a pioneering community artist, transformed her personal experiences into a powerful advocacy for marginalized voices through art. Her journey began in a challenging neighborhood in Chicago, where she discovered her passion for performance and community engagement. This podcast explores her belief that every individual, regardless of their visibility, contributes to the intricate tapestry of human existence. Throughout her career, Rice emphasized the importance of creative collaboration, using theater as a means to address social issues such as domestic violence and racial justice. As she reflects on her work, listeners are invited to consider the profound impact of art in fostering understanding and change within communities.

Rebecca Rice's profound journey as a community artist is explored through her reflections on art's power to transform lives, especially within marginalized communities. She perceives herself as an 'artist communicator,' emphasizing the importance of every individual’s story in shaping the broader human experience. Through her work, she has sought to give voice to those often overlooked—prisoners, youth, and the disabled—highlighting the reciprocal nature of her partnerships where the shared experiences of both artist and collaborators create a deeper understanding and artistic expression. Bill Cleveland, the host, reminisces about his mentorship under Rebecca, illustrating how her teachings transcend mere technical skill to delve into the moral and ethical dimensions of artistry. This rich dialogue not only honors Rebecca's legacy but also underscores the relevance of her insights on community arts and racial justice in today's societal landscape.

The episode also delves into Rebecca's early influences and formative experiences that shaped her artistic philosophy. Growing up in a challenging environment on Chicago's West Side, she was introduced to community arts through Johnny Houston's program, which instilled in her a sense of capability and belonging. This program acted as a catalyst for her development as an artist, fostering her talent while teaching her the importance of dedication, hard work, and the value of creative expression irrespective of societal limitations. As Rebecca transitioned into the realm of political street theater and later into her tenure at Living Stage Theater, she began to intertwine her artistic endeavors with social activism, using theater as a vehicle for change and a platform for the stories of the oppressed. This evolution highlights the dynamic interplay between art and activism, showcasing how Rebecca's work was not just about performance but about empowering individuals and communities through creativity.

Moreover, the discussion touches on the concept of 'creative trust' and how it serves as a foundation for successful artistic collaboration, especially within vulnerable populations. Rebecca articulates the necessity of creating a safe space where individuals can explore their creativity without the fear of judgment. This sanctuary-like environment allows participants to confront their internalized negativity and engage with their artistic voices authentically. The conversation also critiques the superficiality of multiculturalism in arts funding, advocating for deeper, more genuine engagement with communities rather than tokenistic approaches. Rebecca's insights push for a re-examination of the roles artists play within their communities, advocating for a shift in focus from individual acclaim to collective empowerment, ultimately striving to make art a fundamental and essential aspect of societal healing and growth.

Takeaways:

• Rebecca Rice emphasized the importance of every individual's contribution to the fabric of human existence, not just the prominent figures.
• Art can serve as a transformative tool for personal empowerment and societal change, particularly in marginalized communities.
• The Living Stage Theater Company focused on improvisational techniques to engage diverse audiences, including prisoners and youth.
• Rebecca Rice's work with community arts highlighted the need for art to be inclusive and accessible to all individuals.
• The collaboration between artists and community members can lead to profound insights and creative breakthroughs.
• Rebecca Rice's approach to teaching stressed the importance of building trust and understanding the unique experiences of each participant.

I see myself as an artist communicator, giving voice to the invisible, reminding us that each of our lives affects the entire fabric of human existence.

That each of us is important, not just the high visibility folks who have their achievements and failures touted and scorned, but every blessed one of us.

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the story, Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland. Now, that quote you just heard was from the legendary actress, director, teacher and anti racism activist Rebecca Rice.

Now, if you're lucky, you'll encounter teachers like Rebecca on your life path who literally turn your head.

Now these are people who are willing to share the things that they know, things they've learned that end up providing a foundation for how you operate in the world. This is not the same as people who generously pass on critical skills or tricks of the trade.

Now these foundational pathfinders may do that, but the real differences they make is what they share that goes beyond the technical into the heart and soul, the moral and ethical dimensions of their essential practice, which in my case is something I still refer to as community arts. And I can say that I'm privileged to count Rebecca Rice as one of my community arts mentors.

As long as I've been producing this podcast, I've pondered how can I share this small slice of Rebecca's insight and wisdom with you folks out there. But since the original audio no longer exists, the only way to do this was to create a theatrical version of the conversation.

As I'm sure you'll agree, Rebecca Rice's reflection on community arts change making theater and racial justice are as relevant today as they were 36 years ago.

Part 1: Newer Still

Now Although many considered her a pioneer in the field, Rebecca Rice thought of herself as a second generation community artist, and she was in fact a product of the kind of program she went on to establish herself.

Starting as a child in a Chicago community arts program, she spent most of her life working as an actress, writer, singer, poet and teacher at what she describes as giving voice to invisible people For Rice, these invisibles, the prisoners, youth, disabled and abused with whom she has worked, were her collaborators as well as as her students. Bits and pieces of the tragedies and triumphs of their lives inhabit Rice's plays, poems, and songs.

But these partnerships were reciprocal because of Rice's willingness to include her own challenging life experiences in her work with others.

As such, she described the outcome as a shared journey in which she acts as a creative sentry who ensures the safe passage of the artistic voyager, pointing out minefields and giving rest and sustenance when exhaustion and discouragement set in. In our conversation, Rice related some of the characters and events she's encountered on that journey.

So, Rebecca, you've described yourself as the product of the type of program you eventually created yourself. What do you mean by that, and where did you start in this work?

I grew up in a really rough neighborhood on the west side of Chicago.

When I was five years old, I was contacted by a man named Johnny Houston who had a community arts program called Newer Still Productions to get kids for his program. He would literally go out and comb the streets and pull them into the park district where he worked as a drama instructor.

I remember being in his office when I was 5 years old with a bunch of other kids. I was on his desk tap dancing and singing whatever the latest top 40 hits were.

Instead of telling me to get off his desk, he said, you are very talented. It's pretty amazing to be able to tap dance and sing all those songs. I stayed in his company until I was 19 years old.

What was it about his program that grabbed you as a child and kept you committed for so long?

Well, we worked very hard and had fun. We took dance and voice and acting and we were thoroughly trained and he didn't consider limitations. We just did it, you know, whatever it was.

So we started in a touring dance company when we were just 12 years old. We danced all over the Midwest. Oh, we did A Raisin in the Sun and the girl who played the mother was 14 years old.

We put white shoe polish on her temples to make her look old. Then we did things like the song of the Lusitanian Boogie. He just put us up on stage and we did it regardless of how crazy it seemed.

That do or die attitude rubbed off and we were very loyal and he didn't have a big ego, though. He was almost an invisible person. He just let the work stand for itself. It wasn't his work, it was our work. We all had a significant part in it.

Now, prior to that, my life had been shaped by poverty. Working with newer still allowed me to say to myself, I know what I'm capable of. It gave me birth in many ways.

So was there any particular idea or philosophy behind what Johnny Houston was doing?

Yes and no. He certainly didn't make any speeches, but he had a standard and he let the work speak for itself.

The people who were in the group were alcoholics, dope addicts, kids off the street, gang kids, everything. I don't remember one single moralizing word from him.

At one point, though, my mother told him that she thought I lived in a dream world and she was very worried about me. Instead of him saying, yes, Rebecca, you've got to get down to reality. He said, keep dreaming, but write it down.

Nobody's going to believe anything you say, but if you write it down, they will believe you.

So when did you find yourself moving beyond your community arts base and leaving home, so to speak?

Johnny was like a father figure to me. I mean, he kept me working hard. So I really excelled in school. And that led to my receiving a lot of scholarships and starting college when I was 16.

You know, this was the beginning of a big change. I ended up in an all white college at the University of Chicago and the university of Illinois after living an almost totally black lifestyle.

I didn't know any white people except people my parents work for. Being thrust into these places was very psychologically jarring for me.

Even though I had the intellectual capacity to make it, I didn't have the social awareness to really understand what was going on. It was kind of devastating for me to be there.

And when the 60s happened, I gave vent to a lot of the anger I was feeling Trying to be one of the few black students in the university. Johnny really stood by me through most of it because he wanted me to excel. But eventually the streets and the politics of the 60s took over.

So I left school and I got very involved with the black panthers. It was street politics and guerrilla theater, and it was. It was very exciting.

I discovered a way to use theater to express something I really believed in.

Well, how did that relate to your other theater experiences?

I had been trying to major in theater at school, but it made no sense to me. We were studying Greek theater and I was feeling like I must have dropped onto another planet or something. I'm saying to myself, where the hell am I?

The street theater made sense because it was vital and it was alive. It was very rough, but it was an easy transference for me because it was rough.

It focused a lot of struggles I had been dealing with in my life that I had internalized in a very negative way. It helped me to externalize.

Well, that's a lot. So what was the path that took you off the street and out of the 60s?

Well, it was kind of a funny path. I went with the Mobilization for Survival to do a demonstration in New York. And we did the demonstration and several people got busted, but I didn't.

I was literally left on the streets of New York with nothing. No food, no money, nothing to do. So there I am, I'm just. I'm standing on the street and this guy walks by and he asked me if I need a place to stay.

He said, I've got a loft. Come on up. It turned out he was R. Crumb, the cartoonist. He had all these artists and theater folks staying with him in the loft.

There was this one group that was doing street theater in dc. They were leaving the next day and I just wanted to get out of New York. So I joined this theater company and I went to Washington D.C. and did ome street theater there.

Part 2: Living Stage Theater

At the time of Rice's introduction to the company, it had begun to establish its reputation for innovative improvisational theater work with what Alexander called the forgotten people, children, disadvantaged youth, the mentally and physically disabled, prisoners and the elderly. So, Rebecca, did you know right off that the Living Stage was something you wanted to do?

Well, I think I knew that Bob was somebody I definitely wanted to work with, but I did not really think of myself as a theater artist. I had never done an audition in my life. I had no idea what that was.

He said, I need you to prepare a piece for me using words that express something vitally beautiful, important to you. I did a Martin Luther King speech and sang the Beatles song Blackbird from a racial perspective. That was my audition piece.

My skill was still pretty raw. I joined the company several months later and stayed for the next 14 years.

Wow, that was quite a long period. A real commitment. So what was Living Stage doing that kept you so engaged? I mean, from my understanding, Living Stage did not have a stage.

So where were you performing and who were your audiences?

We worked exclusively with improvisational techniques, doing workshops and performances for a wide variety of audiences. And we started with inmates at Lorton Reformatory, and we also did Some work at the D.C. women's jail.

Here is a little taste of Living stage at the D.C. women's jail.

I don't know freedom but I know it When I see it, I know it I've never been a fighter but I know I can't be it I never been a star yeah, I never been a star But I know I'm gonna shine I never own my whole life but I know it's mine.

Welcome to Living Stage. We have been waiting all our lives.

Those two programs, they still exist today.

We worked with school children and hospitals and special schools, also preschool children and eventually the disabled. Yeah, in the beginning we would go in and do one or two performances and a workshop.

But the more we worked at a certain place with a certain group, the more we realized how limiting those short term commitments were.

So little by little, we kept increasing the length of our stays and over the next two or three years we evolved to where we made a year long commitment to about seven or eight groups.

So what was it like for you, moving from political street theater into prisons and schools?

It allowed the union of my art and my politics, which had been functioning separately. In my mind, I saw guerrilla theater as a political act, not as an artistic act. When I came to Living Stage, I switched to the art side.

For a while, I saw improvisation as a technique that I needed to learn and master.

In the process, though, I found that by becoming a better improviser, I was really utilizing all the information that I had learned as a political worker. It was very, very exhilarating to bring those two things together. Living Stage also helped me understand that what I was doing was art.

Up until then, my experience led me to believe that all art was very elitist. I did not want to see myself as an artist because I didn' see art as a revolutionary act. I saw it as being something outside myself.

He came from the point of view that everyone has artistic ability. Everyone, everyone, everyone.

He told us that there was something extremely destructive about contributing to the idea that some people have it and some people don't. An attitude he felt that led to the haves being catered and bowed to and the have nots looking to the haves as the only source for whatever it is.

He broke that down for all of us and said, this attitude is a lie. We are the ones we have been looking for.

So Was there any particular, I don't know, formal theater approach that you were using?

When we started, we worked exclusively with the viola Spolen improvisational technique, which comes from her book Improvisation for the Theater. But after a while, we started developing our own.

See, we recognized our need to develop techniques which spoke more directly to and from the people we were working with. When the viola spolling technique wasn't working that well with the guys in prison, we began making something up ourselves.

Eventually, within five or maybe seven years, the company was totally using its own technique.

Wow. So what was the living stage process? What was it about the process that worked?

We turned their own process back on themselves. Now, someone at Lorton Reformatory or DC Jail would write a poem. You would not critique that work from an external criterion.

Our aim was to help them flesh out their own process. You looked at the poem and said, good. Now use your body and your voice to physicalize and express the images in the poem. Don't hide behind the words.

Bring the feelings out. The poem was a doorway into their inner life. You never suggested changes.

You never said, that's wrong or I've got a better way of doing that, or that doesn't work. It was constant positive reinforcement. Giving back what they gave you so they could look at it and grow in their own way, at their own pace.

Some might say it was unrealistic, but it worked.

Now, that approach must have demanded an extraordinary amount of discipline and trust within the company itself. How did that work? How did you build this process into the company?

We constantly worked at the process. I mean, we came back to the theater after sessions, even after working with 2 or 3 year olds, we would have 3 and 4 hour long note sessions.

We talked about each individual person and every interaction that everybody in the company had with that person. We would explore what had happened and what was the result and ways to go back to that person and help them further.

We were constantly trying to eliminate the need to criticize and to judge.

So if that kind of feedback, that critical element, the guidance, is not appropriate, how does a teacher provide the student the benefit of whatever experience or wisdom they bring along with them?

The artist educator acts as creative sentry that ensures the safe passage of the artistic voyager, pointing out the minefields of negative thought and action, disconnecting old tapes from useless past histories, and giving rest and sustenance when exhaustion and discouragement set in.

See, our responsibility is to ignite the awareness of the participants to the power of the imagination to aid us all and re envisioning the world and our relationship to it. And once their creativity is engaged, they can teach themselves.

It sounded like the studio or the classroom became kind of a sanctuary, a safe space where patterns of negativity were suspended and the students became their own judges rather than looking outside for validation.

Oh, definitely. But it wasn't just that the word suspended doesn't apply. Those patterns were constantly and methodically being disengaged and dismantled.

I would be sitting there with a person doing an exercise, and I would get to a point to where I was so tuned into them that I could pick up something going on with them in the flicker of their eye and say, what was that? Their eyes and face would say, what are you talking about?

And I would say, you read that part and there was a flicker in your eye that said, maybe you don't think the way you did it was right. At that point, they would realize that I was really looking and paying attention.

So what is it that you're seeing then?

You are looking at ways in which that internalized negativity which comes from society has worked into this person's psyche and into their body.

So how do you deal with that when it. When it shows up?

Well, you try to see if you can be an angel, if you will, an angel who will sit with them at that moment and help them cut all those negative threads and say, you can be your own person.

Wow. You're talking about being very focused and very, very sensitive.

It's extremely subtle in some instances, especially working with disabled people who don't have the normal ways of communicating outwardly. You've got to look for flushes of the skin, the changes in the mucus in their eyes.

I remember working with a young boy, about five, who had been operated on so many times that there was probably nothing in his body that functioned on its own.

I remember putting my hand on him with my fingers between the wires that were telling his organs what to do, trying to find out where the person was in there. As I'm telling him a story, I am trying to see if the temperature of his skin changes to know if I'm getting a response.

That was the level we were working on.

That is extraordinary. Connecting to that child in that way, establishing, I don't know, a sensory language, building trust. What was the role of the director in all this?

How was Bob working with the company in situations like this?

Oh, he was really the guide. I mean, sometimes he was quite charismatic, but most of the time he was putting in time, listening to what we said and watching.

After a while, he became somewhat ruthless in note sessions. He might say, why did you do that? He would be on you almost immediately and you would say, what did I do?

It was maddening, but he was being the voice of question until we learned to do it ourselves. He wanted us to be asking ourselves what was behind everything we were doing in our work.

That's when we began to see our own negative patterns, how issues like racism, miseducation and dysfunctional family lives had crippled our creative drive. He would watch until he saw it catch in each one of us. That's when a little light went on and you said, now I know what you are talking about.

Sometimes this took years. Oh, he was very patient.

Was he directing on site in the institutions as well?

Well, he wanted you out there on your own as soon as possible. It was a sink or swim kind of thing. I started in the company in February, and by that summer I was already teaching a full complement of workshops.

He would come in on the first few sessions, you would talk about them afterwards, then it was on you. He felt we would learn best by being on the front lines, dealing with people directly. It was not a theoretical process.

Information and theory were integrated with experience and practice.

Part 3: Working Solo

After leaving Living Stage, she began focusing her attention on developing her own process and applying it to the problems of domestic violence and abuse. Over the next few years, Rice became a much sought after consultant for arts and social service agencies addressing these problems.

She also co directed Human Bridge Theater, which had been exposing struggles faced by abused women and children to Washington, D.C. theater audiences. Rice touched on a wide range of compelling subjects during our discussion about her solo work.

Of particular interest were her observations about her experience working with the clients and staff of social service agencies. She also offered a different perspective on the increased attention that was then being paid to multiculturalism by public and private arts agencies.

So, Rebecca, since leaving Living Stage, you focused your efforts on the enormously complex and painful issue of domestic violence. What led you down that path?

My mother was a battered woman. When I started working with battered women in Washington, D.C. i realized that I had made a particularly strong connection personally.

That's when my partner, Janet Stanford, and I founded the Human Bridge Theater. I said, rebecca, this is really what your life is about.

I have come to see that my dharma in life seems to be dwelling in the dark corridors of humanity.

So bringing light to dark corners.

Yes.

I think my life experience and my work has given me an understanding of how one can use the powers of art in these places without becoming personally devastated. I actually have a tremendous love for people who dwell on the outskirts of humanity. I believe that art has the ability to reclaim those people.

It's not even a belief, it's a knowledge. I know it. I know that it can happen. I see it happening, and I feel that I'm part of the community that is making it happen.

There's nothing mysterious or speculative about it.

So what is it about art, the making, the experience of it that you think is so powerful in these hard and difficult places?

Art can be a philosophy, an idea, but mostly it is an action. It is a direct pathway into the soul of the person you are working with. The creative act is an act of transformation.

The things you once hated about yourself can be turned into strengths. You don't want to throw anything away. You want to reshape it, use it. If a woman has been battered for 15 years, does that mean she's weak?

I think it takes incredible strength to survive that kind of abuse. I compare that to the survivors of the Holocaust or slavery. When two people or more make creative contact, revolutions happen.

So what do you mean by creative contact? Is that the spark, the key?

No, that's the minimum. At its best, it's much, much more. What really needs to happen is that a sense of creative trust needs to be established.

That is where that is what artists who are successful working in this field know how to do. I say creative trust more than personal trust because of the vulnerable joy and beauty intrinsic to the creative act.

You don't have to know anything about each other personally in order to create together. Personal information can actually be a hindrance. Psychologists use this same practice as a tool. And for the artist, it's an end in itself.

It's not taking you somewhere else. I start to get very angry when I feel my work is being manipulated.

Yeah. So working across community sectors, you know, professions can be a tricky thing.

So do you ever find yourself in what you feel is a compromising position working with therapists and psychologists?

Sometimes they ask me if I can get the students or patients to do such and such, and I tell them no. If the student chooses to do it, that's fine.

Then it will be because he wants to and because he has been provided with a creative, supportive atmosphere where he can, I should say, in practice, I'm not as confrontive as I sound. I really respect these people for their commitment to the difficult jobs they have. So I'm actually very kind. I don't compromise, but I'm kind.

These people are working in one arena and I'm working in another. But we can learn a lot from each other.

Now, most of your work has been with the victims of domestic violence, but recently you had the experience of working with a group of abusers. Tell me about that.

I spent four weeks working with Parents United and Daughters and Sons United. These organizations work with families who are involved with incest and sexual abuse.

I was part of a team from Planned Parenthood who were brought in to help develop a treatment video. I had never done anything like that. My approach was to get in there and work with these men. But it was very difficult for me.

Here I was facing men who had done despicable, disgusting, unbelievable things to their children, and I. I had to find some way to find their humanity. In the course of my struggle with this, I discovered that this is what I do, what I have always done.

My work has taught me to find the creative soul in everyone. I started doing my work with my brain and my heart screaming in different directions.

I thought about my own father, who had neglected and psychologically abused me. I flashed on my mother's bloody face after he had beaten her. But I said, okay, here we go. I'm gonna start talking to this man.

We're going to write this poem, and we are going to do this scene. It's going to work. After a while, the psychologist came up to me and asked me what I was doing with these guys.

She told me this one guy had never been able to talk with anybody. He had never owned up to what he was doing with his family, what happened, or why it happened. He had never talked about his childhood either.

She said, now he's talking. What did you do?

What did you do?

I tried to reach underneath the layers of his personal wreckage. The poem, the story we were working on, came from the place in him that was still alive.

I could touch that maybe for a few minutes, but then it would get hard. The sick part, the dead part, may have been stronger. I'm no miracle worker, and change doesn't happen in a day or from one single act.

I was only there a short time, so, you know, you try to make inroads. That's all you can do. Incest is something that nobody knows how to deal with. Now.

This was all very hard for me because the psychologists and therapists I was working with could not define success. They were just working their asses off in the dark. After about four weeks, my part of the project was completed.

Part 4 Multiculturalism at the time of our conversation, Rice had been spending a considerable amount of her time working at the Minneapolis based professional Women's theater at the Foot of the Mountain. One of her tasks there was to design an outreach program for that organization.

And as a part of that, she had been considering how barriers to cultural participation could be overcome.

In the following section, she shared her feelings about the attempts by many public agencies at the time to broaden participation by creating special funding categories for minority arts programs.

I just, I decided that I am very suspicious of the word multiculturalism and everything that comes under its heading. It sounds too much like the term integration or melting pot. I think to a certain extent it serves racism.

Naya Watkins, the managing director here at the Foot, uses this analogy which describes what I'm talking about.

She describes multiculturalism as a beautiful multi colored flower garden that has been watered and nurtured and cared for by white people of privilege. These people want to make their world more colorful and exciting by having all these colored people around.

But nobody is looking outside the garden at the grisly picture of racism and how it affects these people, particularly how it affects artists of color and our ability or inability to do our work.

So you're saying it's kind of a setup, almost scripted. What do you think really needs to happen?

The only road to substantive change is to get on the power side of the relationship. I've decided I want to stop being the person who gets brought in and paid and then sent away.

I want to be the person who was allocating funds, the person setting up the program at the beginning. Even organizations with a conscience wind up going out and finding some colored people to put in after the fact.

I mean, these add ons are never really apart, so change doesn't take place.

So what's the alternative? How do we make good programs with integrity and accountability that truly alter the playing field?

We need to be there at the beginning. What we are doing here to help that along is shifting the focus of the artists from themselves to the community.

We are asking what is happening in this community that the theater can serve. We are not swinging in, doing our thing and leaving or asking the community to help us multiculturalize our theater.

We just started a workshop at a local community organization for single mothers. Last week one of the women came up to me and said, I am so glad this workshop is happening here.

If it was happening in a theater, I would never have come. And in other words, we are trying to serve them, not have them serve us.

It actually sounds like the multicolored flower garden of multiculturalism is actually the antithesis of your work.

Multiculturalism searches too much for sameness. It does not really want to work with difference. It succumbs to the notion that lumping things together is more efficient.

By lumping, you can focus on it as though it is all the same. If you allow things to be considered separately, then you have a much more complicated, intricate thing to look at.

Then you have to spend more time with it and work with it much more deeply. This is not something that we like to do as a society. I think this is something people are becoming aware of but are really confused by.

So you feel the new programs, the new funding categories are actually exacerbating the problem?

What is scaring me is that multiculturalism will go the way of the multidisciplinary category, which was the biggest thing a while back. I'm afraid they will get tired of it and the energy and work and the money will dry up. Then I will no longer be a constituency.

So where is this leading you in terms of your own work?

I have always been involved in work which deals with issues of race. But I'm starting to come to the conclusion that this cross cultural multiracial approach doesn't work.

What we need to find are ways of allowing people to work with and stay within communities they feel the most comfortable.

It really gets crazy when people are brought out of their communities to sit on boards or do fundraising for organizations that largely give lip service to community involvement. You get turned into something else.

Part of the reason I am getting disenchanted with consultancy is that I have to deal with the glorious notion that this black woman came and they got a chance to work on their racism because I was there. I think I'm being ripped off. People of color are tired of being invited into the house to pick through the buffet that whites have laid.

We're still locked in that master slave mentality. I mean, either come to our house or give up that metaphor altogether and let's envision something totally new.

There's got to be a lot of questions asked and then a whole lot of listening.

So the multiracial, interracial approach has been the guiding light of thinking on this issue for such a long time. I think you're saying this was a mistake.

No, it's not necessarily a mistake, but mistakes are being made everywhere. I don't want to condemn the whole history of people coming to this kind of work.

But I think it is very necessary in any movement to stop and have an evaluation. I feel we need a strategic change in direction. Now, one of our guiding assumptions has been that we need to find ways to work together.

I understand where that comes from because the powers that be love to divide us. We can't retreat together and say we are not going to work together. But we need to find a way to give each other enough room to be who we are.

We've blinded ourselves with certain assumptions because those assumptions felt good. One of those assumptions has been if I'm a good person and I have good ideas and good intentions that I will do good things.

Sorry, folks, it just don't work that way. Now we are beached somewhere trying to figure out where we are going and where the boat went.

So where is Rebecca Rice going?

I'm going to be working to help people survive. Let me give you an example. It's a wonderful story.

We were getting ready to do a public performance of this is the House, which is about battered women. There was a certain amount of media attention, so we were going on a lot of talk shows.

We decided that it was important to include women from the shelter because they could tell their story better than we could. So we invited them and they said, yeah, we'll come. But several times they didn't show up. We called and said, hey, what's going on?

And after a lot of hemming and hawing, this one woman finally said we were going to come, but I couldn't get my hair done. Then it hit me. I said to myself, okay, Rebecca, where are your priorities?

Why didn't you know that these women have a sense of dignity and they are not going to come on the Team TV show with their hair looking bad or in some old dress or something? So we were trying to figure out what to do about this, and this woman called and told us she loved our work.

She asked if we could use some old clothing to give to the women in the shelters. I said, sure, bring it to me and I'll take it over. She said, what I have is overstock for my collection.

If you're going to take them, I think you'll need a truck. She had about 140 boxes of new unworn designer clothing. So we rented this huge rider truck.

We picked up the clothes and called the shelters and told them we were bringing over some surplus clothes. They thought they were getting green army clothes. And when we showed up, they started opening up these boxes. And it was just unbelievable.

I said, the next time we go on a TV show, you are going to come dressed to the nines. I mean, it's just a little thing, but that's what happens when you become a part of the community. I had an interesting thought the other day.

Now everyone assumes the necessity of a plumber. If the pipes are malfunctioning, you know who to call. We don't always assume the necessity of an artist as part of our lives and our community.

When there is a creative malfunction, we don't know how to spot it, how to fix it, or who to call. If we do know who to call, we are not willing to pay for their services at the same rate we pay the plumber.

I want to work together with other artists to become as essential to this society as the plumber.

As essential as a plumber.

Not really an outrageous aspiration for a person with a practice and a profession that has played such a significant role in healing and liberating and celebrating so many souls. So those were the words of Rebecca Rice and thank you. With your help, Kathy. I'm so glad that we got to spend a few moments with her.

Well, I'm honored to bring Rebecca's story to life. She is very inspirational to me, though I never got to meet her on this planet this time. But she is, my gosh, something beautiful.

And for those of you who want to hear a little more from Rebecca, you can see some of her work and hear from her in a documentary by Tanisha Christie that features her and fellow artists Lisa Biggs and Anu Yadav called Walk With Me.

And thank you to our listeners out there across the US and the UK And India, Singapore, Canada, Cambodia, Costa Rica, New Zealand, Serbia and South Africa and the rest of the world with your big ears, your big hearts and your thoughtful comments. This show is labor of love and we love that you're out there listening and hopefully learning and being inspired.

Change the Story, Change the World is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community. It's written and hosted by me, Bill Cleveland. And our theme and soundscape are by the stupendous Judy Munson. Our editing is by Andre Nebbe.

Our special effects come from freesound.com and our inspiration rises up from the mysterious but ever present presence of UC235. Until next time, please stay well, do good and spread the good word.

And we'll finish with Rebecca singing us out with a piece, a reprise of a piece we heard earlier from the D.C. women's jail.

I've never been a fighter But I know I can't be I never been a star yeah, I never been a star But I know I'm going to shine I never own my whole life But I know it's my heart. Welcome to Living Stage. We have been waiting all our lives for you to come here today.