Given the differences in power, and definitions of success, how can arts and change collaborations between institutions of higher learning and their local communities be equitable and accountable? And how can change oriented artists practice effectively and ethically with a foot in each camp? Billy Yalowitz has had a career as a theater director and choreographer that I think provides provocative answers to both questions and more.

This podcast features a rich conversation between Bill Cleveland and Billy Yalowitz, focusing on the intersection of community arts and social justice. At the heart of their discussion is the importance of facilitating equitable collaborations between artists and their communities, particularly in the context of higher education. Yalowitz shares insights from his diverse career as a theater director and choreographer, emphasizing the necessity of understanding one's own heritage and community narratives before engaging with others. The dialogue also explores the significance of storytelling as a means of empowerment and healing, particularly in marginalized communities. Ultimately, the episode highlights the transformative power of art in bridging divides and fostering mutual understanding across different cultural backgrounds.

A key highlight of the episode is the Black Bottom Performance Project, where Yalowitz worked to amplify the voices of a community displaced by urban renewal. This project not only sought to reclaim lost stories but also fostered a sense of belonging among participants. Yalowitz emphasizes the importance of creating spaces for collective memory and narrative sharing, illustrating how art can bridge divides and facilitate healing. The project serves as a testament to the potential of community arts to address historical injustices and promote social cohesion, prompting listeners to consider the power of storytelling in their own lives.

As the episode progresses, the discussion evolves into pressing contemporary issues, particularly climate justice and the disconnection from land that many communities experience. Yalowitz shares his ongoing work in the Hudson Valley, where he seeks to reconnect with his cultural roots while collaborating with indigenous peoples. This aspect of the conversation underscores the interconnectedness of social justice and environmental stewardship.

Key Moments

03:47 The Keys to the Kingdom: Billy's Building Project

05:29 Exploring Identity and Community

08:48 Golden's Bridge: A Cultural Sanctuary

15:22 The Tradition of Community Arts

21:40 The Legacy of Folk and Modern Dance

26:05 The Black Bottom Performance Project

27:23 Community Stories and Reparations

32:15 Migrations and Hyphenations: An Israeli/Palestinian Sago

36:25 The Birth Narrative and Twin, Twin Transfusion Syndrome

41:54 Challenges and Breakthroughs in Rehearsal

47:06 Land Amnesia and Climate Justice

51:40 Reflections and Inspirations

BIO

Billy Yalowitz is a writer, director and community arts practitioner whose writings and interdisciplinary performance works draw from public history and chronicle grassroots movements for self-determination.

Yalowitz’s interdisciplinary performance works have been presented off-Broadway and internationally. He has directed critically acclaimed and nationally profiled community-based performance-installations in Philadelphia neighborhoods since 1991. Yalowitz has been named “Best Unclassifiable Theater Artist” by Philadelphia’s City Paper, Best Choreographer by the Philadelphia Inquirer, and was nominated for a Barrymore Award for his work at People’s Light & Theater Company.  He was commissioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art to create a performance-festival, The Fathering Circle.

Yalowitz’s work has been featured in the New York Times http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/31/theater/newsandfeatures/31acto.html?_r=1,

Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article.aspx?id=9291, San Francisco Chronicle, Philadelphia Inquirer, on National Public Radio, and profiled in Letting Go - Arts & Public History (Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, 2011), Brother Keepers: New Perspectives On Jewish Masculinity (Men’s Studies Press, 2010), White Men Challenging Racism (Duke Univ. Press, 2003) , and Body and Bible (Trinity, 1992). He has been awarded grants from the Nathan Cummings Foundation, James L. Knight Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Woodrow Wilson Foundation, among others. 

Yalowitz is an Associate Professor, and founder and co-director of the Community Arts Practices program at Tyler School of Art & Architecture , Temple University.

 Notable Mentions

• University of California, Monterey Bay
• El Teatro Campesino
•  Golden’s Bridge Community
• Migrations and Hyphenations - Peace Child Israel
• East Towards Home - American Roots Music Foundation
• Amalia Mesa-Bains
• Luis Valdez
• Earl Monroe
• Woody Guthrie
• Martha Graham
• Pete Seeger
• Sophie Maslow
• Paul Robeson
• Jacob Lawrence
• Susan Robeson
• Works Progress Administration (WPA)
• Howard Theatre
• Black Bottom (neighborhood in Philadelphia)
• Popular Front

Bill Cleveland

From the center for the Study of Art and community. This is change the story, change the world. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Now, more than 20 years ago, I was part of a gathering of artists and activists convened by renowned educator, artist, and social critic Amalia Mesa Baines at the newly minted University of California Monterey Bayou. We've been invited there to explore ideas and share stories related to what many of us then refer to as the community arts movement.

This was an important moment because Amalia Mesa Baines, now Teatro Campesinos, Luis Valdez, and their colleagues at the university had established a department of visual and public art that centered the essential role of the arts and culture in the development of just and thriving communities.

It was particularly important because the program had not only been a first, but its creation had been from scratch, from the ground up, which was, at the time, revolutionary. I met a lot of wonderfully thoughtful and passionate compatriots at that gathering.

One of them was a theater and dance guy from Temple University named Billy Yalowitz.

Now, Billy made an impression upon me because he was what I call a creative hybrid, which in his case meant that he was an academician with a fully engaged, community-based practice focused on mutual exchange and learning, which at the time was pretty unique.

I'm sure that's why he was there, because the new department at Monterey Bay had been headed down that same path through a community collaboration called the Reciprocal University Arts Partnership.

Interestingly enough, though, when I thought about asking Billy to be on the show, that the questions that rose up for me were very similar to the ones I had when we first met.

Namely, given the significant differences in power and definitions of success, how can arts and change collaborations between institutions of higher learning and their local communities work in ways that are truly equitable and accountable? And how can change oriented artists practice effectively and ethically with a foot in each camp?

Billy Yalowitz has had a career as a theater director and choreographer that I think provides provocative answers to both questions and more.

It has taken him from the classrooms and stages of Temple University to the streets and neighborhoods of Philadelphia, from Jerusalem's muslim quarter to a collective farm in rural New York that's provided a cultural, spiritual, and political refuge for multiple generations of his Jewish community, he's traveled a creative and often contrary life path.

That prompted Philadelphia's city paper to name Billy the best unclassifiable theater artist, and, as you will hear, has produced a rich body of work and stories that we can all learn from.

Now, just to let you know, prior to our conversation, Billy had been hard at work at that collective farm called the Golden's Bridge Farm collective, restoring one of its buildings. So we started with, what else? A review of his endeavors with a hammer and saw, part one, the keys to the kingdom.

So, Billy, tell me the outcome of your building project.

Billy Yalowitz

Oh, thank you. Well, if I were really quick on this thing, I would show you it proudly.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah.

Billy Yalowitz

But we did get in there to the gutsheen, and we had to repair a bunch of water damage and replace a cap joist. Yeah. That house is a bungalow that's about 90 years old, but that deck probably just goes back 40 years.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah.

Billy Yalowitz

I'm very pleased with it. Yeah. Yeah.

Bill Cleveland

Well, as I said, I think in my email, can't tell you I've been there, and I sense this from you. Is that number one, obviously, we got to do this. This is not something we put off. That's number one.

But number two is the act of restoration is, at least to me, especially for a place you care about is sacred.

Billy Yalowitz

Absolutely. And this particular one is an ancestral home.

Bill Cleveland

Oh, I know. I've been living in your ancestry for the last couple of days. So let's begin with the beginning by asking, where are you?

Billy Yalowitz

Yeah, well, thank you. I'm in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

I really haven't done the work to just say Lenape hoking and have it mean as much as it should be meaning, and I've just begun that work here, have done more of it in the Hudson valley. But, yes, this was Lenape land.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah.

Billy Yalowitz

And there's a renewed effort among the current Lenape to have their voices out here and claim their land. Yeah.

Bill Cleveland

So I know that you've been in the academy for quite some time, and of course, every university, once you become a faculty member, gets a street name, right.

Billy Yalowitz

That's right. That's right.

Well, at different times, I've thought of myself, and my work is storytelling, culture, organizing, choreographer, performer, director, writer. I'm not sure I have a good snappy handle. I would love one. In fact, I had one when I was twelve.

If you look on the crosstown bus on 23rd street in Manhattan, you would have seen my tag. Earl 27.

Bill Cleveland

There you go.

Billy Yalowitz

That's the last time I had a good handle. That was after Earl Munro, who played four blocks away in Madison Square Square garden. And we used to. We used to have.

I used to be able to pick the lock to get in and see the Knicks games for free. So whatever limited street cred I had, that was my last handle.

I think in some ways that more and more I find my work grows out of a tradition, one I wasn't always aware of and I now find is in danger of being eclipsed into obscurity. So if you think of a good handle, let me know.

Bill Cleveland

Well, you just gave me one. I think your work, in many ways, is lock picking.

Billy Yalowitz

Oh, I like that.

Bill Cleveland

You are slipping into places that either are just not available and people assume that somebody like you wouldn't want to be there. So why would I give you the key?

And also, you are a subversive, and subversives have those tools for fiddling around with the locks that we're trying to mess with.

Billy Yalowitz

I like that, Bill. Thank you. You're welcome. I think I could start to work with that. And I am very proud that I figured out how to pick those locks, I got to tell you.

Bill Cleveland

Oh, are you kidding me? And I talk about street cred. More than that, you could probably trade a lot of things for what Nick's gave. Absolutely.

Couldn't think of anything more valuable other than, at least for me, is getting into the Washington, DC version of the Apollo Theater, which I got to do a lot.

Billy Yalowitz

How did you pick the lock for that?

Bill Cleveland

Well, a group of us decided that the Howard Theater was where the most important music in the world was, at least at that moment in our lives. And as you can imagine, we were suburban kids and we had no, no idea what we were doing.

And it was one of those places you go where you learn a lot in a. In a big hurry, which was, for us, the humility you need when you are a guest in someone else's sacred space.

Billy Yalowitz

How about that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Keys to the kingdom, keys to the king. We had one.

There was one of those in North Philly, the Uptown Theater, just a few blocks from where I worked. And, boy, you get people telling those stories about that place, and it was a powerhouse. Yep. Yeah.

Bill Cleveland

It's another sacred place.

Billy Yalowitz

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Bill Cleveland

Part two, Golden's bridge.

I'm going to ask you the big, wide question, and that is, what is your work in the world?

Billy Yalowitz

There's a lot of answers I have for it. You know, the shorthand is, what kind of art do I do? And what's the relationship between my personal practice and public practice? What do I make?

What have I made in different media, conventionally speaking? Started out as a young one, mostly with music, and then it became dance, which became movement theater and directing and playwriting.

But again, it's most resonant for me to answer that question in terms of the tradition that I wasn't aware of working in. In some ways, I've taken up the family business.

When I think of my family as part of the extended kinship community of secular, working class, progressive Jews from New York City and into the Hudson Valley over the last 100 years, my people initiated urban housing cooperatives in New York City and rural ones north of New York City.

Yeah, I mean, those things are important to me because they are. They do inform my work very deeply.

And I didn't know it, in a way, partly because of McCarthyism and the way that was wielded at my community and the way I internalized that.

And so, it's been a long process excavating that to understand what was motivating me, what was in there, what nurtured me, what the fuel was that allowed me to move through these different art media, which I felt more or less comfortable with. But the core of it, I think, really comes from the culture practices I grew up around and didn't really recognize as such.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah. And in some ways, it's like you had two layers of othering.

One of them, America's consistent through line of anti-semitism, and the other one was the political othering that came along with that. And then you have the cultural piece where you're just asking for a little space and a little respect, and then the pushback on all fronts.

I don't know, Billy. Why do humans do this over and over and over? It's so common and it's so appalling.

Billy Yalowitz

You got it.

Though I think the strengths of that background, I faith, did lead into being able to tell the stories of other communities in ways that felt very familiar, but that I left myself out. I left my community out. I started bringing myself in at a certain point.

I was midway through a four- or five-year cycle called North Called Home in North Philadelphia, adjacent to where Temple University is, where I worked for 25 years.

And I'm just retiring from and was directing a large scale multimedia performance about the history of that church, which was the epicenter of the black power and civil rights movements in Philadelphia in the sixties and seventies. And the son of Father Paul Washington, Kemah Washington. Father Paul was one of the key leaders in those movements and the pastor in that church.

So Kemah comes up to me and says, how come you're telling our story, Billy, and not in any critical way, just like what you know, and respectfully, I mean, you could see that I had the capacity not to patronize, but when Kemah said that to me, I was something, I went as far as I could without beginning to really look at telling my own community story.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah, it clicked.

And so many people that I talk to around this kind of work often do come around to the fact that if I haven't done this work on myself, I'm going to be missing something here when I work with other folks.

Billy Yalowitz

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And if you're white or has recently become white, as my community did, you're in a special kind of vulnerability to get really lost there and be touristing in communities of color.

And in the teaching work that I did at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, at the Community Arts practices program, a keystone in that work was having students do work on their communities of origin as they came into preparing themselves to work with others communities and their own communities. And that was a beginning of, for me, a lifelong process that I wanted to initiate or make the space for them to initiate about their own communities.

So absolutely. And not only white people get lost there. All people in this society do.

And I think it is, I agree, it is essential to longevity in the work and depth in the work and accountability and integrity. If community basis were actually.

Bill Cleveland

That brings another question. First, people use the term the work from your perspective, not in terms of technique or discipline, but what is the work itself?

Billy Yalowitz

Well, there are a few essences that I think I try for.

One is to help facilitate a collective voice for a group of people, a neighborhood, an organization of families, a faith tradition, to be able to speak in the "WE."

And that is key to that community gaining its story, its pride, and also its capacity for organizing, for self determination, to use that term, that theres a wing there that gets attacked and or gets invisibilized, or I picked away at and a lot of it is facilitating a space where a group of people can begin to regain that. And then what story is to be told there in the "WE."?

Bill Cleveland

Yeah, and the other one is, and it's a little more personal, because you say you struggled to come to your own reckoning with your story, and obviously, the center of it is Golden's bridge. So the question that jumps up for me here is, if Golden's Bridge is a dot and community arts is another dot, how do they connect for you?

Billy Yalowitz

Yeah, well, you know, come to find the place I was growing up in that was really home and nurtured me the most was a, you could call it a durational navity, arts, civic practice, a space where the. The immigrant generation in the 1920s had the audacity to rub their very meager resources.

These were poor people who were highly principled and deeply aspirational and quite brilliant, and had a very strong collective sense of what they were about.

But in that physical space, they built the roads, they built these stone walls, they built the bungalows, they created a daycare, they created a culture that I grew up in that was. It was a kind of sovereign cultural space. Its native language was Yiddish. Its animated principles were revolutionary in the communist sense.

And it was a place of great joyous and a place where we could be ourselves. And it was a seasonal migration. I mean, it was a summer community, but.

And that migration up and down the Hudson, at first, on the train from the Bronx, there were many other communities I'm writing about now. That's a digression, but not so much.

People would take the day, line up the piers on the west side, up to the dozens of communities that are kin founded in that valley, and created a culture based on our peoplehood. But that it. The Hudson flows, it's an estuario river. It's the Mahicanuck, the river that flows two ways. And so it really did.

The culture flowed up and down that river for them, because these were sea seasonal camps for them as well. And often the folks from Manahatta would come up from my very limiter understanding of this, but we were traveling that same migratory route.

And what that meant is, during the summer, we could restore ourselves, we could have a place that was ours, we could be shielded to some extent from the active anti semitism or anti communism. That we were nevertheless persisting in the face of in New York City. But that fed into the arts and cultural organizing.

And also the political organizing that my ancestors were doing in New York City.

Bill Cleveland

The thing that really rises up for me when you tell this story. Is that your ancestors came from a place where the idea of community arts and culture were not separate. There was no such thing as community arts.

Language, food, ways, singing, everything was of a piece. And they came to a world that was in the process of separating all those things out.

And actually classifying some of them as okay and some of them as not okay. Right. And what you're describing is okay. We just found a sanctuary or a refuge to put those things back together.

Billy Yalowitz

Well said. And that's what was happening more, more or less consciously. I mean, for example, the barn, which was the barn that preceded our presence there.

The golden's Bridge was a dairy farm. Before we came there in the late twenties. That barn and back floor was our sacred community space.

And so including, and I should say this in terms of the connection between that place and community based work. When dance was my primary medium, I started to go in with it. Who were the Jewish dancers? What did we do?

While they were doing their dances at union halls and in settlement houses, they collaborated with Woody Guthrie. My play called east towards home, was based on that exchange.

Bill Cleveland

Here's a little taste of east of.

Billy Yalowitz

Home everybody might be just one big soul well, it looks that a way to me everywhere that you look in the day or the night well, I'd come to the end of my rope my jig was up. I'd been fooling audiences for too long already. And now I fell in love with. With this. Well, a whole group, new dancers.

I told them I would sing these songs for them. Anybody who could walk, I picked. I wanted the workers themselves on the stage representing the proletarian masses.

So I recruited my dancers from everywhere. The artef, yiddish theater workers, International Relief culture and chess club, the needles trades workers, industrial union.

So, you know, those were the kind of parts of the culture that we were reassembling and adapting and hybridizing. And there were core cultural practices that can step back and begin to describe the richness of that world and how it fed us.

Bill Cleveland

One of the things you write about is every one of those dances from different parts of the world were not just entertainments. They told very serious stories. There were lessons embedded in them, hard lessons in some cases.

So, once again, this idea of the completely integrated and connected art is just personified in this whole idea of we're doing this dance, and there's three or four layers of learning.

Billy Yalowitz

And then this continuum between high art, modern dance, and folk dance is dissolved.

And you could see that in some of the Jewish choreographers, Sophie Maslow, Alan Tamiris, others in the forties and fifties, I'm probably forgetting some names, where that group of choreographers began to dissolve. Baps. And here again is a valuing of folk voices, so to speak, the vernacular.

The democratization of the arthem that we see in community arts, seeing the beauty of working people's stories and bodies and movement and songs that became such a foundation, a well from which to draw for the folk revival, a term which is like has that highfalutin down to it, but what's being revived there? And I think they were onto it, that there was. There had been a devaluing, that this was hillbilly stuff in of no real value.

And I could tell you stories of the different bundle of colonies of rich. Golden's bridge was one of two dozen. There were also summer camps for children that were easy to trivialize and nostalgize.

But they were quite profound places where some of that kind of cultural aspiration and agenda of artists, composers, Pearl Primus, Paul Robeson, Jacob Lawrence, thers were the art counselors at places like Camp o Chica or Camp Woodland.

And young people's minds were taken very seriously, and they were being invited into a tradition that included going out and listening to the stories of people in the Catskills, for instance, at a place like Camp Woodland or camp Thoreau, which is my generation's camp.

Bill Cleveland

Part Three: Black Bottom.

We're at the point where you have actually touched on a number of things, both artworks and stories.

Can you think of one of your many creative adventures that really, just for you, delivered on what you feel is the promise of this kind of work?

Billy Yalowitz

Yes.

One that comes to mind was here, where I live now in West Philadelphia, and was called the Black Bottom Performance Project, named after the community. A lot of cities had their bottoms, the Fondi Bottom and Washington, DC. There are others in Philadelphia.

It was the bottom and a community that had been destroyed by eminent domain and so called urban renewal, what James Baldwin called negro removal. And so I was invited to teach a course in this at the University of Pennsylvania. And I put my ear to the ground when I got there.

And I thought, well, what's the story that isn't told about the relationship between this institution and its surrounding community? Why the hostility toward this Ivy League university, as many of them have experienced? Columbia University, your taxi stories are legion.

And what's happening there? This one is emblematic of the universities, Penn and Drexel and beings, the city planning commission of Philadelphia.

And it's a land grab, a colonizing land grab. And the people in the neighborhood were understandably rich about this and wanted their story told. And so I started to listen to those stories.

There was a man who grew up in the neighborhood, Walter Palmer, who was teaching him a social work school at Penn. And I listened to him.

Walter Palmer

Walter Palmer: I came to Philadelphia as a transplant from Atlantic City, New Jersey, when I was about six or seven years old in the 1940s.

And so all of my childhood life was in the black bottom. I remember about the black bottom. What impressed me was how the older guys would take care and protect the community.

And I always wanted to be one of those guys who did it. They're called the warlords. By the time I was 14 years old, I was a junior warlord. By the time I was 16 years old, I was the warlord.

This is where I was raised, 36 45 Market street. We were on welfare when my father died. And it isn't ironic.

I teach in the University of Pennsylvania School of Graduate School of Social Work, where I try to tell people the experience of what it's like to be feeling intruded by social workers, people who invade your privacy, etcetera.

Billy Yalowitz

And he introduced me to some of his friends, and I introduced that group, who were elders by this point, to my students.

And we created a project over 40 years where we did a series of performances that were based on those oral histories of hoax in the black bottom. And it was very moving to me and very humbling to me to be trusted over time with those stories.

And there is a certain cathartic nature to the performances that took place at first in social halls of the Metropolitan Baptist church back in their old neighborhood. This is a community in exile, essentially. And their homes were destroyed.

And they were there, diaspora around Philadelphia, who came together and had a reunion day in August where up to a thousand of the descendants of the black bond gathered. Wow. Boy, did they have a beautiful community and loyalty. And they wanted their story told and took a while for them to put those stories in my hands.

And their goals were just to be listened to. And then some of the folks in the community wanted some kind of reparations. Scholarships for their grandchildren to the university.

Their houses backed a meeting space where they could hold their black bottom association, the social events. And we.

And here you see some of the limits, really, of what could actually happen there, because these were folks mostly in their seventies and eighties, and we were getting there 20 years, 30 years after the destruction of their neighborhood. And we were pretty warmly invited to their social events.

And it changed the lives of mostly white college students that were there to be so generously invited into their stories and their lives. And some good things happened and some tokenized things happened. Was reparations granted? No.

Was there a city resolution recognizing the black bottom neighborhood? Now there's a black bottom day in Philadelphia. Pissed off some of the old timers.

They knew they were being bought off, and some were quite pleased with it.

And the performances became a process of gathering that group together and telling their stories and an intergenerational practice that was happening anyway, really. But we gave it a kind of theatrical form that they were pleased with. They performed in it. Some of the elders, they wrote some of it.

They seized production. We were having a light cue mishap, and they got up, and these guys were in the seventies and queued.

The band were black bottomers to play a song and danced while they were sorting out the light cue. And so it became more and more their space over time, over the three years that we had these performances.

Bill Cleveland

Part Four: Migrations and Hyphenations.

So there's a project you did called Migrations and Hyphenations.

Billy Yalowitz

Well, that was the one I was going to talk about next. And at the core of that project was a play called Six Actors in search of a Plot after the Pirandello.

And that process is dear to my heart and to the actors and playwright Mohammed Tahir that I co-wrote it with. It was produced by an organization called Peace Child Israel. And I had gone to a series of Arab Jewish peace gatherings.

They had eight or ten of these going throughout Israel, and some that were cross border in the West bank between groups of Jewish, israeli and palestinian high school students.

And they would create these partnerships, and those groups of young people would encounter each other and befriend each other and left together and create plays. Played a good function in those young people's lives, I think.

And they were limited in what they could accomplish within the power relations that were there. And at a certain point, they and the facilitators of those plays were interested in going further and creating some kind of professional production.

And they would hire playwrights, including Mohammed, who is a palestinian playwright of note and commissioned him to write a play. And what a wonderful, brilliant man this was and or did.

I love getting to work with him and meet his family and spend long weekends and overnights in his home in re muslim quarter in the old city, and at the family kind of compound in the West bank. And I was invited in to direct his play with a cast of three Jewish Israelis and three palestinian Israelis.

Those Palestinians were living in Israel inside the so called green line. I get there for the rehearsal process. These actors adored each other. We would play cards late into the night.

They had, some of them had gone to drama school and Haifa together. And then we get into the rehearsal room, and they fought about every line.

And the process of making the play reflected territories, which was, at that point, the territory of the script. And I tried to direct Muhammad's play, and that the thing would keep breaking down.

Bill Cleveland

Here is Mohammed Zahir describing the situation.

Mohammed Zahir

They begin with accusations. Everybody wants the process and the play. To be according to how they would color the picture. So they never reach an agreement because.

Theyre always accusing one another. In the end, they realized that the. Plot must begin here, and they must stop accusing each other in the play. They look for something new, for a new page and for a new life.

We address this through the birthing process.

Billy Yalowitz

The ending image of that play was the possibility of birth as a new beginning and the human commonality of births. And I said, mohammed, that's a beautiful image. Can I do something with the actors to build on that?

Because we're having trouble in the rehearsal process of finding the common ground that you're reaching toward here. This was not a kumbaya piece. There was a lot of battle in this play. It was very gritty, and yet he was reaching for Kalingrev.

And Mohammed said, okay, yeah, go ahead, do what you can do. So I. We had a couple of days of a parade, and I said, will you, the actors, go home and ask your mothers about your birth stories?

I didnt know what wed get. And so they came back and they had their birth stories, and I invited in a two midwives, Jerrys, israeli midwives, and an Arab Palestinian.

They would work together and quite closely. Only Mindy, the Jewish form, was actually able to come. And she arrived with a model of an emerging fetus and a pelvis.

And she taught us the six cardinal movements of gerhs. And this midwife started doing this very beautiful lesson on childbirth. She just said, this is what happens.

The head tucks and the shoulder moves and the other rectifies to get out the very narrow opening of the pelvis. And so, boy, the rehearsal room was different that day.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah, I bet.

Billy Yalowitz

Right? And I think it's what Muhammad was intuiting.

And so then we choreographed a kind of interim section of the piece, which was the actors birth narratives while they were dancing, the six cardinal movements. And it was quite beautiful. And there were tears and a different kind of laughter, and the connection was made.

And I said, mohammed, what do you think? He said, please keep going with this. What's next? Enormous generosity in that man here. I'm an american jew. I don't speak Arabic or Hebrew.

And the play was in Arabic and Hebrew, back and forth, self translating.

I don't know if I would advise this or maybe something as foolhardy as trying to do that, to have an outside perspective, which is one of the things I think we can offer in our work. Right. When you come to a community that's not your own, and you're checking to see if you're completely opposing something or not.

But Mohammed said, keep going with this. And on our way out of working with us, the midwives said to Muhammad, as I was doing this workshop with you all, something came up.

There's something called twin twin transfusion syndrome. And I think you make the interesting to you.

This is when in utero, fraternal twins are in separate amniotic sacs and one of them gets all of the fluid and nourishment and one doesn't get almost anything.

Six Actors Actress 1

Yeah, we can see that there is.

An uneven sharing of blood between these two babies. The amount of oxygen and nutrition going to one twin. The donor twin is much less than to the other, the receiver twin.

This is called twin twin transfusion syndrome. The

Six Actors Actress 2

receiver twin develops heart problems from having excess blood more than her heart can handle.

Shaden Abu Alisal

The Donor twin is stuck against the uterine wall, starving. There is very little fluid in her amniotic sac.

Billy Yalowitz

And there is Israel in Palestine right there.

But it goes further than that in that the larger trim is called the recipient twin can die of a heart attack from having too much blood, too much pressure.

And I thought, this is what happens to a national group that has not healed from its own trauma and is receiving too much without having resolved that trauma and is depriving the other group of its national self determination. The donor twin, the smaller twin often is born stronger spiritually, you would say, but malnourished. And I thought, here's our story, Muhammad.

Can we do something with that? And so we create two midwife characters on top of the six actors in the title, and the play transforms, and the group can buy into that.

In other words, we had to come away from the immediate narrative and bring in both the story from the Quran and from the Torah about Jacob and Esau, the struggle in the womb. And so that process showed some promise of what happens when you go into an emergent rehearsal trajectory.

Where you come in, you're aware, but you might be opposing. You see what's happening and you think, can I make it kind of an intervention here that will help move this thing forward? And it did.

And we rewrote the play Muhammad and I together, including back narratives and including movement sequences, where one of the palestinian performers and one of the Jewish israeli performers did a series of movement duets of the in utero twins, including a recent medical intervention where the enlarged, distorted twin can receive an injection in their thigh to immobilize them such that the blood vessels can be equalized between the two amniotic sacs. Right? And if you know the story of Jacob, you know that there's an injury to the thigh there in order to reconcile with the twin. And so there it was.

And that became part of the performance.

Most of those families lived in the north of Nusra, which was receiving Hezbollah's fire and returning back and forth between israeli fire and rehearsal, almost stroked down. But we were able to through it by giving these actors a chance to just talk about how scared they were.

Bill Cleveland

Here is israeli actor Narik Parente talking about this tension

Narik Parente

I felt in this. World that I have to keep to be in my side because there is a war outside, okay? And in that way, you can never.

Really listen or you can never really hurt the other side. And so that was very, very hard. But we did break it through and we did go through it eventually.

So I think this is the most important process that I've been through is to open my mind and to really listen and to understand that there are things that have to be changed in Israel. And this is my way to do that.

Billy Yalowitz

And there were tears and they could recognize that the mutuality. There was the fear of what it's like to live at a warzone.

And we broke through that. The play continued.

Bill Cleveland

Here. Palestinian Shaddin Abu Alas reflects on how the project impacted her.

Shaden Abu Alisal

In this process that I have here. get back my faith that if. You are more close to people, if you get a more friends, if you are your relationship, you and the one. That is supposed to be your enemy.

Is more personal and human, then he. Has the ability to understand you and to understand your pain.

Billy Yalowitz

With the formidatoram Israel, we brought it to the United States and the palestinian performers were reluctant at many stages of the piece and understandably so that their story wouldn't be co opted. The term that I think rigidly gets used now is, oh, this is normalizing something by allowing some cultural process to go on.

And the Palestinians said, we're aware that we would be accused of this, but we've got real relationships now. And the art process allows us to keep reaching for commonality, joint humanity.

And I bet that play could not have be written, rehearsed or performed at this point.

But I would take a stand by saying, and I don't know how they would feel about it, but that whatever very thin grades of possibility there are for those kinds of relationships through the arts to be picked up and regenerated. Therein lies part of how art contributed to what at this point is. It's called intractable. It gets called all these things.

But, you know, I just grieve. My heart can break through both sides every given day. And if your heart isn't breaking from the other side, then you're lost.

And there are people, Palestinians and Jewish Israelis who continue in that tradition and are the really blessed are the peace builders and they continue, and their stories are not lifted up. And combatants for peace, the bereaved family swarm standing together. Many more continue that work. And our media is giving us those stories.

And they're not some sentimental, idealistic vestige. They're at the core of how the arts could be part of that. And activism and the arts are so much of the same fiber.

Bill Cleveland

Obviously, these are moments that harden hearts in the worst possible way.

And when you talk about the, the metaphor and the reality of the twin, twin scenario, if I were a parent of those twins, right, there's no perfect option here. You grieve for both. You fear for both your being and their being are intrinsically connected.

And to my mind, these are the kinds of things that we need to transcendental the fog of trauma which create rage and the need for revenge. That is cyclic. That's an incredible story.

So, one of the reasons I do this is to shine a light on the obviously wonderful things that people do that are celebratory and affirming, but also shine a light in the trenches on the hard and crazy work that is bringing the power, the creative process, to the places where humans are at their worst. And this is one of them. And it's very important work. Part five land Amnesia so, cutting to the current time, Billy, what are you up to now?

Billy Yalowitz

Retiring. This is my last year at Tyler's community Arts practices program. And what I'm finding is that my practice has become about writing.

And in the last three or four years of my teaching, I began to focus on climate justice and on the destruction of the climate by this economy. And so I began to teach about it as I was learning about it.

And what I had understood about community of origin being essential to young artists, being able to do risk electives were I clumsily at first, probably still tried to apply that to climate work.

And so what is inspiring me now is about the process of human communities reconnecting with a deep intergenerational coexistence with land, with place. And so I've been doing my own work on that. I was very inspired by the work with the students on theirs, which was teaching me.

And so I'm writing about intergenerational connection to that place, learning how to be, to steward that land, and continuing to steward the cultural practices of that place. And telling those stories also not only golden sprints, but getting to know the many other communities that did exist.

Many of them were closed down, you could say, demographic sources. A lot of them were forces of repression and state violence, partyism that wiped out a number of them. There are pogroms that happen in these places.

Those stories are now being told.

But the beauty and joy in those communities and in my own, and the excavation of what that culture was, how it connects to contemporary Jewish practices, for me, that there's this gulf between the secular and the judaic or religious, that is it of interest to me. I experiencing and writing about that without disavowing as secular, so richer than I can hope for body of work that Chirac has tried to follow.

Bill Cleveland

So what I hear you saying here, first it's a personal journey, and then it's a community journey. And I have to say your vulnerability in describing it really shows up with power.

And particularly when you talk about how so many communities in the world have been cut off from the sacred places that are so critical to them. Land amnesia, I think you call it, that we're all suffering from.

Billy Yalowitz

Yeah. And using the tools that I have, what kind of contribution can I make and how do I experience it physically?

Either that restoring skills that I grew up learning and then put aside carpentry, agriculture, working class trees that my people were involved with, and also placing the story of my particular people within the context of every community which has been separated from its land and what kind of tower resides, what do people do? Reconnect. And to put the Jewish story in relation to those.

Bill Cleveland

So are there any books, works of art that have just really made an impression upon you?

Billy Yalowitz

I just finished the Ace Room by Jennifer Cabot, a memoir of belonging in rebellion. I think that milkweed press is really good here. That's where I first encountered braiding sweetgrass, which rightfully is a very important work.

Here I go back again and again to all Paul Robeson's story. The whole world in his hands by his granddaughter, who I was one of my counselors. Camp thorough. Susan Robeson is a wonderful story.

He was prophetic and powerful and won a story of our resilience with him. So anything about all Robeson stories about the artists of the WPA go online and see a film called Native Land and of this time.

Bill Cleveland

So thank you for spending this time and for your incredible work. Billy and Bill, I want to thank.

Billy Yalowitz

You for such a thoughtful space you make for so many of us to tell our story.

Bill Cleveland

Yeah, and it's stories like yours that provide the inspiration and wisdom that fuels this show, that and the folks who listen in, who we really appreciate.

And if you out there have a person or a story or a topic that you think would be a good fit for a change the story episode, let us know@billtrtandcommunity.com. dot change the story, change the world is a production of the center for the Study of art and community.

Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hands of the maestro, Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of ook 235.

So until next time, stay well, do good, and spread the good word. And once again, please know that this episode has been 100% human. Oh, yeah.

And lastly, I know you know this, but in case you've been in a coma or hiding under a rock for the past few months, one of the biggest and most consequential stories in the world is about to begin a new chapter, and we need all of our fingerprints on the page as it turns. So vote, vote, vote.