Receive, Reorganize, Return: Theatre as Creative Scholarship

Using the Stage to Heighten and Direct Attention

The first theatrical principle noted above is fundamental to all of our work: theatre can both heighten and direct attention to dynamics that are often ignored or difficult to discern in daily life. One of our goals in the theatre program is to help educators pay attention to the ways they interact with others in their professional lives because the details of these interactions play a fundamental role in shaping climate in institutions of higher education. We use theatre’s intrinsic capacity to focus attention in order to highlight the texture and tone of these professional interactions. In doing so, we introduce our audiences to information and concepts drawn from research on higher education, which, despite its central focus on the academic environments they work in, most faculty are only marginally aware of. This theatrical dissemination is not, however, tantamount to the staging of a full scholarly argument/analysis. Instead, we use theatre’s spotlighting power to draw attention to the data on which this research is based by presenting behaviors identified in the literature as key factors in the creation of negative climate.

Before saying more about how we capitalize on that theatrical power in our work, it is important to explain why directing attention to these data is so necessary. Although environments in higher education have, over many years, arguably become less hospitable to overt displays of racism and sexism, marginalizing behaviors have certainly not been eradicated in these settings. In what many call a “post racial” or “post feminist” academy, bias has, in many instances, transitioned from the explicitly hostile to the implicitly chilly. While some dismiss the call to attend to these more subtle forms of biased behavior as an over extension of political correctness that privileges a culture of victimhood (e.g., Campbell & Manning, 2015), a range of scholarship has compellingly argued that small, negatively inflected interactions can have a significant detrimental impact on the experiences and success of members of underrepresented minority groups. In Why So Slow, for instance, Virginia Valian (1998) marshals an interdisciplinary set of data to argue that the recurrence of implicitly biased behaviors in academia results in the accumulation of a measurable advantage for men and disadvantage for women. Framing her work on the experience of women in the academy around the analogy of “lifting a ton of feathers,” Paula Caplan (1993) similarly points to the challenges created by the accrual of these kinds of microaggressions for female academics and, by implication, for all members of underrepresented minorities working in academe.

As Derald Wing Sue (2004) has highlighted, however, it is not just the accumulated figurative weight of such microaggressions that makes them challenging for the individuals at whom they are leveled. It is their relative invisibility. Perspective is created, he reminds his reader, not only by what is seen but also by what is not seen. Identity based microaggressions, he argues, are largely invisible to those situated within a dominant culture because “people are conditioned and rewarded for remaining unaware and oblivious of how their beliefs and actions may unfairly oppress people of color, women, and other groups in society” (Sue, 2004, p. 767). This conditioned invisibility, paired with its attendant lack of malicious intent and ignorance of negative emotional impact, makes microaggressions particularly powerful tools of structural oppression, helping maintain an institutional status quo of inequity. This is true partly because those who call attention to widely unnoticed dynamics or patterns are susceptible to the charge that they are overly sensitive or seeking special treatment. In addition, their relative invisibility also makes implicit bias and microaggressions especially difficult to address at an institutional level. How, after all, can an institution effectively promote inclusive behaviors when a majority of its population cannot see their own marginalizing behavior or its impact? And if seeing this behavior and its personal and professional fallout is necessary to creating more inclusive climates, how can an institution enhance visibility, especially for the members of its community who have limited access because of their own identities and experiences?

Though it is obviously not the only answer to this question, the Players have found their response in theatre. Theatre encourages a particular kind of attention that is especially well suited for making visible what in “real life” is often invisible. Placing any action onstage heightens our awareness of and ability to attend to it. In theatre studies, the example of walking is often deployed to illustrate this dynamic of the spectatorial experience. Walking is, for people whose bodies are able to move through the world in this way, such a habitual part of their experience that they rarely attend consciously to their own or others’ bodies as they walk. Think about all of the people who have walked by you in the past week. How often have you attended to the complex biomechanics that propelled their bodies through space or to the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s gait? These kinds of observations have likely not occupied much of your conscious attention, although they have probably shaped your impressions of these bodies in complicated ways you did not realize. Think now about a figure walking across an empty stage. This theatrical action demands attention in a way that its quotidian analog does not, prompting viewers to more consciously form ideas about the person’s life experiences, attitudes, intentions, moral state, and so forth. Staged in a proscenium theatre, this action would have a literal frame around it that would direct visual attention to the movement contained within. Yet, even without this architectural direction, spectators attend to actions occurring in a theatrical context differently from those in daily life because they realize that these actions have been put before them for the explicit purpose of being viewed and, in some sense, deliberately analyzed.

Curated in a way that daily interactions are not, theatre prompts spectators to see and consider what they might otherwise not see at all. As a mode of dissemination, it also operates differently than more traditional forms of scholarship because it removes a level of abstraction and translation. The data that theatrical spectators engage with in a Players performance are concrete because they are embodied. Although staging invites interpretation, it does not require the audience to imagine behaviors based simply on a description (and their own experiences or imaginative ability) as reading a written text would. Audiences can hear actors’ inflections, see their proximity to other performers, and even follow their lines of sight. As such, all session attendees have access to shared referents.

In the case of No Offense, the capacity of dramatic dissemination to allow shared viewing is particularly valuable as the behaviors being considered are often only available to those directly involved in these challenging situations, a limitation that, especially when paired with the privacy surrounding investigations, typically disallows full community engagement. Interestingly, with theatre’s ability to make behavior visible, the artistic challenge often becomes how to make newly visible behavior not seem obvious. Knowing that our audiences are resistant to overly broad or heavy handed representations, we worked in building this piece to balance the need to make biased behaviors visible while also honoring the truly subtle nature of microaggressions. Below, we describe how we opted to negotiate that challenge.

The second section of the sketch begins with a voiceover pulled from one of Virginia Valian’s talks. As the actors take their positions onstage, the audience hears Valian say,

The next eight scenes depict the kinds of “tiny little problems” that many female graduate students in STEM fields report experiencing in lab environments. This sequence of short scenes calls the audience to consider whether such challenges can or should be ignored. Each scene presents an example of a potentially problematic behavior of the faculty advisor, Carpenter, toward his student Kiana that might escape notice or censure in its quotidian context. Carpenter refers to Kiana off handedly as a girl. He brings her—and only her—a cup of coffee. He arrives early knowing she will be alone in the lab. He leans just a bit too close to her as he looks at an image on her computer (see Figure 1). Each scene ends immediately after the possibly offensive behavior has been introduced. In this way, behaviors that would normally be invisible, or at least easily overlooked, are made more visible through the very brevity of the scenes that depict them.

Figure 1. In the Foreground, Carpenter (Loren Bass) Invades Kiana’s (Helki Jackson) Personal Space. In the Background, Courtney (Rochelle Clark) and Joel (Matios Simonian) Work on a Project Unaware of Their Labmate’s Discomfort. (Photo taken by Pamela Fisher and reprinted with permission.)

Removed from the less charged interactions that would surround these small acts in situ, the structure of this presentation spotlights the behavior we want the audience to consider. This staging identifies the behavior as important, theatrically encouraging the audience to attend to it. Similarly, the impact of these kinds of behaviors is made visible by another kind of theatrical curation. Although the series of eight scenes presented in this section represents interactions (as indicated by projected slides between scenes) that have occurred over the course of a year, they take up less than 10 minutes of theatrical time. This artificial proximity anticipates the dismissive response that women in these spaces often encounter when they are exhorted not to make a mountain out of a molehill, allowing the audience to vicariously see and feel the weight of these accumulated disadvantages. Valian argues that, “Mountains are molehills, piled one on top of the other,” and by wresting these behavioral molehills from the kind of timeline in which they would typically occur, we prime the audience to see a mountain that may have, until that time, been visible only to those who had to climb it (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011).

Indeed, this is a common revelation for many viewers who have seen this sketch and participated in the facilitated discussion that accompanies it. In both the discussion and in formal feedback collected after the session, participants frequently report that seeing these actions presented in a condensed theatrical format has allowed them to understand the damaging potential of behaviors that they would have previously dismissed as harmless. Presented with an embodied representation of the data, they draw conclusions about the negative impact of subtle discrimination that often align with arguments made in the scholarship on implicit bias. It is important to note, however, that this kind of dramatization of implicit bias holds value not only for those who have never before noticed or attended to the “data” we present. For example, women who have encountered subtle gender bias have indicated that they feel validated in seeing their experiences made visible to others. By showing that these slights are not figments of their imagination or a mark of their hypersensitivity, this depiction, they gratefully acknowledge, captures the mental, physical, and emotional toll that bias has taken on them and others they know.

Presenting Multiple Perspectives on Complex Topics

Using theatre to present embodied research data also allows us to honor the complexity of the problem that we have been tasked with investigating. While a central difficulty of implicit bias is its relative invisibility, the dimensions of the problem of identity based bias in higher education extend well beyond the potential invisibility of subtle behaviors to include a much broader set of interpersonal, cultural, and institutional challenges. Shared visibility, after all, does not presume shared interpretation or shared agreement on appropriate response.

To be most useful to the audiences we serve, it is necessary to develop scripts that honor such complexity and acknowledge multiple ways of thinking about difficult issues. Since we ask those who attend our sessions to collaboratively generate strategies that might productively address the problems we pose, we are careful to avoid overly simplistic depictions. To identify useful behaviors, processes, and structures that participants or their institutions might adopt, participants must work from recognizable problems that are realistically complicated. In order to present our audiences with such recognizably fraught scenarios, we begin the sketch development process by gathering data, not only reviewing relevant scholarship but also conducting extensive interviews with people on campus who have firsthand experience with the issues being explored. This interview process helps us identify the full contours of a given problem as well as the particular points where anxieties and tensions emerge: that is, the places our audiences are most likely to feel stuck and would therefore benefit from a structured collaborative process for considering the problem in its full complexity.

In the case of No Offense, one theme that emerged in our conversations with faculty, graduate students, and administrators was a lack of consensus across and even within roles about how, or even whether, subtle cases of gender bias should be addressed. While no one we spoke with denied the occurrence of blatant sexual harassment, these were not the kind of incidents that our interview subjects struggled with the most. As unfortunate and stressful as such cases of blatant harassment are, our interlocutors generally felt there was a shared understanding on campus that behavior of this sort was unacceptable, and they generally agreed that the institution has appropriate procedures in place for addressing transgressions that undeniably create a hostile climate. Most of the people we spoke with, however, had a different perspective on behaviors that fell into what seemed to them a grayer area: for instance, an advisor whose enthusiasm about a given student’s academic work is expressed in ways that seem to her or her labmates erotically charged but who never directly communicates any interest in a sexual relationship with the student; a faculty member who regularly asks questions about a student’s weekend plans or other aspects of her personal life; or an advisor who (to cite a recent widely publicized example that occurred on a different campus) seems to be trying to look down his female advisee’s blouse whenever they discuss her work. Our interviewees indicated there was lack of agreement within their departmental communities as to whether such ambiguous, well intentioned, or “micro” transgressions were, indeed, problems that even needed to be addressed. The majority also noted at least some degree of confusion about the institution’s policies around such behaviors and, for faculty, their own responsibilities to those policies.

This murkiness was exacerbated by differential awareness (largely correlated to the gender of the respondent) of how frequently such incidents of subtle bias or sexualization of the professional relationship occur as well as different understandings of their emotional impact. While “clear” cases of sexual harassment could be met with decisive action, they asserted, there was no such similarly apparent path forward in this more nebulous territory. Questions our interview subjects wrestled with included: What will happen if a report is made? What are the professional and personal stakes of reporting—for all parties? Will reporting actually change behavior or cultural attitudes? Should these kinds of behavior be punished or sanctioned? Is education a more appropriate response? What responsibilities do I have to particular students, to students generally, and to my colleagues around this issue? What are the boundaries of my responsibility? Do they extend beyond my lab? Beyond my own department?

With a greater appreciation for the thorniness of the problem we were investigating, the challenge then became how to communicate that complexity to our audiences. How to lay out the contours of an issue at least partially shaped by conflicting perspectives on what would constitute an appropriate response to a problem that not everyone even recognizes as such? An additional challenge was how to efficiently honor these tensions, tensions that became clear in our analysis of over 10 hours of interviews. Because our audiences have limited time for professional development activities, Players sessions are typically only 90–120 minutes long, and that session necessarily includes both time to develop greater awareness of the problem and time for crowd sourced strategy generation.

Theatre, again, offers the tools to meet the challenges of disseminating this kind of research. The presentation of characters who hold differing identities, experiences, and opinions allows those who participate in our sessions quick access to the matrix of problems related to creating more inclusive climates and cultures. Placing a set of characters together in action around a problem allows us to show the various facets of that problem rather than relying on a presenter—or a written text—to describe them. In the case of No Offense, we were able to quickly convey key takeaways from our research by creating four characters that captured a range of understandings of and relationships to gender bias:

1. COURTNEY, an advanced graduate student. Although Courtney has limited personal experience encountering gender bias in her own working/learning environment, she is well aware of the kinds of issues her peers at other institutions have faced. Gender bias has, from her perspective, an undeniably negative impact on women in STEM, but she believes that there is little redress available to individuals who find themselves the target of these kinds of behavior.

2. KIANA, a graduate student new to the lab. Kiana has experienced gender based microaggressions outside of the university and feels confident in knowing how to respond in these settings. She is disheartened when she encounters behavior that makes her uncomfortable in her own lab, however, and is unsure what she should do given the power differential between her and her advisor. We made the dramaturgical decision to include two women with quite different perspectives in this sketch in order to unsettle any assumptions that all women experience gender bias in the same way. We also intentionally choose to cast actors of visibly different races or ethnicities in these two parts to emphasize the ways in which intersectional identities can affect women’s experience of discrimination in academic settings.

3. JOEL, an advanced graduate student. Joel is surprised to learn about the issues that women in his field face and believes there must be structures in place to protect and assist them. He would like to be supportive of his female colleagues but does not know the best way to do that, so he relies on jokes to dispel his own discomfort when subjects like these come up in the lab.

4. CARPENTER, the faculty advisor of the students above. Carpenter is described by other characters as a “good guy.” He tries hard to make personal connections with his advisees. He recognizes that he is sometimes awkward in social interactions but is completely unaware of the ways his behavior is affecting Kiana or the dynamics in the lab more generally.

When set into motion within a focused scenario, these characters allow session participants to see quickly what makes implicit bias such a fraught problem, especially for individuals who are members of underrepresented minority groups and/or negatively affected by unequal power dynamics. With access to aural and visual information in the form of dialogue, stage positioning, and body language, spectators can begin to identify the complex terrain of the problem under consideration in minutes (see Figure 2). The sketch economically illustrates that people interpret the same behavior differently, that intent differs from reception, and that the question of whether a student in Kiana’s position should say nothing, express her discomfort to her advisor, report the behavior to someone else, or leave the lab altogether is very much a live one.

Figure 2. Three Graduate Students Discuss the Treatment of Women at a Recent STEM Conference. From Left, Helki Jackson as Kiana, Rochelle Clark as Courtney, and Matios Simonian as Joel. (Photo taken by Pamela Fisher and reprinted with permission.)

Importantly, the interplay of these characters also allows audience members multiple points of identification. Our dramaturgical choices invite empathy with any number of perspectives or positions, allowing us to humanize several data points and thereby represent the messy human complexity of the issue(s) we are investigating. Because all four characters are drawn sympathetically, they provide different pathways to the consideration of the problem. Attention focused on any character’s actions and attitudes can be leveraged into a productive discussion of what might be done to create a more inclusive environment at the disciplinary, departmental, or lab level. This is another reason we believe that avoiding oversimplification of the problem in our work is essential. Since neither Carpenter nor Joel is a stereotypical, one dimensional, mustache twirling “bad” guy, they, and by extension the questions posed by the sketch, cannot be easily dismissed as attempts to vilify or sanctify along gender lines. While the piece does not shy away from showing the detrimental effects of marginalizing behavior and most definitely does not offer absolution for it, it does offer a way for male audience members to enter into dialogue less defensively than they might with less nuanced character depictions. It is from this less guarded position that those who attend a No Offense session can begin or continue to try to identify ways to understand, anticipate, and respond to gender based tensions that are created when damage is done to a woman in the absence of malicious intent or in spite of benevolent motivation.

Casting the Audience in the Roles of Critical Observer and Active Participant

Through this presentation of, and invitation to, empathy with multiple perspectives, theatre allows us to minimize the “agonism” that Deborah Tannen (2000) has argued is “endemic to academe.” Tannen proposes that academic culture frames scholarly exchange as a “battle” that casts scholars in adversarial positions that “[require] us to position our work in opposition to someone else’s which we prove wrong” through tendencies to oversimplify and misrepresent alternative viewpoints. By staging multiple perspectives as reasonable and leaning into rather than away from the complexity of the problems we consider, our performances anticipate and counteract such agonistic habits of critique. Realizing it is neither possible nor useful, however, to disrupt all of our audience’s analytical habits, we have identified ways to productively channel their laudable commitment to and considerable skill with critical modes of engagement. We do this by positioning the audience so that they can, at least initially, inhabit a familiar critical stance.

For theatre artists, the audience is the final role in any production. Playwrights and directors intentionally hail their audiences into particular relationships to the work that they create. In our sketches, such audience positioning is accomplished through a combination of scriptwork, staging, and facilitator framing. Although the specifics of the audience’s role vary depending on the sketch being performed (and the identified goals of the sponsoring organization), the trajectory of audiences within our sessions typically follows a predictable arc. Most often, our audience members are initially cast in the role of critical observer but are eventually called into a more active relationship to the characters and scenario. This spectatorial shift runs parallel to the basic shape of our sessions, which move, broadly speaking, from issue identification to strategy generation.

As critical observers, audience members are asked to attend to and reflect upon what they see in the scenario(s) they are presented with. Prompted by a facilitator who guides their work in the session, they are asked to note their observations of and responses to the interactions they witness. This prompting positions audience members as ethnographers of a sort. Coming from within academia but freed of their typical responsibilities to it, audience members are insiders granted temporary outsider status so that they might gain a different perspective on the academic environments within which they typically operate. They can observe a familiar situation, informed by their own past experiences, but they have no control over the ways in which events unfold and no responsibility for the eventual outcome. Their only responsibility lies in attending to the dynamics that play out before them. On its face, the impact of observing a familiar situation from a position outside of the action may seem negligible. Consider, though, the attentional difference between teaching a class and observing someone else teach. Immersed in the act of teaching, one’s attention is necessarily split between oneself and one’s students. As educational development professionals often know well from first hand experience, one’s attention as an observer is qualitatively different. Outside of existing classroom relationships and instructional responsibilities, we can see differently and probably see more. In a similar way, by explicitly positioning session participants as critical observers, we allow them to see in new ways the interactions we present, further amplifying the stage’s ability to heighten and direct attention. Situated in this way, audience members can begin to identify, from their own perspective, the issues that underlie or contribute to the problem that they have been asked to consider.

Our work, however, never stops at this point. Greater awareness of barriers to inclusivity and equity is, we believe, valuable, but it can also be counterproductively demoralizing if no strategies for reducing those barriers are explored. We never want our message to be, “Yeah, this is tough. Good luck with that.” Yet we also do not want to abandon our commitment to active learning by simply presenting effective responses or identifying “best practices.” Because we believe generating strategies is as necessary as identifying issues—and know that strategies generated actively rather than received passively will be more meaningful and memorable to our audiences—we have found it beneficial to recast the audience during our sessions. After guiding participants through issue identification, our facilitators switch their mode of address, hailing audience members not as critical observers but as active participants in the situation being considered. In our classroom sketches, for instance, audience members are repositioned as consultants or coaches. As the session shifts from issue identification to strategy generation, they are tasked by the facilitator to use their observations as the basis of peer to peer coaching. They are charged with offering suggestions on what the observed instructor could do differently to create a more inclusive climate. In other sketches, audience members are literally invited to step into the action, to take a seat at the table, and to try to shift dynamics that they have identified as problematic.

In No Offense, the way we chose to transition the audience from critical observer to active participant was guided directly by a repeated concern that emerged in the interviews we conducted. Within the broader anxiety about interpretation of and response to subtle gender bias came a very specific concern about practices surrounding disclosure. For faculty and administrators, this concern manifested as significant uncertainty about the appropriate consequences of behavior such as Carpenter’s. For students, this concern took the form of frustration with the ways faculty, administrators, and peers had reacted when they disclosed discomfort with particular behaviors they had encountered in their academic/work environments. Focusing our attention on these connected, emotionally charged concerns in No Offense allowed us to create a productive way to move audience members into the role of active participants. We asked them to imagine that they were the faculty member with whom Kiana had chosen to share her concerns. While in the earlier sections of this sketch, the audience was asked to identify behaviors that might negatively affect the climate of the depicted environment, in this moment, the audience was asked how they would respond if Kiana came to them.

The play’s third and final act positions the audience in this way through a monologue. Kiana, alone on stage, speaks directly to the audience. As she talks, she gestures to the interactions that the audience has previously seen but provides them with new information as well. She apologizes. She feels that sharing this information will be a burden, and she admits that she is not even sure that she has chosen the right person to talk to. She tells of her efforts to ignore Carpenter’s behavior and to manage her own complicated reactions to it. She worries about how others will view her and how her actions, if she takes any, might affect her advisor. She speaks to her confusion, and she wonders if she should leave her lab or her program or maybe even the field. “I don’t know,” she says. “I just know that he makes me uncomfortable, and I’m tired of having to think about this. Am I being crazy? What am I supposed to do? Maybe I’m just not cut out for this.” And with these questions still hanging in the air, the lights fade down on Kiana, and the facilitator turns to the audience and asks, “What would you say to Kiana? What would you do in this moment? What would you do later? Is what you would do what you think you should do?”

Analogous in some ways to the “implications” section of a standard social science article, this final movement in No Offense seeks quite a different effect upon our audiences. Rather than simply proffering ways the foregoing data might be of use to the audience—in some sense, a gesture that seeks to comfort a reader or allay uncertainty—this monologue intentionally shifts the audience into a position of discomfort. We recognize that this shift from critical observer to active participant is a move into greater vulnerability for our audiences. It pulls them out of a critical stance that likely feels more familiar and comfortable into a space of high stakes engagement with another person’s direct appeal to their empathy, an appeal that, in its immediacy, is hard to dismiss as unimportant, whatever an individual hearer’s perspective on Kiana’s situation.

As facilitators, we recognize and respond to this vulnerability partly by prompting a collaborative process in which audience members consider together their options and responsibilities in the face of Kiana’s appeal. In pairs and as a group, the audience wrestles with the questions she has addressed to them. Now more familiar with the complex landscape of the problem and the stakes for all involved, the gravity of the impact of their potential responses is apparent. Together, they make suggestions about what should and should not be said and perhaps what even cannot be said. Participants talk about the importance of body language. They identify pertinent campus resources to share with the distressed student. They try to determine if a conversation with Carpenter would be appropriate or helpful. They learn about the protocols that other units have (or do not have) in place to address situations like this. They agree. They disagree. They enumerate the pros and cons of proposed solutions. There are no easy answers, they decide, and, as we will explain further below, we do not want them to experience the conversation as easy. Yet even in the midst of this acknowledged difficulty, their “toolbox” expands. Called to think concretely about how they would respond to a report of bias that did not clearly cross the threshold of harassment, the audience participates in a kind of dry run. The character of Kiana grounds their thinking in situational specificity and puts a human face on the other with whom they are invited into imagined dialogue. Kiana gives them the opportunity to rehearse a range of responses and to trace the effect of chosen actions through to their possible outcomes so that when they find themselves in front of an actual person reporting such concerns, they know—if not the perfect things to say and do—at least a range of possibilities of what might be said and done.

Theatrical Facilitation

Having outlined the frameworks that inform our thinking as we develop and present theatre for the purposes of faculty development, we turn our attention, in closing, to the facilitator’s role in our sessions. As we have already intimated, the influence of theatrical principles extends beyond our work in script development and performance, directly informing how we understand the function of the person who mediates the interactions between performance/performers and audience.

Although our theatre program’s sketches are typically tightly scripted, our sessions are necessarily improvisational. Because we invite participants’ active involvement but do not script their contributions, the facilitator must be prepared to meet the audience where they are, balancing intended learning objectives with the interests and insights audience members articulate in the moment. In this adaptability to an audience, our sessions share much with many other kinds of faculty development workshops but differ substantively from more conventional mechanisms for disseminating research, such as journal publications or conference presentations. This productive combination of similarity with and difference from existing forms is part of what makes our scholarship creative and also why “dissemination” does not fully capture the relationship we seek to develop among our research, our audience, and ourselves. Indeed, our goal is not simply to distribute research. Rather, we seek to engage in dialogue with our university stakeholders about the research we have conducted (or synthesized), and we recognize this dialogue as a generative process. Our sessions contribute not just to our audience’s understanding of the issues we are investigating but to our own as well. The research process, in other words, does not stop when script creation begins. It continues through the script development process, through previews and pilot performances, and through each subsequent presentation of “finished” material. In house, we even hesitate to designate any of the pieces in our repertoire as finished because all of our scripts evolve over time as we gather feedback from the actors and audiences who engage with them.

Moreover, our representations of climate shaping behaviors create a time and space for the sharing of stories and the collision of perspectives. Very often, this sharing and colliding produces interpersonal dynamics within the room that mirror and complicate those we present onstage, and those amplifications and complications add to our knowledge of the issues under consideration. Because we understand ourselves always to be gathering as well as sharing data, the openness we aim to develop in our facilitative style is not just about accommodation. It is about anticipating novelty and challenging ourselves to be with our audiences in meaningful ways each time we present a session.

Being open and responsive to the unexpected while working within a repeated structure is one of the fundamental challenges of theatrical performance. For an actor, the goal is not to repeat what one has done in an earlier performance—even if what was done was breathtakingly effective. As Constantin Stanislavski (1936) argued in his seminal An Actor Prepares, the goal of acting is not replication but living presence through continual creation. The actor who accepts this challenge commits to a kind of perpetual discovery. Each time she steps into a role, she meets her scene partners anew because she recognizes that what they bring to the stage today will not be exactly what they have brought before. As such, the others one engages with onstage become fascinating in their unpredictably, and awareness of the mercurial possibilities of these others is what tethers one firmly in the moment with them.

In his book Acting Through Exercises, John Gronbeck Tedesco (1992) suggests that this kind of attentive presence with another can be cultivated by focusing on the “Three R’s”: in this context, “receive, reorganize, and return” (pp. 93–95). In the receiving stage, an actor opens herself to her partners, reading both the what and how of their behavior. In the reorganizing stage, the actor determines what she will do with the information she has gathered. She lets that information shape her response, determining how much she will acquiesce to the other’s interests and objectives and how much energy she will put into pursuing her own. The final stage is the return, the moment of responding to the other, of returning information to them in a way that is fundamentally informed by what was received. After this, the cycle of give and take resets, creating, in the best of circumstances, a dynamic of mutual influence (Gronbeck Tedesco, 1992).

Like actors, our facilitators open themselves to their “scene partners,” the members of the audience, whose unpredictable contributions they expect and invite. This openness can be unsettling even for seasoned facilitators because true commitment to it requires acknowledging that on a basic level, one does not have absolute or even primary control of the conversation. As Gronbeck Tedesco cautions, “Contact [of this kind] is risky business.” It should not be confused, he asserts, “with the sort of generic good feelings associated with campfires, pep rallies, and some forms of group therapy” (Gronbeck Tedesco, 1992, pp. 83–84).

But it is not just risky for the facilitator; this kind of contact is precarious for the audience as well. The conversations that emerge in response to pieces like No Offense are challenging and very often uncomfortable, but their value lies, at least in part, in this very difficulty. We close with a final idea about performance that undergirds our firm belief that such difficulty is a necessary element of positive culture change. Performance theorist Diana Taylor (2003) has written extensively about the distinction between the “archive” and the “repertoire.” Where archive acts as a designation for artifacts that are imagined to have relative permanence (texts, buildings, bones), repertoire is used to describe more ephemeral embodied practice. Of the latter, she says, “The repertoire requires presence– people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission.” In our sessions, we work in tandem with our audiences to create a repertoire of pro social practices around diversity, inclusivity, and climate. The repertoire cultivated through our sessions is not, however, limited to the lists of strategies our audiences generate in response to the problems posed by our performances. It also includes the ways of being with each other that attendees at our sessions practice by engaging in difficult dialogues. From within these moments of difficulty and challenge, attendees have the opportunity to begin to develop habits of practice, habits that allow them to better understand others’ experiences, to articulate their own perspectives precisely, and to appreciate the productive potential of discomfort for shifting culture. We see this kind of repertoire development on a small scale when we perform at other campuses. At U M, where our events are a regular part of programming, we see a broader scale shift. By being open to what we receive from the members of our community, we are able to return to them a process and a product that contributes to a powerful reorganization of our campus culture.