By Dinah Zeiger

Inside Arts, The Journal of The Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Nov/Dec 1999.

I looked up the word "story" in the American Heritage Dictionary recently to see exactly what it meant because I remember my Grandma warning me not to tell stories - meaning fibs - about what I had been up to down in the cellar. I especially like the fact that "story" derives from a Greek work signifying a "learned man," which I also take to include learned woman, since women are most often the keepers of family histories.

I was interested because I'd just spent a weekend at Arizona State University hearing stories - stories of misunderstanding and loneliness, of longing and desire, tall tales and moral fables. Some were told by children, others by grandparents; some were danced, others sung, a few were presented on dressed sets, and some were told from a simple circle of chairs. These stories, told as part of ASU's Untold Stories Festival: Celebrating Campus and Community, had the directness and urgency of truth, opening windows onto lives about which I knew nothing.

The three-day festival, which took place April 9-11, 1999, capped several years of planning, workshops, college classes and community productions presented by ASU's Division of Public Events and the American Festival Project.

The partners conceived the festival as a kind of border crossing, a way to explore the small traditions and personal experiences of those who inhabit the diverse communities within and outside the university in Tempe. It was planned on a grand scale, with five professional theatre companies committing two years to working with 15 community groups, culminating in a weekend story-telling extravaganza.

Why tell stories? Flash back to 1963 and the civil rights movement. Out of that turmoil sprang the Free Southern Theater, a Mississippi troupe that used stories to provoke a moral conscience. The theater slowly faded away, but the need for such stories didn't.

"It was still important to get our stories out to the people," says John O'Neal, founder and artistic director of Junebug Productions, one of the professional companies working with the festival and heir to the Free Southern Theater. "We had to keep talking, we had to keep on telling our stories. They're a means of improving the quality of life."

"Telling," says art historian Lucy Lippard, "is the process of understanding and drawing strength from one's past, one's cultural history, beliefs and values." History tells us that the 1930s to 1960s weren't easy years for African-Americans in the United States in regard to the big issues of equality and justice. But the small stories of personal experience told during the Untold Stories Festival packed a bigger wallop than a history reading. So, we winced when Laura Dungee Harris, who graduated from Carver-Phoenix Union Colored High School, class of 1936, described how she and her classmates were practically invisible to the white students at Phoenix Union High School. But this made it possible to more genuinely share Hattie Day Colbert's (class of 1954) delight at being the official "frog monitor" and her pride as the women's ROTC platoon sergeant.

Following someone else's intricate map of reality can be unsettling. Which Way Productions, three Native American women from the Gila River and Ak-Chin reservations who performed at the festival, poked fun at the "Spirit of Do-Do," that impulse to be perfect by doing more. But then they ripped our hearts out with a story, read as a letter, that grimly reminded us of the toll alcohol takes on Native populations.

This is a different - and difficult - kind of theater, one that doesn't lend itself easily to marketing campaigns and traditional audiences. It's risky business for presenting organizations, but the long-term payoff may be a whole new audience, empowered by a sense of cultural ownership and awareness.

Colleen Jennings-Roggensack, director of ASU Public Events, is a true believer in the power of art to transform communities. She'd seen it work in a similar collaboration between American Festival Project and Dartmouth College in 1992, and she brought the concept with her when she came to Arizona State University seven years ago. The festival was less about filling seats, although that was important, than it was about opening and continuing a dialogue. "I think that the festival is a non-elitist look at culture [rather than] art," she says.

The American Festival Project is no stranger to this kind of grassroots theater. Its members, who are professional touring companies as well as individual performers, have been traveling the country for the past 16 years using culture and the arts to foster social change. Performers work within communities, teasing out individuals and their stories and weaving them into a shared sense of history. Past projects have included residencies at Cornell University as well as at Dartmouth.

Under Jennings-Roggensack's guidance, Public Events produces some 500 events a year at three venues and through community outreach efforts. Although many of ASU's students are working adults who live in the area, town and gown don't mingle much. That's not to say the university is invisible. With 41,000 students, the university is definitely a presence in Tempe. "But it's a very big, very diverse community," Jennings-Roggensack says.

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