Director’s Statement

Looking Back Over 25 Years

This year marks my 25th at Roadside and in grassroots theater. In 1975, my colleagues and I had expectations of reinvigorating the national popular theater movement of the first half of the century.

In 1976, we co-founded Alternate ROOTS (Regional Organization of Theaters South) as a rallying point for grassroots artists and managers in the southeast. In its first decade, ROOTS membership grew from a handful to several hundred.

In 1980, Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) veteran John O'Neal and I were figuring out something to be called the American Festival Project as a national grassroots instigator. We launched the portable festival in 1981 in San Francisco with a month-long, intercultural happening that featured, among many others, Junebug Productions, A Traveling Jewish Theatre, Roadside, and El Teatro Campesino.

Having established Alternate ROOTS and the American Festival Project, both with the financial help of the federal government's National Endowment for the Arts, Expansion Arts Program, we began studying how to enter the international discourse about the performing arts.

In 1987, the Reagan administration pulled the United States out of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Partially in response, and through the leadership of Marta Moreno Vega, we established the Global Network for Cultural Rights. The first years of the network's thinking about international cultural rights is captured in the book, Voices from the Battlefront, Achieving Cultural Equity (New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1993).

We hoped that ROOTS, the American Festival Project, and the Global Network for Cultural Rights would help create a critical mass of energy for grassroots art. 1975 to 1987 was a time of great expectations.

The culture policy we advocated postulated that cultural diversity is the world's strength; self-determination is important to the vitality of all cultures; cultural creativity is a dynamic force for communication, especially important across the lines that can divide and when voices have been silenced by the abuse of power, custom, and self-censorship; and access to the best cultural examples, to educational opportunities, to audiences, to informed criticism, and to material support is necessary for any culture to flourish.

As anyone reading this knows first hand, disappointments followed grassroots practitioners through the '90s. Different factors, trends, forces eroded our hopes to create a level playing field where our nation's many cultures could support, learn, and compete with each other. To my view, most harmful to our cause is the inability of the National Endowment for the Arts, bludgeoned by the Right, to any longer provide leadership on the issue of cultural diversity and inclusion. Like the federal Justice Department during the 1960's struggle for racial equality, the National Endowment for the Arts was often a reluctant advocate for cultural equity. But it was the best we had. And within the Endowment, as within the Justice Department, there were some genuine heroes who made a difference.

Now as the culture debates appear to be, at least temporarily, winding down and the various sides calculate the score, we in the grassroots, popular theater movement must find novel ways to connect with our constituency, including the millions of people who believe that the National Endowment for the Arts never touches their lives through the work that it supports. Our job is to bring audiences theater worthy of the emotional and intellectual depth of their experience.

—Dudley Cocke
Director, Roadside Theater

Mar. 2004 Statement
Aug. 2002 Statement