Community-Building

The goal of Sovereign Song was to create a community and inspire community action. This was a lofty goal, considering the difficulty of tracing the direct origins of community action, such as policy change, protests, or simply starting discussions. However, we did successfully create a community with each performance. In keeping with McMillan and Chavis’s tenets for building a sense of community (1986), our community had membership, influence, fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connections. By investing emotional (and sometimes physical) labor in their membership to Elephant and Castle, audience members heightened the value of membership within the community. Each audience’s membership was signified by their Elephant and Castle ID cards, which were awarded halfway through the production. Community members also manifested their influence over the course of the performance by altering the narrative (such as choosing whether E&C remained a sovereign state), voicing their needs and priorities at key moments (like writing to the Prime Minister to explain why they deserved to live), and changing other audience members’ experience of the performance with their decisions (such as requiring the use of molotov cocktails, or disabling enemy troops in an area). The audience was fulfilled (or, in other words, received positive reinforcement) each time their suggestions or improvisations were accepted into the fabric of the production, and when their contributions were shared with the group. And finally, audiences shared emotional experiences through an exchange of ideas. By making an effort to remove political judgements from the production, and focusing the audience instead on productive action, we encouraged audiences to share their ideas of how best to move forward as a community. By fulfilling each of these tenets, Sovereign Song successfully created a new community each night.

However, over the course of my dissertation (Romeo, 2021), I concluded that Sovereign Song’s community most likely ended once the performance was over. After audience members left the tavern, we’ve had difficulty finding direct evidence that our production inspired audience members to enact meaningful change. But upon reflection, we realized we’ve been approaching our goals from the wrong perspective. As the morals of Sovereign Song imply, meaningful change is rarely accomplished individually. We realized that a single production rarely (if ever) sparks community action on its own; instead, it’s the collective efforts of the entire theatre community that inspires change. By contributing to a community of immersive theatre artists who are leading by example with their productions, with their management, and with their offstage actions, we are supporting and enriching a larger community. As I saw during the protests this past year, and as I encouraged within Sovereign Song, true community action comes from steadfast partnerships between allies with similar goals. Therefore, I see Sovereign Song as a brilliant success. Because we added our voice to the community of artists encouraging activism onstage, our production has become an access point for audiences to join the larger discussions within the theatrical activist community. In doing so, we became part of something greater than ourselves, and joined our community in the fight to inspire community change. And the community the we created through our production was one that members reported genuinely enjoying (as is evident from audience reviews), and took pride in creating. Our community was diverse (especially internationally), and celebrated the unique skills and perspectives each member had to offer. In creating a community of my own through Sovereign Song, I also found my place in a larger community, achieving my goal. Both CrushRoom and COLAB plan to continue their efforts to enrich the larger theatrical community, and hope to do so one performance at a time.

Bibliography

McMillan, D. and Chavis, D. (1986) Sense of community: a definition and theory. Journal of community psychology, 14.

Romeo, D. (2021) Crafting Audience Communities: How Can an Immersive Production be Used as a Community-Building Tool? Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.

Appendix A

Romeo, D. (2021) E&C Residency Permit, digital image, CrushRoom, London. 

Romeo, D. (2021) The Sovereign Song Community, digital image, CrushRoom, London.

Romeo, D. (2021) Sovereign Song Closing Night, digital image, CrushRoom, London.

Appendix B