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May 31, 2002
"Bill Rauch of the Cornerstone Theater Company"
An interview with Bill Rauch, Executive Director of Cornerstone Theater Company. Questions and answers will appear below starting at 1 pm EST on Friday, May 31. You may ask a question in advance by clicking on the "Submit a Question" button. Due to time constraints, not all questions will be answered. You may need to refresh your screen during the interview to read the most recent responses.
read background Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us for Leadership Talks. Today's guest is Bill Rauch, Artistic Director of Cornerstone Theater Company, and a 2001 Leadership for a Changing World awardee.
Bill, can you tell us why you started Cornerstone?
Bill Rauch
I wanted to be an actor as a kid, but in college I realized that whatever gifts I had really lay in directing plays. Over my four years in college, I got more and more frustrated that only a narrow percentage of people in the US went to professional theater. That was when my friends and I began to develop what became Cornerstone: to do plays for people who didn't normally go to them, never mind make them. The fact that the material for the plays would come directly out of the participants' lives, and that the plays might address local social problems, arose organically out of the work we did in collaboration with communities all over the country.
Hyattsville, MD
Please explain how you maintain the integrity and quality of "artistic expression" while at the same time consciously promoting social justice/social change.
Bill Rauch
I believe that all art is political and that there's a false dichotomy between artistic quality and social justice, social service. So to me trying to create the most dynamic art and trying to change the world are -- those are completely intertwined, both one and the same.
Topeka, KS
Your work is really inspiring! But how does your organization decide which issues to take on or which plays get made?
Bill Rauch
Although I exercise leadership as an artistic director, I am also a member of a consensus-run ensemble. Our ensemble decides collectively what projects we take on. Each time it is a different spark, a different inspiration. Sometimes it may be a community partner who will call us about a pressing issue in their particular community. Often it is the inspiration of one or more artists in the company that then gets shaped and changed by input from community partners. Our current faith-based work started as the idea of an actor in the company: she wanted us to deal head-on with issues of faith and intolerance because of faith differences, since that cropped up again and again in all our other work. Sitting in a circle during a day-long meeting, as soon as she said it, we all knew that it was the right set of challenges for us to take on next.
Loveland, Oh
Bill, One concept we are working on in WAM! Women, Arts & Media, is: "stories are our sacred texts." What methods do you and colleagues use with your participants to engender and identify the "valuable" or the "sacred" in the ordinary life/story? Note: we are not talking about religion here...but value of each person's life journey.
Best Regards,
Jan Taylor
Bill Rauch
What a beautiful observation. I completely agree with your premise. And in fact, one of the reasons that we have sometimes combined classic text with people's own stories is that people's everyday lives and everyday actions do have the magnitude of so-called great works of dramatic literature.
Hartford, CT
How do you address the challenge of working with community members who may not have formal training in theater?
Bill Rauch
We have always had a philosophy of training through the production process, you know, hands-on experience and through the production process. So while we may bring in somebody with a specific skill, for instance a vocal coach to work with community-based actors, our primary focus is to impart skills by rehearsing the play. Inclusion of professional artists, actors for instance, is a very important part of the mix because there are technical skills that they bring that help influence the work of the community-based actors. But ultimately, the community-based actors, for the most part, are being asked to be themselves on stage, not to transform themselves into people they're not.
Cooperstown, NY
Because you are in both the arts world and the community activism world, but your work is directly with the communities themselves, what type of interactions do you have with more traditional professionals in the arts world and with professional activists?
Bill Rauch
In our first five years we worked almost exclusively in small towns around the country and had almost no interaction with other professional theater makers. Over the last 10 years, in Los Angeles, we're part of a professional theater community. Also over these 10 years, we've been commissioned to do community-based projects at large regional theaters around the country. It's been exciting to redefine ourselves in relation to other professional theaters and also to constantly re-examine questions around quality with professional theater critics because critics weren't part of the mix with us for the first five years.
As for a relationship with other activists, one of the most thrilling parts of the Leadership for a Changing World program for me has been interacting with other activists and having our work seen explicitly in that light through this program.
Shelton, WA
Because you work with marginialized communities that have residents who are working two or sometimes three jobs to make ends meet, hhow do we motivate those individuals to spare some of their extra time for a project like yours thta hopes to improve the community?
Bill Rauch
What a great question. The challenges of scheduling and trying to bring together the schedules of professional artists for whom this is a full-time job and community-based artists for whom, as you say, this is on top of two or three jobs, as well as school, family responsibilities, is part of our work that never gets easier. We have the line item for food in our budget goes up every year. We have found that feeding people is really important and can make a big difference in people's ability to participate. Sometimes we lose people because there's just not time in their lives. We're also flexible, almost to a fault sometimes, in trying to work schedules around people's lives. We have an extensive understudy system so that there are actors who can stand in for people who are missing. We also try to involve multiple generations of families whenever possible so that the play can become an activity family members participate in together rather than the play taking people away from their families.
Quezon City, Philippines
How do you go about with your process in making a theatre production that will not just serve the purpose of one subgroup of society?
Thanks!
Bill Rauch
It's all about who's in the room, isn't it? We work very hard to involve people from multiple sides of the issue to work. In fact, we've sometimes been accused of not taking a strong enough stand on an issue because we have both sides of the issue as part of the art making. I feel very strongly, however, that it is more politically radical to have multiple points of view as part of the art making process.
So in answer to your question, I think it goes back to who you talk to to set up the parameters of the projects as project advisors, who the writer talks to, interviews, and workshops with to build the play, and who is performing the play and who's in the audience. I thnk one of the values in the fact that Cornerstone moves from community to commuinty is that we're able to play the role of bringing parties together who otherwise would never come together because of our "neutrality" as a professional theater company that did not grow out of any one of the communities that's participating in the project.
Amherst, MA
How do track community changes or outcomes resulting from a Cornerstone Residency. What are some examples of changes or outcomes?
Bill Rauch
If there's any single thing I've learned in all my years working at Cornerstone it's to have faith in the work and recognize that the value of the work will affect individuals and communities in ways that I'll never be privileged to fully know about. That is not to say you should abdicate your responsibility for trying to set criteria for success and trying to measure them.
But, for instance, we used to measure our success in large part by how many plays were produced in a community after Cornerstone's initial residency. Well, we learned that one community, in which we had "failed" by those standards, had been profoundly changed-- African Americans and European Americans were working together in a civic arena, and getting national attention for it. And it was all because of the play. But I didn't know about it until some years afterward. I guess for me the bottom line about theater is relationship-building: who worked together in the play, who sat together in the audience, and how do those relationships that result within and between communities end up affecting positive social change?
We have recently added new a full-time position, the Director of Community Partnership, Elizabeth Gonzalez. Part of Elizabeth's job is to be more strategic about how we stay in touch with community partners, both individual and institutional, and track change as a result of their work, both civic change, personal change, change in individuals' lives.
Washington, DC
What lessons have you learned about bringing creativity and art to communities or people who are not used to accessing their creative side? Have you found that people can be resistant?
Bill Rauch
One of the things that moves me having done this work for 16 years is that we have yet to work in a community where there is not a large number of people who want to make a play with us. Sometimes we have to work harder than others to find those individuals and, of course, there is always resistance. But the resistance tends to come from people who are more at a distance from the project. Once people are in the room there's conflict, of course, in terms of what the story should be and how the story's being told, but actual resistance to the process is not a big factor once people are in the room together, in my experience.
Grand Rapids, MI
What are some of the challenges of being a founding director? How have you adapted to changes in the organization over time?
Bill Rauch
It's only in the last year or so that I've become fully aware of some of the challenges of being a founder who's still active with the company. It's the challenges you'd expect: because I helped to start it, my mindset is sometimes that of the guy in 1986 trying to hold it all together himself on a real shoestring budget. You know, it's a process of learning to let go, to delegate even more, to let others make their own mistakes as well as have their own triumphs. And, of course, the burnout issues.
There's a joy in saying in any given situation, "this reminds me of what happened 14 years ago," but there's also the fear that creeps in that you're on an endless loop where the same challenges are coming up again and again and will never stop. But honestly, I continue to get, and I hope give, so much more from and to this company than these stories imply. Cornerstone is about constant re-invention of itself, and as I've changed and grown so has the company, and vice versa. That's why I'm still here, and still happy to be here, and I hope still of use to my organization.
Northport, Alabama
How did you get your organization up and running? What are your sources of support...locally, regionally and nationally ? What do you see as major obstacles for this genre of dramatic work ?
Bill Rauch
We were lucky in that we stated with an idea that inspired people. We wrote to everyone we knew, relatives, friends, etc., and asked for money, and we raised quite a bit from individuals. We went to the State Arts Council of the state that my family lived in at the time and asked for money to start a theater company and we were told that the Arts Council couldn't give money to something that didn't exist already, but the Council could give money to artists going into public schools.
So in our home state of Virginia that first year, school residencies were the company's day job as it were, and we did all-ages projects on our own time in the evening. Eventually national foundations became part fo the funding mix.
I should back up and say that Cornerstone's operating budget is 90 percent contributed income and only 10 percent earned. The ratio for most professional theaters in this country: 60 percent earned, 40 percent contributed. So we are largely reliant on grants from foundations, government, and individual contributors.
We have a strict do-what-you-can admissions policy at the box office for all of our community-based plays and we spend more of our time in the creation process than in performance. That's why our ratio is so out of whack.
I think the biggest obstacle to the genre of work, in terms of financial support, is that it can fall between the cracks, that arts funders say it's not art and that social change funders say it's not really social change. The challenge is to convince both that it is both at the same time, which I believe with all my heart.
New Brunswick, NJ
What type of commitment does it take, both financial and otherwise, from an organization that would be interested in collaborating with Cornerstone?
Bill Rauch
We have collaborated with arts organizations and non-arts partners on a huge variety of models. Most of our work in our home city of Los Angeles these days and for projects in our home city, community partners and Cornerstone together raise money. Any given project costs anywhere from 100 to $250,000. We usually do out of town projects nowadays when we're commissioned by organizations to leave our home city and travel to another part of the country. We've sent as few as three representatives from Cornerstone for an out of state project and as many as our entire artistic company.
In terms of the otherwise part of your question, I think it's about the real hunger to build relationships within a designated community or communities. Obviously the capacity in terms of people to make it happen is important, but I think the desire is the most important ingredient, active desire.
Racine, WI
I have a follow up to the question about being a founding director: How are you building leadership within your organization?
Thank you, and keep up the great work!
Bill Rauch
This, again, is an ongoing process, and one we're always striving to improve. Our ensemble is a good way we exercise shared leadership. For instance, to use a minor example, we rotate who facilitates meetings. We also have the Altvater Fellowship program for early career theater workers interested in the intersection between theater and community. Three of our current staff members, a quarter of our total staff, are former Altvater Fellows!
Our board is run democratically with majority-rule votes, our ensemble is run by consensus where any one member can block any one decision, and in our staff there's a clear chart of who reports to whom. Obviously, on the staff all voices are valued, but it is the most traditionally hierarchical body. That our different bodies govern themselves in different ways creates an interesting tension in our organization -- on bad days, it's maddening, while on good days it's a brilliant and necessary balance. I serve on all three bodies, so I have to exercise leadership and encourage leadership from others in different ways with the three different groups.
Washington, DC
Have you found that the topics have changed much over time, or are there themes that endure despite current events? What are some examples of themes/topics?
Bill Rauch
Good question. Well, I think that how we interact with the community and how we express community topics have changed even more than the topics themselves. For instance, we used to only work through adapted classics of the Western canon in our first five years. Today, it's equally likely that a Cornerstone play might be oral history-based, might be completely original, might be based on a non-Western novel, for instance. Also, the strategies we use to collaborate with the community to create the play, those have grown and changed and deepened over the years.
In terms of actual themes and topics, of course every commiunity is different, and that's part of the excitement of our work. Certainly there are recurrent themes of economic disparity, of political power, of family relationships to name just a few that come up again and again, and, of course, racism.
Bethlehem, PA
As a leader, do you ever find a project just too difficult to affect or change? If so, how do you decide to call it quits, or do you continue to move forward even though you are really standing still? My question does not solely apply to your productions, but perhaps other areas of Cornerstone. Cheers, Bette K.
Bill Rauch
I can only think of two projects in 16 years that we began work on that did not reach full production as opposed to the 60 or so that have. Your metaphor of moving forward versus standing still is really provocative because one of the things that I've noticed recently is how sometimes it's in the moment when you're most stuck that you've actually made the most progress.
In terms of other aspects of the company's work, it's a constant uphill battle to raise 90 percent of our budget from contributed sources. It's tiring, I will admit. We have begun an endowment and a cash reseve to begin to have our own source of earned income that's not about the box office. We're also trying to explore ways that we might be able to market our methodology, how we do what we do, both to be able to share it and to be able to have a source of earned income.
Ann Arbor, MI
What are some tried and true methods for being inclusive to all community members? How can we have equity when groups from both majority populations and minority populations are trying to partner?
Bill Rauch
For us at Cornerstone, it's all about how hard you're willing to try. For instance, when we worked on a Native American Reservation in Nevada, no tribal elders came out to get involved. So a few of us ate lunch with the tribal elders every day for a month and someone finally auditioned. Sometimes it's not possible to keep trying, but I do believe that ultimately you can involve representatives of every part of the community if you try hard enough, or if not every, that you can approach that goal.
Your question about true equity is very astute. There will always be power dynamics based on many different factors. I think the real challenge is in building a process that acknowledges the disparities openly and to create a safe environment for those disparities to be acknowledged.
Ames, Iowa
How do you handle the tensions and conflicts that are aired as part of the process of your work among the participants themselves? It seems like a necessary part of your job would be conflict resolution.
Bill Rauch
It is and there have been moments where we have brought in professional consultants, either in human relations or other experts. Most of the time, however, it's about those of us working on the project trying to build an environment in which people can talk honestly and often agree to disagree. Sometimes the conflict is painful enough that someone will walk away, but it's rare. Usually in the work Cornerstone has done, if people get to the place, having the courage to discuss an undiscussable topic, they are all the more invested emotionally in remaining part of the process.
Leadership for a Changing World
We're almost out of time. Unfortunately, we only have time for one more question:
Bill, how do you sustain yourself and your staff to prevent burnout?
Bill Rauch
That's a hard one, an ongoing process, something we're always trying to improve. We "check-in" and "check-out" of every meeting to see how people are feeling. We feel that the meeting will run more smoothly, and we will all be more humane, if we know that someone's relative died, that someone is bursting with good news, or that someone is at a boiling point in terms of frustration with a work situation. Once a month the staff has lunch and does something cultural together -- we go to a movie or a museum or carve pumpkins for Halloween. Five years ago a foundation gave every member of our ensemble a small grant to have an adventure -- it had to last a month and have nothing to do with theater. It was a great grant designed to prevent burn-out. I have a six-month sabbatical coming up in 2003 in honor of my having been here what will then be almost 18 years. I guess there are a lot of ways we try to prevent burn-out. And of course always to stay connected to the core values of the organization, to the mission. If you can find joy in the work, that's the surest way to avoid burn-out.
Leadership for a Changing World
Thank you for joining us today for Leadership Talks. For more information, you may contact Bill at:
Cornerstone Theater Co.
708 Traction Ave.
Los Angeles, CA 90013
Phone: 213-613-1700
Fax: 213-613-1714
Email: brauch@cornerstonetheater.org
Web: www.cornerstonetheater.org
Please join us in June for our next Leadership Talks.
Bill Rauch
I'd like to thank everyone who participated with their wonderful and provocative questions. It's been an honor to participate in this. Please feel free to continue the dialogue by getting in touch with me directly.
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