blueprints

54 | anna deavere smith
I have lived in this crossroad for the greater part of my life and created
my best work there. I think again of Roz Malamud saying in my presence
on 60 Minutes, “What does she know? She’s not from here.” But what is the
“here”? We are all from somewhere, but we may be changing the here constantly.
The moment when the young Korean American graduate students
began a sentence with “We think you are going to get it wrong” and ended
with “so we want to help you.” It seems to me that at this point, artistically,
there is no possibility of community without collaboration.
Collaborations that link artists with agents of social change could be
extraordinarily provocative. There was an era in which collaboration proliferated.
I have been enormously affected by reading the journals of the Free
Southern Theater. This group of actors and writers and thinkers went to the
American South during the 1960s—probably the South’s bitterest moment
post–Civil War. They performed plays in community centers, and when the
community centers were threatened with bombings because of the activist
nature of the plays, they performed in open fields under the stars. Their
cause? Their provocation? Getting the vote for African Americans. Did they
cause a change? Yes, but against the background of a huge movement, a
movement that included many kinds of change agents—among them artists.
The big haunting questions about art and change, or change of any
kind, are: What are you willing to lose? and What are you willing to sacrifice?
Change does not come for free.
My suggestion is that we find ways of sparking unlikely collaborations—collaborations
that will enrich the public sphere, inspiring and
encouraging all kinds of people to come out of their safe houses. In those
spaces, with singular people who dare to leave the safe house of identity,
intellectual or artistic discipline, or political encampment, we might create
some movement. We live in a world where some people don’t even carry
their wallets or change in their pockets anymore. It’s too bothersome. It’s a
big-bill world, at least in the United States. There are people begging for
change on our streets and on streets all over the world. Art cannot supply all
of the change. However, because so many artists are nomadic, on the move,
outside of safe houses, we have a chance to join up where change is on the
verge. Our companionship with those who understand policy, or the deeper
things that ail us as humans, could at least put some holes into the larger
and more ominous walls.