The America Project Teaching Method

8/12/2019 The America Project Teaching Method

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A Teaching Method for

Collaboration

Creativity

andCitizenship

Developed by

Sekou Sundiata

The America Project

dance & be still arts

mapp international productions


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2009 dance & be still artsAll rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form,without written permission from the publisher.

Published in the United States by MAPP International Productions

This publication was made possible with generous support fromThe Ford Foundation and The Nathan Cummings Foundation.

Written by Kym Ragusa

Edited by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani

Design: Buscada

Take part in The America Project!To learn how others are using this teaching guide and The America Projectmethod in their communities and to share your experiences, please visit thesewebsites:www.mappinternational.org/america-project

www.theamericaproject.tumblr.com

The websites also contain information and materials related to the ongoingwork of The America Project Working Group, a consortium dedicated tosustaining arts-based and artist-driven public explorations of the meaning ofengaged citizenship in the U.S. today.


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Table of contents

Acknowledgements

5 IntroductionThe America Project: Performance and teaching method

The America Project course at the New SchoolThe ongoing life of The America Project teaching method

9 Tools for Creativity and CollaborationReadings and discussions: Founding documents and framing questionsWriting: Notes toward & first person pluralCollaborations with artists and scholarsBeing in public: Arts and communityA four-part processCoursework for the processRelated readings

19 Final ProjectsThe visual arts exhibitThe documentary theater projectThe writing anthologyHow to hold a citizenship dinnerQuestions to keep the conversation going...

25 Making Use of ChallengesA pedagogy of challenges, frictions and silencesSekou SundiataAbout the contributorsfinding the 51st (dream) state


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This guide to Sekou Sundiatas America Project teachingmethodology is part of the ongoing work of The America ProjectWorking Group, a consortium of individuals who collectively investtheir resources in sustaining arts-based and artist-driven publicexplorations of the meaning of engaged citizenship in the U.S. today.This exploration was conceived of by the late artist and educatorSekou Sundiata as a multi-year process that included teaching atseveral universities, and that contributed to the development of hismultidisciplinary theatrical work, the 51st (dream) state. The WorkingGroups commitment to extend this investigation emanates frommembers first-hand experiences with Sundiatas powerful America

Project method.

This document was drafted from a number of sources, first fromspeeches and writings by Sekou Sundiata on civic engagement, therole of artists in education and in communities. More specifically,this document also builds on readers, syllabi and student papers fromThe America Project course that Sundiata designed for Eugene LangCollege, the New School University in New York City. In phoneconversations and email exchanges, colleagues Maurine Knighton,Ann Rosenthal, Margaret Cronin and Julie Ellison mined memo-ries, and interpreted experiences of the course to come up with an

exploration of Sundiatas powerful vision and teaching method.The text on how to hold a citizenship dinner was contributed by ateam of University of Michigan students working with Sundiata andJulie Ellison: Brent Fogt, V. Robin Grice, Cornelius Delro Harris,Jesse Kropf, Laura Meili, Molly Raynor, Emily Squires.

Also contributing were conversations with and writing by AlannaBailey, Amanda Morgan, and Dena H. Saleh, students from TheAmerica Project class at Eugene Lang College; and my ownrecollections as writer-in-residence for the course.

Maurine and Ann initiated this project and provided its vision, andJulie identified and articulated the defining ideas and practicesthat shaped Sekous curriculum and provide a foundation for thenarrative. Margaret provided invaluable feedback and support duringthe process of compiling and organizing this material. GabrielleBendiner-Viani brought the critical and objective perspective of aneditor and educator to this publication. I am indebted to them fortheir insight and their guidance.

Kym Ragusa

Acknowledgements


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Introduction


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The America Project: Performance and teaching method

The multi-part America Project emerged from the creative work ofartist, poet and performer Sekou Sundiata in response to 9/11 and theresurgence of American empire. Sundiata wrote:

Those events triggered a running commentary, an unsettling conversationwith myself to understand what it means to be an American. I knew rightaway that the world had changed in ways that would challenge much ofhow I understood my life and work up to that point. But this is the onlything I could claim to know, and this more by instinct than by reason.(Disintegrating General Public, pp. 79-80)

In 2001, Sundiata began using a research-to-performance methodto explore these unsettling conversations, asking:

What does it mean to be a critically engaged citizen in a time ofintensifying U.S. imperial power and influence?

This process culminated in the multimedia theatrical performance,the 51st (dream) state, which premiered in 2006.

During those five years, Sundiata worked with community groups,arts organizations, and universities to create conversations betweenpeople of different racial, ethnic, gender, class, regional, and religiousbackgrounds about their understandings of what it meant to be an

American. These discussions addressed what connected people acrosslines of difference, as well as what kept them from a sense of commonidentity and purpose. This work included residencies at academicinstitutions including the University of Michigan, Lafayette College andStanford University; small-scale civic gatherings such as communitysings and citizenship dinners in homes, churches, and bookstores; andlarger public performances, including Checkpoint: A Concert of Poetsat the Arab American National Museum. What Sundiata discoveredduring the research, creation, rehearsal, and public discussion of

the 51st (dream) stateled him to envision an undergraduate courseintimately connected to the performance.

Sundiata taught and created The America Project course as a year-long seminar (2006-2007) at Eugene Lang College, the New SchoolUniversity in New York City. It was a course that could be seen asthe culmination of Sundiatas two decades of teaching poetry andwriting at the College. Engaging students with world events throughhis ongoing exploration of the intersection between the academy,arts, and community, Sundiata was able to combine different subjectsand genressocial change, race, history; poetry, music, theater; the

spoken and the written word. The class enabled him to combine hisroles as teacher, writer, performer, and mentor. It allowed him tobring his active art-making process into the classroom.

As a performer and poet, Sundiatas pedagogical methods weregrounded in improvisation and collaboration and were responsiveto what was happening in the nation and the world, as well as theclassroom. For many years he had been working at what he calledthe intersections of Art, Imagination, Humanities, and PublicEngagement within the space of the university as a place ofintellectual engagement, play, and diversity.

Sundiata helped students engage with real world concerns in both

private and public ways. Students combined thinking and writing,reading and talking, individual reflection and public action, creativityand critical thinking, through group projects and classroom sharing.


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The America Project course at the New School

At Eugene Lang College, the New School University, The AmericaProject course placed an emphasis on discussion and the sharing ofwritten work, involving aspects of a seminar, writing workshop, andpracticum. The year-long course met twice a week for an hour and ahalf each session.

An excerpt from the course description describes the scope of whatSekou Sundiata imagined:

The America Project Class is both a course and an experience that involvesstudents with issues of Americas national and cultural identity, of its

power in the world, and of its guiding mythologies. The course will exam-ine how America defines itself in a new era characterized by unprecedentedglobal influence and power. It is also an intellectual and personal quest touncover a vision of what it means to be both a citizen and an individual ina deeply complex, hyper-kinetic society. Some of the questions of the classare: What does pursuit of happiness mean in a society that places somuch emphasis on tangible outcomes for most endeavors? How do religionand faith shape American identity and conduct? What are the prospectsfor love, compassion, and human solidarity? Is there a critically usefulway to claim citizenship? How do Race and Difference always matter inAmerica? (Syllabus, Fall 2006)

The seminar aspect of the course was a space for critical read-

ing and discussion of selected texts, viewing films, listening torecorded music and poetry, and attending lectures by invited guests.Connected to the real world, these seminars responded to, anddrew on, events unfolding at Eugene Lang College, in New York City,in Washington, D.C., in New Orleans, in Iraq, and beyond.

The writing workshops focused on the presentation, support,critique, and revision of original personal essays, works of creativenon-fiction, and short written responses to help students build aportfolio of written work.

The practicum involved engagements with artists and scholars ascollaborators and an immersion in documenting, producing, andattending some of the events and community activities that werepart of the roll-out of a major theater work. This included two classretreats and viewings of several performances: the 51st (dream) stateatBrooklyn Academy of Music, WeDaPeoples Cabaret at Eugene Lang

College and Harlem Stage, and the Day of Art and Ideas at HarlemStage. Students drew on these professionally-produced experiencesto design and implement their own collaborative group projectsthat were presented as culminating events at the end of the course.These final artistic projects were visible, public manifestations of theprocess of intellectual growth that happened over the year.

The students were mostly juniors and seniors, primarily AfricanAmerican and white, from working class, middle class, and elitebackgrounds. They came from a variety of disciplines/majors: VisualArts, Literature, Political Science, Creative Writing, and Education.Many considered themselves politically aware and active; a numberhad been engaged in various forms of community and university

activism before they took the class. Many students remained for bothsemesters, although some registered only for the first. The workand presence of all students from both semesters was representedin the final class projects, particularly in the writing anthology,Disintegrating General Public.


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The ongoing life of The America Project teaching method

Sekou Sundiata passed away in 2007, shortly after the end of TheAmerica Project course and before there was a chance to assess itsfull impact. He had planned to teach the course again, building on,and learning from, that first experience. Working improvisationallyin the classroom, Sundiata used his syllabus as a guide that couldmorph if other events became relevant, and brought in guest scholarsand artists who offered their own perspectives on the course material.This guide to The America Project teaching method is designed inthe same spirit of improvisation and creative collaboration.

Sundiatas performance, teaching, writing, and activism grew out

of a commitment to engagement across lines of race, class, gender,sexuality, and age, and across the boundaries between the academyand the community. In this spirit, The America Project methodologymay be used in a variety of ways by university instructors, teachingartists, and in partnerships between universities and community andarts organizations. It includes tools for creating an improvisationaland collaborative classroom, provides inspiration for creative workin the public realm, and provides models for connecting students tocommunities outside the university in ways that help foster dialogueand civic engagement.

Working with The America Project, we have found that the mostrevelatory moments occur when teachers and students take risks,learn in community, and respond together to events as they unfold inthe world around them. We hope that you will take on the challengeof keeping this method alive by reinterpreting it for your own context.

Central tenets of the methodology The study of a large idea Collaboration across departments and beyond the university An intersection of art, humanities, public engagement and action Student work paralleling an artists own creative process Artistic public manifestations of students own learning experiences


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Tools forCreativity

andCollaboration

The tools used in The America Project teaching method

flow around a core of central ideas: reading and discussion

of founding documents and framing questions; writing

notes toward and addressing the first person plural;

collaboration; and producing for the public.


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Sekou Sundiatas engagement with what he called critical citizen-ship emerged from his work as an artist and activist, and fromhis close reading of relevant texts, many of which he wove into histeaching. This selection of texts was built around a core of creativenon-fiction and personal essays and included a diverse range of stylesand genres, from essays to excerpts, articles to op-ed pieces.

In Sundiatas class, the goal of the readings was to understand howtheir thematic and literary concerns could create knowledge aboutthe place and meaning of America in private and public life. Theclass read and discussed two to three essays per week, including work

by Terry Tempest Williams, Harry Boyte, Jacob Needleman, ElaineScarry, Michael Ignatieff, Cornel West, Jane Lazarre, Rebecca Solnit,Kwame Anthony Appiah, Joseph Epstein, Darrell M. West, SaskiaSassen, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez,Gloria Anzalda, and Sekou Sundiata. In addition, Sundiata assignedrelevant pieces from The New York Times, current affairs publications,and web sites as they appeared (see Related readings.)

Founding documentsPrimary among readings in Sundiatas class were the foundingdocuments of the nation: the Declaration of Independence, theConstitution, and the Bill of Rights. Sundiata and scholars DavidScobey and Sam Haselby gave lectures or led workshops on these

documents, working with students to interpret them, and discuss-ing them in light of their own experience. Jacob Needleman (TheAmerican Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders ) gave alecture on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, presentinghis understanding and critique of those concepts and his views onthe American Soul. Needleman suggested that Americans needto return to the mythic meanings of the country, to gain a senseof connection with the ideals upon which the nation was founded,

and to encourage in Americans a renewed civic empowerment andresponsibility.

In his own research-to-performance work, Sundiata asked whetherone could embrace, or reclaim, the ideas of liberty, democracy, andpossibility embedded in the founding documents while critiquingthe misinterpretation and misuse of those ideas. He challenged hisstudents to do the same; in their own writing, students grappled withthe meanings of phrases such as the pursuit of happiness and wethe people.

Sundiata explained in a keynote address he gave to the TheatreCommunications Group National Conference in 2005:

I found that many people were also tryingto reinterpret the meaning ofAmerica. In fact, Ive come to see this constant re-visioning and re-definingas a driving force in the creative process of democracy, a process thats notmaintained in a fixed and settled consensus, but one that has been histori-cally powered forward by argumentation, dissent, p rotest and bold imagi-nation. Im talking about this need to perpetually calibrate the meaning ofAmerica as something thats deep in the cultural and mythic DNA, thatprobably has its origins in revolution, in the American Revolution. So thisstruggle to re-vision and re-define is not new. What is new is the context inwhich we are wrestling with these ideas. The stakes and how high they are,thats whats new.

Readings and discussions: Founding documents and framing questions


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Students also engaged with the work of scholar and activist HarryBoyte of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and the HubertH. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in Minnesota. Boyte(Everyday Politics) advocates civic action as a form of problem-solvingthrough building coalitions based on common interests that crosslines of race, class, gender, sexuality, age, religion, and culture, andwhich encourage individuals to become actors in public life.

Sundiata spent a number of class sessions discussing the work ofBoyte and Needleman; the students engagement with these textswas evident in their individual papers and collaborative projects, all

of which were attempts to combine imagination (Needleman) withaction (Boyte).

Framing questionsAs a teacher and an artist, I recognize the value of a good question. AndI knew that I had a good question when it led to other questions aboutAmerican identity, and when it implicated me on a personal level. Whatdoes it mean to be a citizen of the empire? Empire can I say that I amin it but not of it? Can the old myths of beauty and power and destinysustain a nation? Is national identity necessary in a global culture? Whatare the prospects for love, compassion and human solidarity? What kindof God do Americans imagine? What kind of God do Americans need?Sekou Sundiata, Keynote address, Theatre Communications Group

National Conference, June 2005

The America Project methodology also grapples with what Sundiatacalled framing questions: central questions that become startingpoints for a larger investigation. This process leads students awayfrom the specifics of the news cycle toward a deeper discussion ofabstract ideas. These framing questions also serve to direct studentwriting.

For example, a question such as what is democracy? might lead toa discussion of how we might form what Sundiata described, in hiskeynote address to the Diversity Revisited conference, as a humanesocial practice that elevates and promotes the best in individualsbecause it requires each of us to see and accept the Other as bothdifferent from us and the same as us at a fundamental level.

In a class using The America Project method, students ownframing questionsconnected to citizenship, civic engagement,and identitystructure their final papers. Students in Sundiatasclass, for example, wrote about topics including: activism, economic

disparity, war, sexuality, transnational identity, and consumer culture.


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Writing: Notes toward & first person plural

Using The America Project method, students explore different actsof writing (personal essays, in-class exercises, quick responses toreadings and discussions, and formal pieces for public consumption)to engage in individual questioning and community-making. Writingis not something students do for the teacher or for a grade; it isintellectual and creative work requiring commitment, patience andrisk-taking.

Informal writing: Notes towardStudents keep a notebook of responses to class discussions, guestlectures, performances, class events and events outside the class-

room. These notes toward are informal writings of a few sentencesor a few paragraphs in which students can clarify what is importantto them, what makes them wonder, question, or get angry. Theyprovide a record of thinking, reading and plans for writing, andconstitute a collection of notes toward more formal papers andgroup projects.

Viewpoint and context: First person pluralThe first person plural refers to selfhood and relationality. The firstperson is as much we as it is I; a singular, subjective identity can-not exist or develop agency without a nuanced understanding of howthat identity is connected to layers of local and national community.In his course, Sekou Sundiata instructed students to consider theirown experience within the larger context of American identity, andto examine their own social position, privilege, and blind spots whilealso engaging in critiques of racism, sexism, homophobia, corporatecapitalism, and imperialism. Using this concept, students can bechallenged to write about how they are implicated in global Americanpower and racial and economic inequities within the U.S., or howthey benefit from them in ways they might not even notice.

Building ongoing work: Developing the portfolioIn The America Project method, writings build on each other and aremined for material for formal papers and group projects, mirroringan artists own iterative working process. In addition to notes-toward, assignments might include free writing to start discussion,in-class topic-based writing, response papers, and personal essayswritten from the premise of the first person plural. Students mightalso conduct, transcribe, and edit individual oral histories to explorecourse questions through the lens of other individuals experiences,echoing Sundiatas own process of developing the 51st (dream) state.All of this work helps students to develop a final portfolio of formal

writings that emerge from their informal work and that referenceclass readings and discussions. Throughout the class, writingsaddress connections between individual narratives and the broadquestions of the course. For example, in Sundiatas class, studentsresponded to questions implied by the phrase the place and mean-ing of America in personal and public life.

Sharing in publicUsing this method students share their written work in a number ofways: engaging in small peer workshop groups to exchange feedback;reading aloud from in-class writing assignments during largerwriting workshops; and incorporating written work into the publicly-presented group projects. Sharing work is critical in order to support

a process of thinking together through personal narrative acts thatmay be journeys into history and place.


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Collaborations with artists and scholars

Collaboration among people from different disciplines is integral toThe America Project teaching method, as it was to Sekou Sundiatasown creative work. Collaboration may take place in the classroomas well as in larger public settings, but each setting allows peopleto share their experiences, their creative processes, their questions.For Sundiata, collaboration was a way of enacting democracy andconsidering citizenship, fusing the personal with the collective.

The America Project methodology encourages, even relies on,collaboration with guest scholars and artists giving lectures and/orworking directly with students. For example, Sundiatas class

collaborators included Julie Ellison, Professor of American Culture,English, and Art and Design at the University of Michigan. Ellisonspoke to the class about the life of the anecdote, the power of ashort, personal story as it is told and retold, linking the individualwith the group by illustrating common interests and commonhumanity. Jane Lazarre (writer and former Eugene Lang Collegeprofessor) did a three-class workshop on writing about race,encouraging students to think and write critically about whiteness.

Cecilia Rubino and Vicky Abrash, theater directors and professors atthe New School University, worked with a group of the students overthe Spring semester to develop and stage the documentary theaterfinal project. Kym Ragusa held workshops on writing critically frompersonal experience, and worked with a group of the students onthe anthology of student writings, another final project. In addition,students were able to engage with the singers, musicians, designersand director who worked with Sundiata on the 51st (dream) state. Thisfed into their own creative output, including the various forms ofpersonal writing and the group projects.


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Being in public: Arts and community

Sekou Sundiata thought that the democratic crisis we found ourselvesin after 9/11 was, in part, a failure of imagination. Believing thatwe needed to reinvigorate our sense of the nation not just throughanalysis but through the imagination, he desired to engage theAmerican Dream as a serious proposition in a spirit of criticalpatriotism. By linking arts and citizenship, Sundiata sought torevitalize the mythic source of American democracy.

Watching and participationThe arts, especially performance, poetry, and music, are an integral

component of The America Project teaching methodology. Sundiatasstudents attended a series of performance projects that he had orga-nized during the year: WeDaPeoples Cabaret at Eugene Lang Collegeand Harlem Stage, The Day of Art and Ideas at Harlem Stage, and the51st (dream) state at Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).

Sundiata brought ideas from these performances into the classroom.He discussed the process of creating large-scale, collaborative, andmultimedia works; showed video excerpts shot for the performances;engaged students in discussion after performances; and invitedpoets, musicians, singers, and theater directors into the classroomto discuss the collaborative process. At Harlem Stage and at BAM,students were engaged audience members as well as collaboratorswho were encouraged to take part in question and answer sessionswith Sundiata and the other performers. Back in the classroom, thestudents wrote about their experience of the performances they hadseen, sometimes offering critiques and creative feedback.

Creating for the publicIn The America Project method, small working groups of studentsdevelop and create projects for the public, practicing their ownforms of collaboration. Giving students access to the professionalproduction process of performances or artworks helps prepare themfor producing their own major culminating projects to which thisteaching method builds.

In Sundiatas class, students were given considerable freedom duringthe process of conceiving, planning, organizing, and mounting/performing their projects. The culminating projects that emerged

from Sundiatas America Project coursethe Visual Arts Exhibit; theDocumentary Theater project, America is in the Room; the anthologyof student writing, Disintegrating General Public: Waking up in the 51st(dream) state; and the Citizenship Dinnerare described in the nextsection.


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The America Project Course at the New School

At the New School, the America Project course placed an emphasis on discus-sion and the sharing of written work, involving aspects of a seminar, writingworkshop, and practicum. The year-long course met twice a week for an hourand a half each session.

An excerpt from the course description describes the scope of what heimagined:The America Project Class is both a course and an experience that involvesstudents with issues of Americas national and cultural identity, of its powerin the world, and of its guiding mythologies. The course will examine how

America defines itself in a new era characterized by unprecedented globalinfluence and power. It is a lso an intellectual and personal quest to uncovera vision of what it means to be both a citizen and an individual in a deeplycomplex, hyper-kinetic society. Some of the questions of the class are: Whatdoes pursuit of happiness mean in a society that places so much emphasison tangible outcomes for most endeavors? How do religion and faith shapeAmerican identity and conduct? What are the prospects for love, compassion,and human solidarity? Is there a critically useful way to claim citizenship?How do Race and Difference always matter in America? (Syllabus, Fall 2006)

The seminar aspect of the course was a space for critical reading and discus-sion of selected texts, viewing films, listening to recorded music and poetry,and attending lectures by invited guests. Connected to the real world,

these seminars responded to, and drew on, events unfolding at Eugene LangCollege, in New York City, in Washington, D.C., in New Orleans, in Iraq, andbeyond.

The writing workshops focused on the presentation, support, critique, andrevision of original personal essays, works of creative non-fiction, and shortwritten responses to help students build a portfolio of written work.The practicum involved intensive engagements with artists and scholars ascollaborators and an immersion in documenting, producing, attending some

of the events and practices that were part of the research-to-performancedesign of a major theater work. This included two class retreats and view-ings of performances: the 51st (dream) state at Brooklyn Academy of Music,WeDaPeoples Cabaret at Lang, and the Day of Art and Ideas at Harlem Stage.Students drew on these experiences to design and implement their owncollaborative group projects that were presented at a culminating event at theend of the class.

The students were mostly juniors and seniors, primarily African Americanand white, from working class, middle class, and elite backgrounds. They

came from a variety of disciplines/majors: Visual Arts, Literature, PoliticalScience, Creative Writing, and Education. Many considered themselvespolitically aware and active; a number had been engaged in various forms ofcommunity and university activism before they took the class. Specifically,some students had been engaged in actions directed at the universityadministration to call for more racial diversity among students and faculty,and more inclusion in decision-making processes on issues such as invest-ment, faculty hiring, and curriculum design. Many students remained forboth semesters, although some registered only for the first. The work andpresence of all students from both semesters was represented in the finalclass projects, particularly in the anthology.

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A four-part process


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The multi-part America Project emerged from the creative work of artist,poet and performer Sekou Sundiata in response to 9/11, the resurgence ofAmerican empire as well as the physical and social devastation in the wake ofHurricane Katrina. Sundiata wrote, Those events triggered a running com-mentary, an unsettling conversation with myself to understand what it meansto be an American. I knew right away that the world had changed in ways thatwould challenge much of how I understood my life and work up to that point.But this is the only thing I could claim to know, and this more by instinctthan by reason. (Disintegrating General Public, pp. 79-80)

In 2002, Sundiata began using a research-to-performance method toexplore these unsettling conversations, asking: What does it mean to be acritically engaged citizen in a time of intensifying U.S. imperial power andinfluence?

He worked with community groups, arts organizations, and universities tocreate conversations between people of different racial, ethnic, gender, class,regional, and religious backgrounds about their understandings of what itmeant to be an American, in order to learn what connected them across linesof difference, and what kept them from a sense of common identity andpurpose. This work included residencies at academic institutions includingthe University of Michigan and Lafayette College; small-scale civic gather-ings such as community sings and citizenship dinners in homes, churches,and bookstores; and larger public performances, including Checkpoint:A Concert of Poets at the Arab American National Museum. This processculminated in the multimedia theatrical performance, the 51st (dream) state.What Sundiata discovered during the creation, rehearsal, performance andpublic discussion of the 51st (dream) state led Sundiata to envision a courseintimately connected to the performance.Sundiata taught and created The America Project course as a year-longseminar (2006-2007) at Eugene Lang College, the New School, in New YorkCity. It was a course that could be seen as the culmination of Sundiatas

two decades of teaching poetry and performance at the college. Engagingstudents with world events through his ongoing exploration of the intersec-tion between the academy, arts and community, this was a course in whichSundiata was able to combine different subjects and genres social change,race, history; poetry, music, theater; the spoken and the written word. Theclass enabled him to combine his roles as teacher, writer, performer, advisor,and mentor and allowed him to bring his active art-making process into theclassroom.

As a performer and poet, Sundiatas pedagogical methods were grounded in

improvisation and collaboration and were responsive to what was happeningin the nation and the world, as well as the classroom. For many years hehad been working at what he called the intersections of Art, Imagination,Humanities, and Public Engagement within the space of the university as aplace of intellectual engagement, play, and diversity.

Sundiata brought what he called real-world concerns into the academy tocombine creative pursuits with critical thinking. He helped students engagewith these concerns in both private and public ways, combining thinkingand writing, reading and talking, individual reflection and public actionthrough group projects and classroom sharing. The final group projects werea visible, public manifestation of the process of the intellectual growth thathappened over the year.

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Coursework for the process


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Related readings

Readings, Plays & Performances for Civic Public Dialogue

The Declaration of Independence

Anzalda, Gloria How To Tame a Wild Tongue in Borderlands LaFrontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition (Aunt Lute Books, 2007)

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. The Case for Contamination The NewYork Times, January 1, 2006.

Atlas, Caron and Pam Korza, Eds. Critical Perspectives: Writings onArt and Civic Dialogue (Animating Democracy Initiative, 2005)

Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son (Beacon 1984, orig 1955)

Berlant, Lauren. Citizenship in Keywords of American CulturalStudies, Bruce Burgett & Glenn Hendler, Eds. (NYU Press, 2007).

Boyd, Melba Joyce and M. L. Liebler, Eds. Abandon Automobile:Detroit City Poetry 2001 (Wayne State University Press, 2001)

Blank, Jessica & Erik Jensen. The Exonerated: A Play. (Faber andFaber, 2003) www.theexonerated.com

Boyte, Harry. Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and PublicLife (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004)

Boyte, Harry. The Citizen Solution: How You Can Make a Difference

(Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008)Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre(The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)

Carton, Evan. Directors Column The Citizen-Scholar (HumanitiesInstitute, University of Texas, Fall 2006) http://humanitiesinstitute.utexas.edu/download/newsletters/Newsletter_Fall06.pdf

Douglass, Frederick. What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?

Foner, Phillip S. We the Other People (University of Illinois Press, 1976)

Gross, Terry. Performance Poet Sekou Sundiata Fresh Air [audiointerview] (National Public Radio, March 25, 2005)

Guinier, Lani and Gerald Torres. The Miners Canary: Enlisting Race,Resisting Power, Transforming Democracy (Harvard UniversityPress, 2003)

Ignatieff, Michael. The American Empire; The Burden New YorkTimes, January 5, 2003.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

(Beacon, 2003)

King, Jr., Martin Luther. Letter from Birmingham Jail in Why WeCant Wait (Signet Classics, 2000, orig. 1964)

Lazarre, Jane. Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiographyand White Identity (review) American Literature, Vol. 71, No. 3,September 1999, pp. 598-599

Lazarre, Jane. Beyond The Whiteness of Whiteness: Memoir of aWhite Mother of Black Sons (Duke University Press, 1996)

Lerman, Liz. The Hallelujah Project. (2000-2002) [performance andvideo recording] www.danceexchange.org

Morgan, Amanda, Rossoff, Rebecca, Saleh, Dena H., Weitzer, Robert,Eds. Disintegrating General Public: Waking Up in the 51st (dream)state. An anthology by students of The America Project. (EugeneLang College, 2007)

Myers, Sondra, Ed. The Democracy Reader (International DebateEducation Association, 2002)

Needleman, Jacob. The American Soul: Rediscovering the Wisdom ofthe Founders (Penguin/Tarcher, 2003)


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Nussbaum, Martha, Ed. For Love of Country?: A New DemocracyForum on the Limits of Patriotism (Beacon, 2002)

Obama, Barack, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race andInheritance (Three Rivers Press, 1995)

Ragusa, Kym. The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race, Beauty, andBelonging (W.W. Norton & Co., 2006)

Rodriguez, Richard. Hunger of Memory: The Education of RichardRodriguez (Bantam, 1983)

Sassen, Saskia. The repositioning of citizenship and alienage:

Emergent subjects and spaces for politics Globalizations, 2:1 (2005).

Scarry, Elaine. The Difficulty of Imagining Other Persons inThe Handbook of Interethnic Coexistence; Eugene Weiner, Ed.(Continuum, 1998)

Scobey, David Putting the Academy in its Place Places: Vol. 14: No. 3(2002) http://repositories.cdlib.org/ced/places/vol14/iss3/Scobey

Sundiata, Sekou. Thinking Out Loud: Democracy, Imagination, andPeeps of Color A Summary of the Diversity Revisited Conference June8-9 2004. (The August Wilson Center for African American Art andthe Association of Performing Arts Presenters, 2004)

Sundiata, Sekou. Keynote speech at the Theatre Communications

Group National Conference. (2005)http://tcg.org/events/conference/2005/Sundiata.cfm

Sundiata, Sekou. The Blue Oneness of Dreams [audio recording](Mercury/ Polygram Records, 1997)

Sundiata, Sekou. longstoryshort [audio recording] (Righteous BabeRecords, 2000)

Sundiata, Sekou. The America Project residency, Austin Texas:Community conversation. [video recording] (Courtesy of Evan Cartonand the Humanities Institute, University of Texas, 2007)

Smith, Anna Deavere. Fires in the Mirror (Anchor, 1993)

Smith, Anna Deavere. Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (Anchor, 1994)

Solnit, Rebecca. The uses of disaster: Notes on bad weather and goodgovernment Harpers Magazine, October 2005.

West, Cornel. Race Matters (Vintage, 2001)

West, Cornel. Democracy Matters (Penguin, 2004)

Williams, Terry Tempest. Why I Write in Writing CreativeNonfiction, Carolyn Forch & Phillip Gerard, Eds. (Story Press, 2001)

Readings for a Citizenship DinnerI Am Waiting Lawrence Ferlinghetti (www.worldofpoetry.org)First Writing Since Suheir Hammad (www.teachingforchange.org)Steps Naomi Shihab Nye in Arab Detroit: From Margin toMainstream, Nabeel Abraham & Andrew Shryock, Eds.(Wayne State University Press, 2000)Prospective Immigrants, Please Note Adrienne Rich(www.americanpoems.com)Personal Letter No. 3 Sonia Sanchez (www.poemhunter.com)

Resources for Civic Public DialogueThe America Project: www.mappinternational/america-projectThe Arts & Democracy Project: www.artsanddemocracy.orgProject for Public Spaces: www.pps.orgPublic Achievement: www.publicachievement.orgNPRs Extraordinary Stories from Ordinary People: www.storycorps.orgWork Together for Creative Community Change: www.studycircles.org


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The America Project course culminated in four major

projects: a visual arts exhibition, a documentary theater

performance, an anthology of student writing and a

citizenship dinner. Each student participated in a working

group that developed a project. These were presented at the

end of the semester in the Day of Art and Ideas, a series

of talks, panels, and performances in a temporary public

square that engendered critical conversations about the

place and meaning of America in private and public life,

and in the world.

Final Projects


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One public outcome of The America Project method can be astudent-produced and -curated exhibition comprised of various mediathat explore students intellectual and personal journeys through theclass. The process of creating and mounting an exhibition requiresstudents to move between individual and collaborative production,while developing skills of negotiation, fostering accountability, andcultivating shared ownership of a course or series of questions.

Exhibition materials can come from students creative work (painting,drawing, photography, poetry) or from public images and documents,such as posters advertising performances or protests. Engaging in acuratorial selection process pushes students to negotiate why certain

images and words are meaningful to them. The design and mountingof the exhibition fosters collaboration, spatial considerations, andproblem-solving. An iterative process of planning, building mock-ups, and developing visual literacy is crucial to creating an exhibition,and therefore helping students to develop production skills must notbe overlooked.

In Sekou Sundiatas course, the Visual Arts Exhibit was conceivedas a publicly viewed interpretation of students experiences of thecourse. It consisted of photographs taken by the students throughoutthe year, flyers and posters for the various public events connectedto the course and tothe 51st (dream) state, and poems and other texts.Students mounted the show in the Skybridge Gallery, a connectingspace regularly used by students, faculty members, maintenance

workers, and other members of the university community. Peoplepassing by were struck by the bold graphics of the posters, andmany stopped to read the accompanying texts from Sundiatas andstudents writings. Interspersed were photographs, some of whichwere conceptual images challenging normative/essentialist ideas ofsexuality and race (composed by Amanda Morgan), others of whichdocumented performances, rehearsals and other public events, suchas student and public anti-war protests.

The visual arts exhibit


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The documentary theater project

Though a complex undertaking, documentary theater can be apowerful way for students to synthesize ideas and present those ideasto a public audience. A theater project can be produced over longer orshorter periods of time, using a variety of materials to write the text.This kind of project can also allow for university/communitycollaboration, when students and community members share thework of writing, organizing, staging, and performing the piece.

It should be noted that the development and rehearsal of a theaterproject often requires planning and time from students and facultyoutside of class meetings. It also requires guidance from an experi-enced instructor on producing and directing a public performance.

In the Eugene Lang College, New School University course, thedocumentary theater project was closely connected to SekouSundiatas own way of working. A group of students wrote, staged,and acted in a performance piece that reflected on their experience ofthe class and drew directly from class discussions, writings and notes.The students titled the piece America is in the Room after a phraseof Sundiatas, referencing students personal implications in theproblems and privileges of the American nation and idea. The theaterproject was developed in collaboration with professional theaterdirectors Cecilia Rubino and Vicky Abrash.

The text was student-written, based on both student writing portfoliosand Sundiatas lectures, writings, and performances. The dialogue

explored a series of classroom events that had been turning pointsin the course, including clashes around race and gender and thestudents struggle to work through those challenges as a community.The piece was performed at Eugene Lang College at the end of theyear for an audience of faculty, students, parents, friends, and per-formers from Sundiatas the 51st (dream) state. It was later performedat Bucknell University in Pennsylvania allowing for an inspiringexchange of ideas between students of both universities aroundissues of identity, writing, and cultural and political activism.


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Work for the public can also be a more intimate experience: forexample, the production of a written piece, meant to be read by acommunity beyond the classroom. Drawing on final portfolios fromthe class, students can develop, edit, design and publish an anthologyof writings from the course.

Sekou Sundiatas class published an anthology called DisintegratingGeneral Public: Waking up in the 51st (dream) state, a collection ofstudent poetry and prose collected, edited, and designed by theanthology group. In this small group, much of the work was doneindividually; one student designed the cover art, one copy-editedthe manuscript, one wrote the call for entries and encouraged herfellow students to contribute work for the collection. At the sametime, the students worked collaboratively to select the contributions,looking for pieces that represented a true wrestling with the framingquestions of the course; to develop the themes around which theanthology was organized; and to write an introduction that describedtheir work as writers and citizens.

The students organized the anthology into four sections: Home asCountry; Self as Outsider; Consumerism as Culture; America asEmpire. The anthology group distributed copies of the book andpresented the collection at the citizenship dinner, where a numberof contributors read from their work. A rich discussion followed,and in this way transformed the private act of writing into public

engagement. The publication of the anthology allowed for thesecollected experiences to be shared and sustained with other publicsand students at other universities.

The writing anthology


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What is a citizenship dinner?The creation of a citizenship dinner builds on a series of com-munity events that Sekou Sundiata organized as he developed the 51st(dream) state. Citizenship dinners are public gatherings that combinethe intimacy of personal storytelling with community participationin order to generate creative dialogue around ideas of citizenship andbelonging. The events are organized around potluck dinners held inprivate homes or in community spaces. After a shared reading of apoem, participants share their experiences of citizenship, commu-nity, freedom, family, and place. Responding to a poem in this waysheds light on peoples different relationships to language, history,

and culture. It puts the past and the future in motion. Throughpersonal memory and storytelling, individuals come together to talk,to laugh, to disagree, and to see themselves as connected to eachother and empowered to act in public ways, for the public good.

In his class, Sundiata translated this community forum to an eventin the final weeks of The America Project course. The dinner washeld at a performance space in Brooklyn on a weekend evening.Students were encouraged to bring family and friends, as well ashome foods, dishes that connected them to their sense of culturalidentity. Students brought homemade babaganouj and pierogi, storebought ital peas and rice and vegan sweets. It was an opportunity forstudents and faculty to reflect on their experiences of the course, andto take account of the work, struggles, accomplishments and learningthat had taken place over the course of the year.The citizenship dinner was also a way for students to share the workthey did around issues of citizenship and community with their peersand with their families.

How to start your own?Bring people together for a potluck dinner, and as people finish theirfood, welcome everyone into the space as equal learners. Below is anexample of a welcoming statementfeel free to adapt it to suit theneeds of your group.Welcome to our citizenship dinner. You may be wondering whatwe are doing here. The answer is up to us. Our goal tonight is toexplore the question of what it means to be a citizen and our personalrelationship to that meaning. Poet Sekou Sundiata put it this way:

Living in the aftermath of 9/11, I feel an urgent and renewed engage-ment with what it means to be an American. But that engagement is atroubling one because of a long-standing estrangement between Americancivic ideals and American civic practice. When it comes to a vision ofme as an artist and as an American, I am caught in a blind spot. I dontthink I am alone. I sense there are many Americans in the same spot.... Itake it as a civic responsibility to think about these things out loud, in theritualized forum of theater and public dialogue.

This is our public dialogue. We hope to create a space of caring thatholds many of our ideas about America. Each of us is a learner and ateacher around this table. We come together to ask questionsabout what it means to be a citizenof a community, of a country, ofa world. Finding the answers may be impossible tonight, but we canstart to discover the right questions.

How to hold a citizenship dinner

Welcoming statement Read poem aloud Discuss poem

Eat


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Where to Start?Read the poem aloud. Invite reactions. Allow silence. After somediscussion, switch away from the poem and into the personal.If you get stalled, look at the prompt questions.

Prompt Questions What is your first citizenship memory? Who are the parents of your American identity? If every person who called themselves American was in one room,what would they have in common? How do your other identities interact with your American identity?

When and where are your citizen feelings at their strongest?In a polling booth? At a place of worship? At a desk? In a mall?During the Super Bowl? On a bus?

Are We Getting Stuck? Are we talking a lot about what makes me mad? Are we generalizing our feelings about these issues? Are we saying they/them instead of I or we? Are we obsessing over vocabulary and avoiding deeper questions? Are we all talking? Are we getting so personal that we are missing the larger issues? Are we over-intellectualizing?

How to Get Unstuck Move into the realm of the personal. Start telling your own stories.

Change key words. Perhaps a particular idea does not work for you. Think about citizenship moments in elementary school. Invite those who have not spoken into the discussion. Think aloud. Listen closely. Seek fresh language. Look at the prompt questions.

In ClosingRead the poem aloud again. See if anything has changed. Reflect.Thank everyone for his or her participation.

Questions to keep the conversation going...

Move to personal Re-read poem Reflect

Thanks


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Making Use of

Challenges

As Sekou Sundiata taught it, The America Project course

was full of challenges, and projects that interpret this

methodology will likely face their own set of challenges.

Some challenges are more difficult than others, but

all have the potential to contribute to the depth of the

conversation and work in which teachers, artists,

students, and community members are engaged.


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A pedagogy of challenges, frictions and silences

Though every project using this method will have its own challenges,those faced and managed by Sekou Sundiatas The America Projectcourse may be instructive.

Structure of the courseThe initial challenge of Sundiatas course was its format: so manymoving parts to manage and keep track of, the need for continuityin student enrollment over both semesters, the reliance on studentsabilities and will to work together to realize the large group projectsintegral to Sundiatas vision. In addition, during the first semestercourse enrollment was full; indeed, on the first day of class there

were almost thirty students in the room. The final number droppedto twenty-two the first semester, and there were sixteen students inthe second semester. Consequently, the depth of class discussionswas greater during the second semester. With fewer students, therewas more time to focus on and explore ideas as they came up. Inaddition, with one challenging and productive semester behindthem, the students who returned for the second semester expresseda profound commitment to the work of the course, and, to a certainextent, to each other.

Discussion & frictionThere was often friction between the students. During many classdiscussions, students were reluctant to speak, and were mistrustful

of each other. During the first writing workshop, many studentsoutright refused to read their work aloud, something that Sundiataand Ragusa required as part of the process of learning from eachothers voices and experiences. Other students were fearful or shy. Ittook half of one workshop session to encourage one student to breakthe ice by sharing her work; she began with this statement: I donttrust white people. This ultimately opened upinstead of shuttingdownmore sharing of work along with a rich discussion, showing

that room for silence, and a willingness to address tension, cangenerate deep engagement in the classroom.

Race & challengesThe silences and frictions were not all generative, however. Most ofthe difficulties students had with each other centered around race,especially around relations (both historical and current) betweenAfrican Americans and whites. As the class had no Asian Americanor Native American students, one African American/Latina studentwho self-identified as black, and a Palestinian American studentwho often stayed out of these particular discussions, it was difficult

to widen the inquiry to include, for example, relationships betweendifferent communities of color, or to examine white ethnicities as away of complicating whiteness, or to discuss class without conflatingit with race. In addition, Sundiata intended to focus a good deal ofthe course on questions of empire and to encourage students toconsider their privilege as American citizens, to think about how thatmight implicate them in issues like the war in Iraq and globalization.He wanted students to understand themselves as critical citizens ofboth the United States and of the world. Although some studentstried, it was difficult for many to break out of a kind of black-whitedichotomy, as they genuinely tried to inhabit Sundiatas notion of thefirst person plural.

To shift the emphasis on race as solely a black/white U.S. issue andto encourage more discussion about empire and globalization, a classmight include more film screenings dealing with U.S. power on theworld stage. One might also include readings on global environmentaljustice issues and look at protest events and marches in termsof critical citizenship. Inclusion of more readings by writers andtheorists from other U.S. communities of color, and from the globalSouth would play a role, and the assumption of U.S. citizenship in


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the classroom should be challenged, creating a space for discussionof struggles for that citizenship. Current issues in the news couldbe addressed, for example: LGBT rights, through a discussion ofCalifornias 2008 Proposition 8 (which sought to eliminate the rightof same-sex couples to marry), or debates on immigration, through adiscussion of the proposed U.S./Mexico border fence.

A powerful example of the challenges posed by classroom tensionsaround race was ultimately incorporated into the coursework ofSundiatas class. In a draft of his final paper, a white student wroteabout his African American friend giving him permission to usethe N-word when addressing him. This student wrote about his beliefthat, after some internal struggle, it was okay for him to use thatword, that by claiming and re-contextualizing disparaging language,it was possible to weaken that language, to make it lose its abilityto wound. The majority of his classmates, both black and white,were deeply uncomfortable with this; many of them were enraged,some of his small-group workshop peers wanted him to remove thestory from his paper. He in turn felt that he was being attacked, andbecame silent and withdrawn.

This raised the complex issue of censorship and brought the groupback to a consideration of the First Amendment. Sundiata encour-aged the group to consider what freedom of speech meant to them,and to think about both the historical context of the idea and the

contemporary struggles around it. After two volatile class sessionsdevoted to discussion of the issue, the group agreed to disagree withthis students view, and to challenge him to think further about themany meanings and consequences of his use of that particular word.Eventually the class considered it a critical incident in the course thatneeded to be included in both the theater piece and in the anthology.It was important to make that struggle public, and to allow thatstudent a voice.

While, or perhaps because, this struggle was emotionally fraught andtime-consuming, it became a rich avenue for both action andreflection. Sundiatas reminder that America is in the room, alongwith the students and teachers willingness to stay in the roomwith each other through times of conflict, became a defining featureof this course.


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1948-2007so metaphorically precise, so exquisitely wordish. Amiri Baraka

Sekou Sundiata was internationally known as a poet who wrote forprint, performance, music and theater; as an educator; and as anartist-activist. He was a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow, aColumbia University Revson Fellow, a Master Artist-in-Residence atthe Atlantic Center for the Arts, the first Writer-in-Residence at theNew School University, and the recipient of a Lambent Fellowshipin the Arts. He was featured in the Bill Moyers PBS series on poetry,The Language of Life, and as part of Russell Simmons Def Poetry Jamon HBO. Sundiata was a professor at Eugene Lang College, the NewSchool University, in New York City.

Sundiata wrote and performed in the highly acclaimed musictheater works The Circle Unbroken is a Hard Bop; The Mystery of Love,commissioned and produced by Aaron Davis Hall in New York Cityand the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia; and Udu,produced by 651 ARTS in Brooklyn. blessing the boats, Sundiatas onlysolo theater piece, produced by MAPP International Productions,opened in 2002 and toured through 2007 to more than 30 citiesacross the U.S., in Scotland and Australia. In 2005, Sundiataproduced The Gift of Life Concert, an organ donation public awarenessevent at the Apollo Theater that kicked off a three-week run of blessingthe boats, also at the Apollo Theater. These events were produced in

partnership with the National Kidney Foundation and the New YorkOrgan Donor Network with support from the U.S. Department ofHealth and Human Services.

Sundiata released two major recordings, the GRAMMY-nominatedThe Blue Oneness of Dreams(Mouth Almighty/Mercury), and itssuccessor, longstoryshort(Righteous Babe Records).

Sundiatas final music/theater production, the 51st (dream) state,which he described as his personal and poetic State of the AmericanSoul Address, premiered at Stanford Lively Arts in April 2006.Produced by MAPP International Productions, it was presented bymore than a dozen renowned performing arts centers and festivals.Sundiata passed away on July 18, 2007 just before the Europeanpremiere of the 51st (dream) state.

Sekou Sundiata


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AuthorKym Ragusa is the author of The Skin Between Us: A Memoir of Race,Beauty and Belonging,published by W.W. Norton and Company in2006. Her essays have appeared in the anthologies Are Italians White:The Making of Race in America, The Milk of Almonds, and About Face:Women Write What They See When They Look In the Mirror, as well asthe journals Leggendariaand TutteStorie. She is the recipient of a fel-lowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts and an Ida andDaniel Lang Award for Excellence in the Humanities. She has taughtCreative Writing and Nonfiction at City College, Queens College, andEugene Lang College in New York; Queens University in Charlotte,North Carolina; MIT in Boston; and at Josai International Universityin Japan. Her films Passingand Fuori/Outsidehave been shown onPBS and at festivals throughout North America and Europe. Hervideo, Demarcations, had its premiere at the Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art.

EditorGabrielle Bendiner-Viani works with communities to explore theexperience of everyday life through photographic and narrativeprojects. Her work has appeared in journals including Space andCultureand (dis)Closure, and has been exhibited at institutionsincluding the Center for Architecture New York, MIT, and UCBerkeley. Co-founder of Buscada Projects, she received her PhDin Environmental Psychology from the Graduate Center of the

City University of New York and is Visiting Assistant Professor inUrban Studies at Eugene Lang College, the New School Universityin New York. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Urban andCommunity Research, Goldsmiths College, University of Londonand curates the Urban Encounters conference on photography andurbanism.

PublisherMAPP International Productions works in close partnership withinnovative artists who reside in many parts of the world to create,premiere and tour performing arts projects. We provide resourcesfor challenging artistic voices to be fully heard, and build avenuesfor engagement by bringing together arts, humanities and publicdialogue. This means not only placing live work on the stages ofperforming arts venues, but also creating opportunities for discus-sion, learning and civic engagement that encourage understandingand appreciation of different cultures and perspectives. Based inNew York City, MAPP International Productions was founded byAnn Rosenthal in 1994, and is co-directed by Rosenthal andCathy Zimmerman.

This Teaching Guide is a project ofMAPP International Productionsdance & be still artsThe America Project Working Group

For more information:www.mappinternational.org/america-project

Photographsp. 13: Ray Llanos; Brent Fogtp. 20: Karen Ruggles

p. 21: Karen Ruggles; Linda A. Cicero / Stanford News Servicep. 28: Chris Bennion

About the contributors


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One of the things I talk about is to look at the ways in which this work canlive in the world. Once the show is over, once I leave town, and once thesepartnerships or relationships are developed, we can begin...does it makesense to develop other projects and other kinds of connections?Sekou Sundiata

To further understand how this work can live in the world,the related DVD set presents two more ways of exploring SekouSundiatas methodology: a documentary called finding the 51st(dream) state and a film of Sundiatas performance of the 51st(dream) state at the Brooklyn Academy of Music onNovember 10, 2006.

The documentary,finding the 51st (dream) state, weaves together foot-age from performances, residencies, citizenship dinners, classes andseminars. It is the account of how Sundiata found a clearing anda way to see in small-scale public gatherings, in classrooms, andon stage.

The film of the 51st (dream) stateas performed at the BrooklynAcademy of Music shows the piece in its entirety, and one can seehow the collaborative methods explored in the documentary informedthe creation of this major work of theater.

We hope that this DVD set can explicate the model for collaboration

that we have explored in this guide, and that by using this guide, andwatching these films, you will be able to adapt the spirit and practiceof Sundiatas The America Project for your own community.

To learn how others are using The America Project method in theircommunities and to share your own experiences, we invite you tovisit the following websites:www.mappinternational.org/america-projectwww.theamericaproject.tumblr.com

The websites also contain information and materials related to theongoing work of The America Project Working Group, a consortiumdedicated to sustaining arts-based and artist-driven public explora-tions of the meaning of engaged citizenship in the U.S. today.

finding the 51st (dream) state


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mapp international productionswww.mappinternational.org 140 Second Ave, Suite 502, New York, NY 10003 646 602 9390

Documents

The America Project Teaching Method