THE PROJECT
"Arms Around America" is a community-based performance project. It culminates in a season of podcast episodes and an evening of six short plays and monologues based on the oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped by guns. The goal is to foster dialogue among diverse community members about the role of guns in American society.
Community partnerships form the foundation of our work. Partners include arts presenters committed to the development of the work and community organizations whose missions touch on gun-related issues. By prioritizing cross-sector partnerships, we are working to inclusively engage culturally and politically diverse audiences. Partners include UCLA Center for the Art of Performance, The Myrna Loy Center, Miami Light Project, Guitars Over Guns, Empowered Youth, Veteran Resource Center, and The Office of Los Angele County Supervisor Kathryn Barger. We are in discussion with other potential partners in several locations nationally.
THE PROCESS
We conduct six book-length oral histories of families in Southern California, Western Montana, and South Florida. Then we adapt those narratives into short plays or monologues (in consultation with the families themselves). The theater pieces are produced as a season of podcast episodes, and are then staged as live performances in the form of audio theater, or radio plays.
We aim for a constellation of stories that represent diverse scenarios, themes and perspectives. AAA focuses not on guns themselves, but on the ways that fear, power, identity, and entitlement are enacted through our relationships with guns, against the backdrop of socio-economic forces, culture wars, and other external circumstances.
Pictured is a moment from Pang! (2018), which is also built on a radio play model. Three actors voice dozens of characters while navigating a forest of microphones and tables overflowing with sound effects props.
THE TIMELINE
PHASE 1 (COMPLETED)
- DF&Co Establish partnerships with community organizations
- Partners pre-screen their constituent families for participation in the project, and consult with DF&Co to decide on which families to nominate.
- Virtual Residency #1: Oral History Consent Process. Family representatives will be walked through their rights and responsibilities, as well as the potential benefits and risks of the oral history process. Signed agreements will guarantee the boundaries of their participation.
- Oral History Interviews. A local artist, trained in oral history methodology by DF&Co, will conduct ten one-hour interviews with each of the two participating families. Every interview will be transcribed verbatim and made available to the respective families for approval and/or redaction.
- Virtual Residency #2: DF&Co further develop partnerships and community relations; DF&Co attend community gatherings and offer workshop programming tailored to community.
PHASE 2 (Spring 2022-Winter 2023)
- Adaptation of oral histories into podcast episodes: DF&Co will choose one oral history from each city to adapt into the form of an audio drama, and write a script based on that family’s story, in consultation with the family themselves.
- Virtual Residency #3:DF&Co further develop partnerships and community relations; DF&Co attend community gatherings and offer workshop programming tailored to community and read excerpts from early scripts.
PHASE 3 (Spring-Fall 2023)
- Podcast production: DF&Co record, edit, master, publish six podcast episodes: three audio dramas and a reflection on the issues and themes of each of them.
- In-person residencies #4 & #5
PHASE 4 (Fall 2023-Fall 2024)
- DF&Co adapt the podcast audio dramas into live theatrical performance pieces, in consultation with participating families.
- In-Person Residencies #6 and #7
- Premiere of Arms Around America
OUR MISSION
Arms Around America is designed to promote empathy and dialogue by positioning audiences “between the ears” of participating families, and creatively interpreting their life-stories through sound: dialogue, music, and sound effects. We render complex theatrical portraits, illustrating families’ relationships to guns, without totalizing those families’ identities through those relationships. We combine documentary theater’s practice of sourcing scripts from oral histories, and investigatory theater’s productive tension between verbatim transcripts and formal experimentation.
OUR VALUES
- Dialogue: We believe the free exchange of perspectives — between artists, audiences, community members, presenters, and funders — is vital to all stages of the artistic process, including research, creation, production, and post-production.
- Equity: We uphold the rights and stories of systematically oppressed people, including Black, Brown, Indigenous, Female, Queer, Trans and Non-Binary individuals.
- Shifting Narratives: We believe that stories are a critical form of knowledge that preserve traditions and forge new understandings. We believe that stories need to evolve and be reinvented as our social contexts change.
OUR STRATEGIES
- In order to promote safety during the pandemic, we conduct low-cost "virtual residencies," which include up to a week of day-long programming in a single community, repeated over the course of a couple of years of development, at zero or minimal cost to the presenter. During these visits we develop community partnerships and long-term relationships with community stakeholders and the families we work with. We develop the scripts in Los Angeles, in consultation with the families themselves.
- We bring world-class artists into close, consistent, and extended contact with communities.
- We train local artists as oral historians. We conduct several residencies in each community over the 3-year project.
- We maintain reciprocal relationships with community members throughout and beyond the project.
- We embed communities deeply inside our process.
Arms Around America is commissioned by The Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. (Los Angeles CA), The Myrna Loy Center (Helena MT) and Miami Light Project (Miami FL).
The development of Arms Around America is made possible in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts Art Works program, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, the UCLA Office for Research & Creative Activities, the UCLA Chancellor’s Council on the Arts, and the National Performance Network's Community Fund.Arms Around America is a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation & Development Fund Project, co-commissioned by The Myrna Loy (Helena MT) in partnership with Miami Light Project (Miami FL), UCLA's Center for the Art of Performance, and NPN. The Creation & Development Fund is supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts (a federal agency).
ARTIST STATEMENT
Arms Around America experiments with the audio theater format we began exploring in Pang! (2017). Creating a work of national scope around such an urgent social issue challenges us as artists and activists to participate in wider socio-political discourses. Neither a pro- nor anti-gun project, Arms Around America is a pro-dialogue project.
As an oral historian, playwright, and producer, I am uniquely equipped to bring diverse communities into dialogue around difficult issues, and to contribute to greater empathy and understanding.
WHO WE ARE
Performance artist Dan Froot has toured internationally since 1983. Awards include a Bessie (New York Dance & Performance Award), a City of Los Angeles Artist Fellowship, and a Foundation for Jewish Culture Playwriting Fellowship. He has worked with Dan Hurlin, Yoshiko Chuma, Ping Chong, David Dorfman, Mabou Mines, Ralph Lemon, and Victoria Marks, among others. Dan teaches at UCLA's Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.
Natalie Camunas is a native Los Angeleno, USC graduate, queer second-generation Latinx actor, playwright, and voice-over artist. Natalie works regionally in theatres across the country, favorites include Mother Road at Arena Stage in Washington D.C., Native Gardens at the Cleveland Playhouse and originating the role of “Gabby Orozco” in the World Premiere co-production of American Mariachi at the Old Globe Theatre & Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Recent TV credits: Goliath opposite Billy Bob Thornton on AMAZON & Speechless on ABC. As a voice over artist, you can hear Natalie’s voice in promo spots for Fox’s 911 and in the New York Times recommended podcast PANG! (@pangpodcast) available on iTunes. As a playwright, Natalie’s plays have been produced in Los Angeles, New York, and Ireland. nataliecamunas.com
Donna Simone Johnson is a LA Native, actress, choreographer and liberator. Deeply rooted in arts leadership and activism, she is the Co-Founder of Hardcorps (an arts organization providing training to under-resourced artists) and leads various community organizing activations, including work with the LA Poverty Department, Watts Village Theater Company, We Charge Genocide, Calling Up Justice and Equity and Diversity Initiatives for Center Theater Group. An LA Native, she attended New York University, where she earned her MA in Dance Education and CalArts, where she received her MFA in Acting. Since then, she has enjoyed a vibrant career working in commercials, voiceover, on screen and international stages. She is a series regular on Y'all Family, premiering this fall and a Company Member in Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2020 Season, playing Somerset in the Henry VI adaptation, Bring Down The House, (Parts 1 & 2). TV/Film credits include: The Inspectors, Agent X, and Dreamland and NETFLIX's animated Super Drags (recurring). She won the NAACP Award for Best Lead Actress for her work in Broken Fences at The Road Theatre and has worked regionally at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, The Pantages, Portland Center Stage, Virginia Stage, Playwrights Arena, African American Shakespeare, Co. The Broad, The Royal George and Off-Broadway's Union Square NYC to name a few. International credits and tours include CITIZENSHIP in Kampala, Uganda, Echoes of a Thousand Hills (alongside Mashrika and Center for New Performance, Kigali, Rwanda), and with the award-winning CLOUD 9 (RITu, Liege, Belgium). At a time where the power of the collective is being alchemized into tangible change and liberation, Donna is more energized than ever to continue the work with Dan Froot and Co towards empathy, change and harnessing the power of the collective. @dsimonejo across all platforms for joy and activism alike!
Christopher Rivas is an actor, author, podcaster, and storyteller best known for his on-screen work on the Fox series, CALL ME KAT. In addition, he hosts two podcasts on SiriusXM's Stitcher: Rubirosa, a limited series about the life of Porfirio Rubirosa, and a weekly show, Brown Enough. Rivas is simultaneously authoring a book, BROWN ENOUGH that Row House Publishing is slated to release on October 11, 2022. He is a Ph.D. Candidate in Expressive Arts for Global Health & Peace Building from The European Graduate School and a Rothschild Social Impact fellow.
Bobby Gordon (Dramaturge) is a theater maker, photographer, and Theater of the Oppressed multiplier committed to the arts for social justice. Recent dramaturgical credits include Free Mind Free Style (Versastyle Dance Company at the Ford Amphitheater) 2021, and Pang! with the Dan Froot & Company (Various Venues, 2017). A 2016 Drama For Life Artist in Residence at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) Gordon has a M.A. in Applied Theater Arts from the University of Southern California, and has been a longtime collaborator with the Center for Theater of the Oppressed in Rio de Janeiro. As a performer, he has presented work across the United States, Brazil and Southern Africa and is a founding member of the Melrose Poetry Bureau, an interactive performance poetry collective. Gordon is the former Assistant Director of UCLA’s Art & Global Health Center where he co-founded the UCLA Sex Squad, a theater troupe that tours Los Angeles high schools with interactive and inclusive sex education performance.
For More Information:
Dan Froot | (310) 766-4942 | danfroot@me.com
danfroot.com | linktr.ee/pangpodcast | #pangpodcast
Credits:
David Hector Rosales and Monica McGivern