THE PROJECT

"Arms Around America" is a community-based performance project. It culminates in a season of podcast episodes and an evening of three short plays, all based on the oral histories of families around the country whose lives have been shaped in some way by guns. The goal is to foster dialogue among community members on all sides of the gun debate.

What are we asking of our Community Partners?

We would ask you to:

• Help us identify families in your community, ideally constituents of your organization, who might like to participate in our project by telling us their life-stories in the form of an oral history.
• Pre-screen families by asking them if they would like to tell their stories.
• Explain the project to prospective families.
• Host an online informational meeting with each interested family and Dan Froot and Company.
• If a family chooses to participate, host a meeting during which the consent process takes place.
• Be a liaison between participating families and Dan Froot and Company throughout the process, to assist with communication and logistics.

What do we offer community partners?

We are happy to:

• Participate in your organization's public programming, free of charge.
• Conduct workshops or other artistic or educational activities with your constituents, free of charge.
• Promote your mission and programming through our own social media channels.

What are the criteria for participating families?

• Most importantly, we are looking for families who want to tell their stories.
• We are interested in families whose lives have been touched in some way, either directly or indirectly, by guns.
• We welcome all definitions of “family.”
• We would prefer to work with families that live under the same roof. This is for the sake of logistical efficiency.
• Unfortunately, we will not be able to provide a language interpreter so all families must be able to speak English fluently.
• Families’ lifestyle and health needs to be stable enough for them to reliably meet online with our oral historians for a one-hour interview every other week.

What will be asked of participating families once they are chosen for the project?

• A representative of each family will meet with Dan Froot online to sign a consent form. The form describes families’ legal rights and guarantees their privacy. It tells them that they can quit the project at any time with no consequence.
• Families will schedule an online one-hour interview every other week, for a total of ten interviews. The entire process is likely to take six to eight months.
• We will ship each family an oral history recording kit. The kit is easy to set up and contains all necessary instructions. It requires each family to have a smart phone in good working order, and reliable WiFi internet service. An additional computer is optional, but helpful. We ask that families take good care of the kit and ship it back to DF&Co once the interview process is complete.
• Some weeks we may ask to interview the whole family, and some weeks we may ask for a subset of people.
• At each interview, the family will receive a verbatim transcript of the previous interview. Families can direct us to change or delete anything from those transcripts.
• In order to preserve families’ privacy, we will not use real names in the transcripts. We will use pseudonyms. We will also change the names of other people, places and companies, so that no one can be identified.

What are the benefits for participating families?

• Participating families have the opportunity to tell their story, to each other and the world. It is an opportunity for their voices to be heard, literally and figuratively.
• Each family will receive their oral history bound in book form.
• One family from each location will be chosen to participate in the second part of the project: to have their story adapted into a podcast and live theater.
• Families will be paid for all activities having to do with the project.

THE TIMELINE

2021: YEAR ONE

• 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.

2022: YEAR 2

• 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.

2023: YEAR 3

• 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

2024: YEAR 4

• 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

THE MISSION

Arms Around America is designed to position audiences “between the ears” of participating families by creatively interpreting the sounds of their life-stories. We will render empathetic, complex theatrical portraits, illustrating families’ relationships to guns, but not 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.

Artistic and social values are equally important in our work:

OUR STRATEGIES

• During this period of coronavirus lockdown, 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, 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.

The work is being commissioned by The Myrna Loy Center in Helena MT and Miami Light Project in Miami FL. We are looking for at least one more co-commissioner, preferably in the Pacific Northwest or the Northeast.

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 Department of Arts and Culture, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the National Performance Network's Community Fund.

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

Dan Froot | (310) 766-4942 | danfroot@me.com

danfroot.com | linktr.ee/pangpodcast | #pangpodcast