Pantomime and politics: the story of a performance ethnography

Introduction

This article looks at how performance ethnography can be used in collaboration with local communities in order to tell the stories that emerge through social research. It describes the process of a research project that took place over two years (2003–5) at a Sure Start programme in a socially and economically disadvantaged area of North West England. Sure Start is a New Labour initiative that has recently seen dramatic cuts in its resources since the new conservative-led coalition government came to power in the UK. Over the last 10 years it has provided a range of services, from playgroups to parenting courses, directed at those families experiencing – or deemed to be at risk of – poverty and social exclusion, with the aim of improving young children’s life chances through this early intervention.

I spent several years working and socializing with the families attending the Sure Start programme, much of the time in the company of my own young son. My involvement began when I set up a weekly community arts group for parents and carers of children attending Sure Start. At the time I was also carrying out a postgraduate degree in research methods and becomingly increasingly interested in participatory and arts-based approaches to knowledge creation. The following year I embarked on a two-year research project at the programme, which formed part of my ESRC-funded doctorate. ¹ The main aim of the project was to enable parents and carers involved in Sure Start to collaborate in research into the effectiveness of the local programme.

The project thus involved recruiting local people to the project and providing them with training in research methods. Six women (all mothers of children attending the Sure Start programme) engaged with this project throughout the two years and I worked with them to create research questions, collect, analyse and ultimately perform the data. Because the Sure Start programme tended to be viewed with suspicion by those families who stood to benefit from the services on offer, take-up of its services was not high. We decided to look at what drove this lack of engagement as well as to examine the experiences of those families who were involved with Sure Start. We also wanted to explore local people’s experiences of parenting. We employed a range of methods to address these concerns, supplementing the more conventional questionnaire survey and in-depth interviews with arts-based methods such as short-film making and creative writing (see Author, 2007, 2008). Seventy-two parents took part in the questionnaire survey and 17 in the in-depth interviews. A further 23 provided data in the form of art work, short film or poetry.

We used a thematic approach to analyse the resultant interview data. Each member of the research team undertook a number of interviews; I transcribed each one and distributed copies of the transcript to the rest of the team to read. We met regularly to discuss this data and drew key themes from it, several of which are discussed below. The art work produced echoed the themes of the interview data and added a richness and emotional intensity to these findings. I used the computer programme SPSS to analyse the questionnaire data that the team had collected and we included the findings in a research report that we produced for the Sure Start programme. We also disseminated the work through a series of presentations at academic institutions. However, the most exciting vehicle for showcasing the findings of our research was a short play, The Wizard of Us, which was produced and performed by local parents. This provided a way of reaching a wide, varied audience (comprising local families, professionals and academics) as well as involving local families – sometimes three generations of the same family – in a drama group, an activity that often proved uplifting and rewarding. This play is the focus of this article. It encapsulates many of the stories and experiences that we were told during the course of the research, and re-tells them through the familiar characters of Dorothy, Scarecrow, Lion and Tinman (from L Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, made famous by the1939 MGM movie).

Interspersed with sections of transcript from the play, the article examines how we came to produce the play and the motivations behind employing this methodological approach. It discusses the need for research that works with local communities in culturally appropriate ways to produce knowledge that promotes social justice. The article proposes that drama has the potential to do this: that a theatrical, artificial burlesque has the potential of coming closer to the pathos of social life than a more conventional approach to social research that can lack colour, complexity and humour. However, it also acknowledges the limitations of this approach. The article concludes by looking at some of the project’s outcomes for the women involved in the production of the drama.

The characters

Narrator

Dorothy: Mother of four-month-old baby Toto. She is suffering from post-natal depression and feeling extremely isolated.

Scarecrow: A character with very low self-esteem. Was told she was stupid at school and would not amount to anything.

Lion: A shy, timid character, she is nervous about meeting new people and would rather live a sheltered life than venture outside her safety zone.

Tinman: A single parent who gave up his job to raise his son. Feels he cannot get back into work as he is rusty, lacking the newly required qualifications, and doesn’t know where to get help.

Good Conscience: Reflects Dorothy’s optimistic state of mind and tries to keep her on the straight and narrow.

Bad Conscience: Reflects Dorothy’s darker thoughts and offers temptations.

Video of children singing ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’. ²

The drama group

A drama group was set up at the beginning of the two year research project and this was initially open to the parents and carers of children attending the Sure Start programme. However, it proved an unpopular activity, with numbers worryingly low. People told us that they would be much happier to take part if their children could be involved too; they would feel ‘less silly’. In response to this, we made the drama group an after-school club, open to all local families and children of all ages. This indeed proved much more successful and became a popular weekly event, run by local amateur dramatist Diane and funded by the Sure Start programme.

Participants decided that they would like to work on a pantomime because this was the form of theatre they were most familiar with and they thought it would be fun to do. Pantomime is a British tradition of family entertainment and is part of the popular culture. It typically involves a re-telling of a fairy tale with the stock characters of a Dame (played by a man), principal boy (usually played by a woman) and a heroine, and includes cross-dressing, double-entendre, dance and slapstick comedy routines (see Taylor, 2007). Carter (1994: 99–100) defines Pantoland as a place of ‘illusion and transformation’ where ‘everything is excessive’.

Diane helped us to script, rehearse and (eventually) perform a pantomime, Hansel and Gretel Grow Up, complete with local references and jokes. The children involved were often tired by the early evening sessions and thus disruptive, fuelled by the beans on toast that we provided as a snack. However, in the main, the rehearsals were full of laughter, particularly as we struggled to perfect our dance routines (myself included, as I was cast by families as the principal boy) and learn our lines, devised our costumes and painted backdrops. It took months to arrive at the point where we were ready to perform to an audience of local people as well as Sure Start staff, health professionals and local councillors. However, the performance went well and was enthusiastically received, providing us all with a sense of achievement as one participant describes:

Since the panto the kids have been talking amongst themselves, role-playing all the time. They know the lines off by heart. Everything they say is in panto language! They play together more – they’ve got something to say and act out. They’ve never got the video [of the panto] off. They show it to everyone. They go to the theatre more now – they love watching plays and pantos.

While I had intended that the drama group, once the pantomime was over, would work on more ‘issue-based’ drama, drafting in an expert in forum theatre to work with us using Boal’s (1979) methods, this did not prove popular with the participants. They felt that such work was dry and ‘depressing’ and they wanted to enjoy themselves – to ‘escape’ from real-life rather than re-create it. After much discussion we came up with the idea of The Wizard of Us as a way of retelling the stories told to us during the course of the research, as well as being a further opportunity for dressing up and having fun.

Employing this dreamlike, expressive, theatrical method removed the work from their everyday lives in a way that the forum theatre we experimented with was unable to do. The play, then, to some extent was concerned with ‘letting go of the literal rather than documenting it’ (Rasberry, 2002: 116). Imbued with a sense of the ‘carnivalesque’, it offered the possibility of presenting ‘a view of life that exudes a sense of energy and vitality in a world that promises not only joy but a fair share of misery as well’ (Danow, 2004: 67).

Storm scene and meeting scarecrow

Wind blows, lights flash, thunder sounds then blackout. Spotlight on Dorothy who is lying on the floor with Toto beside her in a baby car seat. A crossroads sign is marked: ‘Drugs City’, ‘Armchair City’, ‘Dole City’ and ‘Home’.

Flash of light. Good and Bad Conscience appear on either side of Dorothy.

Bad gives Dorothy a joint. Dorothy takes a puff and goes woozy.

Flash and Blackout.

Dorothy and Scarecrow are lying on the floor. Dorothy awakens.

Scarecrow starts to awaken, coughing and spluttering and gagging.

Methodology

Denzin (1997: 93) understands that ‘the performance text is the single, most powerful way for ethnography to recover yet interrogate the meanings of lived experience’. Through a re-telling of the stories that arise through ethnography, the audience is presented with an ‘embodied performance’ that, as Leavy (2009: 13) points out, ‘can be highly effective for communicating the emotional aspects of social life’. Performance texts open up the possibility of evoking empathy and understanding in a wider audience than a solely academic one, and therefore hold the potential for heightening critical awareness or ‘consciousness raising’ (Leavy, 2009: 12). Eagleton (2004: 133) writes of the need, if one is ever to truly appreciate the situation of others, to ‘feel your way imaginatively into the experience of another, sharing their delight and sorrow without thinking of oneself’. Performance texts act as a vehicle to achieve such a connection and to understand ‘the moral and the aesthetic [as being] closely allied’ (2004: 133).

Performance ethnography particularly appealed to me because of its fit with feminist epistemology and participatory research, approaches that strongly informed the design of the research at the Sure Start programme. While there are a range of feminisms, feminists are united in their commitment to ‘ways of knowing that avoid subordination’ (Humphries, 2000: 181), sharing the belief that all research is ‘value-laden and inevitably political as it represents interests of a particular (usually powerful, white male) group’ (2000: 181). The notion of consciousness raising itself arose from the ‘second wave’ feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, providing a means of inquiry that challenged received knowledge and allowed women to learn from one another (DeVault, 1999: 25–27).

Thus, feminist research should seek to reveal power relations and the ‘contradictions distorted or hidden by everyday understandings’ (Lather, 1991: 52). Whitmore (1994: 98) agrees that an examination of political relations is a necessary part of the research process. Without such, research, if not a replication of society, is then, according to Witkin (2000: 207), a moralistic statement of what should be. Descriptions of society are reflections of our culture, our values, beliefs and relationships (2000: 207).

A key motivation for undertaking the research at Sure Start was to counter hegemonic representations of ‘good’ mothers and the ‘judgements of real and imaginary others’ of which poor working-class mothers are ‘constantly aware’ (Skeggs, 2002: 4). Poor working-class mothers are regularly subject to derision from the media and the tabloid press (see Author, 2009), being depicted as irresponsible, lazy and physically unattractive. Moreover, government policy has, in recent years, targeted children and their parents with increasingly interventionist and authoritarian measures (Author, 2009) that include reforming – or ‘remoralizing’ – ‘proper parenting’ (Hey and Bradford, 2006). Sure Start itself can be seen as part of an agenda that ‘has as its ultimate aim the eradication of class differences by reconstructing and transforming working-class parents into middle-class ones’ (Gewirtz, 2001: 366). Indeed, it automatically assumes a deficit in working-class parenting that requires correcting through such means as parenting classes. The much more complex, structural causes of poverty and inequality remain invisible while poor mothers, whose behaviour does not ‘conform to the norms promoted by this ideology’, can be construed as ignorant and morally deviant (Clarke, 2006: 701).

It was key to the methodology that local mothers were involved in the research as active agents rather than the passive objects of traditional research. In so doing, the project also drew from participatory research, an approach with diverse roots but that has close ties with feminisms. It aims to support those with less power in their organizational or community settings (Hall, 2001: 171), building skills with and giving voice to individuals involved in the research process with the aim of ameliorating communities and, ultimately, liberating the oppressed.

As outlined above, I worked on every stage of the project with a group of co-researchers who were all local mothers. I floated the idea of using drama in the research process right at the start of the project and this appealed to my co-researchers, several of whom subsequently became involved in the drama group themselves, and performed in the final production of The Wizard of Us. Once data collection and analysis was complete, and simultaneously we had produced our pantomime, we worked together on scripting this play (with the assistance of Diane who continued to work with us, lending her considerable experience). In particular, the women were keen to include stories of: overcoming drug use, illicit drug use being a considerable problem in the local area and something that a number of women who took part in the research had battled against; isolation, a condition that virtually all the mothers we talked to during the course of the research had encountered since having children; and post-natal depression, which again a vast proportion of the women spoke about having experienced, even though we didn’t directly question them about this. We also wanted to convey the sense of women’s lack of self-esteem and confidence, and a general dissatisfaction with life that seeped through the data.

Lion leaves the house

Flash – Good and Bad Conscience appear.

Flash of light and Good and Bad disappear.

Loud ‘knock knock’ noise – no answer. Repeat – no answer. Repeat.

Truth and artifice

In Inckle’s (2010) exploration of using ‘ethnographic fictions’ as a way of researching and representing the complexities of bodily experience, she discusses the ‘ethical shortfalls’ (2010: 36) of conventional ways of representing knowledge gained from research. She is also very aware of the way that certain kinds of knowledge are privileged over others (2010: 39). Over the past two decades, there has been a growing interest in alternative ways of producing research accounts in both ethnographic and feminist research, following the postmodern turn in the social sciences that revealed a constantly changing, ‘plural’ world where ‘meanings and truth never arrive simply’ (Plummer, 2001: xi). Employing the use of metaphor, allegory and other fictive devices in writing research has become more acceptable (Banks and Banks, 1998; Clifford, 1986; Ellis and Bochner, 1996). Avarett (2009) reflects that it can still be difficult to have experimental writing published; however, there has been a definite rise in research accounts that experiment with fictive devices. Doing so can serve to counter some of the frustration that Anna Banks (Banks and Banks, 1998: 11) articulates here:

My telling the story of … research often is disturbingly vacuous, because it lacks the traditional qualities of good storytelling, qualities like plot development … Character is important, too. Believable characters and their personal motives also promote the resonance I mentioned, as does figurative language … facts don’t always tell the truth, or a truth worth worrying about, and the truth in a good story – its resonance with our felt experience … sometimes must use imaginary facts.

Smith’s (1993) work is also concerned with how the distortion of reality can actually show its true nature. Her performance piece, Fires in the Mirror, is based on the Crown Heights riots in Brooklyn, a series of violent tensions between the Black and Jewish communities. Smith carried out a number of interviews after the event with major players and proceeded to perform these interviews verbatim, taking on the roles of the characters interviewed. Smith’s portrayal of these figures makes unsettling viewing, mediated as they are through her black female identity. Forsyth (2005) points out that Smith deliberately distances herself from naturalism in order to emphasize otherness: ‘Naturalism naturalises ideology and takes us no further.’

Since, as I state above, the goal of feminist research is to challenge the status quo, in this case to move away from the hegemonic notions of working-class motherhood, then the artificiality of The Wizard of Us characters in their gaudy costumes seems a fitting way of viewing lives that, through another lens, could appear grey and dull. In an in-depth interview, a mother who had worked as a volunteer for the Sure Start programme since its beginnings, even having a stint as Chair of the management board, laments the ways in which outsiders see the community as just another run down ex-mining town, when for its residents, it is home, family and everything they know and love, or hate:

When I read the first thing, the draft of the programme, it said, deprived, houses falling to bits. I was like, get me razor blades out. I thought, is it that – I thought, I live here and does it sound that – is that how people view you? What other things it’s got other than by the state of your house is, whether it looks like a shed or whatever, or … there’s other things that can be counted that have more of a wealth that you can’t see.

The Wizard of Us does have its characters tell their stories ‘realistically’ and the use of local language and expression heightens this realism, encouraging identification from the audience. At the same time, however – not least through the costumes and sets – there are constant reminders of the play’s theatrical artifice. Like traditional pantomime, The Wizard of Us aims to ‘draw the audience into its complicity with the comedians in the perception of the performance world, pantoland, as unique, original, archaic and fun’ (Taylor, 2007: 102). It could be argued that the vivid colours and characters of The Wizard of Us, an evident artificiality, perhaps hold more resonance, more authenticity, than an outsider’s bland, judgmental, account of the local area and its residents.

In this respect, the collaborative nature of the play, and indeed the research project itself, was successful. In line with Denzin’s (2000) vision of an interpretive methodology for a radical democratic social justice, it works with a community ‘with its own symbolism, mythology, and heroic figures’, drawing on ‘vernacular, folk, and popular culture forms of representation’ (2000: 258). It is quite a different project from Bagley’s (2008) work, which also involved dramatizing the findings from research at a Sure Start programme. Bagley gave his field notes to a group of community artists and drama students who interpreted them themselves and subsequently staged their interpretations. While the production resulting from this project appears to have been interesting and affective – including an evocative-sounding instillation comprising such everyday household objects as washing baskets, an ironing board, children’s toys, small plastic childrens chairs, tables, chairs, kettles and a pair of slippers (2008: 57) – it does beg the question of how the local Sure Start community would have staged such a production themselves.

Both The Wizard of Us and Bagley’s (2008) production were collaborative affairs, albeit with rather different groups of collaborators. Eisner (2008: 10) describes his vision of an arts-based research that is ‘considerably more collaborative, cooperative, multidisciplinary, and multimodal in character’. He continues: ‘Knowledge creation is a social affair. The solo producer will no longer be salient, particularly in the contexts for those wishing to do arts-informed research’ (Eisner, 2008: 10). While I agree that collaborative knowledge creation is necessary, it does not come without its problems, not least the concern of whose voice should be given precedence (assuming that not all collaborators will share the very same views and experiences).

In theory, enabling the local mothers to construct and perform the play was a fitting methodology in terms of producing work that empowers communities and challenges the status quo. However, I was (and I remain) uncomfortable with aspects of our play.

Dressing up in outlandish costumes and play-acting arguably gave the women a sense of freedom to be able to caricature and satirize the widespread representations of working-class mothers. However, there is a certain irony in employing Disneyesque stereotypes in order to do so, and this would have benefited from more critical discussion with both participants and audience (see below). In addition, the women were keen to provide the play with a positive message and ‘happy ending’, thus painting a rather rosy picture of Sure Start. Certainly, there were some very worthwhile elements to the programme, not least the fact that it enabled mothers to make friends and ‘get out of the house’. Yet there were also strong undercurrents throughout the research (and through my own observations through my years at the programme) of Sure Start fulfilling other purposes, including the monitoring and ‘assessment’ of the women’s competence as parents. Tensions abounded between parents and staff, the latter often deemed judgmental and interfering by the former, yet these remained invisible in a play that afforded an opportunity to tackle such issues. The emphasis the Sure Start initiative gave to paid work as a route out of poverty (as in Tinman’s story, below) was also much resisted by local mothers, including the research team, but appeared in the play devoid of critique.

While The Wizard of Us had a certain authenticity about it, it lacks that critical edge that would have reflected local families’ ambivalence about the programme, although were I to repeat the research, I am undecided as to the extent to which I would challenge the story that the women wished to tell about Sure Start in the play. Privileging my own concerns as a white, middle-class researcher would highlight power differences and compromise the methodology (see Gillies and Alldred, 2002: 40).

Tinman joins in

Good and Bad Conscience appear

Good and Bad disappear

Transformations

Inckle (2010: 30) discusses an ‘ethic of transformation’ that looks for research to make changes at both a micro and macro level: ‘it should be affective for researcher, participants, audience, and the broader structures of policy and theory’. The use of drama in the feminist, participatory research process at the Sure Start programme was certainly successful on a micro level. It added colour and humour to the work in a way that resonated with local families and produced an emotional response in the audience. After performing The Wizard of Us at a showcase of the research findings, which also included readings of the poetry and showings of the short films produced during the research project, audience members (including local parents, professionals and academics) were invited to give their feedback. Interestingly, this often referred to the veracity of the work:

Very enjoyable – the girls did very well. The girls’ stories made tears come to my eyes when I heard their stories about their past lives. But all they said and did was the truth about P [local mother].

Another audience member noted: ‘The drama was fantastic and showed how lives really are’.

It is the involvement of local women in every stage of the research process that contributes to the reliability of the findings. Daly (2000: 65), for instance, asserts that knowledge produced through an alternative, participatory approach has been validated by all those involved in the research rather than a ‘scientific’ conclusion that has been reached by the researcher in isolation. Certainly, throughout the research process (including the scripting of the drama), the themes focused on for the research questions and analysis were always the result of much group discussion. What it was lacking, and what I would certainly include were I to repeat this project, is discussion with the audience after the performance. This would enable more critical reflection of the findings. The following feedback from a member of Sure Start’s staff is typical of the way that staff and other practitioners were keen to attribute the more positive findings to their own work:

I found the presentation today very moving (can’t believe I couldn’t stop crying!) I’ve been a member of staff in the programme virtually from the beginning and am so happy to see the parents who helped me settle in on that stage today with loads of confidence … The Wizard of Us play was excellent and got loads of messages across. I feel really valued and somehow made me feel I had a hand through Sure Start to improve lives.

The play reached a wider audience than the more conventional research report did and offered this audience a view of working-class mothers as strong, capable and talented. It did prove more popular with its academic viewers rather than those that set the policy agenda. The National Evaluation of Sure Start, a national, large-scale, government-funded research project investigating the effectiveness of Sure Start and responsible for overseeing such local pieces of research as ours, would only accept a brief written summary of our research and was not interested in the film that we produced of the play. We did show the film footage at academic conferences, however, and this proved popular and engaging.

A further ESRC research grant ³ enabled me to re-visit the Sure Start community in 2008–9 and, disappointingly, it was clear that the issues with tensions between staff at the programme and the parents had not been resolved. In fact, the situation had deteriorated to the point where parents who volunteered at the programme were not allowed to use the staff kitchen. The divide between ‘us and them’ had grown, when the very point of the research had been to encourage staff (along with other professionals and academics) to empathize with poor, working-class mothers and to see the world from their perspective. Certainly more work needed to have been done in order to effect change on anything more than an individual level.

It was encouraging, though, that the lives of those women who had been involved in the drama and their families had continued to benefit positively from their involvement.

The drama group continued to run at Sure Start after the completion of the research project and another pantomime was written, rehearsed and staged. Three years on it was no longer running, but remained an important achievement to participants. It had also filtered through to their children, several of whom continued to attend dance and drama classes – which, they admitted, would have been inconceivable prior to the drama group.

One woman offers her own reflections:

[I’m] not just like confident, but proud as well. You know, that I actually did it. ’Cos I never thought I’d do owt like that. Never. I think me kids as well – you know if they like see me doing stuff, you know, then they’re not gonna be frightened … ’Cos I hate being out of my comfort zone, I really do … I mean [my daughter] now … she’s going to the NEM Arena singing with the Young Voices project. And I think there’s something like 1500 children all going and singing all these songs and that, and she’s getting really nervous. And I keep saying to her, ‘Well I don’t like talking in front of people, but I did it!’

Another woman who took part in each stage of the research, including the drama, is now a member of a gospel choir and admits that she would not have had the confidence to audition for this prior to her involvement with our project. A further member of the play’s cast – who also took part in the pantomimes – had learning difficulties and at the start of her involvement with the drama struggled greatly to read and learn her lines. However, she thrived on the weekly drama groups and was given lots of support and encouragement, to the point that not only did she develop these skills, but her confidence improved dramatically. At the time of the follow-up interviews she was training to become a crèche worker and had left an abusive relationship. Other participants in the follow-up interviews reiterated this story and held it up as being one of the successes of the project. As Behar (2003: 37) stresses in her work, which encourages ethnographers to present their findings in a wider variety of literary and artistic genres:

One thing remains constant about our humanity – that we must never stop trying to tell stories of who we think we are. Equally, we must never stop wanting to listen to each other’s stories. If we ever stopped, it would all be over.

It proved disappointing – and a flaw in the research process – that those in the position to make changes on a larger scale did not hear the stories that we intended them to. However, the fact that participants grew close to one another, inspired their children, developed their own sense of self and celebrated in each other’s successes made the work very much worthwhile.

There’s No Place Like Home…

Good and Bad appear

They all nod