Brooke Kiener
Instructor of Theatre
Whitworth University

I am community arts practitioner and a member of the theatre faculty at Whitworth University in Spokane, Washington. And (perhaps more interestingly) an avid gardener, community-garden organizer, card carrying co-op supporter, and all around foodie!

I am intrigued and inspired by the description of this seminar and find resonance between your professed belief in “engaged learning as a critical methodology to address food system concerns” and a recent community-based performance project that I completed with students at my university. In the spring of 2010, a group of 11 students and I researched local and national food production-to-consumption issues, and created a 45-minute, site-specific performance that was free and accessible to our community. Our process included reflecting on our own histories with food, directed readings, interviews, farm visits, and independent research projects. All of the material we gathered we debrief together through both discursive and embodied methods. Then we collaboratively organized and interpreted our findings and experiences, creating a truly co-authored work. Our performance piece, titled “What’s in a Meal?”, shared our methods of exploration, our findings, and our personal histories and related to food. The performance also sought to engage audience members through game that we created and a culminating ritual of making and eating food together.

I understand that your seminar seeks to “engender a discussion about methods, project successes and failures, and results for communities both within and outside of the academy,” and I am eager to share our project with a wider audience and in the context of these discussion points. In particular, I believe our project can cite many successes on the personal level for the students and the audience members, but did not have any direct effects on a more institutional level. In fact, in my work I continue to struggle with balancing individual consciousness-raising, and advocating and fighting for larger policy and systemic changes. This would be a question I’d be interested in exploring in this seminar.