Unsettled Borders Dramaturg

“Community Engagement” as Creative Dialogue

"It's just ok" by Nia Easley, 2019 (a response to neighborhood alienation installed in Avondale, Chicago)

Community engagement is a term often used by arts organizations and corporate entities alike — referring broadly to the work a company takes on to dialogue with a segment of a local populace.

We see that while much community engagement is initiated with good will, there is often a disconnect between an organization’s engagement efforts and the working creative practice of the artists themselves.

How can artists responsively dialogue with the ever-changing politics of the communities around them? Can artists and presenting organizations be compelled to change their practices in order to better listen to local groups that are not being reached by their work? This is where we introduce our Borders Dramaturg, a specified role that weds community engagement with dramaturgical and creative work bespoke to each iteration of each Unsettlement Music project.

This role was created by Nia Easley in collaboration with director Ashley Tata, as we prepared the premiere performance of Farming. Exploring the impact of settler colonialism on current labor practices, this large-scale music-theatre work sets texts by the colonist William Penn (his letters to and about the Lenape people) alongside public addresses by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Featuring the Grammy-winning chamber choir The Crossing and a 6-person band, Farming was first performed outdoors on a farm in Bucks County, PA.

Nia connected in person with urban farming groups, local farmers, and also members of the Lenape Nation, an indigenous tribe that remains unrecognized in the state of Pennsylvania. Individuals from these organizations were not just invited to engage with the artistic work through conversation and attendance of rehearsals and performances, but Nia worked to integrate the substance of her interactions into a design installation at the performance.

Learning from this experience, we ask: how can communities have a stake in the art being produced around them? And how can our creative practice as artists and presenters become more porous, contextualizing the content of our work differently as we learn more about the different people around us?

NIA EASLEY is a visual artist whose artistic and research practices center community engagement and local histories of marginalized populations. 

Nia’s other art works range from historically positioned print books like THE LAST GREEN BOOK (2022), which retells the Chicago-based South Side sites listed in the 1962 edition of the famed African American travel guide ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’ through careful photo documentation, observation and extensive research; to interventional time-based projects like IT’S JUST OK (2019), a response to neighborhood alienation installed as a billboard in Avondale, Chicago and paired with guided neighborhood tours. Also an art educator, Nia has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2020.