Season 3 - Ep. 4 Dayron J. Miles - The power of theater to bring communities together

Visible through the windows of the ArtLab, the construction site for the American Repertory Theater’s new Goel Center for Creativity and Performance bustles with activity. This new home for the A.R.T. promises to accommodate public gatherings and community activities alongside the typical slate of theatrical works, weaving itself into a thriving arts community in Allston. 

In Season 3, episode 4 of “Works in Progress,” ArtLab director Bree Edwards speaks with Dayron J. Miles, Associate Artistic Director at the American Repertory Theater, about the power of theater to bring communities together. 

Dayron’s belief in theater as an artistic experience that helps exercise skills of democratic thinking grounds much of his practice. This ideal draws back to the early days of Western theater in Ancient Greece — a source of inspiration for Dayron. With anecdotes stretching from his time in high school to his current work with the A.R.T., Dayron shares his experiences connecting with local communities and building empathy through theatrical exposure. 

Looking forward to the Goel Center’s opening, we discuss how this new space turns many of these ideals into a reality. Join us for a thoughtful conversation that reminds us to keep listening and playing throughout our lives. 

Thanks for joining us for Works in Progress. We hope these conversations give you a glimpse into the creativity, collaboration, and experimentation happening at ArtLab. To learn more, visit artlab.harvard.edu.

The podcast is recorded in the Mead Production Lab at the ArtLab in Boston, Massachusetts.

Hosted by Bree Edwards
Audio by Luke Damroch
Production by Kat Nakaji
Research by Sadie Trichler & Ria Cuéllar-Koh

Design by James Blue & Sonia Ralston

Transcript

[INTRO MUSIC PLAYING] 

BREE EDWARDS: 

Hello and thank you for joining me for Works in Progress.  

I'm Bree Edwards, director of the ArtLab at Harvard, a place where artists, students, and scholars come together to explore, experiment, and create new work. 

The ArtLab is a special initiative of Harvard's Office of the President and Provost, supporting creative research and development across disciplines. 

In this podcast, we go behind the scenes to hear from artists as they grapple with big questions and transform their ideas into art. 

BREE 

Dayron J. Miles is the Associate Artistic Director at the American Repertory Theater (ART) at Harvard University. He joined the ART in November 2019 as the Senior Advisor for Civic Engagement and Strategic Partnerships, helping to envision the theater's move to Harvard's Allston campus.  

Before coming to Harvard, Dayron was previously the founding director of Public Works Dallas at the Dallas Theater Center, a community engagement and participatory theater project that was designed to deliberately blur the lines between professional artists and community members. 

Dayron, thank you for joining me today. 

DAYRON J. MILES 

Hello, Bree. Good morning. Have you had coffee? I had coffee. That’s what I’m looking at. Is that water? 

BREE 

It’s water. My coffee was at 5:00 a.m.  

DAYRON 

Oh, got it. I started my first cup at maybe 5:45 a.m. We could have coffee together. I'm an early riser, so I’m always up. 

BREE 

The power of gathering together in spaces is integral to the mission and your work at the American Repertory Theater at Harvard, also known as the ART, where you serve as the Associate Artistic Director. 

There's something really powerful about how theater brings people together, not just to reflect on the world, but to reimagine it. What have you seen emerge when communities are invited to co-create and re-envision together? 

DAYRON 

First of all, thank you for having me this morning and thank you for the question.  

You know, I think in order to fully be able to answer that question, I think I have to articulate my belief in and understanding of what the theater is meant to do, what the theater is meant for. 

And I'll also acknowledge theater has happened since humanity has existed in many forms. At the ART particularly, we practice Western theater, which was invented in ancient Greece or came about in ancient Greece in 5th century BC at the same time, within the same decade as democracy. So it’s really hard for me to sort of unbraid Western theater as we practice from democracy or Western democracy as we practice.  

So I think of the theater as a gymnasium of sorts in order for us to be able to come in and work out our empathy and expand our empathy. And I think of empathy as a necessary tool for democratic participation. We're all like working on this big experiment of democracy that's been going on here in the US for almost 250 years. 

And the theater gives us the opportunity, whether we know it or not, whether we are willing participants or not, the space to be able to embody perspectives that are not our own. And so at its core, what I think theater does for community or what emerges from communities experiencing theater together is a community who emerges from a shared experience of storytelling with a bigger worldview and a bigger understanding of what it means not only to be human, but to be in community with one another. And at the core of that, at the core of that engagement, is a more connected community. 

So I think the, sort of, most primary thing that I've witnessed and I've experienced myself, truly, like it's like the medicine works on me too, is this bigger sense of connectivity with those around me and with those who I share and build community with.  

BREE 

Dayron, you wear a lot of different hats. You will soon be our neighbor at the ArtLab across the street in Allston. You are also on the faculty advisory committee of the ArtLab. You’ve been a champion, a collaborator, a friend. So I want to talk about the classes that you teach in TDM. I want to talk about the vision for the ART, and what you bring to it. 

But I'd like to just start by kind of going back because I think you have individually a unique practice as a professional in the theater. And I'm curious, how did you come to have the practice that you have or the way that you work? Was there something in your past that brought you to your present? 

DAYRON 

Oh, again, I'm so grateful for the question because it's, I think sometimes when you're doing the work, it's, you often forget how you even got to where you are. 

I'm from Toledo, Ohio, which is, it's a pretty diverse place, but I lived in a pretty homogeneous neighborhood and went to a school that focused on the performing arts, the performing arts school, Metropolitan Toledo. 

And I had a graduating class of 20 people. And within the sort of cohort of 20, there were many ethnic backgrounds represented. And it's Toledo, Ohio. We have incredible winters. It’s probably one of the snowiest places in the United States, so our schools didn’t cancel for snow. Like a snow day was very, very rare. 

What we did have were two-hour delays. And so two-hour delays would happen quite frequently. And instead of sleeping in or just, you know, like delaying going to school, we all would meet up at the mall. I was born in the 80s, grew up in the 90s. In the early 2000s, the mall is what you did as a teenager.  

And so we would meet up at the mall and we would sort of converge at the mall as this cohort of about maybe like 17, 15, 17 of us would meet at the mall. And because of our different tastes and our different backgrounds and interests, it provoked something in me, this curiosity to investigate the things that across difference brought us together. 

I had already been practicing theater. I was at the performing arts school. So I started to think about how the theater could amplify aid and serve that because it was already core to theatrical practice and what the theater was sort of invented to do. That never left me. 

So I got my degree in theater and I went to a theater in Atlanta for a fellowship, the Kenny Leon Artistic Fellowship, and the artistic director at the end of that fellowship looked at me and was like, I want to investigate community engagement with you. And I was like, yes, what is that? 

And she was like, I'm actually not entirely sure, but we're going to figure it out together. The assignment became thinking about how the shows on our stage served a larger purpose in connecting our community and how we could take that program, amplify it in communities, and use it to bring people together.  

BREE 

That resonates with me. I really appreciate that, having been trained as a contemporary art curator, but have always worked on the engagement side. And how does that sit within the professional museum with the scholars and the practitioners when you are also in charge of making those opportunities for engagement. And I see you doing that in theater. 

One really exciting program that I know you've been very passionate about and I'm really excited about is called the Levine Learning Lab. And this is going to be groundbreaking for the students, for the youth of Boston. It's a little bit different than what you're talking about growing up, but I can see some connective threads. 

Can you tell us a little bit about the lab? What it will do or what your hopes are for it? 

DAYRON 

Absolutely, and it might seem different, but it isn't dissimilar, actually. When I first got to ART, I had breakfast with Diane Paulus, our artistic director, and I asked her, what part of the community do you imagine us deepening our relationships with? Who don't you feel like are regularly represented in the sort of core audience of the theater?  

And Diane surprised me because we are the American Repertory Theater at Harvard University. I, again, not knowing the audience well yet, imagine that we had this really core group of college age students or even teenagers represented. And she said that we didn't. 

I thought that was curious being on a college campus. So as I continued to get to know the ART and really started to understand our programming, you know, I thought, how privileged are we to be a world-class theater on the campus of Harvard University. The resources that we have at Harvard to create stories, to create work are almost unimaginable. Like the artists who come with us, they have access to world-class thinkers, world-class research. They oftentimes have access to world-class spaces like the ArtLab to imagine and dream of making the best work possible. 

I thought, wouldn't it be cool to be able to unlock and share these resources through production with young people? And simultaneously, just like everybody else, I listen to the news podcasts. I watch NPR and CNN and MSNBC and consume news like we all do. And it's almost impossible to do those things and not note the incredible polarization happening in our country, in our world. 00:10:47 DAYRON 

I thought, you know, I'm a big fan of democracy. I love democracy. I love theater. We've already talked about those shared values. One thing that seems to have evaporated in the last decade or two is this practice of empathy. How do we return? And it’s like, we actually don’t have to learn a new skill. Our country has existed for a long time. Like, we actually know how to have debate and discourse. Maybe we’ve forgotten.  

The act or the job isn’t necessarily teaching a new skill. It’s just remembering. And so I thought, you know, if we’re going to help any parts of our humanity, any parts of our community remember, what if it’s our young people? What if it’s the people that we are handing the keys to our democracy two in just a few years? What if we started to embed the practice of empathic understanding and civil discourse? 

And, again, I’ve already articulated how I think the theater is a gymnasium that can allow that to exist. And so I thought, what if we partnered with public schools in the greater Boston area? What if we imagined workshops that did not necessarily teach them to be better actors or to be better theater artists, but what if these workshops were based in the humanities? What if we started to teach the practice of expressing different viewpoints and sort of viewpoint diversity with our young people, using our shows and the essential questions that our productions ask as prompts?  

Would we—this always starts with a question—would we or could we start to embed the practice of empathy in the next generation of the people who will be leading and practicing our democracy? That was what birthed the Levine Learning Lab. And I'm so grateful to the Levine Family Foundation and the Crimson Lion Foundation for partnering with us to make sure that as long as the ART exists, we'll be able to do that for public schools in the greater Boston area. 

They experience 3 workshops associated with each show. They don’t come to student matinees. Rather, it was really important that their energy and the diversity of thought permeated the experience of our evening shows. So they come to the regular evening shows with regular patrons. They're not seated in a large group, but rather in pairs or trios throughout the theater. And they experience the art. They experience the shared event of live theater. And my hope is that on the other side of practicing this, after they've seen all of the shows in our season, that they feel comfortable expressing their different viewpoints. They feel comfortable engaging in debate and civil discourse that doesn't necessarily equal acquiescence, but provides the conditions for real exchange and the opportunity for growth and humanity.  

BREE 

And I think I've heard that there's also a workforce development and you're hiring theater artists to lead some of this facilitation. And have I also heard that the Harvard shuttles go out and pick up the kids in the schools? 

DAYRON 

Absolutely. You know, this has been this has been an incredible partnership, not just with the foundation, but with the university writ large. And we partnered with the Harvard shuttle or Harvard Transportation Department to think about how we could facilitate one of the the ideas and values of the Levine Learning Lab is to remove as many barriers from this gymnasium of empathy, the theater, for our participants. 

And so they eat a meal, we feed them when they come to the theater the night of the performance. And we provide transportation. The Harvard Transportation Department, they have been great partners. 

One of the byproducts of this partnership, which I didn't forecast, like I didn't foresee, was what it meant to these young people to have a Harvard-branded shuttle go into their neighborhood and pick them up. I just thought this might be easy, Harvard’s willing to partner with us—let’s do it. But the impact of seeing the Harvard shuttles in their neighborhood, providing safe transport from their schools to the theater and back, it landed so deeply. And when these shuttles go out, they go out bearing the motto of our university, Veritas, the truth that always emerges through the exchange in debate of ideas.  

BREE 

That's nice. And I think you need the creative idea, the artists, the funders, everyone on board. But there's also a kind of critical thing, which is timing. I'm thinking about you and your colleagues launching this lab at the same time that Michelle Wu is also opening up all the great resources of the city of Boston to the youth of the city, and how radically different that is from just 10 years ago when I was here, where there were all these world-class institutions, universities here, but thinking about how they actually served the youth of Boston, the residents of Boston, in a way that wasn't special programming that's just for them, that they were invited to the general program.  

And we've talked a minute about community theater and professional theater. I want to just spend some time thinking about what are the visions that you have for the new American Repertory Theater (ART) that will be across the street from the ArtLab, how it will sit in the community, how some of these communities that you've been working with already will come and use the theater, and how it might be different from the theater that we know today as the ART. 

DAYRON 

I think, first of all, the new Goel Center for Creativity and Performance was envisioned to be this space that facilitated the opportunity for serendipitous collision with our community members. It was meant to be this place where artists and students and members of our neighborhood here in Austin and throughout Greater Boston were able to sort of exist in a shared ecosystem.  

That ethos really inspired, you're going to get a theme here, I love ancient Greece, but really inspired by the ancient Greek agora, this place where activity and community happened and it was just a part of daily civic life. That ethos is imbued in the design and the material choices. It's imbued in every aspect of our new Center for Creativity and Performance, the new home of ART. 

Programmatically, it was really important, again, tapping back into this idea of sharing the resources of Harvard University. You know, we are inspired deeply by the ethos of teaching hospitals and what is able to occur when students are working alongside working professionals at the top of their field and what that provides for the next generation of artisans. 

We are also curious about intentionally blurring the lines between our students, the working professionals, and community members. I think inviting community members into the creative process unlocks imagination. And it is actually the unlocking of imagination that I think will help our experiment of democracy to persist, so that when we encounter these challenges in community, when we encounter these challenges in government, that actually the answer to those obstacles, the opportunity in that is for us to imagine differently and imagine collectively.  

So by unveiling the sort of creative process, we're helping everybody remember, it's not even learning a new skill, remember the inalienable human act of creation and imagination. I often think about being a kid. Like I spend a lot of time thinking about childhood and the things that have pulled us away from what we did so naturally.  

Bree, let me ask you a question. When’s the last time you pretended? 

BREE 

I'm a terrible pretender, really a terrible pretender. It’s true. Play is hard for me. 

DAYRON 

But I wonder, has it always been? 

BREE 

Probably not.  I mean, it’s a great question. It takes me back to pause, to dead air. Yeah, I think that’s the point. 

DAYRON 

It is. And Bree, maybe you’ll be happy or not happy to know that, like, you are in such good company. So many of us, we reach adulthood and we feel like the act of pretend, the act of imagination is child's play, but it isn't. It’s humanity. And in order for us to tackle these incredible challenges of our future, we have to have wild, big, vivid imaginations.  

The answers to our problems might not exist yet, but they do exist within us. We just have to remember. So I think sometimes if we unveil our creative process, we might help people remember what it means to think in creative ways to imagine.  

BREE 

And I love you turning the question back on me. In some ways, you just answered, what really is, I think, my last question for you, but I'm just going to frame it slightly different because I think it really gets to the crux of the work that you do and you're most passionate about. 

Both you and Diane Paulus are beautiful storytellers. It's a pleasure to listen to you, but a deeply integral part of your work at the ART and beyond revolves around public storytelling. What's different about how you approach stories when the goal is community healing or empowerment and not just entertainment, how we often think of the theater? And what kind of world do you think theater can help us imagine or create or rehearse for? 

DAYRON 

Yeah, I think it's, again, brilliant question. And I would slightly, I'll just answer it, but I think it might go a bit against some of the inherent, not assumptions, but like circumstances of the question. 

At ART, and I don't know if this is true for every theater, but at ART, we actually only want to tell stories that center the healing of communities and the sort of expansion of our understanding of what it means to be human. I think hopefully one of the byproducts of that is that it is deliciously entertaining, but I don't think that is the goal. And I don’t, we don’t set out for that to be the goal.  

And I think the call or the mission to lift and develop stories that allow for us to gather and to enter worlds and perspectives that are not our own, that provide the opportunity for community healing, is amplified by the rigor of doing that very work on the campus of a research institution, which just means that the polish and the...the final production that makes it to the stage is entertaining and is operating at a high frequency. 

I think our stories, the stories of community members, the stories of differing perspectives is always important. It is always important for us to examine worlds that are not our own, for us to understand cultures and ideas that are not easily accessible for us, because it's actually in that act that we're expanding our humanity and our capacity for empathy and empathetic understanding.  

BREE 

You serve on the ArtLab's Faculty Advisory Committee, and you have taught some amazing classes in the TDM, Theater, Dance, and Media program with amazing titles. I'm hoping that we can talk a little bit about the classes that you teach, because I think it's also part of building up that connection to the university, the students at the university.  

DAYRON 

I've taught a producing class, but the course I'm most proud of is the course that I currently teach in theater, dance, and media. And that is intersections. Intersections examines the intersection of Western democracy and Western theater practice, both, like I said, invented in 5th century BC. And by examining the shared values and the shared principles, we're able to see how theater can be a vehicle for civic and democratic engagement.  

BREE 

The podcast, Works in Progress, was born out of the COVID pandemic. So a lot of that first season we talked about how to be creative in challenging times of a pandemic.  And I think you and I both share a kind of core belief of optimism and getting excited and the power of getting people excited about ideas and being together. But we can’t also not acknowledge that these are challenging times at Harvard in the United States.  

But I want to just close on if there's somewhere a different theater or something that you've seen recently, something that's really inspired you, something that's just taking a step out of what we do every day, taking a step off the Harvard campus, what inspires you? 

DAYRON 

Well, right now, Bree, that's an easy question to answer. I'm actually directing an opera, a community opera. It's the final opera in the Boston Lyric Opera's season. It's called Noah's Flood. It is inspired by the Chester Miracle Plays. And it's the story of Noah's, Noah's Flood, Noah's Ark. And this community opera will involve 188 kids from all over the city, many, many different community groups. It in some ways reflects some of the work that I did in community engagement in Dallas, Texas. 

These big pageant, large-scale productions that actually have a history here in Boston, that have a history here in Austin in 1917. There was a production of Percy McKay's Caliban by the Yellow Sands. It was a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest that happened in the Harvard Stadium that involved over 5,000 Bostonians coming together to raise money for the Red Cross. And so they came together and did this huge community production that ran about 3 weeks to raise money for the Red Cross. So in some ways, the land on which we stand right now has already been imbued with Bostonians and community coming together to tell stories, to share stories for a greater good. 

And so in these challenging times, the opportunity to mount this community opera with hundreds of people from across our great city that examines what it means to be a community that comes together in the face of a crisis, an existential crisis, and to come out on the other side united feels like not a cure, but at least a balm to the polarization and the challenge of our day. And I think if we can continue to do these extreme acts of shared humanity, shared storytelling, and the almost impossible act of remembering, then we're going to be just fine.  

BREE 

Thank you, Dayron, for coming by the ArtLab and talking with me today. 

DAYRON 

Thank you for having me, and thank you for existing, ArtLab. The work that goes on here is incredible, and I feel incredibly fortunate that the ART will be joining this ecosystem of innovation and artistic exploration. 

BREE 

I can’t wait.  

DAYRON 

Neither can I.  

BREE 

Thanks for joining me for this episode of Works in Progress. We hope these conversations give you a glimpse into the creativity and experimentation happening here. 

To learn more, visit artlab.harvard.edu.  

This episode was recorded at the Mead Production Lab at the ArtLab in Boston, Massachusetts, with audio by Luke Yamrash, production by Kat Nikaji, research by Sadie Trichler, designed by James Blue, and I am your host, Bree Edwards.