Certainty Kills Civic Imagination | Michael Rohd

Bio:

Michael Rohd has spent thirty-five years asking the same question from increasingly systemic angles: what does it take for people who don't usually talk to each other to actually talk, and what happens when they do?

He started in 1991, running theater workshops on the secret fifth floor of a Washington DC homeless shelter — a hidden HIV clinic where people sought care anonymously because being seen there put them at risk. He didn't know yet that what he was building had a name. A decade later, he co-founded Sojourn Theatre in Portland, spent nine years at Northwestern University, then moved to ASU before joining the University of Montana in 2022 to found the Co-Lab for Civic Imagination. His book, *Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue*, has been widely translated and remains the field manual for applied civic theater practice in the US.

His current project — State of Mind, done in partnership with Montana Repertory Theater — is a touring theater and public dialogue residency on behavioral health that has now reached 37 Montana communities and more than 2,700 participants. Montana has ranked in the top five states for suicide for thirty consecutive years. The work is not incidental.

In this conversation: what kills civic imagination (certainty is first on the list), what a well-designed facilitation process makes possible that a badly designed one doesn't, why theater can't change people's deeply held beliefs but can be a gymnasium for practicing courage, what students in rural Montana keep telling adults about adult behavior, the moment a Great Falls school board meeting stopped because board members were moved to tears, and what you do with thirty years of witnessing.

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In this episode:

- The origin story: HIV workshops on a secret fifth floor in 1991
- Dwight Conquergood and the ethics of working as an outsider in communities not your own
- Augusto Boal and the discovery that someone else was already doing adjacent work
- What kills civic imagination: certainty, lack of trust, no analysis of power, racism and exclusion
- Process design: what a well-designed facilitation makes possible
- What theater can't do — and why Rohd is careful not to overclaim
- State of Mind: 37 communities, care commitments, and what young people keep saying about adults
- The Great Falls moment: a school board meeting halted by student testimony
- The most surprising finding: students surfacing adult drinking, drug use, and modeling as the obstacle to their own wellbeing
- What you do with thirty years of bearing witness

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Links:

- Michael Rohd's article on the Malta 2.0 residency (with photographs): https://michaelrohd.substack.com/p/state-of-mind-20-malta-montana
- Co-Lab for Civic Imagination at University of Montana: https://www.umcivicimagination.com/
- State of Mind project: https://www.headwatersmt.org/stateofmind-mentalhealth/
- *Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue* by Michael Rohd: https://www.heinemann.com/products/e00002.aspx
- Augusto Boal, *Games for Actors and Non-Actors*:

Transcript

The Principal Uncertainty

Conversation with Michael Rohd

"Certainty Kills Civic Imagination"

George Laufenberg: Michael, six months ago, you and I were sitting in a bowling alley. It was the cast party for the fall show that our kids were in together. I was trying to explain this project that I'm building — mostly, I think, to hear myself, to see if I could get the words out in front of someone whose opinion I respected. I'm not sure I pulled it off. I remember you being very generous.

That conversation stayed with me, partly because I was circling around something I wasn't then able to name very clearly — which is really about what happens for people when the maps they use to navigate their lives stop working. And I've been thinking about it ever since as the project has gotten more real and I've gotten clearer about who I wanted to talk to. And then this week, of course, I'm in a community theater production with your kid and my kid. It's just right. So welcome, good sir, to The Principal Uncertainty. I am so glad that we finally got here.

Michael Rohd: Thank you, George. I'm happy to be here too. Thank you.

George: Michael, you've been doing civic theater for thirty years now. But the origin story matters. What was the problem you were trying to solve? How clearly did you see it at the time?

Michael: Well, if you're talking about thirty years ago and my starting work that feels kind of civic-focused, it goes before Sojourn — it goes about thirty-five years back to 1991. I think the two problems I was trying to figure out, although I couldn't name them yet: one, I felt a little dissatisfied with the way the theater industry — the field I thought I was trying to enter — actually did and didn't engage with communities where it took place.

The industry was based on a very particular kind of nonprofit industrial complex model, with a particular mode of producing and distributing product that had a relationship, as it would have to in that system, to capital and capitalism. Although it was non-commercial theater, the nonprofit theater was pretty much driven by financial imperatives and board relationships. I didn't know any of that at the time, but I was noticing and unsettled by the lack of relationship that most theater companies had to the neighborhoods and places where they existed. The relationship was most frequently that the audiences of most of the theaters that were paying artists at this moment — the late eighties, early nineties — were selling tickets to people who lived twenty or twenty-five miles outside of the city in the suburbs, who would drive in, pay for parking, see the show, go back out. There was no relationship between the people who worked in that building and the people who lived around it.

I didn't quite understand it because I'd grown up loving theater because of the sense of community that happened in the process and with audiences — school, camp, all that stuff. And I'd had amazing mentors in undergrad who pointed a lot at the power of theater in relation to community building and social change. So one challenge I was trying to tackle was: how could theater connect to place and be a part of people's lives? Not that entertainment isn't good — it's great, I love it — but theater could be more than that.

The second thing that drew me into this kind of work was in the early nineties in Washington DC. I was randomly invited by a friend to give workshops at a place called Healthcare for the Homeless. In Washington DC at the time, the largest homeless shelter was the 14th Street Mission Shelter. On the fifth floor of that, in 1991, was a secret clinic called Healthcare for the Homeless — where men and women living with HIV and AIDS would go secretly, anonymously, on stairs and a back elevator, because if they were in the main population receiving any care for HIV and people knew, they would be in danger. The myths were so prevalent. People thought it was dangerous to be near them in the shelter.

So I started doing theater workshops up on the fifth floor. The challenge I was tackling was: how do you move conversations about HIV and homelessness into community in different ways? Can theater be a part of that? That pulled me into something I started with a bunch of people called Hope is Vital, which became a national program for about a decade of my life, before Sojourn.

So those two things altered what I thought was going to be acting, writing, directing — just a straight theater world. It veered me in a different direction.

George: You just mentioned your undergraduate experience, and I was struck by a parallel to what in higher ed is usually called the town-gown divide — the relationship between universities and the spaces they occupy. Can you tease that out? How does that analogy hold?

Michael: One of my mentors in college was a really significant figure in sociology, ethnography, and justice work. He was a performance studies professor at Northwestern, where I went. His name was Dwight Conquergood. He published and made documentaries in the eighties and nineties that were pretty important.

What he really taught, in addition to turning non-fiction into performance through community partnership and with a deep sense of activism, was that he was one of the first people I met who was exploring ways as an outsider to build authentic relationship in spaces that were not his naturally or natively — and then to bring his art into those spaces in useful ways, contributing to the advocacy agendas of the people there, not some external agenda being brought in.

He famously spent years working with gangs on the South Side of Chicago and with Hmong refugees in Chicago, basically by embedding himself in those communities and becoming part of them for years, then creating work about — but with — them for the larger world. He became a very significant anti-capital punishment activist through his work on the South Side, and ultimately began training lawyers around the United States in how to fight capital punishment cases based on the work he'd done as an artist in those spaces. As a student, at around twenty-one or twenty-two, that was a very impressionable time to be around somebody like that.

That, mixed with other great mentors who were working in really non-traditional ways, helped me think about how to deploy and investigate theater differently outside of the arts ecosystem.

George: Your book, Theatre for Community, Conflict, and Dialogue, has been widely translated and is essentially the field manual for this work. When you wrote it, did you think you were creating something new or describing a practice that already existed?

Michael: That's an interesting question. I wrote it thirty years ago — like now, this month, thirty years ago. I wrote it in ninety-six, published in ninety-eight.

When I started working with Hope is Vital, I thought I was inventing a kind of participatory practice. For myself, I was inventing something — although I had teachers and was creating tools and synthesizing stuff. I didn't know about this guy named Augusto Boal, a Brazilian theater practitioner and philosopher who's world-renowned. He wasn't quite as known then. And so I was out doing my work before I wrote the book, and I was in San Francisco in ninety-four, on the road with Hope is Vital, visiting a friend. We went to the big art museum and went into the gift shop, and there was this book called Games for Actors and Non-Actors by Augusto Boal. I picked it up. This looks familiar. I read the foreword, the first couple of pages. This guy is doing stuff similar to me. I bought it, went out, sat on the lawn. It was a spring day. From about three-thirty to ten PM, my friend just left me there, and I read the whole book.

I realized this guy had been doing work, and I'd basically found my way to everything in this book — it just gave it a different name. It was also translated from Brazilian into English, and I found it a little dense and wordy. I couldn't imagine practitioners I was meeting around the country being able to activate it unless they had a deep theater background. So I spent a couple more years on the road and thought: what I might offer isn't a duplicate of that. It's certainly a cousin.

That guy became a mentor of mine — I ended up working with him in a couple of spots around the world. But what happened was, the Nebraska Department of Health said: we want you to do a big residency, start some youth groups, teach teachers. And what we really want is a workbook so our teachers can use it after you leave.

So I set up two weeks in Omaha. The first week: an in-depth training for educators and health workers, with every moment recorded and noted, structured in the order I thought would serve a book. The second week: organizing my notes and revisiting everyone I'd trained. The deal was they got the free training if they'd give me an evening to give feedback on how I was structuring things.

After those two weeks, I had four weeks — ridiculous — to deliver a manuscript. I went back to DC, to an apartment over somebody's garage, sat on a bad wooden chair at a desk using the first laptop computer I'd ever had. My ex-girlfriend's mother had given me a bad old MacBook. I didn't leave that room except to get food for about four weeks. I actually injured my back. It took me years to undo what I did sitting on that chair, typing nonstop.

I turned in the manuscript. Three months to copy-edit and design it. That fall of ninety-six, we had a thing to give back to those teachers. And then I had a three-ring binder I could take to Kinko's and sell at workshops.

After a year of carting around that bag and always losing money, I decided to get it published. I reached out to the one publisher I was most interested in. Finally drove to New Hampshire with the notebook, the number of people who'd bought it, quotes from people using it around the country. Finally they did it. I thought I was doing something new. I realized it was adjacent to other practices, and I made sure what I wrote was original — every activity credits a source if it comes from somewhere else. I felt okay about it.

George: Is there a line from the process you developed for writing the book to the work you're doing in communities now?

Michael: Yes. Being that intentional about using that first week in Omaha to design a process that would leave people with tools they could keep using definitely affects how I think about designing workshops that leave stuff in places. There's a line there in terms of organizing pedagogy and organizing experiences so they're comprehensible and usable.

George: In your work you use the phrase "civic imagination." What kills it? What are the specific conditions that make it impossible?

Michael: What kills civic imagination. I would list a couple of things.

One: certainty. Certainty kills civic imagination. Curiosity and discovery are necessary for the collective act of figuring and imagining. So certainty would be number one.

Number two: lack of trust, which is a major issue in our country right now — a lack of trust across difference and even across distance.

Then: a lack of awareness of power and its relationship to what is happening in a given moment in a given space. No awareness and no analysis of power kills civic imagination.

And then, to get really specific: racism, classism, homophobia, misogyny. Those kill civic imagination. Because you might be working on solutions, but if everybody isn't welcome and involved — and being involved means being welcomed — then the word civic isn't actually part of what you're doing. You can't put civic in front of imagination unless everybody's a part of it.

George: The awareness of power structures is a really interesting one. My immediate reaction was: doesn't that awareness foreclose imagination? When I'm even close to fully aware of the power structures in play, my first reaction is — I can't even imagine being out from under this. Part of the work seems to be about holding that experience of hopelessness in abeyance long enough to imagine something different.

Michael: What I mean by analysis of power and its relationship to civic imagination is less about a constant awareness of politics or Trump or Republicans. I mean: who in the room has different layers of privilege outside the room, and how does that privilege show up in relation to an acknowledgment of who's here, what is possible for people here and outside the space?

If you're in a room with seventeen people and the person who owns the biggest business in town is taking up a lot of air — saying things like, we could do this and this, when I take my kids to London we have this kind of experience — there's no awareness of what's actually available to the other people in the room. Everybody feeling like they have as much right to be present and have agency — and everybody making that possible, not just through civility but through honesty about the layers we're all living amidst and how they affect what does and doesn't seem possible.

George: Let's get into the facilitation work itself. Your work is rooted in what you call process design. What does a well-designed process make possible that a badly designed one doesn't?

Michael: A well-designed process does not affirm, invite, or lift up certainty. It consistently looks for ways to invite curiosity into the space — and adjacent to curiosity, generosity.

Another thing that kills civic imagination is lack of trust. So a well-facilitated process really foregrounds building trust. Before anything else can happen, it doesn't have to build lifetime trust — but it has to incrementally, authentically build trust between the humans in the space, between those humans and the facilitator, and between what's happening in that room and the context that invited the room together. Facilitation has to take into account: this is a public engagement event for our city and you're going to be giving input on a planning issue. That means people have to trust that the city actually cares and wants to listen. If people think it's just a check-the-box experiment, there actually isn't going to be trust, and there won't be much success doing really significant thinking or imagining together.

A well-facilitated process is also thoughtful about cadence — the cadence most likely to build trust, invite curiosity, move toward useful outcomes, create a positive and joyful experience — by starting slow, whatever slow can mean in that space, and then picking up velocity on whatever timeline exists. Not having those things is the not-well-facilitated process, which leads to all the things that prevent civic imagination from being possible.

George: How do you get people to allow for the possibility that the city — capital C, title case — actually cares about them?

Michael: If you're doing public engagement in relation to some kind of governmental body, you have to have representation from that body in the process, at least at the beginning, to make a compelling case for why this is happening and to articulate the process by which their listening will occur — and the process by which they will hold themselves accountable, and how participants can participate in that accountability.

George: You've been very careful not to overclaim what theater can do. Where is the line between what a theater process can open up and where it has to hand off to something else?

Michael: Theater can accomplish a lot. I'm careful about overstating it because then one sets oneself up to be easily proven false, and people denigrate the potential and value of theater art.

Theater's role in civic imagination: bringing people together to co-design, to problem-solve, to coalition-build, to engage publics authentically, to imagine futures. Theater can help with all those things. I do think theater can be an empathy machine. I do think it can be a gymnasium for practicing our muscles of courage and engagement and disagreement. But it can do all those things really poorly if not well-designed and well-guided.

Mostly when you say theater, people understandably think about plays — the most public manifestation. I do a lot of advocating for all the ways theater can exist as process, separate from show. But when you just talk about shows: people often claim it'll change people's minds, change lives. I do think it changes lives. But I don't actually believe theater changes people's minds about something they hold a strong, identity-connected belief in.

Maybe when Arthur Miller's All My Sons or Death of a Salesman was done, and we had more of a monoculture, people really thought about the ethics of capitalism or what the war had done to families. Maybe. But I certainly don't believe that anybody on the left or right is seeing a play on the other side and changing their ideology. When theater claims to be a route for change in that way, I think that is false.

When theater talks about transformation as a way for people to expand their emotional bandwidth, or to see different perspectives in new ways — I think that's true. But when we sit in the dark and watch stuff in the light, that's a very minuscule portion of what can actually happen when you have people somehow involved in play or experiences together.

George: That resonates with my very amateur-hour experience of shows being almost an artifact of the actual thing — the long durée process of hours and hours spent making a community with people, getting to know them, surprising yourself over and over again.

Michael: Yeah. Yeah.

George: Let's talk about State of Mind. For listeners who aren't familiar, can you describe the project?

Michael: State of Mind is a theater and public dialogue program — even a campaign — that comes out of the University of Montana's Co-Lab for Civic Imagination, which I direct. We've been working on it for four years and it's been touring Montana for almost two years.

Basically it is a play — a devised, participatory show. A workshop that high school students go through. A workshop that teachers, health providers, and health officials go through. And a community meeting, a town hall meeting. We do two-day residencies: youth workshop, adult workshop, free performance at night for the public, town meeting the next morning. We've done thirty-seven communities around Montana now — all over the state, east, west, north, south. And we've been invited to return to communities for what we call 2.0 residencies, which are longer and deeper with expanded goals.

The goals were developed three years ago with a circle of collaborators from all over Montana — public health officials, health providers, school principals. They are: tackle the stigma that surrounds mental and behavioral health in Montana; make local services more visible; help stitch together folks across sectors who may not know they are allies around positive behavioral and mental health outcomes; explore models of community care — an expanded notion that it's not just about professionals but about ways community members can look out for and support each other; activate and center youth voices; and take what we learn and move it into other statewide conversations and help communities get access to statewide resources they may not know about.

The project goes out on the road with three actor-facilitators, a social worker/counselor, and a lead facilitator — a team of five, usually. About nine actors rotate in and out of the cast based on availability and where we're going.

George: What are the care commitments?

Michael: In the workshop we do with fifteen to thirty high school students — the first morning of our residency — we use theater activities and facilitated conversation to basically have a listening session. We're not training them on mental health. We're asking them questions, using prompts, and they're talking about their experience of living in the place they live.

The last thirty minutes, we have the students write with us. The care commitments are ten statements. They begin with something like: For the last couple of days, we've been here in Red Lodge, and we had the privilege of working with a group of students at the high school. They did some thinking about what they would need to feel safe, healthy, and welcome in this place where they live — and they crafted a document, a series of statements. We call it care commitments. We're going to read that to you now.

Those lines go into the show that night. The care commitments are fresh at every performance, from that community's young people.

The commitments themselves are: We need to believe — blank. We need to see — blank. We need to know — blank. We need to have faith in the fact that — blank. We need teachers in our school every day to — blank. We need adults in our lives every day to — blank. We need resources for — blank. We need to never worry — blank. And students craft completions in small groups, then as a whole room arrive at consensus on what they want adults in the community to hear.

George: When this happened in Great Falls — a school board meeting was halted because board members were in tears, moved by the commitments. What do you make of that moment?

Michael: Unbeknownst to us, it happened to be on the calendar that that evening there was a school board meeting. And unbeknownst to us, some of the people in our student workshop were part of an advisory group at the school that had already been planning to go to that meeting. Because they'd written the care commitments that day, they asked if they could read them as testimony at the board meeting — and they did. We were told the next day that board members were in tears and they had to pause the meeting a little bit and talk about it. There are a number of places where those care commitments have been used to advocate for more mental health resources in school communities.

George: The content is different in every town because it comes from the community's workshop. What's the most surprising thing a community has surfaced?

Michael: Two things that started happening early on and have been consistent across the whole state: we were a little surprised — we shouldn't have been — at how aware our young people are of the impact adult behavior has on them. They are aware of, and angry, upset, frustrated, sad, confused about the fact that what they see adults model is not what they're being told is healthy behavior. They see unhealthy relationships in their adult community. Unhealthy use of substances and alcohol. Unhealthy gossip and rumoring.

What they say to us again and again — it appears in the care commitments every time — is something along the lines of: We need to see adults caring for each other and being better role models for us. We've been to communities where the care commitments included: We need adults to stop drinking so much. We need adults to stop modeling hard drug use. There was one place where the high school students said: we can't go to our little downtown on a Friday night because we're afraid we'll get hit by a drunk adult driver. So we just don't go downtown.

Things that young people observed in adults, and what they wanted from adults, were powerful to hear — and really powerful for adults in those communities to hear as well.

George: As you head into the 2.0 residencies, what's different? What do you imagine is possible in the application of another layer of process?

Michael: We've done two. We went to Malta for a week and to Conrad for a week. They were very intense and really good. We decided to be really community-responsive and design different residencies for what we were learning people wanted in their communities.

In Malta, the goal was to normalize conversations about mental health in both youth and adult communities — not just in the school, but with adults feeling like they could talk about it together more. Over the course of a week, we did workshops with every single student in the high school — every student had at least ninety minutes with us.

We brought two visual artists in addition to our theater team. The visual artists built two kinds of work: an exhibit expressing things that came out of the youth sessions, and large-scale installation pieces that were interactive and data-gathering. We wrote ten prompts the public health officials wanted community input on. One was: If you needed mental health support, how comfortable would you be going to someone for that support? The installations — which I'd love to show you pictures of; I'll send you the article I wrote about it — allowed people to respond in really beautiful, physical ways.

The reason we went with art in Malta: every year on the first Friday in February, there's a massive rivalry sports event where Glasgow comes to the Malta gym for girls basketball, boys basketball, and wrestling. Malta and Glasgow together are about five thousand people total. This event is a night when more people come out than almost any other occasion. So it was determined: if we want to impact adult conversations, we need to be part of that night. We filled the halls and lobby of that gym so everybody coming through had to move through the exhibit.

That night, fifteen hundred people came — one-third of the combined population of both towns. They came through the art, participated in it, saw the student voices, had conversations. We heard again and again that people went home and talked about things because they couldn't avoid looking at it.

And then the next day, the Saturday, we co-hosted a free community brunch — a four-course meal with performances interspersed through it and facilitated dialogues at the tables. It was a really beautiful event.

George: You left a national touring company and a consulting collective to become a faculty member at a land-grant university in Montana. What were you betting on with that move?

Michael: I'm going to correct your timeline a little bit. Sojourn started in 1999, and that's what I did until 2007, when I moved from Portland to Chicago to take a job at Northwestern University. I taught there for nine years while I continued to work with Sojourn as artistic director. I left Northwestern in 2016 and went to ASU to move out of a traditional theater department and work more cross-disciplinarily. And then I really stopped being artistic director of Sojourn while I was at ASU, around 2021 or 2022 right before we moved.

When we came to UM to start this lab, I wasn't really leaving Sojourn — I'd already made that transition. I was leaving one public university to come to another one because I hadn't been succeeding in finding the higher-ed space where I could do projects like State of Mind.

Our family felt we'd be really lucky to live in Montana and in Missoula. And at the university there seemed to be an opportunity to do some cross-sector collaborative work that a lot of universities and certainly arts programs don't have space for. They were willing to give me a chance to try something different. The first year and a half before State of Mind got on the road, they let me build partnerships around the state. I had to raise the money for the project — the university didn't pay for it, but they paid for me. They gave me a job as a lab director.

They stuck with me those first couple years as I did the planning work. And once we got on the road, it's been easier for university leadership to understand that there's meaningful work happening around the state. I made the move because I believed there was an opportunity to do something different here — to work with great folks in an ecosystem that might be a useful place to explore and contribute.

George: I understand the Co-Lab has appointments in both Arts and Media and Public and Community Health Sciences — structurally unusual.

Michael: It's also no longer the case, actually. My position now is director of the Collaborative for Civic Imagination under the provost's office. I'm not formally under the College of Art and Media or the College of Health, although I collaborate in both spaces. If I were to return to a professorship — and I am a tenured professor — it would be in the College of Art and Media. But right now, I exist as a friend of that college working in the provost's office. The College of Art kind of cut me loose about a year and a half ago.

George: Without stepping on any toes about the unfolding of that — what kinds of possibilities are enabled or foreclosed by those different structural arrangements?

Michael: What's made more possible coming out of the provost's office is that there's a great group of people there who are thoughtful about how arts and creativity can be useful across different disciplines and sectors. I have a different opportunity to collaborate — I'm invited to work differently in the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the law school, the College of Health. If I were just in one school, the way higher ed works, it would be less likely for folks to see me as a functioning collaborator — the assumption would be that I'd be deeply embedded and overwhelmed in that one space. This way, I can be embedded and overwhelmed by many spaces.

The drawback is that folks in different colleges may not be sure exactly what my portfolio of activities is. My role on campus is not always legible to people I'm not in regular collaboration with. I continue to try to work on that.

George: As we wrap up: one way to think about what you've done is that you've spent thirty years in the room when people say things they've never said before. What do you do with that? What do you do with thirty years of bearing witness?

Michael: I think you try to learn. You try to receive the gifts of those moments and make them mean something in the project and context in which they were shared. You try to make sure they contribute to the goals or outcomes of that thing. And when you think about the accumulation — I think you just try to keep asking: what am I learning, form-wise and tool-wise, that is meaningful to share so other folks can do their work even more equipped and intentional?

I remember when I was starting Hope is Vital in the early nineties, going around the country doing residencies with schools and health departments and correctional facilities. My uncle — my only uncle — said to me: Well, what are you doing? You're doing this thing around HIV. What happens when they cure HIV? You're not going to have a job. If you do the thing well, there's no need for you.

And I just remember being like: well, that would be great. Whether it's a cure, successful prevention, or just everybody talking about it and it's not taboo — great. That's the point. The goal isn't to make yourself necessary. It's to keep learning and growing so you are consistently useful, and you are leaving things behind where you are not necessary — and maybe you'll have something else to offer later that will be useful again.

George: I can't imagine a better note on which to wrap up. Michael, thank you so much for your time. It's been a genuine pleasure.

Michael: Thank you very much, George. It was a great conversation. I'm glad to get to spend the time with you.

The Principal Uncertainty is hosted by George Laufenberg. New episodes on an every-two-weeks cadence. Find the show on Buzzsprout and all major podcast platforms.