The mayor is wearing a backwards baseball cap and a sports jersey and there are people skateboarding around the room — this is not a typical city council meeting. Herberton Hall in the Keene Public Library on Wednesday, Oct. 29 was a full house for the mock production of City Council Meeting.
The City Council Meeting production was created by Mallory Catlett, Jim Findlay and Aaron Landsman. The production is referred to as performed participatory democracy, a performance created locally and involving audience participation.
The first performance of City Council Meeting was in Houston, Texas in 2012 and since then it has been taken all over the country.
Members of the community, in this case the community of Keene, sit in the audience and can choose which role they want in the performance.
Contributed Photo / Aaron Landsman
The audience members can choose to be bystanders, supporters or speakers. Speakers become city council members and sit on stage while supporters speak at the podium on certain issues and bystanders are able to watch the performance without speaking.
The performance began asking for audience volunteers to be speakers and supporters, while the bystanders left the room.
The meeting started with an instructional video, including actual council members Terry M. Clark representing Ward 3 and Emily P. Hague from the Planning, Licenses and Development Committee.
Co-creator and director Mallory Catlett described the meeting as a, “task-based performance, in that it is based on a series of tasks that are in a series of instructions. So no one really has a script — the mayor has pieces of a script, but each of the council members has a staffer who instructs them, feeds them lines or tells them what to do at certain points. People in the audience have testimonies that were given somewhere in the United States within the last three years, so they’re just reading transcripts,” Catlett said.
Catlett explained that most of the meeting was based on actual transcripts from city council meetings, except for writing that Landsman added. Also during the performance there were two monitors on either side of the stage giving instructions to the audience, along with live video footage. Messages occasionally scrolled across the screens as well, including questions like, “Are you even here or are you just represented?” Catlett thought the performance went “great.” She continued, “Every place we do it is very distinct and New Hampshire is beautiful.”
Keene State College Alumnus and Staffer with the City Council Meeting production Jon Adams was on stage during the production and also played a role in the beginning of the first act.
Adams explained, “City Council Meeting is basically a mock-city council meeting, but instead of having actors we have audience participation play the role of the council members.”
As a staffer, Adams “gave the city council members information that they needed,” Adams said.
“I didn’t find out exactly what this was until today, ten minutes before the show started,” Adams said.
The second half of the performance consisted of council members Hague and Clark playing guitar and singing some old folk songs mixed with other genres.
Simultaneously, two young men skateboarded around the room.
Adams explained one reason for this was the recent discussions of building a new skate park in Keene.
Writer of the City Council Meeting script, Aaron Landsman, said there were two messages he was trying to convey with the second act. “The message is, what are rules for,” Landsman said.
He continued, “How you find your tribe, how you find your people when you’re younger because I know I didn’t skateboard so I was interested in hearing from those guys what it was like. I grew up in kind of an alternative music scene in the Midwest in the 80s and that was where I found my tribe. So I’m always interested in how people find the people who help them get through life.”
The second message was “People who might be political adversaries — your council members and the skaters — can sometimes seem to be at odds,” he said.
“To just have them on stage together is really the message in a way; that’s the message to kind of embody that spirit. In each city where we do this project we have some kind of combination of people that might have to argue about something at a council meeting and then be on stage together,” Landsman continued.
Adams explained the most important aspect of a show like this for him is, “Bringing to light information that people would not normally think about, like I would not normally go to a city council meeting because they’re kinda boring, to be so blunt,” Adams said.
Hannah Sundell can be contacted at hsundell@keene-equinox.com