Pig Iron spotlights caregivers in its latest social-practice piece

We can sum up the unsung heroism of providing care for a loved one in a single gut-punching analogy: “It’s sort of like you and whoever you’re caring for are running a marathon together, but the caregiver is holding all the gear, and no one is cheering for them.”

In Pig Iron’s latest creative endeavor, The Caregivers, director Nell Bang-Jensen and her team give prime place to society’s necessary and often silent supporters. In a narrative exploring the complications of love versus obligation and broken expectations, the piece also seeks to serve community members and remain true to Pig Iron’s aesthetic of epic sensory fantasia. Two professional artists, Brad Wrenn and Johanna Kasimow, join an ensemble cast of seven “citizen artists” with a variety of backgrounds, all under the umbrella of caregiving.

Making caregivers visible

Instead of considering the hard work that caregivers do, “we see the person who has the disease or the ailment or is just vulnerable,” says Bang-Jensen, who’s also Pig Iron’s interim associate artistic director. “It was important for me to create a process where the caregivers who were participating were front and center and that it was an opportunity for the focus to be on them.”

Bang-Jensen began last summer with a series of story circles, which invited community members to meet, share their experiences, and nosh on snacks. From these initial gatherings, Bang-Jensen began an inclusive casting process that formed the show’s ensemble, including home health aides, hospice workers, and family-care providers. Working around obvious scheduling complications, the group met once a week to generate and craft Caregivers, using Pig Iron’s signature devising methods.

The “social practice” process

What sets Caregivers apart from other community-centered artistic work? According to Bang-Jensen, artists tend to work with communities on a spectrum. Programming initiatives and providing lower-priced tickets are on one side, and civic practice — or work that is created for specific community needs — is on the other. For more on this, Michael Rodh writes in HowlRound about the difference between “social practice” and “civic practice” for artists, where the locus and intention of the work primarily falls either with the initiating artist or the artist’s community partners as makers.

The process for Caregivers falls under “social practice,” meaning work that is initiated by the artist (Bang-Jensen) but is created with community members. Usually this kind of social engagement results in story presentations told at microphones, but Bang-Jensen set different expectations for herself, noting that this is “an experiment in having a more theatrical aesthetic but with more community stories.” The emphasis here is on process rather than product — though Bang-Jensen is still aiming for the product to be a true visual event.

Theater of the future?

Pig Iron has incorporated community members into its work before (as in Period of Animate Existence in the 2017 Fringe). But Caregivers is perhaps the first time for the company that citizen artists were the creative genesis of all scripted text, with Bang-Jensen and other artists shaping the outcome.

Judging from the early response, Caregivers tackles necessary ground, both in topic and process. Free tickets for the three scheduled performances sold out quickly. So maybe Bang-Jensen and Pig Iron signal what is next for the performing arts: a solution to flagging audience attendance and ticket sales could be large-scale inclusivity, allowing the community to take part in the art that they consume.

Pig Iron’s The Caregivers runs Friday, June 1, and Saturday, June 2, at Pig Iron Studios at Crane Old School (1417 N. 2nd Street in South Kensington).

Above: Evelyn and Bill commune with their pet parrot, Popeye. (Photo by John C. Hawthorne.)