‘Celebration Eastlake’ connects a community
Sleeveless Acts group combines art, activism
Claire Redfield doesn’t want this story to be about her. The young director hopes it won’t glorify her art, or the vision of her co-creator, Dontá McGilvery. If she were writing this story, it wouldn’t even focus on their community theater company, Sleeveless Acts, or the onenight-only show that’s taken them a year to create.
She’d rather keep it all about Eastlake Park.
“It’s kind of a pathology to celebrate the individuals,” she said, “when it’s really about the community.”
Neither Redfield nor McGilvery grew up anywhere near Eastlake. They came as outsiders to this small square east of downtown Phoenix that is the city’s oldest park, where Arizona’s AfricanAmerican history is etched into metal.
But the directors, who both study youth theater as graduate students at Arizona State University, spent months immersing themselves in the neighborhood. They studied old photographs, interviewed famous figures and invited everybody to share their stories, to help them piece together a performance they called “Celebration Eastlake.”
They envisioned a show that would sit somewhere between art and activism. It would celebrate Eastlake Park’s past, while inspiring people to build its future. The show would be site-specific and community-based, with no tickets and no red curtain. Instead, everything would flow from the community: People with real connections to Eastlake would tell stories from the neighborhood, about the neighborhood, and while everybody was gathered in the neighborhood.
After decades of silence, Eastlake Park would finally tell its own story.
“It’s an amazing history,” said Margaret Spicer, who oversees recreation programs at the park’s community center. “And I don’t think enough peo
ple know about that history.”
That history reaches a century into Phoenix’s past, back when there was an actual lake, long before statehood and racial integration and the growth of downtown. It began as a gathering place, along Jefferson Street near 16th Street, one of the few areas where African-Americans could meet in peace. Arizona’s most prominent black churches were built there. One of them hosted a speech by Booker T. Washington. Another, the Historic Tanner Chapel AME Church, welcomed Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights marches often began in the safety of Eastlake.
But as Phoenix grew, it left Eastlake Park behind. The lake dried up. A railroad sliced through the neighborhood. The city spread outward, and people who could afford to move away often did. What was left developed a grim reputation that overshadowed the park’s history.
Celebration Eastlake was meant reverse that reputation.
Eastlake Park is home, family
to
“All our stories will happen here,” McGilvery said on a Friday night in May, tapping a monument in front of the park’s community center. That was a change of plans. At first, they wanted to station storytellers around the park, so people could roam and learn on their own. But that would be complicated, and this was their first show of many, so they decided to stay in one place. They’d circle the monument and perform along the stone steps, singing and dancing as each performer shared a story.
Now there were 24 hours until showtime. Sleeveless Acts’ small cast warmed up for rehearsal. The ensemble included six members, not including McGilvery, who planned to deliver the show’s central monologue. One was a nationally recognized performer. Most were amateurs.
All of them felt some connection to Eastlake Park.
It reminded Susan Rayford of the Boys & Girls Club where she spent her childhood. Jontasia Taylor used to come as a little girl, and still attended church down the street. The group’s youngest performer, Janae Goode, grew up in the park. Her grandfather, the legendary former Phoenix councilman Calvin C. Goode, still lived across the street.
“Are we ready to do it?” McGilvery asked, turning to face the ensemble. “Full run?”
“Let’s do it,” Redfield said.
The actors took their places, spreading themselves around a stone-covered patio. Redfield sat on a concrete bench across from them and started the soundtrack, a jazzy electronica beat that brought two dancers along with it. The rest of the cast stayed frozen, and then a poet named Caress Russell took a microphone and recited her first lines.
“Eastlake Park, why, it’s home,” she said, dropping her voice into a low rumble. “Eastlake Park is family.”
She climbed two short steps and spread her arms wide, running down a list of phrases that people had used to describe the park: It was a place where creativity began, where children found their first dreams, where history still lived and breathed. Below her, the ensemble acted out each description.
“It’s a place of community and development,” Russell said. She wrapped one arm around a post and let herself dangle forward, scrunching her entire face for emphasis. “Where generations are intertwined, knowledge is combined and we become a force —”
The music cut out.
All six cast members froze in place, unsure whether they should keep going.
“Oh, that’s my bad,” Redfield said. Her phone had locked, closing the video that played the soundtrack. She tapped in the password and held her finger over the screen, waiting, making sure everybody was ready to pick up where they left off.
Then she hit play.
“—to be reckoned with.”
Transformative power of theater
Two years before the rehearsals, before the interviews, before they even focused their attention on Eastlake Park, the two directors needed a name. McGilvery and Redfield had just won a grant from ASU’s Herberger Institute to build their own community-based theater company, but they didn’t know what to call it.
So they asked the community. “We said, ‘If we start a theater company in this community, what things would you want to see from this company?” McGilvery said. “‘And what are names you think this company should have? What would be a good fit?’”
Already they knew the type of company they wanted to create. Both had passed on theater’s traditional pathway to success, instead devoting their young careers to shows rooted in activism and social justice. Both believed deeply in