Forward to CRADLE

Dear Readers — The <100K Project has been transformed into CRADLE (Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education) with its own website and blog. The conversation will continue over there.

Rerun: On Possibility

America is coming of age. Note the many changing aspects of America.

A maturing America means a nation conscious of its arts among all its people. Communities east, west, north, and south are searching for ways to make community life more attractive.

The arts are at the very center of community development in this time of change…change for the better.

The frontier and all that it once meant in economic development and in the sheer necessity of building a nation is being replaced by the frontier of the arts. In no other way can Americans so well express the core and blood of their democracy; for in the communities lies the final test of the acceptance of the arts as a necessity of everyday life.

In terms of American democracy, the arts are for everyone.They are not reserved for the wealthy, or for the well-endowed museum, the gallery, or the ever-subsidized regional professional theatre. As America emerges into a different understanding of her strength, it becomes clear that her strength is in the people and in the places where the people live.

The people, if shown the way, can create art in and of themselves.

The springs of the American spirit are at the grass roots. Opportunities must exist in places where they never have existed before. A consciousness of the people, a knowledge of their power to generate and nourish art, and a provision of ways in which they may do so are essential for our time.

If we are seeking in America, let it be a seeking for the reality of democracy in art. Let art begin at home, and let it spread through the children and their parents, and through the schools, the institutions, and through government.

And let us start by acceptance, not negation–acceptance that the arts are important everywhere, and that they can exist and flourish in small places as well as in large; with money, or without, according to the will of the people. Let us put firmly and permanently aside as a cliché of an expired moment in time that art is a frill. Let us accept the goodness of art where we are now, and expand its worth in the places where people live.”

Robert Gard, Arts in the Small Community (1969)

When I read this ringing endorsement of the power of the arts in the lives of ordinary people, and the power of ordinary people in the arts, and then I think of so many of the conversations we have here in the theatrosphere and face-to-face, I am reminded of the minister’s funeral oration over the body of Alex, a young man who has committed suicide, in the movie The Big Chill. The minister looks out into the assembled mourners, mostly baby boomers who have lost their idealism, and he asks, “Where did Alex’s hope go?” When each morning I catch up on the thoughts of so many theatre bloggers, I ask the same thing: Where did theatre artists’ hope go? When did we become so convinced that what we do is so little desired, so little respected? When did we lose sight of our importance to a community’s understanding of who it is and what it believes?

But those are the wrong questions. Those are questions based in blame and retribution, questions that points us to the past: how did we get here? It is what Carolynn Myss calls “woundology,” a focusing on one’s injuries and wrongs, a dwelling in the past instead of the future. How we got here is unimportant; where we are going is crucial. As artists, we need to commit to a conversation about possibility.

Peter Block, in his excellent book Community: The Structure of Belonging, describes what such a conversation is like:

The possibility conversation frees us to be pulled by a new future. The distinction is between possibility, which lives into the future, and problem solving, which makes improvements on the past. This distinction takes its value from an understanding that living systems are propelled by the force of the future, and possibility as we use it here…is one way of speaking of the future.

Possibility occurs as a declaration, and declaring a possibility wholeheartedly can, in fact, be the transformation. The leadership task is to postpone problem solving and stay focused on possibility until it is spoken with resonance and passion. The good news is that once we have fully declared a possibility, it works on us — we do not have to work on it.

The challenge with possibility is it gets confused with goals, predictions, and optimism. Possibility is not about what we plan to happen, or what we think will happen, or whether things will get better. Goals, prediction, and optimism don’t create anything; they just might make things a little better and cheer us up in the process. Nor is possibility simply a dream. Dreaming leaves us bystanders or observers of our lives. Possibility creates something new. It is a declaration of a future that has thye quality of being and aliveness that we choose to live into. It is framed as a declaration of the world that I want to inhabit. It is a statement of who I am that transcends our history, our story, our usual demographics. The power is in the act of declaring…The future is created through a declaration of what is the possibility we stand for.

What possibility do you stand for? Block asks, “What is the crossroads where you find yourself at this stage of your life or in the project around which we are assembled?” Or more directly, and to my mind even more powerfully: “What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform the community and inspire you?” And the two “overarching questions” that point to the future: “What do we want to create together that would make the difference?” And “What can we create together than we cannot create alone?”

For me, I find myself at a crossroads in this project of expanding the reach of theatre throughout America where the artist and the community meets; where virtuosity and specialization meets human creativity and common wisdom; where fear meets trust.

I recently read a powerful book by Patrick Overton called Rebuilding the Front Porch of America: Essays on the Art of Community Making. In a chapter near the end of the book entitled “The Deep Voice: The Relationship Between Art, Spirituality, and Healing,” Overton, who testified in front of Congress during the hearings about the NEA’s support of controversial art in 1990, makes a declaration of possibility:

The arts aren’t the cause of the crisis facing our culture, they are a cure. The arts aren’t the source of the hurting in our society, they are a way of healing the pain. The arts are not in and of themselves, evil; they are an authentic expression of self that manifest in an individual’s courage to face life as it really is. Art that is not an authentic expression of self is not art — it is propaganda, or a product — but it is not art. Art is the voice of the soul struggling to express what it means to be human.

He discusses participating in a think tank meeting for the Theatre Program of the NEA where there were two members who had a history together, and what seemed opposite visions of the arts.

One, from a very prestigious private foundation, kept talking about the beauty and magnificence of art because it lifted her spirit. To her, art makes meaning and beauty and this is the kind of art her foundation was interested in funding, This is art that inspires transcendence. The other person was from a theatre cpmpany from the south and he talked about art as that which must challenge the status quo. To him, art is not something created to be beautiful, or to make people pleasant or happy or comfortable. Art is something that confronts what is wrong and unjust in our society and is designed to make people feel uncomfortable. To him art reveals what is wrong with out world and, in so doing. demands something be done to change it. This is art that inspires transformation.

As I listened to them, it seemed to me they weren’t really disagreeing. In essence, they were both saying the same thing, but in a different weay. To understand the nature of art, we have to understand it in both its “ascendant” and “descendant” purpose. Art can, through ascendance, through the elevation of the human spirit, help us transcend what we know, what we see, what we understand. When art does this it is “awful” (that is, full of awe). This is when art lifts the spirit. It is the exhale — art that empties us and sucks the air out of our lungs because of its power and the truth of the simple/complexity it protrays in such a profound way. This is when art reveals mystery and truth and grasps us with such intensity that it transcends the human condition, and leaves us changed, forever. Art is one of the few things left in our world that can create this much-needed sense of “awe-fullness” in us.

But there is another function in art, art as descendence. Art can be an invitation (sometimes compelling) to descend from the surface of our lives — beyond the facade and the masks, to the depths of our existence — the deep place where truth exists. When art does this, it is the inhale — driving us into ourselves, forcing us to gasp for air, taking in the force and intensity of the experience inside of us because of the power and the truth of the simple/compelcity it portrays in such a powerful way.

The one, the descendent function, reveals what is and shouldn’t be. The other, the ascendent function, reveals what isn’t but could be. Art can be beautiful and lift our spirits — but art can also force us to face the truth — to descend to the deep place and see the world as it is and shouldn’t be. They both do the same thing — they are a way we can transcend the condition of our lives — a way we are transformed. These two functions cannot be separated — they are converse images of the same creative force — the same truth.

He then, in one of the most powerful descriptions of what art can do to heal, describes when he was invited to speak at the dedication of the Huntsville Vietnam Memorial in 1994. A Vietnam veteran himself, Overton had not spoken about his experience in Vietnam since his return to the US in 1968. Reluctantly, he agreed. He stood up in front of a crowd of older and younger people, mostly veterans of various wars, and he talked about his experiences on a flagship in the Gulf of Tonkin, and later in a naval hospital in Japan. He closed his speech by reading a poem that he wrote specifically for the dedication ceremony about his experiences with the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, DC. The poem, entitled The Healing Wall, is stunning and deeply felt, and while I would like to share it with you, it is much too long for this already-long post. But in it, he describes his unwillingness to experience the wall, and then his eventual visit in which he looked for a name that he did not find — his own, and he felt the pain of having survived. He ended the poem with this line: “No more walls, please, no more walls.”

He writes:

I will never forget that afternoon in Huntsville. It was an emotional experience for all of us. Following my speech, people were very quiet, still. It reminded me of my visit to the Wall in DC. Slowly, people began to move, looking through the crowd for someone to hold, to hug. There was a need to touch. There was not a lot of talking. I saw men of my father’s generation with tears running down their faces, something that is all too rare for them. I saw sons and fathers embrace — with a kind of knowing and understanding that may not have existed before. That afternoon in May invited a small community, deeply wounded by the war, to heal. My speech and poetry did not do the healing. The people did. What I did was extend the invitation. What writing the poem did was invite me to name my own healing and celebrate it. And, by sharing the poem with that community, I invited others to name their own healing and celebrate it with each other as well.

After I read his poem, and imagined his reading of it, and after I finished the essay, I wondered whether it was ascendant or descendent art, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt that it was both, like a descent into hell and a resurrection. In Ireland, Frank Delaney tells a story of an Ulster king who always had his cart pulled by two horses, a black horse and a white horse, because they represented both sides of himself that he must always ride yoked together. Perhaps that is when art is truly transcendent and inspired.

Overton describes a possibility for theatre and for the arts — a possibility of healing. Sometimes healing requires surgery — the cutting of flesh and the inflicting of pain in order to remove that which is diseased. Other times, what is required is nursing, care-full tending and attention. But the motivation is the same: to heal. That is an attitude of goodwill, of caring.

And so I declare here the possibility of caring as a relationship between artist and community, a mutual healing to be shared through descendence and ascendance, inhaling and exhaling, together. I declare the possibility that our fellow citizens hunger for what we can create together, by bringing our imaginations together in one place, and that like Jesus with the loaves and fishes, we can feed everyone through an attitude of abundance. I declare the possibility that all people everywhere share this hunger, and deserve to be fed what will most nourish them.

What is your possibility? What is the crossroads where you find yourself at this stage of your life or work in the project around which we are assembled? What declaration of possibility can you make that has the power to transform the community and inspire you?

David Byrne on Arts Funding

This blog post by Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne, entitled “Art Funding or Arts Funding,” is scary in many ways, and I suppose it is very possible to make a case against what Byrne has to say. And of course, as a musician who made his fortune in the public forum, Byrne has a particular viewpoint that informs his words. As  a former Associate Artistic Director of the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, and a theatre professor who teaches theatre history almost every semester, I can also muster up quite a few arguments myself.

And yet…

If I am consistent in my focus on individual creativity — on “bringing the arts back to life” — then as Byrne says, the emphasis needs to shift from dead guys to the living.

Rural/Urban Internet Gap

http://bit.ly/6AUOL3

How the Myth Is Propagated

The following is from the final paper of a student of mine, who writes:

“I was working on a final project for XXXXX’s acting class, where we had to call a theatre company and find out the audition process and the workings of the company…When I was closing the interview, I was asking the Associate Artistic Director of the company if he had any final comments or advice to add to the paper.  The Director …said, “if you don’t go to New York City in your 20s, your prime age, you’re not serious about this industry.”

This from a man who is making a living in Western North Carolina. Doesn’t he have any sense of the contradiction?

Blogged with the Flock Browser

“Defining Diversity” at Arena Stage

Back on November 30, Isaac made a “Quick Announcement” that he would be attending an Arena Stage “convening” on the topic “Defining Diversity.” He writes, “I, along with a few other bloggers, have been invited to attend and participate as well as “cover” the conference for this blog. I suppose you could call this is a “blog junket”…” It turns out that I, too, will be at the convening, as I have been asked to appear on the panel of twenty that is to discuss this topic. I was flattered to be asked, and look forward to a intriguing couple days this Friday and Saturday. For those who are interested, Arena Stage will be livestreaming the proceedings at 8:00 this Saturday night. And you can participate by sending questions through Twitter at #newplay that night. I’m looking forward to meeting Isaac and the other bloggers — there are plans for an Ethiopian meal!

Sarah Jane on Nurturing Creativity

Sarah Jane, who often comments on this site, has an insightful post entitled “Nurturing Creativity, Part 1,” in which she discusses how we encourage young people to try various activities until they find one they like, and we support them through our encouragement and attendance, but once they get older we lose that commitment. The result is an impoverished community.

I agree entirely, and would add that in a CRADLE arts organization, should one be created, the staff artists would be expected to give a great deal of attention to facilitating and developing adult creativity.

Why Do We Let Them Get Away With This?

From the MSNBC website today:

Headline:
These cities are poised to recover the fastest
Omaha boring? Maybe, but it leads list of places where things will pick up

First sentence:

“Though Omaha, Neb., seems second-rate to some, Warren Buffett may have been on to something when he chose it for the headquarters of his massive holding company, Berkshire Hathaway.”

I have for several years now been writing about the Big City bias of the mass media, and been regularly pooh-poohed. Omaha has a metropolitan area of slightly under a million people, so this attitude is ridiculous. By what possible measure is Omaha “boring” and “second-rate” except by some arrogant New Yorker, which is what the author Francesca Levy is.

“Francesca Levy is a BusinessWeek reporting intern. She has written online and print articles for outlets including the New York Press, The Villager, and Chelsea Now, and Web sites such as Women’s eNews and the New York City News Service….She will receive a master’s degree in journalism from the City University of New York in December.”

BusinessWeek needs to pay closer attention to what it’s interns are writing on-line, and be reminded that New York City is an anomaly, a place that much of the US would be loathe to imitate.

When you’re stepping outside the well-trodden path and trying to create something new, you often have to find inspiration outside of the discipline itself. I tend to read books on local economics, environmentalism, and small business practices seeking analogous situations that might help to define this new pathway.

To that end, I am in the midst of reading Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, by William McDonough and Michael Braungart (highly recommended). The chapter “A Question of Design” has a segment entitled “One Size Fits All,” in which the authors discuss the Industrial Revolution’s underlying design assumption that “universal design solutions” (i.e., one size fits all) could be implemented to improve the world. They use the examples of International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent to illustrate the flaw in this orientation. I think it is worth quoting at length in order to fully understand that what has happened to the arts is not an isolated and unique historical development that was “organic” and “natural,” but rather part of a larger social movement resulting of a particular way of relating to the world.

First, the International Style of architecture as developed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Walter Groupis, and Le Corbusier:

Their goals were social as well as aesthetic. They wanted to globally replace unsanitary and inequitable housing — fancy, ornate palaces for the rich; ugly, uhealthy places for the poor — with clean, minimalist, affordable buildings unencomubered by distinctions of wealth or class. Large sheets of glass, steel, and concrete and cheap transportation powered by fossil fuels, gave engineers and architects the tools for realizing this style anywhere in the world.

However, the vision of the originators was debased by those who followed:

Today the International Style has evolved into something less ambitious: a bland, uniform structure isolated from the particulars of place — from local culture, nature, energy, and material flows. Such buildings reflect little if any of a region’s distinctness or style.”…Buildings can look and work the same anywhere, in Reykjavik or Rangoon.  (italics mine)

The photo is of the Aluminaire House, and it is, without a doubt, one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen.

Shifting to detergent, the authors write:

Major soap manufacturers design one detergent for all parts of the United States or Europe, even though water qualities and community needs differ. For example, customers in places with soft water, like the Northwest, need only small amounts of detergent. Those where the water is hard, like the Southwest, need more. But detergents are designed so they will alther up, remove dirt, and kill germs efficiently the same way anywhere in the world — in hard, soft, urban, or spring water, in water that flows into fish-filled streams and water channeled to sewage treatment plants.”

In the interest of appealing to as large a market as possible, detergent is disconnected from its relationship to local conditions.

The arts have fallen prey to exactly the same one-size-fits-all approach, not only in mass-produced art such as television, popular music, and movies, but also in art forms that have an intrinsic local orientation, such as theatre and visual art. Plays, for instance, are designed to appeal to NYC audiences and critics. If they achieve a successful NYC run, then across the US regional theatres will produce their own versions during the next couple years, and twenty years later community theatres will do their own reproduction. But is it really true that the stories and styles that appeal to a New York audience will automatically be right for one in Asheville, NC or Lincoln, NE?

Let’s think of this by analogy. Here are two pictures of places in the world:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would these two places not lead, for instance, to very different paintings — paintings that would be created using different palettes, different shapes, different rhythms, different styles, different brushstrokes, different techniques?

And yet when it comes to plays, we see plays such as Rent being performed in Peoria and witnessed by the ultimate New Yorker, Rocco Landesman, who will judge it according to New York values. We universalize those values, and disseminate New York stories as if, like the International Style architecture and mass-produced detergent, they are completely isolated from place, from local culure, traditions, history, and values. People in New Amery WI watch CSI: New York despite the fact that it bears no resemblance whatsoever to their reality. We have become so alienated from our specific place in the world that we no longer even notice that we have been colonized by urban values, urban rhythms, urban styles, urban stories. The gangsta rap music blasting from the car next to mine in downtown Marshall NC is likely to be owned by a farmer’s son out on a Saturday night toot.

The natural outgrowth of this colonization is for the colonizer to see themselves as the pinnacle of quality, as the natural goal of all who labor in the arts.  So nobody bats an eye when Rocco Landesman, visiting Peoria and seeing the aforementioned production of Rent, is noted as having observed “earlier in the day that amateur arts are worthwhile much in the same way that minor leagues and amateur sports have value in relation to the big leagues and professional sports.” There is no recognition that local arts done by amateurs or pro-am artists might not give a tinker’s damn about the self-identified “big leagues,” that the local arts might be a vibrant end in themselves. And artists buy into this value system. Why? Because they are brainwashed with the ideas from a young age. More importantly, what should be commented on is not whether the Peoria production of Rent is “as good as” Steppenwolf (“I’m not going to let you trap me on that one,” Landesman said transparently — har har), but rather whether it makes any sense  for Rent to be performed in Peoria at all.

When are areas outside of New York going to develop some pride, some sense of individual identity? When are they going to express themselves, instead of compulsively sneezing “Me too” after every artistic twitch on the East Coast? When is a visit to the theatre in different parts of the country going to be a unique experience, seasoned with local flavor and served with pride of place? When traveling, every tourist seeks an opportunity to experience the local cuisine, whether it is barbecue in Kansas City, gumbo in New Orleans, or kringle in Racine WI. But going to the theatre is like going to the mall — once you’re inside the doors, you could be anywhere.

University theatre programs need to stop teaching this generic approach, regional theatres need to reclaim their local roots, and artists need to wake up and reclaim their individuality.

Knitting and the Arts

My wife knits. She is a part of the very active knitting community that gathers on the Ravelry.com site, she listens to podcasts and reads blogs, buys books and magazines, and is part of knitting and spinning groups. (The arts could learn a lot from knitters about creating a sense of community.)  Sometimes she buys yarn, sometimes she spins her own from a fleece she’s purchased from a local sheep farmer. From the point of view of economics, this doesn’t make any sense: she could buy a sweater in a store cheaper than what she would pay for yarn, and that doesn’t include the amount of time it takes for her to do the knitting.

Once, I asked her why she did it, and her answer surprised me. I expected that she would say something about the sense of personal connection she feels to clothing she has made using her own hands, and while that is certainly the case — and is the case for me as well, as someone who often benefits from her knitting largesse — that wasn’t the only thing. What she told me was that every pair of socks or sweater she knits she sees as a strike against corporate America. When she makes something herself she feels as if she’s supporting a more local, independent, craftsman-oriented economy instead of the global industrial market.

I love it.

And of course, this applies to the arts as well. Every time we create a play, paint a picture, play or sing music together, dance, or share stories and poems, we are simultaneously not supporting art created by the global mass media. We are disconnecting from the fame machine, from the mass distributed, non-local arts economy and instead reinforcing a sense of an independent, self-sufficient community. We support local farmers when we shop at farmer’s markets or join a CSA, we support local bookstores when we buy there instead of ordering from Amazon, we support local restaurants when we eat at owner-operated eateries instead of at chains. But when it comes to the arts, we often forget the local option.

Mass media — film, television, music CDs — is the artistic equivalent of eating at McDonalds, of buying the cheap sweater made in Malaysia. Make your own — stand up against global corporate homogenization. Create something unique, and do it with your own hands. Make it authentic. And then show it with pride.