Art(ist) Education

Old School Community Engagement

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Apropos of my post yesterday about community engagement, the term has so recently been bandied about as something arts organizations should aspire to, it is easy to forget that it isn’t a new idea.

Bread and Puppet, for example, turns 50 this year. They started out in the streets, in the community giving people bread alongside the performances and involving members of the community in their performance.

They may be viewed as agitprop rabble rousers, but the philosophy founder Peter Shumann espouses about his work pretty much parallels the current thought about how the arts should be integral to a community:

“We give you a piece of bread with the puppet show because our bread and theater belong together. For a long time the theater arts have been separated from the stomach. Theater was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. The old rites of baking, eating and offering bread were forgotten. The bread became mush. We would like you to take your shoes off when you come to our puppet show or we would like to bless you with the fiddle bow. The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating.

We want you to understand that theater is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay to get something. Theater is different. It is more like bread, more like a necessity. Theater is a form of religion. It preaches sermons and builds a self-sufficient ritual.

Bread and Puppet’s Cheap Art Manifesto, written 20 years ago, further echoes current sentiments about the value of art.

Cheap Art is not an easy life style though. While the group has endured for 50 years, they haven’t amassed a fortune in the process. From what I have read over the years, their work is fueled as much by passion and sweat today as it was 50 years ago.

The article I link to about the 50th anniversary, suggests Schumann doesn’t feel he has made the impact he had hoped.

While it probably isn’t in the direction Schumann had hoped, his work did have an impact on me. When I was an undergraduate in the late 80s, Bread and Puppet was invited to work with the students to create a performance. If I recall correctly, the piece was protesting the destruction brought about by damming a river to build a hydroelectric plant.

But what impressed me was Schumann’s ability to improvise his show according to the facilities and number of people he had available. My conception of plays to that point was based in the execution of concrete set of lines, stage directions and set pieces.

I recall that the school hadn’t been able to recruit the number of students he had asked for. I thought Schumann would be angry—again based on the idea that shows required a specific number of people. But he and his team just made do and we got an opportunity to work with those great larger than life puppets. The result was pretty visually interesting. (Yeah, I know he didn’t invent improvised performance and the revelation would have certainly come at some point.)

I didn’t go on to protest the construction of environmentally unfriendly projects, but I do still have a poster and the experience has informed programming decisions I have made.

I presented long time Bread and Puppet collaborator, Paul Zaloom at one point. And my college experience with Bread and Puppet was the basic inspiration for a site specific work I commissioned in conjunction with another performance group to provide a similar experience to another set of students. A fair bit of the work I have done in recent years has been about providing a venue for local artists to give voice to elements of their community.

I am sure the memory of that one weekend working with Bread and Puppets has contributed to my conviction about the value of the arts as practice and experience.

At some point in our lives, maybe we all need an encounter with a madman with wild hair who comes with challenging ideas in one hand and a loaf of bread offered in the other.

I was about to suggest that it would be good to sometimes be that madman for our communities, but I realized it takes experience to make the product in both hands palatable.

You Wanna Come Upstairs And See My New Etchings?

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There are days like today when I simultaneously feel invigorated to be working in the arts and grossly inadequate for having been remiss in forging relationships and participating in other arts disciplines.

I went to the local museum today to ask them to put up a poster for a show we are going to be presenting in a couple weeks.

I ended up in the executive director’s office briefly chatting about an email I had sent suggesting possibly collaborating on a grant, though I only had a vague idea for a project.

The artistic director  burst out asking if I had wanted to see some pieces they had brought back from New Orleans for a show they were going to put together. Suddenly I found myself in an area of the museum I didn’t know existed looking at African ritual masks and other works.

Apparently a university in New Orleans (I believe it was Southern University of New Orleans) has long been the beneficiary of doctors at various hospitals around New Orleans who have brought back works from research trips to Africa.

The university campus was damaged by Hurricane Katrina and now the building which housed these works was about to be renovated. Rather than store the works in a warehouse for the next few years, the university is placing the pieces in the custody of our local museum. The museum in turn is going to organize the works into shows that will be lent out to other museums.

Most of the pieces are still boxed up, but I was fascinated by the stories of the pieces conveniently at hand they were showing me. In my excitement at having the opportunity, I also felt some regret that I had neglected to really explore the visual arts until the last five years or so.

Granted, I recognize that the experience I was having was as much a confluence of personalities and opportunity as my having taken the initiative to make that first visit to the museum. Not every performing arts facility manager is going to be able to walk into a museum and establish a relationship with the directors that results in an exclaimed invitation to explore the contents of shipping boxes.

(Though I had the romantic Indiana Jones-esque notation of wooden crates with artifacts nestled in excelsior versus the rather mundane Uhaul shipping boxes and bubble wrap.)

The dynamics may not exist where a performing arts director can walk into the Museum of Modern Art in NYC and get a backstage tour of the conservators’ workshops.

Still, the overtures for these relationships probably don’t happen enough. I bet Nina Simon would be all over the right opportunity to collaborate with a performing arts organization around Santa Cruz. Maybe this sort of thing hasn’t happened as a result of a sense of rivalry, perhaps out of disinterest, or maybe like everyone else, a sense of intimidation of an unfamiliar art form.

I think we are all getting the sense that the time when we can comfortably work isolated from each other is coming to a close. At the very least, an improved understanding of the flora and fauna of the greater arts ecology is going to be necessary.

Even if they never find a project to work on with each other, arts people from different disciplines can provide useful feedback to one another.

For example, after hearing the interesting story about each of the pieces, I told the directors I hoped they would include that in the display rather than a small plaque saying “Female Rite of Passage Mask, Ibo Society.”

They already intended to have a much more descriptive display, but I think it is valuable to have someone else reinforce the idea that the story is interesting and important to the enjoyment of a piece. Seeing someone enthusiastic about their work can be infectious and energize you about your own.

And if your colleague is excitedly babbling about something that seems entirely obscure and arcane to you, a close relationship can allow you to point that out and guide them to a more accessible discussion of what is interesting about the piece. You are enough of an outsider to be confused by challenging terminology a colleague in their discipline might not catch, but enough of an insider to know where to start providing guidance.

And of course, you can get a new perspective on your own practices. I implied not liking the sparse plaques in museums, but there is a debate in visual arts circles about how much and what type of information to provide and how much to leave up to the viewer.

Have you ever thought about whether your performances are helped or harmed by the amount of information you provide audiences?  As an audience member/viewer does it affect your enjoyment to learn that your interpretation of a work is diametrically opposed to that of the creator? Would you be happier not knowing?

Stuff To Ponder: Focus Exercises For Audiences

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Given that I am working on a university campus, there is always a conversation about how do you get more students to attend performances at the performing arts center. One of the easiest answers is to offer extra credit or have students attend and then write some sort of paper on the experience.

I have reservations about this course of action given many years of experience with such programs. If students are not majoring in the arts, but are taking an “introduction to” course figuring the class will be an easy “A,” the results are often less than desirable.

It isn’t so bad if only a few students are taking intro courses during the semester, but if there are multiple sections of large lecture hall size classes, the students all tend to attend on the night that will least impact their weekend plans and that audience is markedly different from any other audience.

In some respects, it is almost better to play in front of a half empty room than a full room where only a few people respond to the performance.

I should note for the record that this isn’t a great concern of mine on my current campus since the intro classes are smaller and fewer students are being directly induced to attend. However, as I mentioned yesterday I dislike the idea of people viewing attendance at the arts as a trial to be endured.

In the course of a recent discussion, I had an idea for a general assignment related to attending an arts event that took the focus of the requirement off the performance itself and might get them in a receptive frame of mind for the performance

Basically, I was inspired by John Cage’s 4’33”. My thought was to assign students to arrive 15-30 minutes early for a performance. Turn off their cell phones and just sit and observe without speaking or interacting for 4’33”. After that, they could make notes about what they observed and then sit back and take the performance as they found it.

The benefit of this assignment is that it is flexible enough to be used by many liberal arts disciplines. Music students could focus on sounds; actors, sociology and psychology students on how people interact; fine arts students on the light in the room; literature students could use the observations as the basis of a short story or poem.

Students majoring in an arts discipline would need to be paying close attention throughout the evening and prepare to generate more involved papers and presentations.

But for students who may be attending a performance for the first time, their assignment is done before the curtain rises. Hopefully the engaging in the process of focusing on observing what was going on around them ends up puts them in frame of mind where they are ready to receive the performance.

If students are told the assignment only requires them to observe the pre-show activity, but they are free to include observations from the entire performance, maybe that assists in helping people maintain their focus throughout, diminishes resentment about their grade depending on attendance and the desire to check the cellphone too frequently.

I would love to see someone conduct a study to see if there is any noticeable increase in attention or enjoyment for first time or infrequent attendees after performing a simple exercise to focus their thoughts and attention just prior to the experience.

I am sure there are plenty of studies on the benefits of visualization for athletes, but that is based on past experience and a knowledge of ideal performance. It would be interesting to know if there is any benefit for those venturing into unknown territory.

Keep Your Arts Sharp and The Arts Will Keep You Sharp

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I was reading an article on The Atlantic about why employers often have a hard time finding workers even during periods of high unemployment.

I saw the sentence, “And workers now really need to think of learning as a lifelong task.” My mind made a leap and it occurred to me that might be the message the arts need to ride the coattails of.

People are changing jobs more frequently now, either involuntarily, or as we are told of Gen Y, out of a desire to do something meaningful. I am sure there will be a lot of articles and news stories over the next few years about how people need to be more agile and keep renewing and reviewing their knowledge and skills.

Keeping in line with this sentiment, the arts community could talk about how gaining knowledge, skills, comfort with artistic experiences and pursuits is something that is easily acquired over time. (Instead of a panicked crash course at the concert hall doors.)

Two hurdles that must be overcome are the perception that the arts are an indulgence and that learning is an onerous chore.

This provides an opportunity to advocate for arts education by pointing out that learning in an artistic/creative context provides the sense of fun that makes the experience more enjoyable. And in fact, may assist in keeping them engaged in the process of maintaining their professional/vocational skills.

There is a great proliferation of information sources for self-directed learning about the arts that don’t require one to expose themselves to the elements of the event attendance experience that intimidate- blogs, online videos, websites, classes, lectures, master classes and volunteering. People just need to be made better aware of them.