In the last year we’ve had five teen suicides. They threw themselves in front of the commuter train that runs through Palo Alto and alongside the Stanford campus. In this kind of crisis where our kids are literally jumping like lemmings to their deaths what comes to mind is Jason Alexander’s keynote speech at a conference of theatre educators—he proclaimed, more than once…Art is the Intervention.
Art is the intervention—think on that–that is the context we must never loose sight of as we struggle to make sense out of the immediate changes descending upon all of us!
We are here for a greater purpose and working in the arts for me is about service. It is not because I am a failed artist, it was a conscious transition for me. I want to have a deep impact on a more intimate level than performing ever gave me. In arts education I found my north star.
Though this discussion is interesting and perhaps it will yield some learning that will authenticate our collective yearnings, I feel a sense of caution that this self-centered banter about Me, My and Mine—what you have and I don’t–what we’ve studied and you haven’t…is simply missing the Truth. It could just be wasting our precious time to do what we can to shore up the descending darkness that threatens to swallow all of us while we thrash about trying to figure out our arse from a whole in the ground—(to make it a bit Bechetian.)
So ride your yearnings, publish the new manifesto’s, jump into the light and fight the good fight but it is not with each other that we should be facing off …it is against an environment that is begging for your new ideas, ideas that will feed our collective need to survive. I say screw those that refuse to open the door to you, let those institutions flounder, stop wasting time on self-serving intellectual banter and get on with it. Good work will replace bad. It will take time, as Obama said in his acceptance speech in Chicago, “Power doesn’t yield easily.” Please don’t waste precious time creating polarized intellectual conversations, blah blah blahing – loosing sight of what really makes a difference.
And send me that book when you’ve got it published.
Popularity: 11%
Insert emoticon for “high five” here.
Thank you, Mary. We need more of that!
New voices often need to run a bit, to hear ourselves, validate ourselves… but listening is akin to, oh, i don’t know, sitting in an open mic where a guy is noodling on a guitar in a 45 minute masterbatory solo…. the music, for all intents and purposes, has left the room. And slowly, so do the people.
right on mary!