377 days, blog #136 reflection on art I've observed this week

On Thursday night (if you happened to check in on this blog without any of my social network sharing, you might have known this already), I went to a high school band concert.  My brother-in-law teaches band in Springfield.  He is one of those teachers about whom they make movies.  In fact, there is a documentary being filmed about him right now.  It is, in every true sense of the overly used word, awesome.  I decided to forgo any inclination of getting home early on a dark, wintry night and invited a friend and my aunt to go with me to see their Winter Festival.

The enthusiasm and surprised, but quickly contagious amazement of the audience is unlike anything you can imagine.  It is so great for so many reasons.  Not the least of which is the experience of those kids on the stage performing.  They are from a level 4 school – a demographic easily written off as too challenging or in crisis.  The sort of school where, typically, they want to stick to the academics and cut away the extras.  Only the thing is, those students defy the logic and through the involvement in their music, their chance of graduating increases to 90% - while the rest of the school is less than half.  It gives hope… and more importantly, pride, to the youth.  And, as I observed sitting towards the back row (the only seats we could find five minutes after the door opened and after not finding a parking space), the pride of the parents.  A lot of parents, I suspect, who were younger than me with a lot less resources than I possess… but happy to be there, clapping with the music and cheering their loved ones on the stage.  

Wow is truly an understatement… but it is the simple syllable that one can articulate in such circumstances.

And then I come home and start to question my professional choices.  Or, I should say, lack thereof.

Before I got the job at the Museum, I was ready to leave JP.  I was formulating a way of coming back to Worcester and starting a theater – half children’s theater, half adult theater.  A theater with a focus on community building and diversity.  A theater that is unafraid to try new things and tackle subjects that are uncomfortable in conversation.  A theater in the city. 

… and a year later, I’m at a desk job doing community theater in a rural town with a lot of white people who think musicals and tradition are a sure bet for success, even though the company continues to hemorrhage money through the furnace without any concern for the fact nearly every show is at 50% capacity or less.  And yet… I want to fight to perform Shakespeare with them?  So I can spend more time not thinking about that theater ambition and … do nothing to find that audience enthusiasm and connection to creativity and the hope it breeds that I saw on Thursday night?

Then yesterday I was reading Amanda Palmer’s book, The Art of Asking.  I am slowly digesting this memoir/ book of wisdom.  On the surface, it is about how one makes a living as an artist.  But, really, it is about making connections with an audience.  With other human beings.  Through art.

So that got me thinking even more.

I love my little small town theater.  It’s where I found my love of theater… and the confidence it required to pursue it wherever I go, as well as the curiosity to understand it from the booth as well as the backstage or in the lights or from the director’s chair.  It’s where I learned the history of this bizarre nexus of American history (seriously, did you know Barre was the first town in the U.S. to free a slave?  Yeah, I didn’t either until someone from our theater WROTE A PLAY about it.)  It’s also in a lot of bizarre levels my Bailey Savings & Loan.

There is a value to art at every level.  In school.  In the community.  In the city.  In a small town.  Of course there is.  Sometimes that value translates to a salary.  Sometimes it translates to the payment of joy that placates the insanity of everything else.  Sometimes… yeah, even in this small town (as I think of a production of Company many moons ago) it does excite the audience.  

But that’s not enough. I want to do more.