Long shot

There is a cultural demon more deadly than the forces that prompted Occupy Wall Street. While OWS is an important part in our continuing battles for the strength of America’s innovation, the cultural demons are worse because they are growing through the outright rejection of facts and the results typically rewards a lack of curiosity. Around the world artists like Pussy Riot and other cultural heroes are by pushing back and demanding an expansion of human rights. This makes sense as artists, musicians, writers, etc have always been on the forefront of progressive politics but now there are grocery shop owners, taxi cab drives, office workers, mothers, and grandmothers willing to demand more representation and access to the modern world. How do societies gear towards great success? They say the “Arab Spring” sprung because of google earth when young people were seeing the world’s opportunities and sizing up what their governments are currently allowing. Improving culture is an ideas game. In the words of the late 20th century philosopher Joseph Campbell: “To change the world we have to change the metaphor.” I wonder, how do we do that? Human beings are always clever, always creative, always resourceful, so when families are awakened they will not rest until there is more equality and more joy in their lives. Humans nature is simply the urge to improve oneself through a group. However we live during slave times, let’s not pretend otherwise. The ignorance demons in the USA are the results of 30 years of eroding public education. When 40% of Americans still have doubts about evolution, we must admit, we have a tragedy on our hands. Unquestioningly USA educational goals need better leadership to prevent this intellectual child abuse across America. Without knowledge there is no power. These chronic failures seem to be set on default mode: prisons instead of job acquiring training. Sadly this nationwide subpar science, math, reading, writing and knowledge delivery system allows myths to prevail, like the one where everyone has the ability to divert their economic paths through hard work. Reality is stacked against success because while parents toil, kids miss out on important skills that are formed in elementary school and earlier. When I have these discussions with myself and that is what evil demons do, they haunt your dreams. I come to this question: Can I be helpful at all? Answer: I am a self-empowered artist with no funding. Plus much to my chagrin my age makes me perceived as just another kooky yet increasingly invisible woman. Deep wish: It is not too late for someone with great character to short circuit then hot wire the US public educational systems to get people vocationally trained. Creepy Fear: The mindset of America popular culture is too polluted by hate to adapt. Honestly there is only so much USA artists’ can do since their strengths are too diffuse for any organized show of political power, just as OWS did not flourish into a sustainable movement. Humans need identifiable cultural leaders with simple objectives. Most forward thinking cannot work when people do not co-operate. Art power has the ability to see through phoniness, the ability to shake off adversity and the ability to express something that has not been expressed yet. On a personal note I have a lot of experiences using the power of art as a community building tool. I was one of those people who attended public meetings, stated the obvious then was unprepared for the daggers as they ripped my womanly flesh. Learning and re-learning to shake off adversity is the best 21st century social skill anyone can have. I should know, you might say I have it by the truckload. Additionally I was a teaching artist and educator for 2 decades with no college credentials just a dynamic artistic drive to develop connections between art and community at Micro Museum®. Now I am looking for those new metaphors as Mr Campbell suggested. The unfortunate demons have been siphoning people’s creative juice for a long time but I still have hope that bigger businesses would fund lifetime learning skills and remedial communication for their workers and their families because it is in the interest of America’s innovation. Maybe Neil DeGrasse Tyson’s science programs “Cosmos” will help launch a new educational energy nationwide, the way Carl Sagan did for science or Leonard Bernstein and Marvin Hamlish did for music education. We just need about 1,000 clones for every subject in every city. Otherwise the demons win.

A part of Micro Museum’s Haunted Maze 2003 – 3006

I have the honor

When I was actively choreographing I thought that I was only as good as my ideas and the dancers I attracted to my company or at least that was one of my rationales. I was lucky to have a group of dancers who stayed with me a very long time. I still imagine myself to be a performing artist first and painter second. My last orchestrated performance art work was 2001 until this year when I involved 44 people, including many who were a part of my original company in my newest piece SPRING FEVER. I had a PLAN A and a PLAN B. Performing arts is a little like parenting, you start off with one idea, then reality sinks in and you accept many many ideas and hope that one of them works. Happily my PLAN A was enough. When my oldest was 5 he asked me to make him a dinosaur costume for Halloween and as a dutiful parent I tried. He played around with it in the house but when the day came for him to wear it to school, he changed the plan. The new plan was that he would carry a baby kangaroo in his pullover’s front pocket, really quite pouch-like. It was his call. He would be a mother kangaroo instead. Since I was not the person going to school in place of him, his plan was beyond perfect. I actually thought it was quite poetic. So in his case, PLAN B worked. So what happens when you are well past PLAN B and maybe onto PLAN G, OR PLAN T? Is that what they call “thinking out of the box”? Kinda like when you have lemons – it is time to make lemonade. Plan X, Plan Y and Plan Z, I guess you do whatever it takes to get the job done. I am struck by the whistle-blowers of our age, Bradley Manning, Ed Snowden, Pussy Riot, Julian Assage, Malala Yousafzai, and now Deric Lostutter. Did they rotate through the alphabet with their plans before committing their controversial acts of honesty. They are paying a serious price and it is as if they are “up on that wall”. I can just hear actor Jack Nickolson’s speech in a FEW GOOD MEN written beautifully first as a play and then as a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin. “You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.” I for one am grateful for their honesty because we are a better world with less secrets. Historical the USA has been very good about covering up the truth with fantasy. “Manifest Destiny” was another term for wholesale genocide in the 1800s. GONE WITH THE WIND, while being a fantasy level for all toiling writers, it is said that Margaret Mitchell works on the book privately for decades before being goaded into sharing it with someone who could publish it. It provoked a long familiar ring: “Not all slavery was bad for black people”. So while I claim to possess no state secrets or claim to ignite a movement that would bring me to the United Nations or solitary confinement, artists still possess one vital secret. The secret is to indulge your inner process and get busy making that process move from idea stage to something alive and present.

2 Performer from SPRING FEVER.