The Arts: Putting the Wonder back in Wonderful
by Jim O’Connell, Executive Director,
Performing Arts Foundation
Presented at The
November 21, 2004
R-r-r-ring! It's 7:15 a.m. I
grope for the phone. (We arts types tend to be night people.)
"H'lo."
"My son isn't feeling well today," says a motherly voice.
"He won't be in school."
"I'm afraid you have the wrong number."
"Isn't this
"I'm sorry. It's not."
"Oh, I'm terribly sorry."
"It's OK. Happens all the time."
Actually, it has happened about a dozen times over the past dozen years.
After the second or third call, I looked up the
Months later, I guessed that they are more likely to be accountants than acrobats,
and that my nemesis is muscle memory. You see, the keys on a calculator
count up from the bottom, while those on a phone pad count down from the
top. In a brain-detached state (such as worrying about a sick child), the
muscles trace the patterns that are most familiar. (That's why our cars
head for work or home, no matter where we thought we were going when we got
behind the wheel.) Anyone who operates a calculator more than a
touch-tone phone will therefore dial a phone number upside down.
I know about brain-detached states, particularly in the morning; muscle memory
is how I get into my day. It works as long as my toothbrush and shampoo
are in their accustomed places, but traveling slows me down. Not only do
I have to think about where I put my stuff, I have to remember what to do
next. (Do I shower before or after combing my hair?)
Muscle memory is often desirable. "The audience can see your mind
working on stage," my college acting teacher would say.
"Rehearse to develop muscle memory. Free your mind to think what
your character would think, so the character convinces the
audience." Dancers and athletes practice for the same reason: so a
dance or a figure skating routine or a football play becomes an organic whole,
performed in a flow, not a series of decisions. ("So much for the
double axle. What next, the sit spin or the triple lutz?")
Musicians practice in order to read markings from a page directly into
fingering, bowing or breath control. Likewise the rest of us, learning a
language, study until collections of letters burst in our mouths as sounds
filled with meaning, bypassing conscious thought.
Muscle memory ― so crucial to our living, yet it can starve the
spirit. How often do we drive home at sunset unconscious of the
colors? How often do we hear without listening, eat without tasting, kiss
without passion? How often do words burst in our mouths as sounds without
meaning? Where is the wonder in wonderful? How do we get it back?
#####
Obviously, my answer is the arts. I'm grateful for this opportunity to
talk about the ways the arts put the wonder back in wonderful. Most
often, I'm called upon to discuss the more practical ways in which the arts are
good:
* The arts are good for the economy. They attract tourism, increase
the velocity of money (the number of times dollar changes hands) in the
community, help attract and retain the best and brightest employees for local
corporations, and enhance an area's reputation as a base from which to do
business.
* The arts are good for the neighborhood. They put venerable
buildings to vibrant use, bring activity and people downtown at night,
stimulate related development and renovation, extend the business day for
restaurants and similar establishments, and generally light corners that would
otherwise be dark.
* The arts are good for the community. They foster civic pride,
provide "something to do around here," bring citizens together to
share valued experiences, and break down the technological isolation that
threatens the very concept of community.
* The arts are good for the children. They encourage creativity,
show rather than tell of other times and places, promote genuine understanding
of and respect for other cultures and peoples, expose students to "the
classics," provide an outlet for the talents of young people, teach
practical lessons in cooperation and individual responsibility, divert,
entertain, enlighten, inspire, and both evoke and validate honest emotion in a
pre-packaged world.
#####
Let me stop here for just a bit more time with the children.
There's nothing like parenthood to improve your hearing.
Twenty years ago, I went through a workshop in New York for Lincoln Center's
aesthetic education program. The project was designed to help classroom
teachers understand and use the arts. My cohorts were practicing artists;
I was class klutz. They were training to teach teachers; I was reporting
to the folks who funded the project.
Still, I did pretty well in most exercises. Except hearing the
music. Each chord and harmony struck me as an organic whole. I
could identify neither the notes nor the instruments playing them.
Not long after, my first son was born. I couldn't afford good cigars for
the occasion, so I settled on a memorable concoction of leaf-ends and stems known
as rum-soaked crooks. I gave one to the program director, Mark Shubart,
former dean of the Juilliard School and surely the most cultured man I have
ever known. The next morning, Mark put his arm around my shoulders and
said, "Jim, I smoked your cigar last night. Don't ever have any more
children."
I didn't take Mark's advice, though
I did refrain from buying cigars when my daughter and second son were
born. All my kids played musical instruments through school: Matt, tuba;
Mary, cello and French horn; and Mike, trombone and tuba. After
innumerable school concerts, I suddenly find that my old disability is
gone. I no longer have trouble picking out the tuba or the cello.
In fact, I've become quite a connoisseur of the lower registers.
We parents get pride and (in some cases) improved ears, but what do school arts
programs offer our children? Try this list:
* An ability to listen and to hear themselves in the context of others (music)
* A chance to participate individually in collective work (music and drama)
* An opportunity to distinguish between what is said and what is meant (drama)
* An appreciation for distinctions evident from different points of view (drama
and visual arts)
* The right to evaluate each detail and use their own taste and judgment in
pursuit of an outcome (visual arts)
The current controversy over cost-effectiveness in education, and in all areas
of public funding, brings "extra" activities into question. But
to label the arts "extra" is to miss the point and continue a tragic
trend that is undermines the ability of our schools to prepare kids for the
future.
So that we can grade our schools on national tests, our children's teachers are
forced to value figuring over reasoning, memory over discovery, individual achievement
over cooperative accomplishment. Yet a recent survey shows that even the
students who test the best can't express themselves in writing.
Nationwide, literacy ― the ability to understand and be understood
― is declining as quickly as the frontiers of math and science are
expanding; but our national obsession with scoring has teachers concentrating
on short answers, ignoring what can't be measured in favor of what can't be
real.
The late visionary Isaac Asimov once wrote that the greatest change in our
modern world is the rate of change. In geography, physics, astronomy and
countless other subjects, new information arrives daily. Pardon me for
mentioning it, but the answer to most of the questions in our world these days
is (e) none of the above. The ability to perceive, discern, decide and
work together is as basic and important as any fact or formula to the kids who
face the world we'll leave behind.
We're fortunate in this area that our public and private schools recognize the
value of the arts. But with public education budgets under increasing
pressure, school-based arts programs will always be on the edge of extinction.
Without arts programs and other "extras," education can become only
ends and stems. If that's all we can afford, maybe we shouldn't have any
more children.
#####
Now, where was I? The arts are good for ... economy, neighborhood, community,
children. What's left? Of course ―
* The arts are good for us, as well, in ways that we can't observe or
measure, or even explain. They challenge and refresh our minds, touch our
hearts, lighten our loads, and sometimes even change the way we perceive our
world. It's what makes them the arts.
But in that, they're not so far from sports.
During Easter dinner several years ago, my brother-in-law Norm brushed the top
of my glass with the wine bottle he was replacing on the table. The glass
started to tip ― and time stood still.
Calmly, without either conscious thought or my habitual clumsiness, I reached
out, took the stem between my fingers and set the glass on its base. Only
a minor slosh wet the tablecloth.
"Wow," said my niece Meaghan. "Nice reflexes."
It was one of those moments I have heard athletes describe, where chance and
certainty intersect, creating a moment of crystal clarity for participant and
onlooker alike. Time stretches. Details that would normally blur
stand out in vivid relief, available for action, contemplation and
appreciation.
At moments like those, I wonder if I could have been an athlete, a baseball
player, a member of the Boston Red Sox. If I had only gotten eyeglasses a
couple of years earlier, could I have gotten a hit in Little League?
Maybe not. A basketball player, then: a Boston Celtic. After all,
Larry Bird was slow and couldn't jump. Oh, he was also six-foot-nine.
I guess my true calling is as fan. I certainly have my memories of time
standing still:
* The arc of an Orlando Cepeda home run on its way to the right field
bullpen in Fenway Park, destined to defeat Nolan Ryan, 1 - 0.
* Bill Russell blocking a Wilt Chamberlain turn-around shot in steamy
Boston Garden ― two bearded, perfect verticals in utter defiance of
gravity.
* Best of all, John Havlicek and Jerry West ― hand to hip, elbow to
chest, knee to thigh all over the court no matter who had the ball ―
throughout the final game of the 1966 NBA Playoffs. A sustained display
of perfectly-matched talent and competitive determination that still brings
tears to my eyes. I could have played like that. Yuh: in my dreams!
And that, of course, is the point. Bart Giamatti, the late commissioner
of baseball and president of Yale University, left us a small book called Take
Time for Paradise. In it he describes the moment when "a person on
the field performs an act that surpasses whatever we have seen or could
conceive of doing ourselves... In that instant, pulled to our feet, we are
pulled out of ourselves. We feel what we saw, become what we
perceived."
Giamatti attributes the same power to the performing arts. "Power
flows in a mysterious circuit from performer to spectator and back... While
cheers or applause are the hoped-for outcome, silence or gasps are the most
desired, for then the moment has occurred...and a unity rare and inspiring
results."
I made such a moment once. In rehearsal with director, stage manager and
four other actors, I struggled through a barely-learned monologue from an
student-written play, manipulating the gawd-awfulest stage prop ever
conceived. Something clicked. My frustration and awkwardness fueled
the self-doubt of the character and time stood still. That mysterious
circuit of power took hold. As I finished, no one in the room was
breathing. It may have been five seconds, but it seemed like minutes
before one of the other actors whispered, "Wow."
I never made that moment again, but it is a key landmark in my transition from
actor to arts presenter because the memory belongs not only to me, but to
everyone who was in the room.
Giamatti describes a "pleasure in the whole pageant of pleasures...the
crowd, its clothing, its comradeship. Very soon the crowd is no crowd at
all but a community...sharing the common experience of being released to enjoy
the moment."
That, to me, is the lasting importance of sports and the performing arts.
In our lives, we come together for so many serious purposes that we lose sight
of the human-ness that unites us. To be a community, we need experiences
that pull us out of ourselves, let us feel together.
As they were leaving an Alvin Ailey Dance Theater performance in Wausau ten
years ago, one woman turned to her companion and exclaimed, "What if we
had missed that?" Time had stood still for her and she knew the
moment would never be repeated.
Such moments are the essence of the arts. One more example.
#####
A moment ago, I said that the arts are good for us in ways that we can't
observe, measure, or even explain: Sometimes they change the way we
perceive the world.
I experienced that change in perception twelve years ago when I originally
wrote what follows. I sat down to write an ironic story about a great
performer past his prime, and the financial considerations that kept him
touring and people like me booking him. What came out when I started
putting words on the page was something quite different:
I presented the legendary guitarist Andres Segovia several times during the
last years of his life. He shouldn't have been performing, but people
still paid. I shouldn't have been presenting him, but people still paid.
Over ninety, squinting behind thick-framed thick-lensed glasses, heavily-shod
as if staying upright were more urgent than lifting his foot to its stool, he
betrayed nothing of the searing talent that had changed the music world.
Sixteen at his debut in 1909, he began a career that lifted the guitar forever
from flamenco and cowboy songs to make of it a serious, magical
instrument.
Three-quarters of a century later, with the classical guitar a recital-stage
staple, a young tour manager shepherded him from hotel to theater, dressing
room to stage to after-show reception line. Affable but absent, he
hunched over each autograph as he hunched over his instrument, with a mixture
of dignity, gratitude and mild surprise, his fingers retracing the patterns of
inspiration while his concentration focused who-knew-where. When I passed
near him, I felt a swell of feeling as familiar as a gaze into a child's crib
or a tiptoe past a dozing grandparent: a misty, fragile sweetness removed some
years from ken. We called him M*stro, believing it a title of another
time, another age. And yet...
And yet.
Huddled in the spotlight, his foot at last in place,
he let his fingers find their way to fret with ageless grace.
His music split the theater, sliced a seam into the night,
his timeless ruling passion traced its mark within our sight.
A vision of eternity, a glistening silvered strand
beckoned us and welcomed us and offered us its hand.
Subtle, supple, sharp and soft, it vivified the air,
solid, shapely, swift and still, common, human, rare.
Quiet, fragile, eloquent, it whispered wordless sense,
creating grammar all its own, active voice, no tense.
We grasped its wordless language, squeezing, holding tight,
but he couldn't quite sustain it, couldn't keep it through the night.
A buzzing string, disfingered chord: once-magic now was gone.
An old man in the spotlight, bewildered, struggled on.
He couldn't make the magic stay, the knack submerged in years.
Consid'ring then what once we'd held, the memory moved to tears.
He couldn't quite sustain the touch of magic for an hour,
but magic infin'tesimal is magic still in power.
An hour in the cosmos' no different than a breath.
A feeling felt's indelible, soul-changing, ours 'til death.
An instant or an hour, it's a gift to give it birth:
a brush against eternity has value beyond worth.
I shouldn't be presenting him, I thought. He's not the same.
But people touched the infinite. No wonder that they came.
Somehow the act of writing about Segovia pierced a layer of cynicism that
separated me from what I really felt about him, from what every audience seeks
in a theater. We take a risk, sit with strangers in the dark, hoping for
an instant that lifts us beyond worry, out of ourselves...that puts the wonder
back in wonderful. It happens.
And thank you all for your commitment to making it happen here.