Art Versus Fear

Reflections on a week of final art performances amidst a backdrop of authoritarianism.

Dancers, Educational Center for the Arts, New Haven, CT

These past few weeks I have witnessed such a dizzying array of human behavior.

At the arts magnet school where I teach nonfiction writing to young students committed enough to the arts that they are willing to be bussed there four days a week to engage in intensive apprenticeship-style education with visual artists, actors, musicians, dancers and writers, it was a time of end-of-year performances and celebration.

Young artists leapt across stage in self-choreographed dances, leaned bows into strings and blew breath through reeds and mouthpieces, banged drums, strummed guitars, plucked basses, became altogether other people in well-rehearsed dramas, comedies, monologues, read poems and essays and stories and screenplay excerpts, hung striking black and white real film photographs, paintings, displayed wondrously shaped objects sculpted from all manner of material….

These endeavors strike to the heart of human goodness, aesthetic beauty, the essentialness of artistic expression (especially in a time of such cold-to-the-bone political division, fear, hatred…authoritarianism).

Time and time again as I sat back in the cool shadows of the arts hall and witnessed young artists celebrating the human potential for creative expressiveness, I was left overwhelmed.

A music teacher sat in with the orchestra playing viola alongside 14-18 year olds already so very good, her face radiating pure joy, especially when she wasn’t playing and was just listening to students embark on their journeys. As four young women sang a cappella in front of the orchestra, her face was especially notable, exuding the exact same deep appreciation-pleasure-wonder I was feeling.

A dancer leapt over a single prop onstage, a simple folding chair, turned mid-air, landing nearly silently in a shape and with movements that emanated an emotion we don’t yet have a word for.

A student of mine stepped up to the microphone with poise, confidence, maturity and mesmerized us with a deeply personal, deeply lyrical reflection on the nature of time and the mysteries of quantum physics.

Another held us in rapt attention as they conveyed a modern day morality play set in the local pet store where they work, all centered on a rich, humorous knowledge of all things guinea pig related.

Still another told of early memories with his father, looking out for turkeys and naively mis-reading signs, trusting entirely and lovingly in his father’s quirky love and tenderness….

Last year, my first year of returning to teach here after many years away, I wrote about this place as well—and here again, with summer about to begin, a cold, wet spring finally beginning to turn toward summer, I took such genuine, authentic solace in having so many young artists remind me of the human potential for beauty and goodness.

I think I responded so strongly because it is so much more necessary this year than last, as our hater-in-chief and his minions of Wizard-the-Ozian-like flying monkeys swoop down on us hourly with what I can only think of now as “anti-art.” Every utterance that comes from their mouths is as far across the spectrum as one can possibly get from the rhythms and slant rhymes and compelling imagery of a student poet, the crescendoing blasts of a young man standing up and tilting his alto sax back as his solo rushes out upon us, the expressive movements of bodies touching, releasing, reconfiguring into shapes of purely emotive motion, the deeply blurred background of a contrasty photograph that at first seems like nothing you’ve ever seen before you realize it is something utterly familiar now made new….

Photo by Katarina Watkins, Educational Center for the Arts

Throughout the relatively short span of human history, while some have always tossed spears, bludgeoned their fellow Homo sapiens with clubs, others have etched elegant figures on the walls of caves, pounded upon hollowed out logs beneath utterly black skies dotted with infinite stars, thrown bodies wildly against the soft light of an essential, central fire, compiled sounds in their throats—now become words—now become language—now become art.

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