Freeing our Cultural Genius through the Arts

"... I believe Music is a great healer and that concerts create energy that can inspire great change. I’d love to hear your thoughts on ways to benefit the environment, spread the message that we can reverse global warming, how we can live more in harmony with nature and each other, ways in which music has changed your life, and anything else you want to share on the intersection of nature and music."


Ukumbwa Sauti - rohoyamto@earthlink.net:  (my response)

One thing comes to mind....a unified populace....brought together by programmatic/ceremonial/ritual offerings that allow people to interface as community, to allow us to be validated by each other, to see each other in the mirror of each others eyes...to see, feel, hear AND take in and understand what and who we are. Modern mass media consumption requires that we focus on screens or on audio streams coming into our own headphones...we are more and more consuming cultural (all be they created and distributed by a select group of people quite disconnected from us) messages/stories that require us to focus on them....not each other. Mass media consumption is individuating us even further....every day.

I did a simple exercise with my college students. I asked them to look around the room and when they catch someone's eye gaze, they were to look into that person's eyes for 10 seconds, then move on to another, 10 seconds, then another, then another. When I suggested this to them, you should have seen and heard the squirming that went on for most of them...but at the end, a number of them admitted realizing that they don't very often look into another person's eyes....something so basic and important to human understanding and relationship-building. Phew! - they got it!!

We would do well to create opportunities for us to be in community with each other where the context and content is about our need to understand each other, educate each other, validate each other and present information that is of vital information to each other. In many African and South American countries, there are national, regional and municipal/community theater and music groups that regularly travel around and perform work that frames important socio-political issues. Playback theater (a la True Story Theater, Arlington, MA) is one local formation of that kind of work, taking stories and experiences from the audience and playing it back, reframing and validating personal stories for the benefit of larger social understanding and knowledge. Focus must be brought to new processes of social communication, popularizing real two-way and organic communication as opposed to the one-way, contrived "communications" that happen with most corporate conglomerate mass media communications processes.

There are wonderful ways of using theater and music, improvisational performances to involve, enliven and empower not just audiences, but communities and societies so that they/we can finally feel like we are in control of our lives and the way we relate to each other and our natural environment. I challenge us all to fill this blog page with all the latent genius that we KNOW we embody, but have not yet shared with each other. I challenge us, along with Rialto Arts, to make the world that we KNOW is possible, the beautiful, supportive, safe and powerful, loving world that we KNOW can be created/re-created - REAL.

Thursday, March 29, 2007 - 01:21 AM