On the Education of Artists and the Arts in our Society.

-Bruce Cohen, MFA

“Are you one of those…?”

Recently, in the scope of some casual conversation, I was asked if I was one of “those theatre

types." When I begged some clarification the response was, "Well, you know, you theatre people

are birds of a feather." The metaphor struck me as funny but also apropos. To the mind outside

of theatre we are often sort of bird-like. We are consigned as flighty, feather-brained and

ultimately unserious. And, arguably, we do gravitate together perpetuating a sort of exclusivity; a

flock. The metaphor, funny or not, is apt. And that question belied a significant lack on the part

of us theatre types when you examine the motivation behind it. To our neighbors who don't

consider themselves “artsy” (actually, an abbreviated version of the term this person used to help

clarify), we do seem like outliers. The very nice person that asked me this question was really

searching for some common denominator, some avenue of familiarity.

At the time I was working on one of those wonderfully vague requests to deliver a talk to a group

about a ‘current trend’ in theatre. Considering the ocean of choice that this cue presents I was

drawn repeatedly to a dictum from my early years as a graduate student researcher, that being

“Bring something entirely new to the field.” I began brainstorming: virtual reality, multimedia

interactivity, immersive aesthetic distance. I could focus on what Cirque du Soleil does. I could

corroborate what the video game aesthetic has done to live performance. I could reinforce the

transitory power of social media communication and concept a production of Hamlet where

Horatio live “tweets” the whole show in medias res. And, as fun as all this brainstorming was, it

occurred to me that this train of thought was leading further and further away from some

commonality with that nice person who pictured me and my “artsy” ilk as different. Theatre (and

us theatre folk) so often lead with device that gimmickry is usually the result. Live “tweeting” a

production in process is gimmick. When it truly boils down, multimedia, immersive performance

and virtual reality are also gimmicks. We get caught up in our cleverness and the result may well

be standing ovations, but also a real depreciation of the tangible value of our craft to society at

large. And when it comes time to kick someone off the proverbial island, the tribe is going to

keep the engineer and surgeon and set the “artsy” afloat. In this regard the question, “are you one

of those…?” is a delimiter of utility. One may as well ask, of what use are the “artsy” to society

and the greater good? Are you one of “those” or are you one of us?

Utility is the idea that brought me back to a current trend I would highlight and pursue, and it

would be the business world's creeping realization that creative capital (in the form of research

and development) has become the missing piece of the economic spur we have all been looking

for to shepherd us out of this perennial downturn. We artsy folk are well positioned to address

this need. Much attention has been paid to the fear of America's fading strength in the sciences

and technologies. Reinvestment and throttled up emphasis on those STEM fields have become

the education clarion call in legislatures across the country.

They tell us we must bring our students up to competitive levels in math and science. How in the

world can we be a superpower if the up and coming generations present so poorly in these

fundamental areas? I don't argue this. Americans do need better preparation in the STEM fields.

However, as the ongoing debate about primary and secondary education standards drags on. As

we collectively wring hands about No Child Left Behind and Common Core and whatever

modality might be next; the sad consequence has been a deficit and depreciation of critical and

abstract thought in favor of the concrete. Education’s traditional bastions of higher-order reason,

music and art, and certainly theatre have vanished from schools across the country. Our

disciplines have been, and are being, kicked off the island. Stressed and time-strapped teachers

wrestle with benchmark testing that emphasizes lower order thinking and recitation while fears

of funding cuts and job eliminations based on these results have heightened their understandable

paranoia.

I have taught the results of this policy shift for well over a decade. The majority of my recent

students have been freshmen and sophomores. I can say, with very little variation, that while

their test-taking skills are often excellent; their ability to operate on those upper levels of

Bloom's taxonomy (synthesis, analysis, and so on) is not. What is even more troubling, in recent

years I have noticed a genuine fear and discomfort with thinking abstractly. It is as if their pre-

collegiate training has inured them to be intellectually risk-averse. So, instead of developing and

refining their hunger to create, to fly with their imagination, and to challenge old orthodoxies; we

are instead laboring to coax these students to simply think outside of a doctrinaire box. And,

frankly, academe must aim higher than educating box-openers. We must develop and encourage

orthodoxy challengers and imagination flyers.

Over on the commercial side of town, trends are changing. Industry, once so ready to offshore

manufacturing and import much of their R&D brain trust, has slowly but surely been

repatriating. Skilled labor recruitment is, once again, tapping the domestic work force. But,

something essential is still lacking. Something, I would argue, that Americans have historically

excelled at but has received short shrift in recent generations; entrepreneurial creativity. Our

educational system is not creative-friendly, but it needs to be. Business realizes this and our

economy needs this going forward. Politicians and bureaucracies have yet to catch up, but they

will (although glacially). Most governmental change moves at a snail's pace when it comes to

progressive legislation, especially in education. I expect that waiting for the politicians to

recognize this shift in the wind and cast their attention toward encouraging creativity will find us

grey-haired, long-toothed, and left further behind.

Regardless of this institutional entropy, the numbers reinforcing change are already there. The

importance of arts programming is borne out by a recent report by the U.S. Bureau of Economic

Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the public release (dated December

2013), the BEA declared that the arts and culture sector contributed $504 billion to the nation’s

annual gross domestic product in FY’11. This amounts to 3.2% of overall GDP which actually

trumps the U.S. travel and tourism industry contribution of 2.8%. The report goes on to detail

that gross output for the entire arts and culture sector amounted to $916 billion in the same

period.

There were eight leading contributors to this $916 billion and advertising was first. It accounted

for just over $199 billion. Arts education, however, is in second place, contributing $103,960

billion to the national economy. Arts education contributed more than radio, movies or

cable/satellite television. The "Creative Economy", “Creative Industries” and “Cultural

Economy” are all phrases seeing recent popularity as ways of defining and recognizing the

business potential and fiscal validity of the work of ideas. As the UK Government Department

for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) defines it; the “Creative Industries” are:

"those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which

have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of

intellectual property" (DCMS 2001, p. 04)

And there is the notion that in the great rush to shore up competence in STEM education we risk

losing sight of creativity, and by extension innovation. I would offer instead, that what we risk

losing sight of is the marvelous potential of cross-pollination from the creative side. Leaders of

business and industry have been calling for more attention and focus on the creative degree fields

of the Arts and Humanities side of higher education. Those much maligned and pitiably

underfunded areas like poetry, dance, sculpture or drama. This is because they understand; the

next big thing, the next blockbusting technology, the next cultural Phenom will come from a

creative and innovative thinker. These are the thinkers that arts education produces.

Shifts toward meeting this need have been happening. A few years ago I attended a theatrical

production at Midwestern State University (MSU). I was on hand as a respondent for the

Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and considered the production one of the

best, if not the best show I responded to all year (and there were many that season). What made

that show special and laudable was cross-pollination. The title of the play is Bandersnatch. It

was an original work, co-authored and directed by Brandon Smith, a faculty member at MSU

and based on Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. Taken alone, the script is solid, funny, and

workmanlike. It is by no means special in and of itself. But the wonder of this production, what I

and many others found captivating was the result of an unusual and unexpected collaboration.

Smith sought out a partnership with MSU's McCoy School of Engineering to create the fanciful,

nonsensical creatures that inhabit Carroll's work. Engineering students collaborated on designs

for mechanized, fully articulated and actor-wearable interpretations of the Jub Jub Bird and an

eight foot tall frumuous Bandersnatch, among others. Smith has mentioned drawing his

inspiration from the Handspring Puppet Co., a group that won several Tony Awards for War

Horse. The similarity is certainly present. The device of the thing is there and the gimmick is

quite good (as it is in War Horse). But that MSU production was more than gimmick. It was

creatively and entrepreneur-ally collaborative. It brought those seemingly so disparate STEM

and artsy folks together.

Electrical and structural engineers who might never have entertained that sort of application for

their designs, dancers, and actors who developed new movement vocabularies in order to bring

these constructions to life and even better than all of this, a spirit of partnership and collegiality

between students who, without this, might have remained ignorant of the others. Usually

balkanized in their traditionally defined roles and departments, a play allowed for common

denominators and avenues of familiarity and resulted in something that was not at all feather-

brained or unserious. It allowed tangible, universally appreciable innovation.

The bean counters and boards of education may ask how we might assess the academic success

of a project like Bandersnatch? How might we define a rubric to distill and apply these

techniques across institutions? How can we separate the creative, experiential wonderfulness that

seems so abstract and translate it into hard numbers and concrete judgments for the legislature to

consider? I am as frustrated with this outcomes inevitability as any other artsy person is. But

even in the seeming qualitative desert of assessment, things are yet changing. I’ve noticed a trend

in terminology in recent assessment trainings. The institutional verbiage being promulgated now

includes phrases like “Learner-Centered” approaches to instruction and reinforces a “Professor

as Facilitator” model. We are now being called to think in terms of an environmental learning

approach and to create an atmosphere where the student can self-determine their path toward

understanding and to be less canonic and dictatorial as a professor.

This is not new in education writ large. Lev Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development posits

the value of students’ vicarious learning over the hierarchy of traditional lecture. Maria

Montessori’s very successful approach to primary education places the student within an option-

rich environment where a child is free to self-direct their intellectual searching while the teacher

acts as coach. Traditionalist university faculty may shake their heads at this shift. After all, it has

been comparatively simple to benchmark learning outcomes and lecture/test to those benchmarks

if the professor establishes both. Allowing the student to set their course and then attempting to

assess a set outcome presents much more challenge. It is much like hitting a moving target.

However challenging, it does work well with other age-cohorts. And it does seem to be the trend.

I say the trend is good. It is good because the learner-centric approach eschews boundaries in

favor of flexibility. I say it is good because it values the abstract over the concrete. I say it is

good because, frankly, it is part and parcel of how arts education (and theatre training

specifically) has been operating all along. Cross-pollination between traditionally separate

disciplines and student-centered classroom approaches encourages innovation and strengthens

learning. Finding opportunities to connect the abstract and the concrete, to repatriate the “artsy”

people back into the general population, does indeed result in entrepreneurial creativity.

I’ve read a number of articles recently that lament the decline of the Arts and Humanities in

education and larger society. In a way, this type of editorial has become quiet hip. It seems a

response to that wave of concern about STEM. And this would be understandable. After all, the

squeaky wheel of STEM anxiety certainly attracted a good deal of grease. Wouldn’t it follow

that weaknesses in Arts and Humanities education will also draw concern and ameliorative

response? However, there is a certain tone to this flood of obituary-literature that I find less than

helpful to the cause. There is an overlying patina of ‘poor-me’ to genre.

The take-away is, all too often, that the Arts and Humanities must be saved because of some

ephemeral specialness. And that specialness is not definable or universally applicable because it

is, well, ephemeral and abstract and ultimately very individual. The arts enrich our spirits. The

humanities broaden our world-view. These are surely valid statements but when the rubber hits

the road, the sciences have empirical utility in their corner. The arts and humanities do not.

Arguments for STEM reforms result in job-training programs and arguments for the arts and

humanities result in inspirational posters and internet memes. The difference here, I would offer,

is clarity of utility. It is pretty simple to express the societal value of science, technology,

engineering and math education. It is not so with the arts and humanities which are so often

subject to the zeitgeist and transitory in effect. I also believe that their immediate worth can be

best measured on an individual basis. However, I hold that their universal value is more

profound and necessary than science, technology, engineering and math. I believe this because it

is through exposure to and training in the arts and humanities that thinkers become critical. It is

by wrestling with the difficult work of abstract concept and counter-intuitive argument that

minds develop strategies of reason and facets of cognition. STEM training may strengthen the

useful brain but arts and humanities training will keep our minds supple and flexible by

challenging parameters. And, if we consider this cognitive flexibility on a larger societal level,

then the utility of an arts and humanities focus becomes much clearer. Where emphasis on

STEM will give us a population with practical skill; emphasis on the arts and humanities will

ground the use of those skills in a wise and flexible consciousness.

One of my favorite books written about the arts (and also humanities) is Robert Edmond Jones'

The Dramatic Imagination. Jones was a scenic, lighting, and costume designer and is routinely

heralded as the father of the modern American design movement. Among other things, The

Dramatic Imagination is a cautionary polemic. Jones recognized and was frustrated by the

tendency of theatre artists to focus inward, to gaze at our own navels, and dig around in our own

emotional viscera. Jones was responding to the new theatre of psychological realism so heavily

influenced by Stanislavsky, Strasberg and Freud. Where many others saw a captivating

expansion of the inner universe of individuality and internal motivations, Jones instead saw a

narrowing. Jones believed that although the inward focus may afford a more complex

understanding of the self, it also carries the tendency to exclude our place in the greater whole of

society. Indeed, Jones was championing a return to theatre's pre-classical roots as a communal

ritual, a celebration, not of the self, but of society. In the book, he writes:

Nothing can stop progress in the American theatre except the workers themselves. To

them I say: There are no limitations there except your own limitations. Lift it. Get the

personal you out of your work. Who cares about you? Get the wonder into it. Get your

dreams into it. Where are your dreams? (Jones, 9)

In calling for elevation of theatre to the realm of wonder and dream, Jones is also encouraging

universality and communion with our fellows. He saw in theatre, the expansive and necessary

power to connect with others. He believed it a misuse of this power, and a detriment to our

fellows, to turn inward too much. Turning inward will invariably lead others to ask if we are one

of “those?”

So, to any that might wonder if I am “one of those….” I would answer, yes and no. I am, as a

theater artist, a valuable and useful member of our society, and a challenging rebel. I am one of

those who raise the impolite questions. I am one of those who embrace uncomfortable

abstractions. I am one of those who debate the value of status quo. I am one of those who

recognize trends as positive progress to be embraced and pushed. I may seem different and

strange. I may seem like an outlier on the fringe of commonality. But, to be on the fringe still

presumes a definite connection to the whole. So, yes, I am one of those artsy types. But I’d offer

that it is the artsy types that exist as necessary change-agents in our society. I describe my

mission as an artsy type as similar to the speck of grit in an oyster. That grit is an irritant. But

consider the result of that irritation. The oyster reacts by surrounding, enveloping and embracing

that grit until what began as an irritant becomes a pearl. However, viewing that speck in the

oyster as an irritant is simply reductive perception. Try, instead, seeing that bit of grit as a

stimulant and agent of progress. What many may avoid as a simple conflict will, if allowed,

develop into a beautiful and lustrous pearl that is both oyster and grit; more lovely than either

individually and precious in combination.

Bruce Cohen, MFA