One of my great frustrations with working at the
Vermont Arts Council is the
number of times in a week or a month that I have to explain what I do for a
living. It’s not the work itself.
It’s because the best way to get
people to understand what we do at the Council is to show them, not tell them,
and I can’t SHOW everybody!
Experiencing art (engaging it, confronting
it, attending it, or simply being in its presence) is frequently the only way
to understand its intuitive and powerful impact. I can talk until I am blue in the face to
anyone about certain works, certain performances or artists that have elicited
a visceral response so powerful that words simply fail to do justice to the
experience. Talking about it doesn’t
have anywhere near the impact of giving people an opportunity to experience it
for themselves.
Back-to-back events last week provided a wealth of
opportunities for folks in Vermont to experience for themselves the power of
the arts, and for one of them, it might become a life-altering experience.
On Tuesday, March 12 Legislators returning from the Town
Meeting Day break were greeted by a fabulous
installation
in the State House Card Room by Elizabeth Billings and Cora Vail Brooks.
Consisting of large sheets of brown parcel
paper with stenciled words cut out, hung from the ceiling by clips and pins,
the exhibit, “Almost,” was created to gently remind anyone who came into the Card Room, that the arts surround us, invite us in, cause us to have an
unexpected(?) reaction, and leave us with a changed outlook.
Judging from the responses that we saw on peoples’ faces,
and the comments they wrote on our feedback sheet, we touched a lot of people,
mostly in a very positive way, and created a new appreciation for art and, yes,
for the Card Room itself. The Card Room
itself was a place legislators used to adjourn to while waiting for, say,
conference committees to finish their work.
To pass the time, they played cards with each other. Today, the room is used for special interest
groups to share information about their causes. In the past, the Arts Council has had
displays of grantees’ works, slide-shows of cultural facilities’ improvements
that we have funded, held poetry readings, and in general shared information
with folks in the building about our programs and services.
This year we gave them an experience they
won’t soon forget.
For eight years, Vermont high school students have
labored to learn three poems well enough to recite them in front of their
school-mates, and be selected to compete in a semifinal competition in
Barre. Finalists are selected from the
30-plus semifinalists, and the winner receives some scholarship money and the
opportunity to do it all over again in Washington DC against the winners from
the 52 other states and jurisdictions; and his/her school receives money to
purchase books. All very simple and
straightforward, right?
Wrong. This
competition is extremely intense and yet it is among the most engaging and
uplifting programs we undertake. The
mechanics are straightforward, but the results are anything but. High schoolers of all ages and types have to
not just learn a poem, but inhabit it, internalize it, and make it their
own. Then they must convey the poem's meaning
and power with a minimum amount of theatrics and a maximum amount of passion
and oratorical skill. Props are
occasionally used, but rarely to any great effect. This year, the most powerful competitor (in
my opinion, of course!) was the guy who barely moved, but held each of us in a
steely gaze, and delivered up a stunning result—using just his voice. He didn’t win. Instead, that honor went to Christian DeKett
of St. Johnsbury Academy and if he goes on to the Nationals and does as well as
last year’s Vermont entry, Claude Mumbere, his life may be truly altered in
profound and exciting ways.
The real point, however, is that more than 4000 students across
the state participated in the competition.
They challenged themselves to do something far outside their normal
comfort-zone. It was far more than
learning the words (which I gather is the easy part). The students not only had to truly understand
the poems, they then had to bring that awareness and understanding to the
audience, especially the judges. The
judges, in turn, were looking at the difficulty of the poem, the student’s
understanding, his/her ability to convey that understanding, his/her delivery,
and the quality of the overall performance.
So many critical skills come in to play for the
participants. In addition to the poem
itself, the student has to consider the impact of the clothes they wear, how
they approach the microphone, the tone and volume of the voice they use, the
degree to which they can overcome their natural fear of being in the spotlight
and being judged.
Probably only a handful or two of those participating
will go on to a career in the arts, and fewer still will become poets. But I can absolutely guarantee that 10, 20,
50 years from now, when asked by a friend or family-member what do they
remember most about high school, most will probably say, the experience that
this competition gave them.
Learning is no more about rote memorization than
education is just about training. There
are times when rote memorization helps achieve a certain end and when training
kicks in and enables us to respond automatically to a set of circumstances that
might (as in a fist-fight) save our hides.
But learning and understanding require a deeper commitment that serves
as a gateway to life-long learning.
This is what the arts can do. This is why adding the A (Arts) to STEM
instruction is so vitally important. We
can all be trained up in the specifics of science, technology, engineering, and
math, but it is the Arts that enable us to learn and to live.
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