Students Speak!

What a whirlwind of a week!

What happens when you bring an expert in classroom management and team building into the classroom? A LOT!

I watched a group of students, known as the “tough group” come together and work as a team, solve problems and show their teacher they had learned the material! What a proud moment for a teacher.

It was really exciting to have Sean Layne, a visiting artist from the Kennedy Center, back with us, leading a workshop for teachers and practicing demonstration teaching in the classrooms. I really loved to hear the student reflections when Sean asked, "Why am I doing this? Your teacher must think I'm wasting time".

What did the students say?

“ It was challenging and I like challenges”. -6th grade

“It helps us learn vocabulary better because it helps us learn synonyms of the words”. -6th grade

“We worked together and cooperated as a team”. -7th grade

“We get to get up and move”. -3rd grade

“It helps us focus”. -3rd grade

“We worked on the length of our sentences”. -6th grade

“It lets us know if we are in symphony with the rest of the group”. -6th grade

What more can we ask for? A group of students engaged, working as a community, being recognized, listening and being listened to and learning more effectively.

The Agony & the Ecstasy of Mike Daisey and the Theater

I wrote most of this update last week, just after seeing Mike Daisey's "The Agony & Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" at the Public Theater in New York.

Wish I'd posted it then. Because for some reason I couldn't put my finger on at the time, I just didn't like the show. I went in thinking I'd be wild about it: I'm a bit of a techno-geek, Apple fan, theater producer and political activist all rolled into one. I went to see it thinking I might direct it as part of OHA's "Our Own Community Playreading Series."

I still might. But the unfolding events around Daisey and this monologue during the past few days have helped me to place what I didn't quite like about the work to begin with.

We OHAGs were in town for our first-ever series of NYC board meetings. Judith and I had researched downtown shows to take our board members to, wanting to expose them to something Off Broadway. We'd considered Daisey's show because he is a native Mainer and a solo performer--both of which make him a potential Opera House performer. And more importantly, his theatrical monologue was making a real difference in the world: people were taking action to protest worker conditions in Apple's China supply chain. Ultimately it seemed the show would be closed by the time we arrived, and instead we (very happily) ended up attending "An Iliad" at New York Theater Workshop (see earlier post, below).

From theater to direct action to make the world a better place: this is a kind of mainlining Opera House Arts' mission. As Scott Rosenberg, former theater critic and co-founder of Salon.com, has written, "Theater can do journalism; it can do activism; it can do anything." Right on.

Rosenberg goes on to say, "What it must do first to do any of these effectively is to establish some kind of trust." Exactly.

Except it turns out Daisey has lied to his audiences--both in the theater and on the radio, for "This American Life." He undertook a grand charade, masquerading his very strong but fictionalized piece on his trip to China as documentary journalism--and even vouching for it as such with "This American Life"'s fact checkers.

He didn't need to do this for the piece to have such power. Daisey could have said, "I went to China, I did some research, and here is how I am going to present this to you, as a fictionalized collection of real facts." He could have kept it away from fact checkers and the news reporters of "This American Life." But I suspect he was having too much fun mocking journalists--which he does in the piece itself, and is probably one of the reasons I didn't like it--and being too carried away with the power his own words were having to set in motion action--to put the brakes on it. And all of this is what I didn't like about the performance itself: it had just enough edge of self-righteousness, of "nobody else would do this except for me"-ism about it, to give it the pure power Daisey hoped for and for which I was looking (and which many others apparently found in it). It felt, in fact, a bit like a movie--and it turns out it is exactly like a movie, in which the director works to heighten the drama and put the screws to your emotions in order to achieve the external result s/he desires.

Oh, right: this is called propaganda.

In many ways, all of this makes the piece even more fascinating to do. Daisey made the script available free for download and performance after the "This American Life" episode, one of the most listened to in the show's history. And in considering casting what is written as a monologue among a group of community members, we'd automatically take the "personal memoir" element out of the production.

So let's discuss: theater is supposed to move us, and has the capacity to move us to action. Knowing in retrospect that what Daisey performs as his experience is in many ways a fiction--but that the underlying facts of the oppression of Apple's China workforce are true--should we view it differently? How will this experience affect our ability to be moved by future theater performances? Will we simply return to blind consumption of our beloved, sleek, beautiful Apple goods?

Is "The Agony & the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs" good theater? Bad journalism? A lie? Propaganda? Good propaganda or bad propaganda? Want to grapple with all of these issues as part of a community-based production at the Opera House? Let us hear from you!

Read more about it all here:
"This American Life" retraction
Mike Daisey's Blog response to "This American Life"'s retraction
the facts in Apple's Chinese factories: "The I-Economy" by the NYTimes
"With 'Agony' Fabrications Exposed, Theater Artists React," Wall Street Journal March 19
Mr. Daisey and the Fact Factory, by Scott Rosenberg
etc. etc. etc.

Teaching Cooperation DOES Change Our Lives

It's a concept that almost feels too obvious: we need to teach our children how to cooperate and collaborate.

Yet if you go into many public schools today, what is most obvious is that these skills so critical to our ability to learn are NOT being taught.

This past week, Opera House Arts and the Deer Isle-Stonington Schools, as part of our Kennedy Center Partners in Education program, brought Washington, D.C.-based actor and teaching artist Sean Layne into residence to work with our teacher and students on effective ways to use arts integrated learning techniques in their every day classrooms. Sean conducted a one hour professional development seminar for all teachers grades K-8 on the power of arts integrated learning and why it is where education is headed to advance the 21st century learning skills our students need to succeed.

Sean then lead self-selected teachers in an additional two hours of professional development on "Putting Drama to the Test: Increasing Test Taking Abilities Through Drama." Sounds like an odd marriage, yes, but the truth is that even if we can correct the imbalances created by No Child Left Behind, test taking will likely be a skill ALL of us need to succeed in life and work. Additionally, Sean worked for four days in classrooms, demonstrating techniques for building effective learning communities among students and teachers. The visible results of his techniques were amazing. With the repetition of a few simple terms and exercises each day, standardizing vocabulary and developing a practice in the students for concentration, cooperation, and collaboration, the climate of the classrooms greatly improved and we could all feel true "learning communities" in formation.

In fact, arts-integrated learning is not only being seen as a leading edge to improve and advance education nationally, but locally we are extremely well suited to it for a variety of reasons. The arts are a community strength on Deer Isle, which is home to four strong community and professional arts organizations as well as numerous individual artists. And our fisheries-based community is comprised primarily of kinesthetic learners, for whom the industrial model of classroom learning has never been a successful fit. As part of his workshop with the full staff, Sean presented a wonderful, short (6 min) video history of education as it has lead us to this moment, when arts-integrated learning is poised to take the lead.

Future posts will go into more detail on Sean's techniques: his Actor's Toolbox (and how we are using that monthly in our MAD (Music/Art/Drama) Morning Meetings, Concentration Circle, Cooperation Challenge, and One-Minute Tableau Challenges.

Could Paul Goodman Change Our Lives, Again?

Ever hear of Paul Goodman?

If you're under 60, probably not.

But look him up. Filmmaker Jonathan Lee and his new documentary film, "Paul Goodman Changed My Life," are trying to put Goodman back into the conversation. And with good reason.

Why invite a writer best remembered for the book he published in 1960, Growing Up Absurd, back into our public conversation?

Because Goodman is iconoclastic in some of the same ways Opera House Arts is. We showed the film this week, and were very lucky to have filmmaker Lee with us for a Talk Back and supper.

Goodman called himself a humanist and defined this widely to encompass a variety of disciplines and genres so that he never settled into one field or type of creation: fiction, poetry, and criticism; psychology, urban planning, community development. Goodman was passionate about life and appears to have wanted to "have it all:" he was an out bisexual as early as the 1940s, with a wife, three children, and numerous male lovers/affairs.

Despite being completely male-centric, Goodman's gorgeous writing and robust, iconoclastic ideas reached many, many people--including feminist heroes such as Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Susan Sontag, and Deborah Meier--who Lee interviewed for the film.

Goodman was hungry. He believed ideas matter, he believed that we could create the change our country desperately needed in the 1960s--and now. He believed in "the Grand Community." At the same time, he saw himself as an outsider--someone whose ideas would never really be accepted in the mold of Hannah Arendt's concept of "the pariah"--and became a contrarian when Growing Up Absurd and his politics and beliefs made him a darling of the growing anti-war movement, and thus a best-seller.

Yet in the end, dead in 1972 at too early an age from a series of heart attacks, his books quickly went out of print, and Goodman and his ideas went out of our public conversations. We haven't really seen a thinker or writer like him again--and we'd all be richer if we had.

Thanks at least in part to Lee's film, Goodman's work is beginning to make a reappearance. The New York Review of Books is offering Growing Up Absurd as an e-book now, and making it available again in a print edition in June. And Oakland's PM Press now has three collections of Goodman's writing back in print, including The Paul Goodman Reader.

Perhaps "the philosopher of the New Left" who set the agenda for the youth movement of the 1960s can generate a little hunger for life back into our own turbulent times.

In the meantime, to test and stretch the boundaries of your own humanism, keep coming to the wide variety of events like this one as Opera House Arts moves into its year of celebrating the 100th anniversary of its home, the Stonington Opera House.

Telling the Story of the Ages

Opera House Arts' board members enjoyed a group outing to New York Theater Workshop this past weekend. We were off our island and in town for our midwinter board meeting, including a meeting of our new Artistic Advisory Board.

We attended NYTW's new production, "An Iliad,' co-written by director Lisa Peterson and actor Denis O'Hare and, the night we saw it, featuring a virtuosic performance by Tony Award-winning actor Stephen Spinella. Artistic Director Judith Jerome and I wanted our board members to experience one of the many ways a well-known story can be movingly retold on stage.

Greek poet Homer's epic narrative is not only one of the oldest works in Western literature: it was also one of the most memorable books I read growing up. Raptly listening to Spinella appeal to his muses and "sing" his tale, I wondered: why? Why be so enamored of a 15,000 line epic poem on the Wrath of Achilles?

Was the main reason that Achilles loved Patroclus and Patroclus, Achilles?

Was it the "Trojan women," so remarkably memorialized by Euripedes, Katharine Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and finally Christa Wolf in her 1988 novel and essays, Cassandra.

No. I think, looking backward and forward, the reason to be enamored with "The Iliad" and all of its heirs, including "An Iliad" at New York Theater Workshop, is Homer's portrayal of the terrible destruction the rage roaring inside each of us wreaks. The cities sacked, the battles fought. The endless, endless, cycle of pointless rage ("because you took my girlfriend," etc.) that has become our story for all ages.

Our human need to be confronted over and over again with the realities of our rages is why the poets write, the troubadours travel and sing and teach, and the rest of us go to theater. With luck, we each gain insight into our own rage and destructiveness as we fall under the spell of this classic tale. With luck, we don't find ourselves storming the battlements for 10 years.

"An Iliad" is there to remind us: it doesn't take much.

Bert and I

Part I of a Year Long Series

It's time we began talking "Burt Dow, Deep Water Man" again. Tonight was our second evening of Equity auditions for the show, at 440 Studios across from the Public Theater at Astor Place in New York.

The "Bert" in the title of this post may appear as an error to those unfamiliar with Opera House Arts' original "children's opera" version of Robert McCloskey's classic 1964 tale of the same name, which we commissioned from composer Maia Aprahamian in 2007, premiered in 2010, and will re-mount August 9-19, 2012, with a Maine tour April 21-May 5, 2013.

The real-to-life Bert Dow, on whom this story is based, was a Deer Isle mariner who is buried on King Row in Deer Isle. When McCloskey turned the real "deep water man" into the protagonist of his final children's book, he changed "Bert" to "Burt"--part of the process of transforming the real into the legendary.

I've titled this series of blog posts, which will track the process of re-mounting and touring "Burt Dow, Deep Water Man," in the spirit of Marshall Dodge's iconic Maine routines, "Bert and I."

And indeed, tonight's auditions were all about "The Burt's."

But first let me tell you how incredibly fun and exciting it is to hold auditions for a musical in New York City. Beginning with our own terrific musical director, Peter Szep, director Joan Jubett, and piano accompanist Michael--who could play anything anyone brought in--we were swimming in a sea of talent: talent with big voices. The kind that knock the back wall out of the room. You can imagine yourself in "A Chorus Line." You can feel as if perhaps you've never really heard a tenor before.

With all the talented bass singers we saw this evening, we're left wrestling with a philosophical question: do we cast someone in the mode of the real life Bert Dow, or the best vocalist?! It's a constant question when casting: so many variables make for a great performance. In this instance, our audience members' emotional attachment to the myth and legend of "Burt Dow" and to the world premiere version make this an even more difficult choice than usual.

What do you think? Shall we cast a grizzled, older New Englander who has Bert Dow in his body? Or go for a younger actor who will need beard and make up to age him, but has a more spectacular voice? What would you do?

Tell us. We want to hear from you.

What's Going On

Two weeks ago, Opera House Arts' staff and Reach Performing Arts Center director Morgan Witham traveled to Washington, D.C. to attend the annual meeting of the Kennedy Center Partners in Education program, of which we are members in collaboration with the Deer Isle-Stonington Schools.

There were many amazing and inspiring aspects of this trip, not the least of which were all the great ideas we have for the coming year of arts education programming collaborations between OHA and the schools (more on these soon, direct from the keyboard of the Opera House's Education Associate Michele Levesque!). OHA was proud to have been asked to give the 300+ members of this nationwide partnership a presentation on our 2011 project, "Dear Fish," in collaboration with the partnership team from Juneau, AK. The presentation of the excellent work done by our teachers and students was enthusiastically received!

And right after our presentation, we were treated to a performance by students from Washington's Duke Ellington School for the Arts. Two girls, one a spoken word poet and one a singer, and a boy accompanying them on improvised acoustic guitar, wowed us with their passion, talent, and maturity. Speaking about their work after their performance, the singer said, "We want you to know that our generation is committed to making the world a better place." If we had not already all been in tears at the beauty of her performance of Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," we were when she said this.

The students introduced us to a new project the Kennedy Center is sponsoring, "What's Going On Now," in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Gaye's Kennedy Center concert of his influential 1971 album. The project asks students to weigh in on what has changed in the 40 years since Gaye so movingly captured the spiritual and cultural chaos of our nation. Gaye sang about war, peace, pollution, personal truth. The website asks students to pick an issue, create, and share their own thoughts on what is happening today--just as the spoken word poet did at the performance we saw, with her moving poems linking the civil wars and genocide in the Congo to the realities of her African-American community in D.C.

The project is a very cool way to encourage students to express their social engagement. It will culminate in an anniversary concert and fresh look at Gaye's album at the Kennedy Center in May, at which Grammy Award-winning R&B artist John Legend will appear with the National Symphony Orchestra--and with selected students from the project.

Art inspires. Art Makes Change.