ART IS CHANGE: Strategies & Skills for Activist Artists & Cultural Organizers

Threshold Questions and Juicy Quotes:

Can collective creation change settled world views?

I mean, there are a couple of Mexican families in Brussels. They're no black folks. So, I would always kid that I was like, you know, that's a cute little house, and if I bought that, I'd be okay. Like, yeah. You know, for some of those students, this was prayerfully life changing in how they see folks and communities that are different than them and for our students from Normandy.

Can we build lasting bridges between communities separated by race and culture?

You’ve got to have people love each other. You’ve got to have people like, "Can't wait to see you at rehearsal."... because then on stage, I got your back ... that experience it was so affirming to me about the power of just having people just talk to each other, you know, so they fell in love with each other. I fell in love with them.  

What kind of leadership grows community ownership and accountability?

I'm humbled by the whole experience. You know, because often people don't know or really care who the director is, and that's okay. That's my goal. So, it's nice to just be on the ferry and nobody know what my roll was in it and hear people like, this is so cool. Oh my gosh, I can't believe we're doing this.
Links

Blackberry Productions

St. Louis Shakespeare Festival:

Shakespeare, in the Streets

Art and Upheaval,

Wedding Community Play.

CHIPS Health: Community Health-In-Partnership Services (d/b/a CHIPS Health and Wellness Center) is the place where uninsured and underserved people in the St. Louis metropolitan area can receive free primary and preventive health care services.

Bread and Roses Missouri An organization with the mission of organizing arts and humanities projects about workers and their families.

 Transcript

Margaret Mischeaux Next week is a very big week. It will not only be the 24:1 festival, but it will also be the premiere of Shakespeare in the Street, Love at the River's Edge, a rendition of As You Like It with a little bit of a twist. We are combining the counties of Brussels and St. Louis's 24:1. So basically, we talk about the divides into two communities; our similarities, our differences, our very unique ways of living.

Bill Cleveland: From the Center for the Study of Art and Community This is Change the Story, Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland:.

The voice you heard at the beginning of this week's episode was Margaret Mischeaux. A student and actress from Normandy High School, near St. Louis, who was one of the dozens of people touched by the story we are about to tell. We call this week's episode of Change the Story, Change the World, Love at the River's Edge. In it, we hear from actor, director, dancer and educator Kathi Bentley, whose life's journey has taken her from St. Louis, to the Freat White Way, and back again to the home of the Gateway Arch. Along the way, we learn how an aspiring young thespian grows to become a respected theatre professional, anti-racism activist, and recipient of the 2020 St. Louis Visionary Award. 

This tale of two cities segues nicely into another powerful story of two extremely different places: the very rural Brussels, Illinois, and the St. Louis ring city of Pagedale, Missouri whose citizens are brought together by way of the unlikely interlocutor of William Shakespeare's, As you Like It in the fall of 2019. Kathi's direction of this ambitious collaboration initiated by Shakespeare Festival St. Louis's Shakespeare in the Streets Program involved hundreds of community members from both towns, as well as the Normandy School’s Collaborative, Brussels High School, and Beyond Housing, a regional community development organization. The yearlong undertaking produced a performance that not only took audiences and actors from both towns across the Mississippi River to stages in each community, but it forever changed the story of both places. My conversation with Kathi took place on May 27th, just 38 hours after George Floyd's murder in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Part One, Love Hate.

BC: How are you Kathi?

Kathi Bentley: Um, I think I'm okay. I thought I was doing good, and then I made the mistak, of getting on social media and looking at stuff and I'm just you know, I mean I already knew about the killing in Minnesota and that mixed with man in Central Park, people dying of Coronavirus. It's just a lot. So today you know, so I you know how you wake up? I'm like, Oh, I'm doing good. And then I'm then I'm just yeah. 

BC: I mean, it's really weird. We're isolated, but we're bombarded.

Yeah. Kathi, hopefully this conversation will be different because I want you to tell a story which of all the people in the world you know best, because it's yours. I'd like to begin by asking you to reflect that you're sitting across the table from your colleagues, and you're sharing with them what it is you do in the world. What's your work, what's your mission?

KB: Okay! My mission is to bring people to together to create a space where we can jointly create, excavate, build, nurture, and activate stories from our shared experiences, or maybe not shared experiences, where we can have space for each other's unique experiences, and places where our experiences intersect. My work is about leading people to that place of self-discovery and affirmation that helps them to see themselves in a different way as storytellers, as members of a collective group of people. My work is to hold space for people who may not feel like they have a place or space to be who they are 

BC:  What was the path that led you to that mission? What's the story of how you came to that work? 

KB: Well, you know, I think as a person who's always been connected to the arts, just for my entire life, as a dancer and an actor. I moved to New York to perform, and did that, and love-hated it a lot, and got connected with an organization in Harlem that helped me to see all these other ways that I could be creative and artistic. And they had to do with working with schools or community groups, or you know, just in ways that didn't look like the traditional ‘going to an audition’, and that was really gratifying. Like, oh, I can help build a curriculum around Harlem Renaissance and how it relates to being a young boy or girl in Harlem right now, you know, or in the 90s. So that that led me to look at my creative self in a different way. As somebody who could actually instigate these kinds of stories and not solely be someone who is given a story to recreate as an actor, so it had me very excited in and like, oh, okay, I could actually help people create, help people devise work and direct other people's stories and, you know… I think that my lifelong mission of building community, it's just been part of what I've been raised to value is that community is really, really important, and the only way I know how to do it is through the arts. So that just has been the center of how I do what I do, this community building piece that's really important to me.

BC: What was that organization that you mentioned

KB: Oh, Blackberry Productions. I'm still really good friends with the founder. She's like a sister, she's like a big sister to me, and we did a play together, and I thought she is Looney Tune. This woman, you know […] Stephanie Berry, and she was just the most talented and creative person that I had met. I mean, she just, it was like, you know somebody wakes up with, like 15 ideas, her feet hit the floor. That’s how I felt about her, and we had we came up with a bunch of stuff, we, we still, every time we talk, we get something new. But that as a young performer, she was so inspiring as far as just the limitless creativity that we have as human beings. So, I got to work with Blackberry Productions after we worked together as performers. I worked with the company for maybe five years or so in different capacities, writing grants, I mean, stuff that I was like, Okay, well, yes, and creating curriculum, you know, all that. Just really directing. That's when I first started directing was with her company, and I got really excited about that.

BC: So, you ended up, you're in St. Louis. I'm in St. Louis, Missouri. What Took you from finding a new spark on the street in New York, back to St. Louis?

KB: Yeah, right […] Well, yes, I'm from here, and then right after college, I moved to New York with my high school friend, no clue. And I lived there for 10 years, you know, a lot of growth happens between the ages of 23 and 31, perform all over the place, you know, and just be an actor. A lot of that did happen, you know, in different ways. I made friends for life there, had experiences that I just could never have had any place else but New York, because there's nowhere like it, and I'm so grateful for that experience, you know, and would advise anyone to do that. If it's in your heart to move somewhere, do it, do it.

I lived there for 10 years and got married, had a baby. A couple years later got separated, I felt like I needed to be back home close to family, and so that brought me back here, and my mentor who I've known for since I was in college actually got me to finish my degree, convinced me build Scrivener. He just kept, you know, he talked me into it and he got me on SIUE (Southern Illinois University Edwardsville) where I teach, I want to direct I love this and I want to do some other things with this theater stuff. 

Part Two, the Golden Eagle Ferry. 

BC: Kathi has a growing reputation for her social justice and undoing racism work. She's made this a central part of her practice as both an educator, and as a theater director. In part two, we explore one prominent example of how this has played out in the community. 

One of the things that I would like to ask you to do is to think about one or two stories of your work that represent the kinds of things that you're trying to accomplish with your efforts in community.

KB: I feel so grateful because I feel like I put in in the path of projects that can be so fulfilling. I'm thinking of a wonderful experience that I got to have last year, at the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival. I got to direct their Shakespeare, in the Streets production, which is a big community involved production. It's like a yearlong prep period. I was asked to come on board, and it was going to be something unique that they hadn't done before. So, it was Love at the River's Edge, and it was an adaptation written by a phenomenal writer, Mariah Richardson, a good friend of mine, and this was going to be bringing two different communities together. A rural community and an urban community in the area separated by the river. 

How do we do this? Usually a production is done over the course of a weekend, and now we have these two different communities where you have to take a bus and a ferry to get to the different communities.

BC: This sounds fairly complicated. What was it about this production that really attracted you?

KB: I love puzzles. That's the one thing about theatre that I love about directing is I get to figure out, you know, like, work with people. I love the collaboration. How do we fit all these pieces together? So, this was a true test. It was a way to really validate building community. We work with schools first. So, when you're working with a school in Brussels, Illinois, a town of 150 people I believe. 

BC: Am I right that the other community was in Pagedale near St. Louis? They're not on each other's dance card typically, are they? 

KB: Never, they didn't know each other. They had heard of each other. Well, Brussels had heard of Normandy, because Normandy in St. Louis, it's part of St. Louis County. Michael Brown went to Normandy High School who died in in Ferguson. So, Ferguson is part of that community. So, the people in Brussels their idea of what Normandy, what St. Louis is just like a lot of them, “We don't go there,” they just would not come to that part. You know, there's a lot of work that we had to do as a team as to you know, getting people together. 

You had a journey where the schools came over and visited each other. A couple of the parents did not want their children coming to Normandy, so they had to miss out. You know, it was so funny when we first got them together. And you know, we had all these activities. First of all, the Brussels school is a little schoolhouse. It's a smallest one building. Normandy is huge, it looks like a college campus. Beautiful, big, beautiful school. So, when they came over here, we're like, wow, okay. This campus is huge. And, and so they were just so shocked to discover that they listen to the same radio stations, that their parents said the same kinds of things. I mean, those kinds of things that you know, we know how important that is and that it is, and yeah, we know that this is true, but to have them experience that, I'm like, oh God, please let us. 

BC: This reminds me of one of the stories that we covered in my book, Art and Upheaval, called the Wedding Community Play. It's about a young Protestant and Catholic couple in Belfast, Northern Ireland during the troubles. They produced the play in both neighborhoods going from one to the other four different acts. Needless to say, it was a logistics nightmare. So were there any bumps in the road that you encountered trying to move people back and forth between Brussels and Normandy, Normandy and Brussels. 

KB: When we were going over to Brussels, the river flooded, and when [that] happens, it's devastating. You cannot get to the other community. So, we didn't know what we were going to do with this production. If indeed the water rose, and we, you know, together for the year trying to like figure out how are we doing […] When we think about it now, it's like unbelievable that that got pulled off. But yeah, so we because we were trying to figure out, is it to separate casts, and I knew this was important, there has to be one cast of folks from both communities or why do this? … Why do this? 

If no one other than these, I forget how many people right now 15-20 people… if they build a bond, then that's it. That's what we got. You know, so why else do this. So, I'm glad that we stuck to that, and we found a middle ground. We [could] only rehearse like two hours at night, because they'd have to get that last ferry to get back home. It was all the things that any you know, theater people are like that His disaster waiting to happen and I was like this is not this is like, phenomenal waiting to happen is what it was.

BC: At this point, I thought it might be useful to share a very brief summary of As You'd Like It. So here goes. Rosalind is a young and frisky royal who is banished to the Arden forest with her cousins Celia. While there Rosalind, who is disguised as a shepherd boy named Ganymede encounters Orlando, Rosalind’s true love, who is also in hiding and in fact pining away for her. After Orlando shares his desperation with his new unsympathetic friend Ganymede, the Wise Shepherd convinces him that he can be cured of this terrible affliction and proceeds to do so, winking and nodding all the way. In the end of course, Ganymede reveals that he, or she, is Rosalind and cutting to the chase, marries Orlando during a festive and raucous group wedding at the close of the play. In it, Shakespeare takes aim at Elizabethan beliefs of love and romance, particularly the notion that these amorous entanglements are a disease that captures the heart and wounds the souls of its victims. He also posits that, depending on the circumstances, humans are both capable of extraordinary change. And yes, quite often silly. 

 Getting back to our story, I asked Kathi, how this cross country to state two-step unfolded in the early fall of 2019. 

KB: You know, it's exciting and nerve wracking, like I would be up at night, like, “What are we going to do? How are we going to figure this out?” I mean, hundreds of people came to see, we only did show two nights and one dress rehearsal. We had 10 busloads of people. We tried to do the bus rides so that people could get to we could build more community on the bus. That was hard. It's a school bus, not a greyhound. The ride was bumpy, it was hot, it was dark. But we had actual games that we had the actors play. So, people, they were just like, “Wow!” It was like nothing they had experienced before. 

BC:: This sounds like an amazing five ring circus. Given all the moving parts, how was the play configured in a way that worked for everybody artistically and logistically? 

KB:: So, people would come from Brussels to see the first act, they came to Normandy just to see Act One. We had a whole two whole sets and two whole setups. So, we had a time all this perfectly. So, there were the city folk, that was Normandy, and then they go into the forest that was in Brussels. Alot of it takes place in the forest, but we managed to have a lot of the scenes that happened in that first act with the background of Normandy … You're sitting on the parking lot of this right there in the neighborhood console outdoors, right students built this beautiful set and you can See the backup. So all of that that happened in what would be called the court in the play, and some things like we really talked about, she incorporated the flood, that actually did happen, that kept us apart from each other. We...

THRESHOLD QUESTIONS AND DELICIOUS QUOTES

?Many older monuments are being challenged these days for for their distorted representation of history. What challenges confronted this effort to create a new monument to an an important but forgotten story?

Well, the Department of General Services told us to do that you are going to have to get the vote of the House, the vote of the Senate, the endorsement of the governor, and you're going to have to raise the money yourself. The only word in the dictionary that I really love is no, because when you say no to me, that's like a green light. So, you know, I said, “cool beans” you know. I know how to do that, you know. So, we got a unanimous decision from the House, a vote of acclamation by the Senate, the governor's endorsement, and we raised the money to place this monument sometime this summer.

?How can monument building become a community organizing strategy?

I will be sad to see the monument go in the ground, because what it has caused is a coming together a purpose, and an advocacy, and a civic dialogue, about the value of the vote and the engagement of individuals, not the leaders. The leaders all step back, said it's on you people to do this. So, this is a way that people project and the process has been monumental. It's the process that I'm hoping will continue engagement, and that many coalition efforts will come out of bringing these people together.

?What is the relevance of a monument building initiative like this in the time of COVID?

And so now I'm, I'm saying, well, perhaps the dedication of a monument will be an equation and a prescription for gathering again, you know, the name of the monument was with a gathering at the at the crossroads takes on new meaning, when we look at how long will it take for people to feel comfortable about gathering, again.

?How does does this story inform this current moment in history?

The story of the of the demise of the old Eighth Ward is the story of redlining today, I mean, you know, the practices of changing your polling place, redrawing neighborhoods, the suppression of black women candidates. I mean, all of the history, which we thought of in a sepia tone way that we were going to recall, we are actually reliving you know, right down to the pandemic that they suffered.

?What lessons can cultural organizers starting out take from a project like this?

So, listening, humility, knowing that things come through you not from you. And you try to contain your ego that insists it was your idea. My chosen culture is New Orleans. You know, the notion of gumbo is you got two crabs, I got okra, somebody else has the roux, you know, we go make up something really good here. So be humble enough to know that you are but an equation, in any idea. Links

The Crossroads Project official website. https://digitalharrisburg.com/commonwealth/ 

Digital Harrisburg: Exploring the history, society, and culture of Pennsylvania’s capital city: //digitalharrisburg.com 

A short documentary on the Crossroads project https://youtu.be/5bzRWI6PKYI

 

TRANSCRIPT

Change the Story, Change the World Episode 3—LS: Gunrunner for the Arts (Pt. 2)

Leni Sloan My current project, which is about African Americans, suffragists, 1918 to 1920, who were trying to not only support the vote for women, but to find a place for themselves and that. They were doing that against the landscape of the 1918 flu. They were doing it in a pandemic year too. They were doing it with their man coming back from World War One having fought segregation in their communities. They were doing it on the eve of a national election of 1920, and they were doing it on the eve of the 1920 Census. 

And I felt that we needed to do something, Bill that was not about ribbon cutting or confetti, but that we needed to do something bold and audacious.

Bill Cleveland  From the Center for the Study of art and community, this is Change the Story Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. I'm BC. 

In our last episode, we began our conversation with activist performer impresario and historian Linwood O Sloan, who among other things, refers to himself as a gun runner for the arts. In it he described how his love of dance, theater and history merged into a life path of creative change making across the globe that has been filled with opportunities, obstacles and a lot of learning. As a case in point he introduced us to A Gathering at the Crossroads, a work in progress currently taking place in his hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. This initiative explores the history of Pennsylvania's black suffragists, the struggles bringing the franchise to African Americans and women through the US constitutions 15th The 19th amendments, Harrisburg role in the Underground Railroad and much, much more. 

Now we rejoin our conversation with Leni, which took place in the spring of 2020 in the midst of the COVID pandemic.

So, Leni… As you began to understand the profound importance of the history you were exploring in Harrisburg, you came to the conclusion that telling the story properly would require something bold and audacious. So, tell me, how will bold and audacious make its presence felt in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 2020?

LS  So, I discovered that of the close to 300 iconic objects on the Pennsylvania State Capitol, 77 of which are statues, there was not a single statue or a monument to an African American, or a woman on the state capital of Pennsylvania, you know… So, I said, okay, you know, we got to fix that first, you know, and the power of public art to create public dialogue, public engagement, the power of placemaking, and cultural and heritage tourism. I was like let's find a place on this campus, which as in 2016, in 2020 will be a deciding factor in the national election, and let us make our moment that's make our place. 

We discovered that a number of orators between 1866 and 1870, when the 15th amendment was passed, came to the Capitol from all over the Mid-Atlantic states to speak on behalf of the franchise, and through a public process we collected the names of 100 important people who had been influential between 1870 (when the 15th amendment was passed) and 1920 (when the 19th amendment was passed) in the progression of Equity and parity in the value of the vote. 

We selected four of them, three men and one woman, to create as full life-sized bronze statues standing on a corner in Harrisburg, Pa with the 15th amendment in their hand. Yeah, in deepened dialogue bronze monument made up of the four statues standing around an orders pedestal. We also place the names of the other 96 on the body of the pedestal. Our goal was to take K. Leroy Irvis, who is passed now, Speaker of the House of Pennsylvania, who was the first black Speaker of the House since reconstruction. The Pennsylvania House of Representatives building is named after him, but the lawn on the Irvice building is the only unmanicured, un-landscaped [lawn]. It's a no place. Okay, let's use his lawn. This is an act of reparation. Let's place this monument to the vote on the K. Leroy Irvice lawn, and let's rename it to K. Leroy Irvice equality circle.

BC   So, the proposal was to turn this neglected corner of the state capitol grounds into what constitutes a new state park. I'm assuming there are a few hoops and hurdles involved in an endeavor like that.

LS  Well, the Department of General Services told us to do that you are going to have to get the vote of the House, the vote of the Senate, the endorsement of the governor, and you're going to have to raise the money yourself. The only word in the dictionary that I really love is no, because when you say no to me, that's like a green light. So, you know, I said, “cool beans” you know. I know how to do that, you know. So, we got a unanimous decision from the House, a vote of acclamation by the Senate, the governor's endorsement, and we raised the money to place this monument sometime this summer. We were going to do a week of celebrations from Monday, June 15th, to Friday, June 19th, using the 15th and the 19th as our emblematic dates, and also June 19, ending in the annual revisit of Juneteenth. Of course, as a gun runner for the arts, I was saying, Why Juneteenth?, because those folks in Texas didn't know the war was over, and these people in Pennsylvania don't know the war is over, and we are still on the battlefield. Yeah, so we will we take this place on the Capitol lawn, and we will make this this piece of history. 

I have to say, the monument, the physical bronze paints, the monument is only the thing that people can lay their hands-on Bill. It's the preparation for the monument that has brought over 45 organizations across the state, and more than 200 individual artists, humanists, and scholars together. It’s the preparation for the progress. So in a way, my colleagues would hate it if I said this, I will be sad to see the monument go in the ground, because what it has caused is a coming together a purpose, and an advocacy, and a civic dialogue, about the value of the vote and the engagement of individuals, not the leaders. The leaders all step back, said it's on you people to do this. So, this is a way that people project and the process has been monumental. It's the process that I'm hoping will continue engagement, and that many coalition efforts will come out of bringing these people together.

BC  So, Sloan speaking of processes and coalitions, you mentioned four people who figure prominently in this franchise, this neglected democracy story. I know, one of them was a guy named Jacob Compton who worked for Lincoln's Secretary of War, Simon Cameron. Who were these people and how do they personify the Crossroads?

LS  Jacob Compton is an every man. Jacob Compton is like, the guys who are on the Iwo Jima monument, you know. He was Simon Cameron's coachman. 

BC Simon Cameron was Lincolns First secretary of war, and a Pennsylvania native’s son.

LS In 1861, when Abraham Lincoln came to Harrisburg on his way to his first inauguration, he was on a whistle stop tour, and when he got to Harrisburg, his guard Pinkerton, the same one that Pinkerton guards are named after, came to him and told him about the first assassination plot. This is an assassination plot on Lincoln before he is even inaugurated in 1861. Can you imagine that? Lincoln was speaking at the state capitol. Pinkerton came, and he was supposed to go to a place called the Jones Hotel. There were 1000 people waiting for him in the street and they took him through the lobby of the hotel out through the kitchen, and there a carriage was waiting and Jacob Compton, the carriage driver, who had been an agent on the Underground Railroad, knew a secret way out of Harrisburg, and spared Abraham Lincoln out of Harrisburg, and to a coach where Pinkerton took him to Washington, and to his inauguration and into history. And I asked Republicans, if Jacob Compton didn't know the way out of dodge, would there have even been a party of Lincoln?

So, this obscure man who has not written anywhere in the history, he went on to become dig in, in the AME church, a great speaker in the 1866 Negro Convention in Pittsburgh, and a passionate advocate of the 15th amendment, and use the AME church pulpits across Pennsylvania to promote

William Howard Day intersects with Jacob Compton's life in that William Howard Day was an orator, and an educator. He was trained at Oberlin College. John Brown was his teacher, and John Brown laid the base coat for William Howard Day’s social advocacy. When Jacob Compton joined the United States Colored Troops 180,000 black men fought in the Civil War on the Union side as the United States Colored Troops. At the end of war there was something called the Grand Review of Soldiers, of all the Union soldiers marched down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House where they were mustered out and officially ended their service, except for the 180,000 black soldiers. They were not invited to march in the Grand Review. Since Simon Cameron had been the secretary for Lincoln, and he lived in Harrisburg, they staged a grand review in Harrisburg. William Howard Day was the keynote speaker of that grand review. So, he helped Jacob Compton to finish his public service. He then stayed in Harrisburg and became the first black superintendent of schools in the state of Pennsylvania and also the one of the founding members of the library society that started the Pennsylvania Public Library System. 

Thomas Morris Chester’s family lived about four blocks away from that, and Thomas Morris Chester had grown up in Harrisburg, was schooled in Pittsburgh under Martin Delaney. Martin Delaney, St. Thomas Chester to Africa before the Civil War. They believe that a black man was not going to get a chance in in America, and so they were going to take all freeborn blacks who were landowners, combined together, they were going to buy land in Africa and they were going to get out of here. They were going to book you're going to use the vernacular. Chester was an Exoduster. Chester had organized an incredible group of men together from all over the Mid-Atlantic states to respond to Abraham Lincoln on the Emancipation Proclamation. They were not convinced about the Emancipation Proclamation at all. And in fact, they elected 70 men to go to Washington DC and present their rebuttal to the Emancipation Proclamation. They don't teach that as in any history book, you know, there's no history people can tell you that three men of color had a rebuttal to the Emancipation Proclamation.

BC  So am I right that Lincoln was actually on board he was partial to this notion of getting on boats going back across the ocean?

LS  He was like “I'm with you. Pack up your guys. We'll get you your freedom if you get out of dodge”. That's not a Lincoln story either. Chester continued to work and he became first black journalists of a major American newspaper. Philadelphia and bear he met a woman by the name of Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, who had been a suffragist. She had been at Seneca with Elizabeth Caddy and Lucretia Mott. They had put it to her to use the vernacular. They were the white suffragists, were very concerned that black men would get the right to vote before white women, and they told Francis Harper that either she had to be a abolitionists or suffragist. You know, she couldn't be on both teams And she made a very famous speech, which asked the question, am I a black woman or a black woman, and she was also the first black woman to have a major newspaper in Pennsylvania. 

BC  So, how are these incredible stories going to show up in the development and design of the monument that we'll be playing placed on the State Capitol grounds?

LS  And so, these four people Jacob Compton, Thomas Morris Chester, William Howard Day, and Francis Harper are standing around this orator’s pedestal. One last piece about that, Francis has the 15th amendment in her hand and the statues animation is that she's handing it back to William Howard Day saying, “I don't see myself in this thing anywhere”, you know. “Boys, this is not good enough”. That's my own little like, secret caption, you know, through the artist, three of the brilliant sculptors, you get it, that she's like, she's not convinced. Also, that all between 1870 and 1920 is Jim Crow. It’s the end of reconstruction, it’s lynching you know, is it well you know, so it's just not those two dates on the calendar. It's the 50 years of struggle between the two that monument speaks to.

BC So one of the things that Leni mentioned when we first started to talk about this project is the juxtaposition of history, human creativity, and the power of story. Whose story gets told, or erased, or whose stories are embellished, whose or distorted? Throughout the years, one of the constants of Leni's work has been his reverence for an investment in those discarded and distorted stories. I know the statue being installed as an important symbol, but my sense was that for this project, it is more a means than an end. That Leni's primary interest here is in the living, breathing, engagement of the social sphere of provoking civic conversation and changing consciousness. As is often the case when I asked Leni to respond on to this, he not only answered with an apt metaphor, he revealed yet another layer of inquiry and organizing.

LS  Yes, the bronze is a GPS marker for the dialogue. It's a point of reference for the social engagement and for the dialogue. I have no idea, as you well know, what I am doing. I just get up and do it. So, when we chose the place for the monument, the K. Leroy Irvis lawn, we didn't know at the time that the site that we chose have been a dynamic free black community that had grown up since 1850, after the Fugitive Slave Act. We didn't know that it was an authentic side of the Underground Railroad, that it was a community called the Eighth Ward, that the majority of the people of the Eighth Ward had been freemen and freedmen. We didn't know that it took 70, 80 years for that black community to build the community around the Capitol, and it took exactly 26 months for it to be all torn down through eminent domain to build the Capitol Park. 

So suddenly, I was on another mission, and that was defined the children of the old Eighth Ward. A block away from the main street of the old eighth Ward was the Federal Fugitive Slave Office. And the bounty hunters used to come into the black neighborhood every morning and tack up wanted signs, and what kind of intimidation must that have been for people to continue to function as agents on the Underground Railroad in a safe house?

BC  So, Leni, I can just say there...

This week we'll meet activist/performer/impresario and historian Lenwood O. Sloan, a man whose extraordinary career has unfolded like a half century-long social change musical.

THRESHOLD QUESTIONS AND DELICIOUS QUOTES

?What defines a "gunrunner for the arts?"

"I try to take things that already exist, and through positioning and repositioning to create magic, you know, to motivate, but performance and visual art, literature and writing, film, you know, whatever medium is the best catalyst or elixir for the magic, but I'm a gun runner for the arts"

? How does history become an art form?

"Well, you know, everything has a history, and everything has a story, and it's the human person that is the juice that brings the linear, sequential, chronological history, and oral tradition of storytelling together into art. It's not what happened in 1864, 1791, or 2018 you know. It's who were the people? What does it mean to you? What relevance does it have for your story today?"

?What can the historic struggles for the passage of the 15th and 19th amendments to the U.S. Constitution teach us as we navigate the Covid Universe?

"You know African American women, 1918 to 1920, who were trying to not only support to vote for women but to find a place for themselves and that they were doing that against the landscape of the 1918 flu. They were doing it in a pandemic year. You know, they were doing it with their men coming back from World War One having segregation in their communities. They, they were doing it on the eve of a national election of 1920, and they were doing it on the eve of the 1920 Census."

?Monuments have often been used to distort and obscure our complex history. How can a monument reveal and celebrate these buried stories?

"So I felt that it was essential that we do something old and big and exciting between the primary and the national election to call African Americans and women through the vote, and I felt that we needed to do something Bill that was not about ribbon cutting or confetti, but that we needed to do something bold and audacious"
TRANSCRIPT

Episode 2—Leni Sloan: A Gunrunner for the Arts

Bill Cleveland: Leni Sloan's father was an iron worker in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He made his mark scaling and helping to erect the tallest buildings in that city's newly soaring post World War Two skyline. When he wasn't climbing iron, Leni's dad would wander local fields lovingly netting butterflies for his precious collection. When Leni was a teenager, his dad took a fall on the job that put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. When I met Leni in the late 1970s, he described a play he was working on. A tribute to his father called Wheels and Butterflies, which, in turn inspired me to make this song.

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Change the Story Change the World, a chronicle of art and transformation. I'm Bill Cleveland.

When I was a kid, I fell in love with the 1930s movie musicals that would often appear on late-night TV. I'm not sure what it was that attracted me. I suppose their airy predictability was reassuring, a little romance, a little drama all wrapped up in a comforting embrace of those inevitably over the top song and dance numbers.

"Hey, kids, listen up. I'm going to write a show for us, and we could put it on right here."

Now, my friend Leni Sloan grew up watching those old TV shows too, and like me, he took them to heart.

The first time I saw, Leni was on a Sacramento stage, starring in a musical played also written and directed called the Wake. The Wake also had a provocative subtitle, three black, and three white refined Jubilee minstrels. It had been commissioned by San Francisco's de Young Museum as a part of the 1976 us bicentennial celebration. The production I saw was in the middle of a three-year World Tour. The story was set in the backstage dressing room at the Ziegfeld Follies, where the ghosts of six famous minstrels, three black and three white from the past, were gathered for a week to lament the death of Bert Williams the last and arguably the greatest black minstrel. As the play unfolded, the minstrels sang and cakewalk, and argued the hundred- and 50-year story of minstrelsy. Looking back, the show was a quintessential Leni Sloan production, combining music, dance, and drama with a heavy dose of long-forgotten and often painful history. It was both a tribute to a great musical tradition and a condemnation of the brutal racism that helped define it.

In this week's episode of Change the Story, Change the World, we'll explore the life and times of activist/performer/impresario and historian Lenwood O. Sloan, a man whose extraordinary career has unfolded like a half century-long social change musical. Some see Leni as an artistic shapeshifter. I just think of him as a creative dynamo.

However you characterize him, he's certainly done a lot as a dancer with Alvin Ailey and the Joffrey Ballet; as an arts leader at the San Francisco Arts Commission, California Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts; as a manager of cultural tourism initiatives in Pennsylvania and California and Louisiana: as a contributor to numerous award-winning television productions; and as a producer, director and performer of dozens of performance works, including Voodoo Macbeth, the Creole Mass, Her Talking Drum, Sweet Saturday Night and the show where we met, The Wake. [AN1]

Our conversation took place at the end of April 2020, a couple of months into this surreal strangeness of what I've come to refer to as Planet COVID.

So, I'm happy to be here talking to my friend and colleague, Leni Sloan. Let me start by saying thanks in advance for what I'm sure is going to be a great conversation. I'd like to start by scratching into your history a bit, given the many years we've known each other, I don't know that I've ever asked you, how do you define you work?

Leni Sloan: Well, as you well know, my nom de plume and my book is catalytic agent. So, my work is to be glue or yeast or baking soda or to cause things to come together and bond and bind them when they're not, so I have used whatever art form necessary. My spirit is as a dancer. For almost 40 years, when people said, "What do you do? I would say, “I am a dancer.”

I've come across at 1906 definition of magic, and The Webster's dictionary in 1906 says that magic is the manipulation of ordinary things in extraordinary ways. And so now I refer to myself as a magician. I try to take things that already exist, and through positioning and repositioning to create magic, you know, to motivate, but performance and visual art, literature and writing, film, you know, whatever medium is the best catalyst or elixir for the magic, but I'm a gun runner for the arts. It's really, I really am

Bill Cleveland: I really can't argue with that, but Leni, Tell me, how did you come to that? You know, as a young person growing up. How did you become this creative gunrunner catalytic healer troublemaker using art to ask hard questions and, and, move mountains?

Leni Sloan: I've always wanted to be a dancer. There was an elderly lady that lived across the street from my parents named Mrs. Jones, and she would call my mother up, and she'd say, your son is at it again, you know. We lived on a hill with 27 steps to the house, and I had seen I'll [AN2] Build a Stairway to Paradise. Whenever I had to take the garbage down the steps, I would go dance up and down the stairs. My grandparents were religious about watching Lawrence Welk, and I would see these guys dancing Lark Well, I was like, "You can make a living dancing. You mean, they actually pay?" Of course, I always wanted to be Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, depending upon which movie.

I chose early to be a dancer and an artist. My parents said, "No, you're going to be a historian". And so, you know, well, Cleveland, that I am a dance historian, you know? (laughter) …Yeah. I think that I finally found the amalgamation between work, history and performing arts, in the looking at social systems and social periods and trying to glean from them. Now,

Bill Cleveland: I'm a student of history too. I really do believe that if you don't know your history, you're very likely to repeat it, particularly the bad parts. As Leni points out. In the second part of our interview in Episode Three, that's happening right now in 2021 of the so-called pillars of democracy is that an informed citizenry is necessary for good government. It's not just a nice thing or an ideal thing. It's essential for our experiment in self-governing to function. Otherwise, it doesn't work, so being well informed about what has happened in the democracy laboratory before we put on our lab coats is pretty basic. But for most of us what passes for history in school is just a gray moment in the schedule when the minute hands on the clock on the wall seemed to go backward.

Somehow, though, after his parental course correction from performing arts to history, Leni Sloan not only fell in love with history, he also found a way to expand his universe to include not only his first love dance and theater, but also the added mission of changing the world. Needless to say, I was curious about how that all came together.

Leni Sloan: When I was in high school, we had something called the Student United Nations. High school was assigned a country in the United Nations, and for that entire year, every Saturday, you went to Carnegie Mellon, and you became the delegate from that country, following that country's position, it's history, chins on the floor. When I was in 10th grade, our school had Morocco, and so I would go to the meeting dressed in my mother's tablecloths, and you know, wrap my head with shawls and tablecloths. "This is not fair," they said, you know, I said, "Oh, no, all, all life is theater. All life is theater."

We advanced in my junior year we were Spain and my senior year we were Haiti, and each year the organizers would say you have to stop wearing costumes you know, and I'd say "but you told us to become" you know, this is what I saw that delegate wear.

Bill Cleveland: So, what is it about history? What is it about becoming immersed in the story of a place that so beguiled you that motivated you that captured your imagination?

Leni Sloan: I that's a very good question. I love studying gestures, stance, and attitude. And I felt that all of history is really the dates and the markers are not nearly as important as the culture, the language, the mores, the attitudes of the people. And so, in each aspect of history, I try not to capture the linear, sequential chronology of place and time, but the nuance, the texture, the emotion, that temperament, the fascia that really defines one people from another.

Bill Cleveland: Now, wasn't there a point back then when you came to that proverbial fork in the road where you're supposed to go one way or the other, and didn't you sort of end up taking both? How did that come about?

Leni Sloan: In my senior year, there was an incredible woman her name was Jean Gant, and I'll always remember Mrs. Gant. Billy, she wore huge hats like Jackie Kennedy hats, or breakfast at Tiffany hat and veils. And I didn't know at that time she had cancer, and that's why she hid behind the veils, but she called me to her side in my senior year, as I was entering my senior year, and she lifted her veil, and she said "You will never be a diplomat, but you're a damn good actor." And she gave me a scholarship in my senior year to the Pittsburgh Playhouse. That's how I entered theater in my senior year in the Pittsburgh Playhouse.

It happened to be the same year that WQED was doing Mr. Rogers and they needed kids on the set, and so, I was sent from the Pittsburgh Playhouse to be on the set. That won me a scholarship to Temple University for theater and I thought I was leaving history and entering the theater at that that time, but it was before the Civil Rights Movement, and I got the Temple and I was told there are no roles for you. There are no there were no plays written for black people, either. You can become a designer, you can become a set designer, you could be a lighting person, but you can't perform. And so I went back to the to the history department.

Bill Cleveland: Sadly, that's not an uncommon story, but it didn't stop you did it?

Leni Sloan: It was important because it gave me the grounding for my historical approach my analytical approach to history, and it also gave me in my I belong to the theater clubs, and I eventually did get my minor in costume design and in choreography, and that led me to a scholarship with the Joffrey Ballet and opportunity to study at the Alvin Ailey School, so those two things have always been my grounding influences; my love of the art and my desire to decode and reconstruct historical events.

Bill Cleveland: So when was it that you realize that decoding and reconstructing history could be disruptive in ways that some people didn't exactly appreciate --- that pushing for change was not always going to win you friends?

Leni Sloan: I think I realized in my senior year We're in, at Temple University, when I challenged my professors in the theatre department to rethink character. I got kicked out of school for a semester for that challenge, but eventually won my first and only role in a play called Queen in the Rebel, by Hugo Betty, and Dr. Randall, who does theater building at Temple University is named after allowed me to play Malpa the sadistic soldier.

And so I studied every sadistic soldier in history and revolutions. And yeah, I was like, what made him what made him this way, you know, and I decided I was going to wear a hump on my back and a wooden lock in my shoes. He had only 12 lines, but I had to create what caused him to be sadistic. He created the narrative. So I took Malpa to a new place.

Bill Cleveland: I think one of the reasons that our history loses its vibrancy is that much of the color literally and figuratively has been drained from the body of stories that rise up from the dusty attics and archives in the past.

Ron Chew, the founder of Seattle's Wing Luke Museum understood this instinctively when he began considering how to best find and share the Hidden History of Seattle's Asian communities. Instead of assuming the traditional curatorial role as the authority as the teller, he turned to his neighbors in those communities and asked, "What stories do you have to share from your family's experience? What do you have in your attic? in basements that can animate those stories".

One of my mentors, the historian Paige Smith knew this too when he wrote his eight-volume People's History of the United States, he focused almost entirely on original First Voice sources from the times he was researching and writing about. The reason I'm mentioning this is that Leni Sloan seems to have followed a similar path, but with a slightly different twist. To me his way of exploring history combines both documentary and creative processes. As a result, most of his initiatives contain elements of research, making, and translating, as well as provocation and celebration. To probe this idea, I asked him how he sees the two characters, the historian and the artist showing up in his work.

Leni Sloan: Well, you know, everything has a history, and everything has a story, and it's the human person that is the juice that brings the linear, sequential, chronological history, and oral tradition of storytelling together into art. It's not what happened in 1864, 1791, or 2018 you know. It's who were the people? What does it mean to you? What relevance does it have for your story today? How does it resonate.

My current project which is about African American suffragists and the 19th amendment, is a project that I'm working on now. You know African American women, 1918 to 1920, who were trying to not only support to vote for women but to find a place for themselves and that they were doing that against the landscape of the 1918 flu. They were doing it in a pandemic year. You know, they were doing it with their men coming back from World War One having filed segregation in their communities. They, they were doing it on the eve of a national election of 1920, and they were doing it on the eve of the 1920 Census.

Bill Cleveland: Just like the spring of 2020.

Leni Sloan: All those conditions are happening today. You know, we have only to look at the history of 1918 to 1920 and figure out how did those women keep true Bill? Yeah, how did they maintain the integrity of their actions when they weren't being counted in the census, when they weren't being allowed to vote, when they were afraid that they were going to die of the flu, when their men were broken from the war. Well, that's, that's, that's yesterday's news, you know. So it's not an old inky dusty sepia-tone thing. It's a vibrant thing that if you if you take out and you hold the same way that a scientist or a doctor would use an X-ray to look at what's wrong with you and prescribe something, I'm telling my colleagues this day, do not be afraid of the corona virus, let us look at these women doing the influenza thing and see how did they survive and thrive and endure in their advocacy? There are lessons to be learned, looking backward to go forward.

Bill Cleveland: So, let's jump into that. looking backwards to see the way forwards because you have this extraordinary parallel universe of history repeating itself where the past has been both forgotten and ignored and what we're going through now is being seen as unprecedented. So, describe this project and how you're going to animate the historical record with these familiar elements, along with the passage of the 15th and 19th amendments, bringing the franchise to black men and women in a way that resonates somehow with the upside down world that we're experiencing right now.

Leni Sloan: Well, the project is called A Gathering at the Crossroads. A Gathering at the Crossroads is a new monument to be placed on the Capitol grounds of the Pennsylvania State Capitol. June 15th was supposed to be the dedication date. We will see, but, June of 2020 is simultaneously the hundred and 150th anniversary of the passage of the 15th amendment, and the hundredth anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment. It's extraordinary that those two days, that those two events would cross each other at the height of the 2020 national election.

Pennsylvania was the fourth state in the Union to ratify the 15th amendment, and Pennsylvania was the seventh state in the Union to ratify the 19th amendment. So the Commonwealth has real ownership in the best sense of that of the legacy of voting. But there are two Pennsylvania, which is also the crossroads, you know, Pennsylvania was a swing state in the 2016 election of Trump, you know, and Pennsylvania, a speaker of...

Bad home, Drugs, and prison. A predictable story? Sure, except when you throw in the National Cathedral choir, a geodesic dome, and the stubborn belief that art can save the world.

This is the first episode of a podcast produced by the Center for the Study of Art & Community called Change the Story, Change the World. (now called ART IS CHANGE) My name is Bill Cleveland. In this first episode I share the very personal story of how this podcast came to be and try to answer why would anybody want to listen to it. It’s a journey of many decades. It begins in the leafy suburbs of our nation’s capital around the time that America started losing what some have called its innocence---Along the way we encounter hippie communes, the requisite drugs, sex and rock and roll, art colonies in prisons, and armies of artists doing battle with the likes of the Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot and the US Department of Justice. This week on Change the Story, Change the World, I share how my story crosses paths with the early history and extraordinary growth of the global community arts movement.

THRESHOLD QUESTIONS AND DELICIOUS QUOTES

?Can the creative process be a lifeline for people who are struggling?

"The pervasive, penetrating pulse of all that music was a god damn miracle, all at once a soothing balm, a shattering depth charge, and a transcendent window into other dimensions."

?Can art help us re-imagine and recreate the social and cultural fabric of our communities?

"One of the bedrock understandings of the hippie universe was, to coin a phrase “you can’t always get what you want, but if you really need it, well, you can make it yourself.” So, in no time at all, we found ourselves imagining that we could make our OWN music.”

?What was CETA and how did it give birth to an ever-expanding community arts movement?

"The prison partnerships we forged … were both groundbreaking and challenging. They taught is a whole lot in a hurry about what artists need to do to build trust with new communities and neighborhood organizations."

? How can art help change the toxic nature of America’s prisons?

"In those instants, we could see prison artists kind of tuning in, you know, moving from static to clear reception."

?How can these transformative stories feed the development of a growing community of creative change agents?

"By the end of the Art in Other Places Conference, we had a mountain of documentation on artists and programs from all over the country. We had made a commitment to NEA to produce … a report, but to really tell the story of what was going on we had to do more, much more."

?How can artists help re-build civic infrastructure, heal unspeakable trauma, and give new voice to the forgotten and disappeared?

"Art and Upheaval took me on an 8-year global journey, documenting artists working in communities facing intense, real-time conflict and trauma.”

?What is Change the Story / Change the World and why should anyone want to tune in?

"We are doing this because we believe that meeting the obvious and daunting challenges of this century is going to require a revolution of thought and deed — in essence, a new set of stories powerful enough to change beliefs and behaviors."
LINKS

1. The Hangin' On, William Cleveland from Songlines, by Cleveland Plainsong
2. Washington's Howard Theater played host to many of the great Black musical artists of the early and mid-twentieth centur was billed as the "Theater of the People."
3. Fritz Perls, a German-born psychoanalyst Perls coined the term 'Gestalt therapy' to identify the form of psychotherapy that he developed with his wife, Laura Perls, in the 1940s and 1950s. Perls became associated with the Esalen Institute in 1964, and he lived there until 1969.
4. CETA and the Arts (Comprehensive Employment and Training Act) Here is an analysis of the impact of the U.S. Federal Government's largest annual investment in the arts.
5. The William James Association's Prison Arts Project contracts with visual, literary and performing artists to provide in-depth, long-term arts experiences for incarcerated men and women in California state prison facilities.
6. Art In Other Places: Artists at Work in America's Community & Social Institutions, William Cleveland
7. Art and Upheaval: Artists on the Worlds Frontlines, William Cleveland

TRANSCRIPT

(Music) THE HANGIN ON

“The Hangin On” is probably the saddest song I’ve ever written. But its more complicated than that, because, you see, the unfortunate story it represents also precipitated its creation. So, for me, it’s also a song of redemption, one of many that have emerged over the years that have both taught me, first-hand, about the healing power of human creativity and, to put it bluntly, probably saved my life.

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community this is Change the Story, Change the World, A Chronicle of Art and Transformation. I’m Bill Cleveland.

Bad home, Drugs, rock and roll, prison. A not uncommon and fairly predictable trajectory, but not really, especially when you throw in the National Cathedral choir, a geodesic dome, and the stubborn belief that art can save the world. You’ve tuned in to the first episode of Change the Story Change the World. In this first chapter we share a very personal and, no doubt highly biased account of how I came to believe that assertion with all my heart and soul.

It’s a journey of many decades. It begins in the leafy suburbs of our nation’s capital around the time that America started losing what some have called its innocence---Along the way we will encounter hippie communes, the requisite drugs, sex and rock and roll, art colonies in prisons, and armies of artists doing battle with = the likes of the Slobodan Milosevic, Pol Pot and the US Department of Justice. This Change the Story, Change the World, I share how my story crosses paths with the early history and extraordinary growth of the global community arts movement.

Part 1

I’m a lucky man. Lucky and incredibly fortunate. To be sure I am a white guy who grew up in the suburbs with good public schools and a swimming pool down the street. All obvious markers of middle-class white privilege in post WW II America. But no, what proved to be the real impetus for what I now think of as a charmed life, came from a different, less obvious place. A place that has much more to do with survival than the silver spoon.

You see, the story unfolding in the Cleveland house was, like too many others I came to know, not what it seemed. My brother, sister and I grew up in a in a slow-moving nightmare born of my parents making what some folks call bad choices and I call just doing bad shit when they drank too much, particularly my dad.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved my parents, and they taught me a lot, but, sometimes bad is just bad. The obvious antidote was, of course, to split as soon as possible. So, as we came of age, the three of us, ran in different directions. Predictably, the compass for my own escape, pointed, well--- due nowhere. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate, my one-way ticket was stamped Forgetsville which is just north of nowhere.

The fuel for this journey came from what I knew best from my time in our suburban fun house. Some call it dissipation, I call it oblivion. Oblivion in search of the numb or to be brutally honest just plain dumb. As dumb as imagining that my escape route was in the vanguard of a new social revolution, totally unaware of the ugly truth that my future had been hijacked by the only movie I had ever known – a script with the most obvious and predictable plot line in the book—Namely, if it hurts just do whatever it takes to make it go away, at least for now. And there’s no denying that us hippies were really into the NOW.

The general pattern of this version of freakdom was pretty simple—essentially, hanging out, getting wrecked and chowing down. Different days in different ways but inevitably ending up a little bit behind, where you started. Surprisingly, my headlong embrace of this flight-no fight treadmill also pointed me in the direction of what I have come to know of as the promised land. This was also the path that led to my lifelong obsession with the power of stories. This is because these episodes of stupor and gluttony also included heavy doses soul, blues, acid rock, metal, country, R&B, gospel, folk, and whatever else was being channeled through those old car radios and thrift store stereo’s --- blasting out and through in continuous waves of one exhilarating, liberating, sonic groove marvel after another.

I had always been beguiled by music. In fact, when I was in the third grade my mother took note of this and had me tryout for the National Cathedral Boys Choir. I’d like to say that getting in proved to be my immediate salvation but like many things in life, the benefits of boy choirdom showed up much later. At the time, though, I hated it. I hated the three-day-a week rehearsals, and two-hour Sunday services, I hated the purple vestments with the cute white collars. Most of all, I hated not having time to play baseball with my buds, which I did the minute my voice started to change.

Like I said, that music fever really hit me after I put high school and home in my rear-view mirror. It was about this time when my friends Alan, Arthur and I started making regular visits to the Howard Theater, D.C.’s version of the Apollo. I suppose you could say my latent condition was severely aggravated from repeated exposure to Otis, Marvin, Smoky, and the Marvelettes sweating and shakeing on that stage. Whatever it was, it was a passion of a different order. Why, then I don’t know, maybe it was the perfect medicine for the moment. But, as far as I was concerned the pervasive, penetrating pulse of all that music was a god damn miracle, all at once a soothing balm, a shattering depth charge and a transcendent window into other dimensions. A place to go, here and not here all at once, where I could bathe in the funk and flash of someone else’s story – It was amazing, not so much that it took me completely out of my stupor. That’s not how this story goes. but It certainly planted a seed.

Now if you are still with me you may be thinking hey this is supposed to be a show about the power of stories to change the way we think and act, which I am assuming you were thinking might be somewhat uplifting. So, at this point I want to reassure you that its coming—

Part Two

After a crash and burn interlude at the University of Maryland and some unfortunate encounters with the criminal justice and the mental health systems my luck, most definitely fortified by birth privilege, (which gave me lots of do-overs) seemed to re-emerge north of Toronto Canada at a falling down farm that we called Buckhorn Center. Buckhorn was community of I guess what you’d call helping professionals and fellow travelers, like me, following in the path of freaky psychoanalyst named Fritz Perls. Dr. Perls, new age thing was referred to as Gestalt. Which means, you or we, are more than just the some of our parts. The basic aim was helping troubled people move from broken to whole.

This made sense to me because I was definitely in need of serious rebuilding. At first Buckhorn was a personal refuge, but eventually it became my family and a kind of celebratory healing place for lots of folks who came there. Back then, the neighboring farmers called it a gad damn hippie commune. I called it home.

Buckhorn was a community of helpers, makers, growers, and, most importantly builders. Early on, our first order of business was getting the place habitable, so we set to fixing and building – A rock wall, a garden, an outhouse for two, a big round dining room table for 16, a performance space, and a geodesic dome, painted orange, all in the short interlude between the melting snows of March and the first flakes of October, 1972. Needless to say, that first year, It was all hands, in the dirt and build, build, build -- no time for pondering, wallowing or bitching.

I loved it. This was just the place I needed for funky seeds of my re-entry to find the soil and water and air needed to sprout and flower and fruit, and surprise, surprise, seed again, and again, spreading roots, and shoots, grabbing hold of whatever would help me make some sense and meaning of my upside down world.

And that was pretty much the deal, for the 8 of us that stuck it out through the winter. The sense and substance that we all craved, was, of course, in all that making. Making and sharing. Taking the rocks and building a wall, together. Planting the seeds and growing the zucchini, and corn and tomatoes together. Harvesting the bounty and feasting, as a family together and, of course when the electricity was flowing cranking up the stereo and boogieing together.

Now, one of the bedrock understandings of the hippie universe was, to coin a phrase “you can’t always get what you want, but if you really need it, well, you can make it yourself.” So, in no time at all, we found ourselves imagining that we could make our OWN music.

For me this translated to long stretches with pen and paper, stealing, imagining procuring, discovering words and rhymes every time I found myself with an idle moment. Not that l all those songs of were worth a hill of beans. But, being lost in that world was an amazing deliverance from the underworld I was crawling out of. The coolest thing was that I was driving the magic bus, no, actually I owned that bus and no one could take it away.

The great part though was that I was NOT alone on this journey. Far from it, because, each evening Marty, and Arthur, and Didy and I would gather in that big orange dome, humming a tune, connecting the rhymes, and the stories, with the chords, harmonies, and beats rising up, and making that music together, our music, and our story coming alive in the songs, over and over, and over. Like I said, the community we were building was called Buckhorn, so was the band.

Like many good things, Buckhorn, the healing place and the band came and went. But the legacy, and the lessons, left a taste that would not fade. Like I said, for me it was akin to an addiction. I had come up there caught in a stupid, vicious circle, snake eating its tail, story. Getting my hands dirty, sharing responsibility, and the two-hole outhouse, becoming a maker, and a partner had smashed that narrative to smithereens. And, you know, as hard as I tried, I just couldn’t put that poor me, pity party back together. I was stuck with a new saga. And that was it. Change the Story, Change the World. – my world at least.

Part Three

It’s the spring of 85. I am standing next to three pottery wheels in the corner of what used to be storage closet in the bowels of a place called the California Medical Facility. Although it sounds like a hospital CMF is actually a prison with a few bits and pieces of hospital thrown in for sick prisoners. My path here has been circuitous with one constant. Music, lots songs and bands birthed and forgotten, lots of late nights, crumby bars and free beer, but also odd jobs, like house painting, and newspaper delivery, cause, well, you know, you have to eat.

There was also a weird job with the city of Sacramento called CETA ARTS that was hiring artists to work in unlikely places like senior centers, parks, public housing, and well, the Sacramento County Jail. Amazingly, It was funded by the US Department of Labor. CETA, that’s C, E, T. A, or Comprehensive Employment and Training Act was actually a national jobs program. Hiring artists was not the intention, but lots of them were jobless and it did – to the tune of $300 million a year. Which was and still is America’s largest public investment in the arts.

It affected hundreds of thousands of people in and out of the arts. Here’s some of them talking about their experience in a 1970’s Department of Labor Documentary on the program.

The disembodied voice of the Federal government notwithstanding, the partnerships we forged in Sacramento were both groundbreaking and challenging. They taught is a whole lot in a hurry about what artists need to do to build trust with new communities and neighborhood organizations.

To be sure CETA was serious work. But we also kept it playful. At one point someone suggested we needed a CETA song. Here is what we came up with.

CETA, Oh my CETA, So completa', your so sweeta'You done me good, you done me good

Anyways that strange gig, somehow landed me, so to speak, in prison., newly hired as the head of something called Arts in Corrections. The idea was pretty simple. Idle inmates, as the prisoners are called, mixed with overcrowding made for trouble. So, give them something to do. The art part the inspiration of a force of nature, named Eloise Smith who, given her extraordinary political savvy and influence,