For me, Wendell Berry is the guiding light for CRADLE. His focus on the local, the particular, the agricultural as well as the cultural, and his belief in humility and service, provide an alternative to the global, materialist, and shallow culture that America has embraced.
In 1989, Berry delivered a Commencement Address at the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine that included not Ten Commandments but ten hopes. They are:
- Beware the justice of Nature.
- Understand that there can be no successful human economy apart from Nature or in defiance of Nature.
- Understand that no amount of education can overcome the innate limits of human intelligence and responsibility. We are not smart enough or conscious enough or alert enough to work responsibly on a gigantic scale.
- In making things always bigger and more centralized, we make them both more vulnerable in themselves and more dangerous to everything else. Learn, therefore, to prefer small-scale elegance and generosity to large-scale greed, crudity, and glamour.
- Make a home. Help to make a community. Be loyal to what you have made.
- Put the interest of the community first.
- Love your neighbors–not the neighbors you pick out, but the ones you have.
- Love this miraculous world that we did not make, that is a gift to us.
- As far as you are able make your lives dependent upon your local place, neighborhood, and household–which thrive by care and generosity–and independent of the industrial economy, which thrives by damage.
- Find work, if you can, that does no damage. Enjoy your work. Work well.
My question for TACT: what would a theatre education, an arts education, look like if it followed Berry’s precepts? This is more about values than the titles of specific classes and skill sets. It is about an orientation to the world, one that informs the kind of art you create, who you create it with, and how you create it. If you look at this list in terms of theatre, you will see that following the hopes would almost totally reverse our current orientation. Is it possible to teach the same things in the same way and still reverse the outcome?
As educators, we often feel a reluctance to explicitly address values. We are afraid that to do so will instantly turn us into William Bennett committed to brainwashing our young wards through the use of our classroom power. But the fact is that, explicitly or not, we are inculcating students with values by every class we teach, every show we choose to create. The mere existence of a class on auditioning, for instancem, implies a certain relationship to the power structure, and an endorsement of The Biz. A design course that teaches young artists to hang hundred of lights in the air or build massive sets out of unrecylable materials teaches them to ignore the ecological impact of their artistic choices, or at the very least to put their design choices first. Every time we dismiss our audience members as being unsophisticated rubes, we endorse a philosophy that puts artists outside and above their community.
What would an arts education look like if it followed Wendell Berry?
