Today I watched a setting of Euripides' Medea with 500 high school students. It was a re-imagining of the tale by the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center, set in an early 20th century tea house, styled in a quasi-Kabuki manner and performed entirely in Japanese, with English subtitles. It was deeply affecting and brilliant, a perfect example of 21st century "remix" culture: the sex-roles of the patrons and geisha of the chashitsu were used to comment on Medea's frustrations as a woman in Greek society, and the uncomfortable intersection between East and West was continually highlighted, as Medea is repeatedly referred to as "Asian." Under different circumstances, this is probably what I would blog about right now.
As it is, life has chosen to interrupt art to a great extent and my experience of the play this week is probably much different than it would have been otherwise.
Although the performances were profoundly different in many ways, my mind naturally wandered to school performances by the West Virginia Dance Company, which I have seen many times. I suppose it's because they, too, often blend cultural elements to achieve a greater artistic impact. Or maybe it's just because they have performed in more West Virginia schools than probably any other arts organization in the state.
I've thought a lot about how young people respond to art. When they are very young, there is an openness that is enviable, even among those of us who spend a good deal of our time in the arts. The youngest of children have not yet learned to mask emotion or to hide with pretension and they respond to the thing itself. It's really beautiful and it's one of the reasons artists like to work with younger students.
Once students reach middle school, they're expected to behave certain ways. They are not allowed to have pure emotional responses, for any number of reasons: they are viewed as inappropriate by adults, as unsophisticated by their peers, and as unnatural in our educational system. To top it off, the arts community (and I'll include myself in this guilty number) bombards them with all these rules about how to experience and respond to art, what to wear, what to do, not to talk, when to laugh or cry, when to applaud . . . and the rules can vary widely according the whether you're watching theatre or dance, whether you're in a concert hall or a jazz club, even who else is in the audience.
Coupled with the truly limited experiences many of them have, most students are pretty uncomfortable watching a performance by the time they reach high school. I suppose it's the years I spent teaching, but I've come to expect this response and to accept it as the general order of things.
Here's something particular I have noticed: when a work of art touches a group of students on a particularly deep level, they get nervous. Just when you know they are feeling the thing the artist is giving them, they act "inappropriately." They fidget. They make disarming comments. They giggle. I've seen it time and time again, and it used to make me angry. "Why the hell can't these kids just go headlong into what is happening? Why do they have to act so damn goofy?"
I don't get angry anymore. I think I understand it somewhat better. Most of them - maybe 80% or more - aren't used to feeling this deeply. They do not have the mechanism to respond.
Most adults don't either, by the way. It's just that when teenagers feel insecure, they joke. When adults feel insecure, they just pretend they know more than they do.
I don't mean this as a judgment in any way. I think the need is clear. We need more art. The arts give us that emotional language to respond to those deep places. Some of those places are transcendent. Listening to Bach helps us feel the divine. Watching Shakespeare helps us fall in love. Some of those places are dark, part of our shadow side.
Medea, especially the production I saw today, was one of those pieces that helps us make meaning of those dark experiences in life. I'll recap the story briefly.
Medea, a princess from a foreign land, is brought to Greece after she kills her brother and helps Jason steal the golden fleece. She marries Jason and has a son by him, but the king of Corinth offers his daughter to Jason, who decides to leave Medea. Creon, king of Corinth, banishes Medea and her son because he suspects that she has powers of witchcraft. Medea hatches a plot to seek her revenge. She makes a gift of a robe and comb to her ex-husband's new bride. The bride puts both on, not knowing that they are poisoned. She dies violently and when her father, the king, comes to rescue her, he is killed, too. Medea completes her revenge by murdering her own son, leaving Jason without an heir.
The setting I saw today was performed in kabuki style. The "readers" of the play were Japanese officials visiting a tea house, while the silent "players" were the geisha who served. The subordinate role of the women is emphasized throughout, with the geisha objectified, silent and serving. The play-with-the-play shows the male officials sexually harassing the women even while they read the angry words of Medea against dominant men. The play concluded with the geisha slaughtering the male officials just as Jason discovers Medea's deeds.
It was brilliant and affecting at the deepest level. Medea's pitiable situation was presented without sentimentalism. There was real pathos and fear as she stabs her own child to death.
The students giggled.
I could feel their discomfort. For most of them, death is presented casually in video games and many films. Now, this is not a "back when I was a kid" diatribe. I actually don't think that these casual portrayals necessarily desensitize children to violence. But they do not portray the powerful emotional impact of violence the way that art does - with color, gesture, pitch, rhythm, movement, drama. You could not watch the action onstage, though it was not graphic in any way, and not feel the horror of the moment.
If we are to make meaning of all of life's experiences, we need art. The universe seems ruled by chaos. The arts - along with religion, philosophy, mathematics, science and the rest - help us make meaning of the chaos. The special role that the arts play are in making meaning of the emotional tumult of our lives.
This is the other reason I was thinking of my friends at the West Virginia Dance Company while watching the play today. One of their dancers, a beautiful young woman named Cyan Maroney, was violently murdered this week. Several of them were witnesses; all of them were a second family to her. I cannot imagine the profound pain they are feeling right now. I find myself hoping that I never know the type of psychic turmoil they have experienced in the last three days.
I only knew Cyan casually from a few introductions. I had seen her dance, though. She was dancing Anne Frank in a piece that the company was currently touring. She knew the power of the arts to bring order to all the darkness there is in the world.
How are the other dancers coping? Today, they are dancing. To those who are not artists, this probably seems strange. For those of us in the arts, we can imagine no other response. Their dance is catharsis, I am sure. But more than that, it is one way they can fight against the occasionally unbearable awfulness of the Universe, a way to scream out, "You haven't beat me yet, dammit!"
There are those who imagine that education is merely to prepare young people for a life of work, so they may go home and anesthetize themselves in the face of life's tragedy. But rather than an anesthetic life, I would suggest an aesthetic life, one that embraces the pain with the joy, knowing that it is all part of our common experience. Such a life is unimaginable without the arts.
My thoughts are with Cyan's family, along with everyone at the West Virginia Dance Company and those in the Beckley arts community who are hurting so much. I hope they find solace.
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