Help me make some theater happen!

So I’m very bad at asking people for things.  Most especially money.  And I know that in all likelihood, pretty much everyone you know is involved in one or more campaigns for very important and wonderful things.

However…I am very much in love with my current production, Maya Macdonald’s Leave the Balcony Open.

It’s a brilliant new play, about love and loss, the insufficiency of language to emotional experience, and deciding how to live in a shattered world.  I’m very, very devoted to this show.  It’s the kind of play that makes me love theater for what it can mean to people’s lives.

And we still need help to make it happen.

Our IndieGoGo campaign is here!  Thank you prizes include program credits, voice-over cameos in the show, tickets, and dinner with the playwright.  Watch our trailer video above, check out the IndieGoGo page, and if you’d like to have a hand in making this beautiful show all it can be, consider making a donation.

http://www.indiegogo.com/Leave-the-Balcony-Open

And if you’re in the New York area in February, I’d love it if you came out to see us.  Previews begin February 5!

Love and thanks,

Emily

Seeking website designer for a project of passion

Dear friends and readers,

A friend of mine, Salvador Speights, who might be the most brilliant person where food is concerned that I know, is in the beginning processes of launching a podcast project based on food culture and politics, and we are seeking all sorts of people who might be interested in lending a hand, but most importantly at the moment, a website designer.  Read more:

I am creating a podcast with the ultimate goal of transitioning to radio. I am looking for creative, passionate people to help lift this project off the ground. We currently have a budget of $200 dollars, but we will be actively fundraising. I need people who are willing to invest their time into the project to build it up to a place where we can start to earn money. Until then, this project will operate on a volunteer basis. I need sound engineers, writers, producers, and web designers. The podcasts will explore contemporary issues regarding food stories. For example, the first podcast will be titled First Meal and it will be discussing the importance of milk, the issues evolving around industrial dairy farming verses alternative dairy, as well as investigating the raw milk debate. We will host interviews with new and expectant mothers regarding breast feeding and the emotional connection created with their child via mother’s milk. Other podcasts will include, but are not limited to, politics, economics, popular culture – how do these transitory climates interact with our permanent necessity for food and sustenance? Each individual podcast will explore topics of food regulation and legislation, agriculture, personal stories and more. If you fit the creative, passionate, food lover we represent.

If anyone’s interested in getting involved (particularly with website design/building!), or knows someone who might be, please get in touch with me, or the Facebook page of the Alvarado School for Sustainability and Community Development.

Thanks, and hope you all are having a happy holiday season!

Happy holidays…

…from my neighbors in Manhattan Valley…

 

 

I have mentioned that I love my neighborhood, right?

A tribute to young artists

“I should be doing the ritual thing and blessing you with words of wisdom and encouragement, and I will.  But the truth is, all I really want to do is thank you.  Thank all of you students who, against all odds and against all pressures to do otherwise, have chosen to have a life in the arts.  All the paradigms of success that we routinely encounter in our everyday lives–on television, in movies, in the online world, in the constant din of advertising, even from our friends and families–all these “models” for success and happiness American-style are really about what is ultimately a disposable life, about a life centered around material gain and about finding the best possible comfort zone for yourself….

…The arts, however, are difficult.  They are mind-bendingly and refreshingly difficult.”

-Composer John Adams, 2011 commencement address to the Juilliard School

What we’re doing instead

I so, so wanted to like this article from the Times, about what some recent graduates of prestigious universities are doing with their lives during the economic downturn instead of the stable, decently-paying jobs in their career field that just aren’t available.  (Generation Limbo: Waiting It Out)  I so, so almost did like it a lot.  Obviously, we didn’t get past the headline without another cute moniker for the latest crop of highly-educated youth left aimless and adrift by the recession (how many names have we had?  Gen Y, Gen Why?, The Millennials, the Peter Pan generation…I’ve had a couple of ciders and I’m losing track.  What are we now?), but it came so close to hitting a mark of sorts concerning how young adults are coping with this economy, without a heavy dose of the condescension and belittlement that so often accompanies Times articles about the generation that supposedly just won’t grow up.

It’s not the subject matter of this article that I find objectionable, because I’m very interested in what young adults and especially the newest graduates are finding to do right now.

It’s the slight tone of amazement and false levity that’s a little annoying.  A summary of the article could almost have read “Some graduates without corporate jobs decide to not be miserable, live lives anyway, do something creative.”

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my.

Some of the subjects profiled are Stephanie Kelly, who has two underwhelming part-time jobs, but sort of enjoys the spare time she has to cook and write; Amy Klein, who took up a friend’s offer to join a punk band when it was clear that a career in publishing wasn’t going to be forthcoming anytime soon; and Sarah Weinstein, who manages a bar while doing media relations for an animal shelter as a volunteer.

“No career? No prospects? No worries!” chirps the author in summation of the outlook of these graduates who are taking their situation in stride, or doing something unconventional instead.  But this is simplistic and patronizing.  No, there are plenty of worries associated with having no job stability, an irregular income, little affordable housing, no health insurance, and no idea when the economy might really turn around or how long you might be jerry-rigging a life this way.  But you can let them terrify you into paralysis and submission and mope around your parents’ house sending out resumés that may get looked at sometime around 2015, or you can go out and do something–anything–anyway.

“They are thinking more in terms of creating their own kinds of life that interests them, rather than following a conventional idea of success and job security,” says Klein.

This is sort of how it’s always been for people who, for many reasons, can’t find a place in the mainstream or corporate job market.  And I feel for the younger grads who are finding themselves not able to have the kinds of lives they were brought up to believe they should.  And there are definitely bigger problems of economic justice when a significant portion of a highly educated generation just can’t make money.  But that so many are relearning what they can and can’t do without, and what really matters to them, and questioning what kind of life they really want as opposed to what they once just assumed they’d have, I believe has the potential to be a great thing for America in the long run.

“They are a postponed generation,” intones Cliff Zukin, author of a study from Rutgers on the economic situation of recent graduates.  But people profiled in the article like Kelly and Klein…well…they’re not.  Just because they’re not doing what they might’ve been in a different economic climate doesn’t mean they’re waiting around with their lives on hold, as if the only life worth working for is comprised of traditional job stability, marriage, kids and home ownership.

Life doesn’t get postponed, though certain goals might; life gets lived, one way or another.  Bad economies don’t stop time.

Why should writing, cooking, taking a punk band on the road or doing whatever paid job you can stand to do while you work as a volunteer or activist for another cause be considered stalling on the life path?  Just because it’s a life path that doesn’t take for granted what the upper middle class used to, in the same time frame?  Why is this necessarily considered being stuck in neutral rather than just in uncharted territory?

I’d be willing to bet, for instance, that the day will come when Ms. Klein, whatever she ultimately ends up doing, will be glad for the creative and organizational lessons that she learns on the road with her band, as well as feeling artistically fulfilled.  Because life is funny and resonant and meaningful like that if you’re paying attention.

So godspeed to the young graduates who don’t see a reason to give up and stop living just because their expectations have been knocked around.  I prefer their attitude to that of the experts telling us how stalled and postponed they are.

A hope for neurodiversity in education

Sometimes when I’m feeling frustrated and pessimistic, I get to wondering if humanity is irredeemably stupid.  Sometimes I look around at some of the things we do to each other and the immensity of the problems we’ve created for ourselves through greed and short-sightedness, and the state of politics in this country, and just can’t fathom how we’re ever going to find the unity, compassion, and concerted problem-solving to get ourselves out.

But I’ve been watching TED talks lately…and this conference has found a really astonishing number of people who have totally brilliant ideas and things to say.  You can really click randomly on just about any TED talk video, and people you’ve never heard of before in a hugely diverse range of disciplines are saying and doing incredible things.  Which makes me think, instead, that we actually have a nearly infinite number of wise and brilliant people on our side.

This talk by Sir Ken Robinson is actually about 5 years old, but for that I think what he says is actually more urgent now and not less.  He says that we’re actually educating kids out of their creativity and natural genius, to our own impoverishment…that we actually stigmatize many kinds of intelligence that simply don’t perform well in a confined classroom environment or on a standardized test.

Creativity isn’t just about making art; it’s that misunderestimation that makes it easy to marginalize as impractical or financially untenable.  We have environmental problems, health problems, food problems, and budget problems, and they’re all going to require creativity to solve.  Balancing our budget will take creativity.  Making alternatives to fossil fuels safe and affordable will take creativity.  Finding ways to teach kids from the most difficult of life circumstances takes creativity (like setting up a pirate supply store as a front for a free tutoring center, as Dave Eggers explains here).

“It’s education that’s meant to take us into this future that we can’t grasp,” Robinson says, noting that we’re trying to educate kids for the next 50 years of their lives, but we have no idea what the world will be like in 5 years.  We have absolutely no basis on which to say that one kind of thinking, one curriculum or set of skills or knowledge, will be the most important one in the future and therefore to stigmatize all the others.

It’s here that I’d like the educational establishment to consider borrowing an idea from the autism community:  neurodiversity, or the conviction that there is very broad natural variation in human neurological wiring, in which even difficult differences should be valued on their own terms.  It’s become a somewhat contentious term and there are plenty of legitimate criticisms of it, but I don’t believe that it’s a denial of the reality of the disabling aspects of this condition, or a denial that people need and deserve help with things that really impede their quality of life.  I see neurodiversity as asking us to understand and accept a way of thought and a way of being on its own terms before we devalue it or decide it should be eradicated from the human experience, to see people first for their gifts and the ways in which humanity needs them.

As Temple Grandin says, “the world needs all kinds of minds.”

To me, neurodiversity’s not just about how we value autistic people, but how we value everyone who thinks differently, anyone who’s out of step with what the culture has decided it values and doesn’t value, and whatever is distinctive about every person.

Very much echoing what I interpret to be at the heart of the neurodiversity movement’s goals, Robinson says “Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.  At the heart of the challenge is to reconstitute our sense of ability and of intelligence.”

Robinson talks specifically about how dance and performance arts are devalued in the educational system, and I think of the League of Extraordinary Dancers, as well as all the dancers I’ve worked with, who never stop amazing me with how their brains work in ways that mine doesn’t.  Skills like these are probably not measurable by standardized test, but, I mean, they only have the potential to revolutionize assumptions about what the human body is capable of and the artistic potential of technology and the internet.

No one gets better or stronger or smarter by being defined and valued according to their weaknesses, but that’s exactly how we educate kids.  We sort students out by what’s wrong with them instead of allowing them the resources and freedom to nurture what’s right with themselves.

I think of Hogwarts, by contrast, which begins the process of formal education by sorting students according to their most basic strengths: Gryffindor students are courageous, Ravenclaws clever, Hufflepuffs hardworking and fair, and Slytherins cunning and ambitious.  Notice how the Sorting Hat doesn’t sort anyone out by their deficiencies.  And how it required the gifts of every single House to save the world from Voldemort.  (Even Slytherin, reviled by all the other houses…Snape’s cunning obviously being what allowed him to act as a double agent for the Order, and it was Narcissa Malfoy’s loyalty to her own family first and foremost that led her to betray Voldemort.)

We all need each other.  We all need each other’s brilliance.

{I couldn’t exactly weave this in to my thesis, but it’s just beautiful and I wanted to share it: spoken word poet Sarah Kay talks about how she found out what she wanted to do, using poetry to solve problems, and teaching self-expression through performance poetry.}