Anything Is Possible!

Art and Social Change

Written for Tresser.com

I’m always struck when well-known actors and musicians are ridiculed for participating in some aspect of the political process.  Remember Meryl Streep testifying in front of Congress to ban Alar on apples or Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon protesting the war or Angelina Jolie serving as a goodwill ambassador for the UN.  Frequently the public reaction runs along the lines of what do a bunch of dumb actors know?  Or when Natalie Maines spoke out against Bush people told her to just shut up and sing. 

To be honest, I’m more than struck, I’m tweaked.  Or more than tweaked, I’m infuriated.  I’m an actor.  Since when did my choice of career abrogate my responsibility as a citizen?  Since when did my choice of career cause my brain to leak out my ears?  Clearly never, that’s when (Though I will allow for making fun of Harrison Ford waxing his chest hair to demonstrate the pain of tropical deforestation.  That was just silly.).

But really, if artists are just dumb and harmless, then why, when fascism strikes, are we first up against the wall?  Why were so many actors and writers and musicians and painters vilified by the House on Unamerican Activities Committee?  Why was Victor Jara murdered during the military coup in Chile?  Why did Hitler ban Ernst, van Gogh, Chagall, Picasso, and Cezanne?

The truth is, we’re not harmless, and we’re not dumb.  As Susan Sarandon said, “People should fear art, film, and theatre. This is where ideas happen. This is where somebody goes into a dark room and starts to watch something and their perspective can be completely questioned...the very seeds of activism are empathy and imagination.”  In other words, we’re potent and powerful and dangerous in a wonderful, world-changing way.

It’s something I became convinced of following my experience as Co-Founder of the Lysistrata Project.  In early 2003, right before the US attacked Iraq, my friend Sharron Bower and I organized over 1000 readings of the ancient Greek anti-war comedy Lysistrata in 59 countries and all 50 US states. 

Both immediately afterwards and in the years since, I’ve had the great fortune to hear from numerous participants, many of whom spoke of their participation in terms of re-validating their artistic careers – or, more specifically, that it was a renewing of their sense of relevance as artists.  And I’ve been hearing a lot more discussion lately in academic circles, conferences, and activist groups, about the vital role that the arts can play in galvanizing people to awareness and action.

The act of reading a play as an act of protest was also important, in that it gave people who were disinclined to march in the streets or write letters to the editor or call their congressperson a means of expressing themselves in a way which felt both pointed and playful, but still entirely non-confrontational.  Lysistrata Project participants also felt their voice multiplied exponentially by their awareness of thousands of other people doing exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.  And, it was flat-out fun - something with which activists aren’t immediately associated.

In a recent edition of Yes Magazine, the editors posed the question: “What happens when we throw off the invisible chains that keep us from realizing the world we want—when we, as they say in the global south, decolonize our minds?”  That’s a wonderful question, but we’ve also got to consider exactly how that happens.  How do we learn to see the invisible chains, how do we rattle them, learn to throw them off, and then how do we know what kind of a world it is that we want?

Here, I think, is the greatest purview of the artist.  And it happens on a couple different levels.  Art shows us the world as it is, names the true-but-as-yet-unnamed.  Art allow us to see ourselves, our whole selves, in infinite shades of dark and light.  Art reflects ourselves back to us in an intense, highly concentrated, extremely potent, and sneakily digestible form.  Often, we connect and relate to what we’re seeing and hearing in a work of art long before we recognize our actual selves reflected back.  We get surreptitiously trapped in a vision of truth.  And once we see, it’s very difficult to un-see.  It’s hard to walk away unchanged.

I’ve had many audience members come up to me after performances of both The Accidental Activist (which told the story of Lysistrata Project) and my current global warming show The Boycott and tell me that I’d just articulated out loud ideas and feelings which they’d been experiencing, but hadn’t expressed – either to themselves or other people.  

Many people have a kind of fear/guilt response to their more powerful emotions – thinking that they shouldn’t feel as much or as powerfully as they do, and that if they acknowledge the depth of how they feel, then they might be overwhelmed or destroyed by their emotional experience.  I know what that’s like – working so hard to contain and deny my inner life that I’m left paralyzed, with no energy to take any kind of action.  Seeing your inner life played out truthfully and unabashedly on stage validates and legitimizes the potency of your feelings, releases the energy locked up in the emotional containment field, and allows it to be put to far more productive, proactive use.

There’s also a magical, alchemical element to the artistic experience – something dynamically and inherently elevating.  There have been times when I’ve gone to, say, a fantastic Frederic Chiu piano concert or brilliant Bill T. Jones dance performance and not only lost myself in the experience, but lost any sense of distinction between myself and the artist.  For a moment, I was Frederic, I was Bill.  I walk away having absorbed from them a touch of the divine, believing that I might actually become my best self.  And for a moment, at least, I feel that I am.  I feel that I’m walking in the borrowed shoes of genius and inspiration, and that right now, anything is possible.

We need that kind of exhilaration because of the truly murky problems we’re facing, and how challenging they’re going to be to overcome.  We need to believe, now and then, that we are capable of anything.

This, of course, begs the question: what, exactly are we capable of?  And herein lies another gift artists bring to the table.  We live in a world of imagination, a world of not-yet and never-been.  We are capable of creating – from glistening filaments of dreams and wonderings and other milky mindstuff - whole and real and concrete worlds.  We specialize in overleaping the reality of what is and delving deeply into the could be.  It’s vital to be able to do that, to shine a light in the murk.  It gives us a hopeful, inspired vision to move towards, rather than just a raging, dark fear from which to run.