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The USA is once again in the throes of a political season. After many months of gassing by a wide variety of folks on a wide variety of questions, Americans will be asked to walk into a small space with a piece of paper – or an electronic screen – and make a decision about people they've probably never met that will have a profound effect on the whole nation. Each voter stands alone in the voting booth. But the collective votes of the community make winners and losers. Voting itself expresses the eternal tension between the individual and the larger group. What responsibilities does an individual have to the larger group in which the individual lives? What responsibilities does the group have to the individual? These questions are not posed simply as a rhetorical device.
Among my college history teachers was a professor who specialized in the history of foot-soldiers — the infantry. He mentioned that one of the threads of history was the tension between the individual and the group -- the question of the community.
Just what is a community, and what does it have to do with theater?
We human folk, as mammals, start life as an individual born into a group. The ongoing tension between a person and a person's family and all of the implications of that tension appear to everyone, more or less. Without such universal situations, we wouldn't have such plays as Antigone, Twelfth Night, Ghosts, or Long Day's Journey Into Night — a few plays of the many that depend on the assumption of the audience's experience with the tension and/or responsibilities of how an individual works within a family.
Then there is the extended family. It may not be far-fetched to suppose that in a tribal structure of ancient times that early settlements grew out of the combinations of extended families.
'Community' (as a word or concept) serves many purposes for many speakers. A government policy official might speak of the "community of nations." A professional journal might write of the "community of lawyers." Politicians certainly speak of strengthening our communities. Some of our readers might work in a community theater. Although community exists not as a static concept, commonalties exist between these usages.
At the core of each usage of "community" is an appeal to loosen the tension between the individual and the group — an appeal to deal with any existing conflicts between the desires of the individual and the group. For example, nations may war with nations, but the 'community of nations' seems to imply a tacit desire that each individual nation within that community will work to further the common goals of the group to the betterment of each individual nation and the group.
Community creation, like any task of making, is not always an easy task. The earliest and most basic community we call 'family' is not always easy. But, as with successful family relationships, the process of building or strengthening successful community relationships can be rewarding both for the group and the group's members.
Shared experience builds communities. A romantic couple builds a link, however tenuous and of whatever nature, and starts a new group. The families tied by their shared experiences and history make a tribe. Friends and co-workers hunt for mastodon or for the Smythe account. They win, or they lose. But they build the bonds that make community. Soon, communities of all kinds spring up – from tribes and families to Star Trek conventions.
Sometimes our large, heterogeneous, diverse, polyglot society seems beyond the building of communities. Today the exurban worker sleeps, cocooned in a McMansion like the hundreds of other strangers each in their McMansions and drives to work in an office block that's separated from anything other than other exurban office blocks. The worker sits in a cubicle or (if awfully lucky) a real office separated from other workers. The workers stops by the mega-mart and buys groceries from high school kid who's also a stranger, and goes home to sleep.
This is why we need the arts.
The arts provide many of the shared experiences through which people can build or strengthen community. Music, naturally, can provide a certain kind of shared experience for many. But the narrative arts embodied in the theater, film and video have a special place in providing experiences by providing tangible stories, by showing tangible relationships, by portraying a wealth of human experience. We see evidence of this in everything from popular "Saturday Night Live" tag-lines common in everyday chat to the enthusiastic comment about a minor detail of a production from an audience member years after seeing the play.
Everyday another report comes down the pipeline of how this school or that town don't have time in the school day nor the money to continue the arts program. I agree we need more scientists. The USA needs more folks who can do the math well. I thought about that every time I drove across a bridge long before the recent tragedy in Minnesota.
But, more than ever, we need to remind our children and ourselves that we are all human. Every one of us is human. And the arts provide that shared communal experience.
The audience wants to have an authentic, shared experience with us as artists and with each other as an audience. The arts strengthen the bonds between individuals. By experiencing our human-ness together artists and audience alike share the common experience of being human together. The experience of being human. In our hunt for new and better technologies and solutions to our technological problems – we must remember the reason for all that work in the first place. We are humans. In a community. Together.
That's what the arts can do. And that's why we need them. Cradle to grave.
Postscript:
In thinking about community, I like to think that I'm sharing something of myself with the readers of this column. While the reader always retains the privilege of anonymity, I find myself curious about you. Are you a theatre professional? Are you someone who enjoys the arts? Who are you? If you feel so moved, drop us a line and/or reply on the reader's blog. I'm just curious to know more about the community that makes up the Scene4 readership. Thanks.
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