Episode Summary

In this second of two episodes exploring democracy as a creative practice Bill Cleveland leads a rich discussion with theater workers Arnaldo Lopez, Ben Fink, and Scott Rankin, and labor organizer Ken Grossinger, who share how artistic endeavors can bridge differences, foster justice, and inspire community engagement. The conversation delves into the transformative power of storytelling and the role of cultural democracy in redefining citizenship and identity.

As the guests recount their experiences, they highlight the importance of trust and cooperation in collaborative projects that address social issues. Ultimately, this episode underscores the vital relationship between art and democracy, encouraging listeners to consider how creative practices can drive meaningful change in society.

Key Moments

• 00:11 - Exploring Democracy as a Creative Practice
• 01:08 - Exploring Art and Democracy
• 16:20 - The Role of Art in Organizing
• 28:05 - The Power of Cultural Change
• 33:01 - The Flow of Change and Learning

The Story

The exploration of democracy as a creative practice takes center stage in this engaging podcast episode led by Bill Cleveland. The conversation invites listeners to consider the intricate relationship between art and democratic engagement, showcasing how creative expression can serve as a powerful tool for fostering community, dialogue, and social change. Throughout the episode, Cleveland draws on insights from a diverse range of guests—artists, theater practitioners, and labor organizers—who share their personal experiences and the transformative impact of art in their respective fields. This multifaceted dialogue not only highlights the challenges faced by contemporary democracies but also illuminates the potential for creative practices to bridge divides and cultivate understanding among disparate communities.

Guests such as Arnaldo Lopez and Ken Grossinger articulate the importance of storytelling in reclaiming democratic spaces and asserting the narratives of marginalized groups. Their contributions underscore the essential role that art plays in illuminating social injustices and inspiring collective action. The podcast does not shy away from addressing the complexities of cultural democracy, emphasizing the necessity for inclusive practices that honor and celebrate cultural differences. Cleveland thoughtfully weaves these narratives together, painting a rich tapestry of insights that challenge listeners to reflect on their own roles within the democratic process.

As the episode unfolds, it becomes clear that the journey towards a creative democracy is ongoing and requires active participation from all individuals. The discussions culminate in a compelling call to action, urging listeners to embrace their creative potential and engage in the collaborative efforts necessary for meaningful change. By fostering a deeper understanding of the interplay between art and democracy, the podcast presents a hopeful vision for the future—one where creative practices not only enrich our understanding of ourselves but also empower us to collectively shape the world around us. In this light, the episode serves as an inspiring reminder of the enduring power of art to catalyze social transformation and reinforce the fundamental ideals of democracy.

Takeaways

• The podcast explores the role of art in fostering democracy and collaboration.
• Art can serve as a powerful tool for reclaiming democratic spaces and identities.
• Collaborative art-making helps bridge cultural differences and create common ground among communities.
• Effective organizing requires integrating artistic practices to shift narratives and foster engagement.
• Trust and cooperation are essential for successful collaborative artistic endeavors across diverse communities.
• The evolution of storytelling in communities strengthens both creative and democratic practices.

Notable Mentions

People

1. Carlton Turner is an artist, activist, and co-founder of Sipp Culture, an organization dedicated to building community resilience through art and culture in rural Mississippi. (See Also CSCW EP: 78)
2. Leni Sloan is a performer and historian known for exploring themes of democracy and cultural transformation through his works. (See Also: CS/CW Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 100 and Episode 101 )
3. Harry Boyte is a scholar and democracy advocate who explores the intersection of civic engagement and democratic practice in modern society. (See Also: CS/CW Episode 79)
4. Barbara Schaeffer Bacon is a co-director of Animating Democracy, a program that brings art and civic engagement together to strengthen democracy. (See Also: CS/CW Episode 98, and Episode 99)
5. Pam Korza is also a co-director of Animating Democracy, focusing on the role of culture in public dialogue and participatory democracy. (See Also: CS/CW Episode 98, and Episode 99 )
6. Arnaldo Lopez Arnaldo is the Managing Director of Pregones Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, contributing significantly to cultural storytelling and community collaboration. (See Also: CS/CW EP 68 )
7. Ben Fink is an editor and collaborator on "Art in a Democracy," focusing on the role of arts in multicultural and democratic dialogue. (See Also: CS/CW EP 68)
8. Ken Grossinger is labor organizer turned arts advocate, Ken Grossinger is known for integrating cultural strategies into social and economic justice movements. (See Also CS/CW EP 96)
9. Scott Rankin is the founder of BIGhART, an Australian organization that creates art to foster social change and community engagement. (See Also: CS/CW Episode 86 and Episode 87 )

Places

1. Pregones Puerto Rican Traveling Theater is a Bronx-based theater company known for its culturally rich performances and collaborations promoting Puerto Rican heritage and diverse storytelling.
2. Roadside Theater is a community-based theater company in Appalachia that uses storytelling to explore local culture and social issues.
3. Junebug Productions is a New Orleans-based theater company focused on African American culture and social justice through performance art.
4. BIGhART is Australia’s leading arts and social change organization, creating transformative projects in disadvantaged communities.
5. Whitesburg, Kentucky is a small town in Appalachia, home to cultural organizations like Appalshop and a center for regional storytelling.

Events and Projects

1. Promise of a Love Song is a collaborative theatrical project interweaving stories from Pregones, Roadside, and Junebug Productions, exploring themes of identity and community.
2. Art in a Democracy is a two-volume book collection of plays and essays examining the role of theater in fostering democratic values.
3. Betsy: A Puerto Rican Appalachian Musical  is a unique musical collaboration between Pregones and Roadside, highlighting the intersection of Appalachian and Puerto Rican cultures.

From the center for the Study of Art and Community. This is Change the Story, Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Welcome to the second chapter of our two part series that poses the question, Is Democracy a Creative Practice?

In which we answer the question in the affirmative by dipping into some past episodes with guests who who are using the arts as collaborative cooperative democratic stimulus with great success and some particularly powerful insights and stories.

Now in our first chapter we heard from Sipp Culture's Carlton Turner, performer, impresario, historian Lenny Sloan, democracy scholar Harry Boyte, and Barbara Schaeffer Bacon and Pam Korza, the dynamic duo. From Animating Democracy with this mob of good troublemakers, we explored questions like can art help reclaim a democracy?

What is an animated democracy? What is democratic imagination? And can cultural democracy redefine citizenship?

In Chapter two, our guests continue to share insights and stories as we consider how art making can help us find common ground across difference, organized for justice and make a better world for young people.

In our conversations, theater workers Arnaldo Lopez and Ben Fink talk about the book Art and Democracy, labor organizer Ken Grossinger makes the case for arts based organizing and Scott Rankin, head of Australia's BIGhART, discusses the moral and ethical dimensions of culturally based democratic practice.

Part 6 Arnaldo Lopez and Ben Fink What is the function of art in a multicultural democracy?

We begin this chapter with a conversation about the two volume book recently published by New Village Press called Art in a Democracy the Selected Plays of Roadside Theater.

At their heart, these plays and their creation stories provide a vivid portrait of a 50 year history of creative collaboration percolating at the crossroad of art community and the ongoing American struggle to craft an authentic living democracy.

Our guests for this show are the book's editor, Ben Fink and Arnaldo Lopez, the Managing Director of Pregones Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, one of the collaborating theater companies profiled in the book. Just want to say that having just dipped my toe in both of these volumes that this is more than just a couple of books with scripts.

I think the scripts are the icing on the cake and I think these are stories of discovery and peeking in on the history is absolutely thrilling.

Some might wonder how those dots connected. Could you share a bit of Pregone's story and that particular production, certainly I.

I think that the stitching and the finding each other that is part of the sort of common experience and the really willingness to get together for these companies.

When I think of Rosalba, when I think of Alan and Jorge, some of our colleagues who are in the first generation for Pregones Theater, and the fact that from a relatively early age, mobilized by political experiences of the 60s and the 70s, they were looking out to generate cultural work in a way that was binding as a means to bring people together, as a means to affirm in a very public way that we are a nation of many differences and that the question of identity and the question of vocation and place that they're cut through.

And luckily there are many contexts in which we do connect with like minded folk and we're always the feeling of being part of a movement is part of what energizes us. So that's exciting. Promise of a Love Song is very special work.

The title comes from John O'Neal at the time leading Junebug Productions and Pregones Theater in the Bronx, Junebug in New Orleans and Roadside in Kentucky. You know, what are the odds?

Can we talk about the things that make all of us folks who are seeking to claim space and identity and place and community? And do we have enough space to talk about how we relate to things outside of the places where we are at home and comfortable?

And can we do that with a whole lot of food and a whole lot of music? Because that's really what helps us keep going. And I think that's the genesis of it. And I should say that the differences are embedded throughout.

And music playing such a big role and I think opening the doors for each creator community to generate its language, bring up its stories, its poetry, the things that they cherish and the pride that came in that exchange. These are all the things that were fundamental to make it something lasting.

The second volume of Art in a Democracy includes Arnaldo's essay on the Making an Impact of Promise of a Love Song. Here's how he describes the play's unique three in one one is three love story configuration.

The script ended up interweaving three love stories In Roadside's Charming Billy, an elderly mother cares for a son living with developmental disability, both shaped by the hardships and blessings of rural life in Appalachia. Pregones', Silent Dancing, adapted from a story by Judith Ortiz Cofer juxtaposes a young woman's memories of growing up in Puerto Rico and her father's plight as an immigrant in New York. Junebug's Star Crossed Lovers tells of two black activists building a family in the bosom of the civil rights movement.

Together, the three stories grapple with intersecting and distinctly American embodiments of race, culture, language, geography and oppression. Each has its own accent, color and historical context. Each also triggers certain narrative expectations in the audience.

To watch the show is to have those expectations constantly readjusted. We wanted to share a taste of promise, of a love song, but unfortunately it's not available.

In this scene, a small piece of that revealed history is shared in dialogue and duet sung by Elise Santora and Caridad de la Luz, playing two parts of Betsy's divided and confusing past.

When my boy Eli was born. Eli. He was your great, great grandfather?

Was Eli's father in law?

No, his father was Eli Phipps. He stayed around just long enough for me to bear another boy.

Shortly after that boy's birth, he sold me a parcel of land for the sum of $18.9acres on the waters of Elk Creek.

Yes, indeed, I tell myself and no one but me will pay the price for how I've live But when I look in the eyes of my children I see my whole life staring back at me Today I start my life over I hold my dreams in my head oh my own name Now I. Own. My own life. My own. My own life.

You know, finding common ground within a seasoned theater company for the creation of a new work is hard enough as it is.

But in this case, Arnaldo, you have three dynamic creative ensembles, each with its own culture and history and ways of working and well, when all is said and done, collaborative creation just doesn't happen without trust. How did you create the foundation of trust and cooperation needed to forge this long lasting partnership?

There was a lot of talk about what this project could be even before it crystallized into something concrete.

There were many avenues that could have been pursued, and the three companies were already committed to learning about each other, visiting their home, staying there, like having residencies that were substantial, opening it up to live audiences, having conversations. At one point there was the possibility of writing a single more traditional looking play. Right. Collaborating in that.

But the idea of this kaleidoscopic approach where each company would be given their own space. And there will be a weaving in and out of those stories that really crystallized and I think was truer, truer to any other attempt.

And when I think of the differences, you know, it was part of the experience, like being there with folks who have different claim on American history and a real desire to push it forward without omissions. Very exciting.

So, Ben, from its early beginnings with the cycle of plays that came out of coal country, I know that Roadside was very sensitive to theater's potential to separate the stories from the people and the communities where they were born. I'm thinking that the fact that many of those community members were embedded in the making process probably helped keep the work accountable.

But for the work represented in volume two, at any given moment in the process, most of the partners were guests from other places and cultures. And I'm wondering how you work together to both keep that accountability to the home stories and allow for surprising hybrids to emerge.

It seems like you had a gigantic learning laboratory for creative give and take, for art into democracy, or even art as democracy. Could you talk about this and the relationship between this work and our current struggle in terms of this thing we call democracy?

So there is a lot of hopelessness, right? There's a lot of fatalism.

There's a lot of people who mean well and care about things that are worth caring about, that are saying things like, we are hopelessly divided. There is no future. We can never build a democracy.

And the fact is, things weren't any better 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 40 years ago, they were different. But when Roadside was starting, there were strikes in the mountains where union organizers were literally getting murdered.

Like, this idea that, oh, it's gotten so much worse is like, no, there has always been these incredible obstacles.

And yet what Roadside, working with Pregones, working with Junebug Productions in the deep south and a whole bunch of other companies said is we can recognize that. We can recognize the depth of the problems.

And we can, as Arnaldo said, start from the stories we share, the food we share, the relationships we share. It's not either or. Same way it's not either. Or. Do we dig deep into our own community or do we go wide, building relationships with other communities?

The deeper you go, the wider you can go. Folks at Roadside talk about a bridge, right? The span of a bridge can only be as strong as the posts on either side of that bridge are deep.

And so we build deep posts within our communities, within Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, within white folks in Appalachia then black folks in the Deep south. And then from those deep posts, we're able to build that bridge.

And we're able to build that bridge in a way that is really specific root in our communities.

So that when, for instance, folks from the prairie in Nebraska come to see Promise of a Love Song that are not from any of these cultures, they immediately see themselves in it just the way people in our communities do. And I mean, this is me, right? I'm a Jew from Connecticut with New York roots, and I see myself in this so clearly.

And we know that people see themselves in it so clearly because after the shows we're doing story circles. We're having people coming up to the stage and sharing stories with the performers.

That the play itself is a working out of this problem is a dialogue in the same way that the backstage work is and in the same way that the essays in this anthology are. Like you said, you said a bit ago, people aren't used to reading scripts. And I get that.

And what I'll say to people is these are not scripts like you are used to reading.

These are collections of stories and collections of memories and people looking to make sense of their own experience and how they can make it possible for them and their families to survive and for their lives to mean something in the world. And so the line between the plays and the essays is actually a little bit blurry.

All these different voices, some on stage, some off the stage, exploring the same questions variously in dialogue with each other and with any luck, in dialogue with the reader.

Part 7 Ken Grossinger: Why does organizing need the arts to succeed?

A dozen or so years ago, Ken Grossinger was well known in labor circles as one of the movement's most influential and effective strategists through his work with the likes of the Service Employees International Union, the AFL CIO, and Democracy Partners.

Today, while he continues his role as a movement leader, he's become a born again advocate for the essential role of the art and artists in the continuing struggle for worker rights and social and economic justice. If you're a curious soul like me, you may be asking yourself, gee, how'd that happen?

He's written about why he thinks this is not only true, but profoundly important for our times in his new book, Art How Organizers and artists are creating a better world together. Ken Grossinger, welcome to the show. So let me begin by just asking, what is your life path?

Most of my adult world has been as a social change strategist.

I've spent my life working in community and labor organizations, basically inside the community organizing world and thinking about how to move the justice ball down the road. When I learn how to think strategically about my work, art and culture were never a part of what I learned.

And then I married an artist and I realized just how big a boat I missed.

And I realized one other thing, which was it wasn't just organizers that didn't think strategically about art and culture in their work, but it was artists themselves who often didn't think strategically about their work in the service of social movement. And so that's what I mean about being a late bloomer here, because I've only just come to this in the last 10 to 15 years.

And that's why I wanted to write the book, because I thought if I was in this boat, many other people would have been.

So the question is, what does that mean? What is an effective strategist, particularly in the work that we're referencing here, which is social change work, justice work.

There are a lot of different definitions of this in my background. It means that I use a power analysis to decide and to develop plans for change.

And what I mean by a power analysis is that I analyze who's in support of what I want to do, who's neutral, and who opposes it. And I use that as the basis to think strategically about what to do.

And that really separates a lot of political and community and labor organizer strategists from other forms of strategists which rely upon less of power analysis and more a host of other things.

So in the power analysis process that you undertake, and I'm going to just say it's not just doing it, it's doing it in a way that connects the insights derived from the analysis to the eventual action that is taken in order to move the ball. So what is that journey from? Oh, now I can see what the playing field looks like now. What's the strategy?

What is brought to bear in that circumstance?

So I think it's about developing relationships where they don't exist and building upon relationships where they do exist to build up a level of support and a way to frame moving the work forward.

And it means reaching out to people who are on the fence and are not yet committed one way or the other, entering into new relationships, or at least new relationships around a particular issue, and then thinking about the extent to which it's possible to convert or neutralize your opposition. And so that's all quite labor intensive. And it's why organizing campaigns require a lot of depth and time to work, but it's all necessary.

So what does art making have to do with the in the trenches work of analyzing the playing field and figuring out where to push and where to pull?

Organizers can't do the work that we do without art and culture. And I want to make two points about this.

One is that art is not just a reflection of or a reaction to social conditions, but it's a contributor to social change. And two, narrative shifts is central to organizing. Now, why is that?

So we know that policy advocates and organizers and lobbyists sometimes can win policy and legislative reform for the good. But what happens is when power changes hands, those concessions get rolled back.

And I think they get rolled back in large part because we never deal with the narrative underlying the progress. And so we have a system in place where we've got organizers taking on institutions and artists trying to shift the way we think.

And artists really have a way of penetrating popular culture in a way that organizers never will, because that's not how organizers think. And in fact, artists don't think like organizers, which makes it such a wonderful collaboration.

Yeah.

But I will also provide the caveat that, particularly in the current landscape that I work in the hybrid, which is people who literally organically come up from both of those streams and are working in the new creative practice and can actually speak both languages. And so I just wonder what you think of that.

Well, I think you're exactly right.

And if you look at the work of Bernice Johnson Reagon, she will tell you that those of us who are cultural workers thought of ourselves as organizers, and culture was just a part of what we did for your audience. Bernice was one of the founders of the Freedom Singers and went on to found A Sweet Honey in the Rock.

And think about another musician, Sy Khan, who's been a civil rights organizer and has, I don't know, produced 20 CDs of music. And so there are in fact, any number of artists who are organizers and organizers who are artists.

And Harry Belafonte is probably the greatest example that I could think of. I mean, Harry, he had to balance his time between art and activism tipped toward the ladder.

I mean, Harry was at the strategy tables of the Southern civil rights movement, and he brought his artistic skills to that table. It wasn't that he was an artist that realized he had celebrity and could raise money for others to do the work. So I think you're exactly right, Bill.

That's a really important caveat. I guess I don't think about that as much because I'm more concerned about the scale at which these collaborations happen.

And they're happening, to be sure, but they're not happening on scales in community and experience.

And, of course, anthropologists and brain scientists are all basically coming together to say that this is not something that is a choice for humans. Yeah, we have to do this. In fact, I would say a community that is not actively involved in making its own narrative is a community that is hurting.

And I think that may in fact be one of the circumstances we find ourselves in right now, which is so many people feel disconnected from the story that is somehow imposed upon them or being told about them, even to the point where some people buy the distorted story that has been crafted externally as a substitute. And I think giving people that agency back, getting their fingerprints back on their story, is critical. Right.

That's such a profound insight, Bill, and reinforces why I wanted to do this podcast.

Okay, good. Well, that's one of my soapboxes. So this actually brings up a question. I guess you'd say my liturgy is this human creative practice.

It's the most powerful aspect of what it is to be human that we have in many ways squandered. And where people use it, it cooks. Okay. It really actually does make a difference.

But one of the things when I teach that I have to pound home is that many people assume that artists and art making are naturally aligned with this progressive tilt, when, in fact, historically, probably some of the most effective cultural organizing has happened from the other side of the coin, which is people like Milosevic and Hitler and Pol Pot and the Stasi all understood the power of culture and on one hand, stifled it and on the other hand, appropriated it in order to totally capture the story and produce tyranny. And once you actually recognize that, you realize you're not dealing with a benign force.

You're dealing with something that's extraordinarily powerful, that could be used for good or for ill. Could you talk about that a bit in terms of your own experience?

It was shown in the White House, in part because it was the first feature length film that was ever made and in part, I think because of its content. And so there is no question that the right has understood this.

And when I interviewed Norman Lear for the book, I asked him if he thought that political change required social change first or did cultural change require political change. So what was the driving force? And of course he said, well, culture change has to happen before you can have political change.

And he draws upon all in the Family and he says racism and homophobia were never water cooler conversations until they entered the homes of people.

Part 8 Scott Rankin: How do you care for a creative democracy?

Scott Rankin runs one of the most impactful arts based change organizations on the planet. No exaggeration, it's called BIGhART. B I G H A R T.

Now if you visit BIGhART's website, which I encourage you to do, you encounter the BIGhART is Australia's leading arts and social change organization. We make art, we build communities, we drive change. 30 years in operation, 62 communities engaged. 47 awards won. 550 artists contributed.

9,500 people participated. 2.6 million audience members. I'm sure you'd agree that's a lot.

But given that social change mission, you may be asking one of my favorite to what end? Meaning what happened and then how?

Professional skateboarders from Element and young people are coming down to skate the Tarkine and everything goes on Insta and their own channels. They are filming, we are filming.

And the Tarkine, which is threatened by a mining company, is going to live in the bedroom channels of young people globally because this temperate rainforest is being skateboarded now. At the same time we're developing a whole range of activities called State of Mind which are about soothing and thriving and belonging.

And it's a mental health project. And we're also making a really big commercial work where skateboarders make the music with the act of skating.

Because when you're on set architecture you skate in time and also painting with light through tracking, projection, et cetera. And that work is to build. This is ambitious, Bill.

We want to gross a billion dollars around the world, put 100 million away into a corpus so all the profit and then those young people can use the hundred million that's in the corpus to change the world because we invite young people into an adult world to bring about transformation.

You're right, this is an immense undertaking with enormous implications. Given the care you've taken with your collaborators and partner communities not to distort the social and cultural ecosystem you're working with.

How are you approaching something of this scale?

So it's recalibrating that whole approach thing. It's taken 10 years of sitting on the edge of skateboarders country and listening to the cathedral of their movement.

It's our longest project to date within the 30 years of big Art. We have legacies on the legacies. It's a project that's has its own trajectory. We are usually careful about not building dependency on.

So creating something beautiful and breaking it apart, Allowing what was once a story. It could be the Namajira story about the injustice of that copyright issue. That's no longer the story. And often some of the worst work in our sector.

Our part of the world that you'd be familiar with is in individual lives and also community lives.

Is locking the narrative to a certain point in time and putting your snout in that trough as an arts organization or a writer or whatever and feeding off the trough of that deficit rather than seeing that is a previous chapter. Now people are doing this and we have to be careful of that and careful of monetizing change, careful of looking for something to change.

I use the phrase look for the flow of consequences and then you don't trap people in time. It's not about you. It's like, do you know Winnie the Pooh?

Well, I sometimes talk about Winnie the Pooh and Piglet throwing the sticks in the river and then running to the other side of the bridge to see where the sticks have gone and which one is winning or whatever. And in a sense, communities are changing all the time. And you're entering into that flow, flow of change. That's not your responsibility.

And you're bringing a gift on invitation. And then there is a flow of consequences from your involvement.

But we tend again to commodify change making and put ourselves as the hero at the center of it rather than be part of the flow of change and change yourself.

So Scott, BIGhART has always been a delicate dance. Learning, adapting, recalibrating, all the while staying true to core values and intentions.

And skate is not only going to put a lot of that to a test. The opportunity for learning will be enormous.

You've created a body of work based on a cumulative process of learning, of being a student of the communities and the issues that you have engaged.

And I can really understand that along the way you can feel expert at learning and also feel incredibly humble at the fact that every time you open one of these new stories, you're not starting off learning how to learn, but you're having to learn a new culture, a new relationship, a new rhythm, a new language, all of those things that come with each of these places. So as you move forward, the question will not only be what have you learned? But how do you pass that on to others?

Yeah, it's a big question.

It's easy with a great storyteller like you to talk about these things as though we never failed or there weren't mistakes or we were doing very well. Thank you. But it is in a constant state of unknowing and propped up failure. It's like compost stinks and then soil thrives.

And you know, there are times when it's all compost and you don't know and you shouldn't know and it's an ugly way of looking at it.

But over the last 30 years of big art, we are 100 million roughly in that's about what we've raised for communities living with disadvantage and invisible stories, etc. And there's 500 artists or something. There's a number of people who have stayed for two decades of work.

And people tend to stay long and they're using first projects that they're involved in as a awakener and a quest. And then that quest is saying to them, what can you let go of and what don't you know so that you can be quiet?

And we are peak primates, peak predator primates addicted to left brain data based skill sets like it's a chronic addiction that's going to destroy most of us and the planet.

So if we are requested as young artists to come innocently to find a solution to something that is defined as a problem, then we will be coming with the problem to solve, to try and come up with a solution. Because the problem is the way of thinking with those addictions.

Ah yes, we are the do gooders and we have come to do good.

So the first projects are usually getting rid of those addictions and not castigating yourself, but just it's like a series of gestalts of I see this new thing. So it is the project talking to you and you're the one who is just as much in the moment of navigating change.

And then these careers start to emerge around what I think is a remaking of wisdom, which we honor in first nations without question, but we dishonor amongst ourselves and often eldership is earned by the wisdom that's come from being quiet and letting go of your assumptions and your addictions. And so I would hope that younger artists are coming into projects and communities and processes.

I mean, I'm a playwright, so I've got to say this, but they are on a dramaturgical journey themselves and they are learning these new virtuosities in the process of making, not mesmerized on the content, the commodity and the stardom. It's those virtuosities, using a European word, that are found in the deep women and men of learning in these ancient cultures on this continent.

And it's in the same zone, those virtuosities, that a man or a woman can be a Ngangkari (Aboriginal healer) who heals. It's not my place to say, but can travel in ways that non aboriginal people don't know how to travel. Elon Musk does not know.

But people can be in two places at once. So there is a world of high culture and high mystery that beckons us.

And we work with skateboarders, we work with seafarers, we work with aboriginal people, we work with the elderly.

In all of those sets there are deep wisdoms and learnings that you find yourself actually in an exchange as a younger artist and you become an elder artist.

Here's a short postscript for these two episodes. One of the most indelible and abiding characteristics of a thriving creative democracy is the sharing of the evolving story Scott just described.

Each generation teaching the next, passing the story on from elder to youth, feeding each other, continuing the cycle of learning and the inexorable deepening of shared wisdom. This is the essential journey of both art making and democracy. These unlikely siblings, strange, wonderful and unpredictable fellow travelers.

Both conceived in the human imagination and both manifest and perpetuated through our creative practice. So here we are at what I'm sure appears to many as one of the hardest moments of our contemporary story.

Clouds looming, prospects meager hope in short supply. I understand the weariness and the pessimism.

But for those of us who are makers and know there are no humans who are not makers, this is what we were built for. Humans are a product of 6 million years of mostly struggle. So we would not have survived without each other, period.

And believe it or not, despite periodic outbreaks of failed imaginations, creative collaboration is in our blood. So let's practice and put it to good use. So that concludes our two part series. Is democracy a creative practice for me at this time?

Hearing these wise folks again has strengthened my resolve, given me heart. We have our work cut out for us, but given the stories we just heard and thousands more like them, there's no doubt we do know what we're doing.

We just need to do it together. So listeners, I hope you feel the same and thank you so much for the time you spent with us here.

And I know if you're like me, there are times when you're listening to a podcast and you want to jump in and say Amen. Or are you out of your mind?

So if that hankering for dialogue lingers beyond this moment, please indulge it by dropping us a line at csac@artandcommunity.com Art and community is all one word.

I also want to thank all of our guests and remind you that you can listen to full episodes with Scott Rankin, Ken Grossinger, Arnaldo Lopez, Ben Fink, and last episode's guests Lenny Sloan, Pam Corza, Barbara Schaeffer Bacon, Carlton Turner, and Harry Boit by tuning into Change the Story, Change the World on itunes or Spotify. Change the Story, Change the World is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hands of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of ook235.

So until next time, stay well, do good and spread. Spread the good word. And once again, please know that this episode has been 100% human.