This episode's guest is artist, educator, and global cultural leader, Eric Booth. Eric’s passion is activating the artistry of others to foster wellness, create thriving communities and change behaviors for the better. Eric has written seven books, taught at Juilliard, Stanford, Lincoln Center, and consulted on arts, learning, teaching, and innovation across the globe.

BIO

In 2015 Eric Booth was given the nation’s highest award in arts education (the first artist to receive it). He began as a Broadway actor, and became a businessman (his company became the largest of its kind in the U.S. in 7 years), and author of seven books, including the bestseller The Everyday Work of Art, Playing for Their Lives (the only book about music for social change programs around the world) and Tending the Perennials, and over 30 published articles. He has been on the faculty of Juilliard (12 years), Tanglewood (5 years), The Kennedy Center (20 years), and Lincoln Center Education (for 41 years). He serves as a consultant for many arts organizations (including seven of the ten largest U.S. orchestras), cities, states and businesses around the U.S., and in 11 other countries. He has founded and led teaching artist training programs around the world. A frequent keynote speaker, he gave the closing keynote to UNESCO's first world arts education conference, and founded the International Teaching Artist Collaborative. Website : ericbooth.net

Notable Mentions

Anton Checkhov:  29 January 1860[note 2] – 15 July 1904[note 3]) was a Russian[3] playwright and short-story writer who is considered to be one of the greatest writers of all time. His career as a playwright produced four classics, and his best short stories are held in high esteem by writers and critics.[

The Bear: A Joke in One Act, or The Boor (Russian: Медведь: Шутка в одном действии, tr. Medved': Shutka v odnom deystvii, 1888), is a one-act comedic play written by Russian author Anton Chekhov. The play was originally dedicated to Nikolai Nikolaevich Solovtsov, Chekhov's boyhood friend and director/actor who first played the character Smirnov.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:  29 September 1934 – 20 October 2021) was a Hungarian-American psychologist. He recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow", a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity.[

Gospel of Mark, Alec McCowen: In 1977, Alec McCowen – unanimously regarded then and now as one of the finest actors in the English language – gave his first solo performance of St. Mark’s Gospel (King James Version) with minimal staging in a tiny church basement in Newcastle, England. Since these humble beginnings, the McCowen St. Mark’s Gospel has become a theatrical marvel of our time. Mr. McCowen, who recites the entire text of the Gospel from memory in this presentation, was nominated for a Tony Award in 1979 for his impressive work.

Arts in Corrections: Arts in Corrections was a program of the California Department of Corrections from 1981 to 2011. At its height it had a full and part-time faculty of over 1000 artists and an incarcerated student body and audience of 25,000. Shuttered in the wake of the great recession it was revived as a joint program of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation and the California Arts Council. The program currently operates in all of California’s 34 prisons.

Jose Alfonso: José Manuel Cerqueira Afonso dos Santos (2 August 1929 – 23 February 1987), known professionally as José Afonso and also popularly known as Zeca Afonso or simply Zeca, was a Portuguese singer-songwriter. One of the most influential folk and protest musicians in the history of Portugal, he became an icon in Portugal due to the role of his music in the resistance against the dictatorial Estado Novo regime.

Estado Novo: The Estado Novo was one of the longest-surviving authoritarian regimes in Europe in the 20th century. Opposed to communism, socialism, syndicalism, anarchism, liberalism and anti-colonialism, the regime was conservative, corporatist, and nationalist in nature, defending Portugal's traditional Catholicism.

Joseph Campbell: (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) was an American writer. He was a professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College who worked in comparative mythology and comparative religion. His work covers many aspects of the human experience. Campbell's best-known work is his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), in which he discusses his theory of the journey of the archetypal hero shared by world mythologies, termed the monomyth.

Audre Lorde: Poet and author Audre Lorde used her writing to shine light on her experience of the world as a Black lesbian woman and later, as a mother and person suffering from cancer. A prominent member of the women’s and LGBTQ rights movements, her writings called attention to the multifaceted nature of identity and the ways in which people from different walks of life could grow stronger together. 

Maxine Green: Through inquiries into sociology, history, and especially philosophy and literature, Maxine Greene explored living in awareness and "wide-awakeness" in order to advance social justice. Her thinking about existence and the power of imagination have been brought to life through her study, academic appointments, essays and books. In her teaching, she desires to educate those who speak, write, and resist in their own voices, rather than mimic her ideas and language. We look forward hearing your voices here in these pages. 

Elaine Scarry (born June 30, 1946) is an American essayist and professor of English and American Literature and Language. She is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University. Her interests include Theory of Representation, the Language of Physical Pain, and Structure of Verbal and Material Making in Art, Science and the Law.

10,000 things: “The Ten Thousand Things” is a common phrase found in Taoist and Buddhist writings to connote the material diversity of the universe. Lao Tzu, for example, writes in the Tao Te Ching: Tao produced the One. The One produced the two.

El Sistema: (which translates to The System) is a publicly financed, voluntary sector, music-education program, founded in Venezuela in 1975 by Venezuelan educator, musician, and activist José Antonio Abreu.[1] It later adopted the motto "Music for Social Change." El Sistema-inspired programs provide what the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies describes as "free classical music education that promotes human opportunity and development for impoverished children."

Academy for Impact Through Music:At its core, AIM is a lab for learning: we gather, innovate and spread good practices for young people to empower themselves through music educatio

ITAC, the International Teaching Artist Collaborative: The International Teaching Artist Collaborative brings together artists, organizations, funders, and researchers from all over the world to explore key issues relating to participatory arts practices.

(The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life: Eric Booth Book of the Month Club Selection, and winner of the Broadway Theatre Institute and Benjamin Franklin awards, The Everyday Work of Art has earned a wide, varied and passionate followingin the arts, education, business, and spiritual communities. Its wide appeal springs from its unique and powerful redefinition of art. 

This episode's guest is artist, educator, and cultural leader, Eric Booth. Eric has written seven books, taught at Juilliard, Stanford, Lincoln Center, and consulted on arts, learning, teaching, and innovation across the globe. Eric’s passion is activating the artistry of others to foster wellness, create thriving communities and change behaviors for the better.

Eric Booth

But in sharing this story early on in our conversation, he points to these kinds of humbling experiences as an unlikely pathway to his life's passion --- namely activating the artistry of others in schools and communities and helping establish and build the teaching artists field around the world.

Along the way. Eric has also written seven books, established and sold a successful publishing company, taught at Juilliard, Stanford, Lincoln Center, and many other educational institutions, and consulted on arts, learning, teaching, and innovation across the globe. That's a lot, but as you'll hear, Eric's resume is not what's driving our conversation.

What has most interested me about Eric's work is the deeply informed and thoughtful way he engages the often amorphous and cliched landscape of human creativity and learning. What I mean by this is that when he speaks of activating the artistry of others, he's talking about fostering wellness, creating thriving communities and changing behaviors for the better. And in doing so he's both inspiring and makes sense. A rare thing these days. I invite you to have a listen and see if you agree.

This is Change the Story. Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.

Part One. Fervor and flow.

So, let's just begin, with where you are, communicating from in the world

BC [00:02:32] So when you share your story, how do you describe your work in the world, particularly with people who are, unfamiliar with that terrain.

And I immediately found it so much more artistically satisfying than the life of a New York actor that I've started to lean that way. And the rest of the story would be 45 years. of projects, most of which were pioneering in building this field of artists. Who work in schools and communities and their main tool is activating the artistry of other people.

And that challenge has remained at the forefront and continues to fascinate me, this endless depth of this capacity of artistry and what it can do when it's activated in groups where it comes from in us, and how you can nurture it in people.

That has really been the driving spine of my story for the last 45.

EB [00:04:37] All right. I'm gonna actually tell one my first day story My very first day as a teaching artist, Lincoln Center. the Vatican of the arts, uh, was developing this teaching artist core and they sent me into a south Bronx elementary school, and I'd been prepared, and I'd planned with the teacher, but of all myopic goals. I was to turn on this group of fourth graders in preparation for their seeing a production of Chekhov’s, The Bear.

Just the thing for fourth graders. Here's a taste of The Bear.

Misogynist: Oh no. This is a matter for the field of honor.

Servant: Oh my God. , oh my god.

Misogynist: to choose weapons.

Widow: And just because you think you have big fists in a bull neck, you think I'm afraid of you, you, you bear

Misogynist: the field of honor. Nobody insults me like that. Not even a woman.

Widow:, Bear, bear, bear.

Misogynist: About time we got rid of all prejudices about only men needing to defend themselves on the field of. If it's equality you want, then it's equality you get. I challenge it to a duel.

Widow: Wanna play a duel right this minute? Oh good. Let's fight

Misogynist: This minute, right this minute.

Widow: My husband had a set of pistols. Wait right here, I'll be right back. God damn, you have no idea what a pleasure it'll be to put a bullet through that thick head of yours.

I believed in it. And on that day when I arrived, the teacher said to me, “Eric, we're gonna have to start a little late.” Somebody had broken into the school overnight and smeared human shit on the walls of her classroom. So, she and I. Cleaned off the walls of the classroom while the kids sat there and watched us.

And then I began my inept education impulse. That was a stupid activity to have kids make little drawings on white paper plates of their superhero, and then hold it up and make a stance and make a statement. And I was inept, but what I noticed was this one little kid in the classroom. The kid that other kids had been bullying, he wanted to go first.

And I, I didn't want him to go first, even incompetent that I was, I knew that maybe wasn't a great idea. But anyway, he jumped right in and he put his mask on his face and he took his stance and he yelled out the avenger and the bullies in the classroom that had been picking on him throughout the whole period actually physically recoiled and went, “Whoa.”

And to actually see this sort of innate artistic statement coming out of this little kid and the bullies physically reacting in a way that disrupted the power dynamics in the classroom that actually changed the way the bullies related to the kid. I saw more power of art in that moment, and I felt it in the gut that I wanted that instead of cranking out the same a show eight times a week on Broadway.

So that's where it began. And then the pursuit of. What else can this do? And like, how else can you activate it? And so, the projects over 45 years have been no longer aimed at getting poor, innocent nine-year old’s to prepare for a fancy show, but to actually discover the breadth of positive impact, some of which includes preparing people for experience of works of art, but the majority of which now my passion is.

Yeah. Well, how do you foster wellness in a community? How do you create a thriving community? How do you actually change behaviors and understandings around climate crisis response? Uh, that's where my learning edge is at this point.

So, here's the question. You thought the path that you were going on, was this the, the high art the path? But how did you come into the arts at all as a kid, where did that come from?

And I had a line about giving it to someone, and I can vividly remember the walk onto the stage, the lights, the kind of heightened aliveness that I felt. And so, attending theater was a regular part of my youth, as were other artistic. endeavors. So, this kind of channel, my personal passion became acting Shakespeare and then wanted to follow that.

In fact, I had a group of friends when I first came back to New York we called ourselves the Art Police. We really believed our job was to defend the honor of the high arts and attack the perpetrators of mediocrity and commercialism. And that was my start. And I thought that was gonna be my journey. That I was gonna be the, the American who rediscovered the relevant potency of Shakespeare for a new generation. until I discovered the, the life of a working actor, it actually isn't built around that.

EB [00:12:03] Yeah. That notion of my kind of coming at life with fervor. Uh, in ninth grade, as a part of some course I took a personality test and that turned out to be my number one personality characteristic. And then, in college psychology, first year, I took a personality test and that came out to be my number one personality characteristic.

So somehow, I've got this like fervor as the way I enter the world, but it has, channeled in different directions. And the fervor that took over is the power of people's innate artistry that, that was where flow experience, that was the most important thing in my life, uh, came up for me. So, I wanted to keep going there and I noticed how much good it started to bring into other people's lives and into the world when you could set up opportunities for others to enter into flow experience

BC [00:14:24] Well actually that's a beautiful thing is to say in the world, “Here I am. I do a thing that I'm in love with.” And it sounds like if there's, uh, threads of that evangelical sense in you, it's to spread that,

So, I did hundreds, and hundreds of performances of The Gospel of Mark told us a story on a bare stage, many of them in churches and many with evangelical audiences, but also with ordinary theatrical audiences. And to actually find the religious fervor behind that story without particular attachment to the, the religious extensions of that story. But finding the, of deep resonance in a spiritual story.

I kind of search for that in all my work. And the way in which I'm a prick is I'll leave work that doesn't have it, or I will leave a project that has lost it. I'm not good for the long run in just grinding it out, uh, because I have the privilege to make choices to live where to me aliveness is hot.

You just quoted yourself and I'm gonna finish out that quote about the water table. you wrote.

“Access to the water table of humanness that the arts provide slakes the thirst that drives much of our social madness. The connection through the arts adds essential nutrients to the medium in which we grow.”

Could you talk a little bit more about that?

That is where the opportunity for real transformative impact from the arts lives, and it's so obviously provides an aliveness. When you are working with people who are reconnecting to that water table in themselves, when they're making stuff they care about, and sometimes they make stuff they care about in arts media. And that's exciting because it's particularly eloquent, but a lot of times they're making stuff they care about in figuring out how to solve a community challenge.

And there's the same freaking aligned aliveness in their discovery of agency and creative solutions for a community challenge as there is in making something that expresses the complexity of sad music. So, I'm promiscuous in where I want to be in contact with it cuz I just want to be in contact with it everywhere and in everything I do, and in my friends, and in what I read.

So, it’s a great privilege to be able to have life, provide enough money to keep you going while that's your drive. But that has been the privilege I've been able to live.

EB [00:19:08] Yeah. You know, I don't use the word art much anymore, because of all its associations. The phrase I tend to use is make stuff you care about. Um, that is working with young people who tend to be compliant. We have conditioned them into compliance in so many cases, or at least in major parts of their lives where we interact with them.

And the antidote to too much compliance is making stuff you care about. And they're really good at doing it when we're not looking and secretly underneath their compliance. And I want to give that burning oxygen. And I want to give it oxygen and guidance to go places where self-expression is one of the channels, but there's a whole lot of shit in this world that needs some improvement and I want to feed it in that direction too so they can find the, the sense of creative satisfaction in making something they care about that makes the world better.

And yes, expressing themselves in various media here, I want to be the agent of artistic experience. Uh, in fact, if that's, I think the real job title of teaching artists and community artists, if I were going to make 'em take their little business cards out and scratch out whatever title they've got there, we've all got that same title, which is Agents of Artistic Experience because that's the power that we all have within us, the experiential. potency of our own potential.

EB [00:21:46] Beautiful, you know, the powerful arts institutions of the world love teaching artists as guides to their foreign land is like, you know, those teaching artists, we can deploy them to make kids love opera. So, let's send them on out there, especially since arts are so absent in school.

Let's go send out, the ambassador core. And that still exists, and it still has value and is to be respected, but what matters is serving to activate this potential in all people. That is so diabolically squelched by our commercial culture, by our systemization of raising young people that has so little respect for that creative potential.

Yeah, we'd love to let kids play and all that, but early on we are really channeling them into compliance and effective delivery of what the culture needs, and teaching artists are. This. Quietly radical force. I'm sometimes surprised they let us into those school buildings because when we're doing our job, we are doing something that is actually subversive to compliance and to the priorities of a school system.

We've learned how to accommodate it effectively enough that it doesn't create a mess most of the time, but it is inherently subversive. And on some level, those systems actually want kids to have some aliveness. The parents care about that, the community cares about it, and we can provide a channel for it.

And just one extra point, uh, as the way you were framing the commodification of the arts, one of the ways I, I like to frame that is that. The US in particular, and arts industries in particular, love the nouns of art. I mean, America is noun central in the known universe. You know, we want the things, and we sell the shows.

And that teaching artists are about the verbs of art; the things artists do when they make those nouns. And that then kind of have a different life after the noun is made. And the verbs people make throughout their lives whenever they artistically engage to make something they care about. And that is the zone of the teaching artist; to activate those nouns guide those verbs into, challenges and projects that are satisfying and impactful in the world. So, teaching artists are masters of the verbs of art while the institutions are masters of the nouns.

EB [00:25:13] Yeah.

And the amazing thing about the culture of prison is, is that the minute people understand that you understand that it's a long-haul prospect, well, they know, long haul really well, you know, and so they go, “Okay, this is not just a room I'm gonna hang out in and maybe, hide my dope in the corner, or, get to see a female teacher, but actually, oh, this is part of the long haul. You know, we're doing time here.”

Number one is I call the law of eighty percent. Eighty percent of what you teach is who you are. And if one can be one's authentic artist self, as you were just describing, there is a kind of credibility and power to radiating being an artist, seeing like an artist, making connections like an artist that wide awakeness that draws others into their own experience of that, that is our greatest working tool.

And then the second working tool is, we're really good at multiple kinds of pleasure. The, you know, those guys you described, they're thinking about the pleasure when they have a bestselling song and we can introduce the pleasures of process, and we're good at introducing them small so that they develop a taste for something they hadn't been thinking about.

And it starts to build up this yearning to really go, an intrinsic motivation to pursue. And it's because of the pleasures that we've introduced and opened up so that they maybe weren't familiar pleasures, but they're, they're rich and they get better when you keep, keep doing more of it. And that's why it works even in a setting as non-conducive as, you know, prison structures

Part Three, The Power of Story

[00:28:59] News Person: Eric, we have just two minutes left. So, could you wrap up this interview for us by giving us a very quick and clear distinction between art and entertainment?

So, I had two minutes of meaningless blather pouring outta me, after which I said, never again will that happen? What is the difference? And what I finally came up with is this, there is no opposition between art and entertainment. Please, God, the entertainment, whatever our reaction of laughing, getting excited, crying because it's sad happens within what we already know.

Underneath those reactions is this confirmation of the way you think the world is. And that feels great to have highly skilled people go to extraordinary lengths to confirm my sense of the world, and the distinction is that art, the artistic experience happens outside of what we already know. That is the artistic experience.

This expansion of our sense of the way the world is or might be, that connecting from what we know to something beyond our knowing, is the artistic work. And here's getting back to your point, that's the same definition as learning, making a personal connection beyond what you know to something new. I think the words art education is a redundant phrase.

Mm-hmm.

I think it is the actual same set of human verbs and experiences teaching artist is, the same word said twice.

BC [00:31:19] Yeah, I agree. and you just sparked a memory, the idea of building on what you know to get where you need to go. It's a prevalent, creative strategy that I see a lot, introducing new ideas, new questions, challenging assumptions, using artworks, songs, poems, plays, all that appear so commonplace as to seem benign.

It's something I see a lot with artists in resistance work in extremely repressive situations. It's really an old strategy, taking something that's extremely familiar: a myth, a fairytale, a folk song, a melodrama form that everybody recognizes and then hitching a right on that story to bring new clarity or awareness or speaking out loud about something everybody knows, but can't say directly in public.

Grândola Vila Morena

Grândola, vila morena,

Terra da fraternidade:

O povo é quem mais ordena

Dentro de ti, ó cidade!

Dentro de ti, ó cidade

O povo é quem mais ordena,

Terra da fraternidade:

Grândola, vila morena!

Em cada esquina um amigo,

Em cada rosto igualdade;

Grândola, vila morena,

Terra da fraternidade!

Terra da fraternidade,

Grândola, vila morena:

Em cada rosto igualdade...

O povo é quem mais ordena!

À sombra duma azinheira

Que já não sabia a idade,

Jurei ter por companheira,

Grândola, a tua vontade!

Grândola, a tua vontade

Jurei ter por companheira,

À sombra duma azinheira

Que já não sabia a idade!

Grândola, swarthy village,

Land of brotherhood:

The people are the ones who hold the greatest power

Within your walls, oh city!

Within your walls, oh city

The people are the ones who hold the greatest power,

Land of brotherhood:

Grândola, swarthy village!

In every street corner, a friend,

On every face, equality;

Grândola, swarthy village,

Land of brotherhood!

Land of brotherhood:

Grândola, swarthy village!:

On every face, equality...

15The people are the ones who hold the greatest power!

Under a holly oak's shadow

That had even forgotten its age,

I swore that I would have as my companion, Grândola, your very own will!

Grândola, your very own will

I swore that I would have as my companion, Under a holly oak's shadow

That had even forgotten its age!

But embedded. Were references and symbols of resistance, and it became a hidden and plain-sight instrument of protest and amazingly triggered the downfall of the dictatorship when it was broadcast on the radio to signal the start of what became known as the Carnation Revolution.

Another really interesting example in a completely different context is the global social soaps movement, where issues like elder abuse, HIV, prevention, literacy, family planning, and women's rights have been addressed in soap operas that have become extremely popular and produced real changes in awareness and behavior in South Asia and South America.

Number one is the teaching artist term, enabling constraints. That if you use a known story structure, such as you were describing, and there's a reason Jung and Joseph Campbell were really big features in my thirties, learning about those elemental structures, the 14 great plot lines, the stories that everyone resonates with

Um, if you use those enabling constraints that provide an entry with that familiarity you get to take that journey to a new place where, people can then travel to something that's outside there, into the art zone where they can connect to the way the world could possibly be.

So, it is the use of the story, and its potency within the human psyche. Uh, psychologists tell us there are two main ways human beings make meaning. One is narrative alignment, and the second is associative connection. It's when we make a personal connection from something we know to something new we're encountering.

Both of those are contained in the story. No wonder it's the tools humans have used. The other way that I find in addition to enabling constraints that uh, I find I use the story framework is actually to reframe a conversation that people think about. I mean, even they think about arts education as they've got the whole story of it down.

They've got opinions, they've got judgments, they've got structures that hold them in place. And if you want to have an advocacy conversation about that, you just lost. If you have the conversation within that frame, don't even bother to have it because it's not going anywhere. But can you reframe it? Can you open up a different plot line for considering something about arts education and the new possibility arises because people engage with some present-ness and with some discovery and consequently some learning.

So, I find much of my work in finding ways to advance the things I'm passionate about is reframing what the issues are so that we can have genuine exchange and not just political positioning.

And I said, what do you mean? He said, look, there will come a time in the near future. When separating a child from active, ongoing participation in artmaking will be considered child abuse. And it will not be an argument. It will just be the same as, you know, did you eat lunch? Did you get a good breakfast? Have you had a little exercise? You know, are you, are you learning to read, All of those things. He was saying, everything I know from my little corner of the research world basically says, you do this, you get this, you don't do this, you get this. And it's not a complicated story.

And speaking of stories, I would like to invite you to open up your Rolodex of available stories and pull out a card and tell a story that personifies what you're up to and where you think what you did really mattered, and you could point to it and say, yeah, that's my aspiration in the world.

Do you have a story like that

You know, the waste of time, the arts are fluff, and we need STEM subjects, and kids need the discipline to learn how to read and all that stuff. And I stood there and took it. And while he was talking, I was thinking,

“Is there anything possible here? Is there any aliveness in the deadness I am hearing? Is there any entry point? Is there any point in standing here and going through this drill, all of us who care about these issues face all the time?”

And I remember. I stopped him and I said, “Can I ask you a question? Do you think the kids in Illinois deserve a highly engaging school day?” And he looked at me with this look of like, this is a trap. Like no good can come from answering this question. But I encouraged him. I said, “Can you just kind of go with me for a minute here?” And he thought about it and figured out he wasn't gonna get in big trouble if he agreed.

And he said, “Yes, I think there's a kind of high engagement, would be a good thing to have for kids.” I said, “Great, you and I agree.” I said, “Do you think there might be some correlation between high engagement and increased learning results and learning better.” And again, the look of maybe this is a trap, but he agreed with me that, you know, a kid who's actively involved and a kid who's learning, there's probably a direct relationship.

We agreed again, and then I said, "Do you know what the research says about what kids find engaging?" He didn't. And I was able to start to open up, a slight empathy for the life of a kid and his remembering what learning felt like way back when. And I can't say there was a Saul of Tarsus conversion at that cocktail party, but I can say we had an actual conversation about human things that included stuff that was important to him, stuff that was important to me, stuff that's important for making a good community. And that was a moment when I learned that framing the truth with a genuine intent has a disruptive power that can be manifested in amazing street theater or amazing creative activism but in a small act of just reframing and entrenched stuck positioning.

And I thought, wow, that's art in small, that little shift that arose in me in that advocacy opportunity, um, that is art applied. to non-art purpose, but to social change,

EB [00:42:09] Right?

[00:42:23] Mm.

And how does the ancient practice of guest-host actually help with that? And one of the things I learned in my study is that guesting, and hosting are not singular roles. They are a part of each other. So, a good guest can help a host, host better. And a good host can help a guest guest better.

And in many ways, that's what you were personifying. You were doing your darnedest to go, "Okay, is there a place where this person can feel safe enough to engage in a conversation Where, as a human, particularly thinking back to his own experience as a learning human, that he can be honest with you and maybe build a small bridge back and forth between the two of you."

Opportunities hear the unspoken needs of one another. That quote of Audre Lord’s always guides me, which is, “We can hear one another into being.” And I think artists' capacity to hear deeply and beyond what's just literally presented is one of the gifts that we bring when we're in live contact with people.

It's part of the law of 80%. People are shocked into awakeness when they are heard and not just heard for the literal text, but heard for what is aching to come out of them. And good artists in direct exchange can do that. And what you were describing in the host-guest dynamic becomes the co-learning, the co-creation of events that have more meaning than their separate parts.

If you've reached the age of 35 and you're still doing your your gig, whatever it is, painting, drawing, acting, you've garnered an enormous amount of humility. You know, in order to engage, particularly in the confrontive, conflict-ridden world that we live in right now, to be able to lead with assertive humility. You know, a kind of healing power that isn't about shrinking and retreating, but in fact, is being, once again, guest-host that that calls forth better angels. If you can, do it, it doesn't always work. But that humility just seems to me to be such an important aspect of that.

Maybe the favorite workshop I ever got to lead was spending one week with a group of teachers, and their goal was to write one sentence. And we spent the whole week looking at what sentences can do and like looking at. , other sentences people had written, and looking at all the stuff we wanted to bring to the sentence. And how do you have the form of the sentence model, the meaning of the sentence? It was some of the most satisfying artistic work I'd ever done, but you tell somebody about it, and it's a pretty humble ambition for a week of your life.

Part Four: El Sistema

So, I'm gonna switch channels here slightly to your work with El Sistema and how that personifies some of what we've been talking about here. I think when. People envision a teaching artist, and they see an artist in a classroom with students in a school or community center teaching art or music or theater, usually as an adjunct to their quote, normal education.

Could you talk a bit about that?

And I went as a skeptic. It sounded a little too like a cult. There was a little bit too much, you know, feet of the saint about Jose Antonio Abreu. So, I went not, not open. And in the first 10 minutes of my experience in the first Nucleo, the learning center I went to, I recognized I was seeing an arts education accomplishment of an order so far beyond anything I had ever imagined that I was reoriented toward what's possible in the world.

That you could have a million young people, mostly kids in economic need, but not entirely, pouring everything they had into collective music-making to accomplish beauty more powerfully than they ever had before, and see it have an impact on the trajectory of their lives. So, it made me believe that music for social change was not some effortful, uh, uh, machination of a marketing genius in a western country, but it was an explosion of human passion in a Latin American country that was spreading through Latin America.

And I wanted to be a part of spreading it beyond Latin America and have been for 15 years. Discovering again, in a humbling way, how very much harder it is to create those environments without a surrounding culture that holds it in a particular way. So, lots of effort involved, but a lot of hopefulness that, in fact, the sheer potency of humans making beauty together because it's the most important thing in the world for them, actually inverts Maslow's pyramid. That, in fact, those kids there and in all the other continents I've seen this work, the kids of hard poverty are actually self-actualizing before they're finding safety and enough food, and that finding self-actualization is accelerating their process to achieve survival needs.

EB [00:52:31] To be honest, I would say the honeymoon period of music for social change programs that exploded around the world, now in 68 countries, something like that. The explosion has somewhat plateaued.

EB [00:52:49] As they've encountered financial sustainability issues where they've really struggled is teachers who come out of a conservatory pipeline can deliver musical results, but don't really know how to open wider to the holistic development of the young people in that ensemble.

So, I would say it's completed its first phase. It's in a transition toward discovering its next phase. And one of the projects I'm most excited about in my own work is an organization based in Europe called the Academy for Impact Through Music, that has had the opportunity to rethink the pedagogy that people who know from the conservatory pipeline how to get musical results, open up the pedagogy so they can have effective, continual development in social results as well.

So, I'm a little hopeful that over the next 10 years, there is a new chapter of music for social change around the world. Uh, it's already having remarkable, if quiet, results in almost every program around the world. Uh, high school graduation rates go from modest numbers to a hundred percent. Kids are not just becoming musicians as a result of this work. They're becoming self-actualized in a way. So, I'm hopeful, but I would say the field, after its global explosion, is looking to find its next foot.

So, here’s a provocative question. What are you excited about right now most? What's sparking you?

We'd have people from 25, 26 countries, and since 2018, we, we got enough money to hire a full-time staff person, and it started to grow. And the excitement of an international conversation where the diversity of perspectives is not just respected but actually celebrated as an intoxicant to find language that's shared across cultures and to connect in work across cultures.

And the most exciting piece of that is two years ago, we launched an initiative of impact on climate crisis response, and we've been able to commission teaching artists community projects that go beyond what the arts normally get to do regarding the climate. We're not just having communities make artworks about environmental themes, or we're not just translating scientific information into more compelling expression.

We're actually. At the ground level, through creative making stuff, changing the way people understand climate, changing their sense of agency to do something about it, and they're starting to move on local policy and environmental law as a result of it. So, to see the full muscularization of teaching artistry around this most prominent crisis of our time it's so exciting.

BC [00:57:04] So, a good ride. Sounds like a good place to wrap it up here. I'll finish with a regular final question. So, tell me, three creative works that you've encountered That have turned you on.

And that particular project, uh, resonates for me as what's possible for the arts to serve as a true catalyst for solutions in real-world ways, using what we knew creatively in terms of, uh, prompting experimentation and guiding experimentation, but letting the experimentation. Be the power, the transformative power.

So that's a beauty. A couple others.

Uh, I have been very influenced by Elaine Scarry wrote about beauty, and her philosophical perspectives on what beauty is and what it does in the world had a gigantic influence on me. She writes about the muscularity of beauty and about the smallness of beauty. Like what it does, this, this human thing that when you make something beautiful, even if it's just a sentence or a story, it begets more beauty. And watching that kind of human thing work around the world, noticing it in myself and in people I work with, uh, that itself has had a, a really long-lasting impulse on me, uh, that I read from years and years ago.

And then, uh, the one other thing, it's not exactly something I can share, but it's had a gigantic influence on me, which is every year I take a retreat in the wilderness. I go to a, a wilderness place that is so remote. It's like I have to hike there and it's miles of, of, uh, bushwhacking. So I won't see any humans. And I spend a week inside a hundred foot circle. With no books, no paper, nothing that can distract me from doing nothing for a week in nature every year.

And I've done this for some 20 something years in a row, and that is the center of my year. That listening to the rhythms of nature and getting out of my own thinking patterns and product productivity impulses, that's where the ideas about the work I wanna bring into the world come clear. And that's where the kind of one or two truths that will drive those ideas come into my gut.

And so, I guess the, the answer to your question is the recognition of the importance of finding a really quiet place. On a, on a regular basis in one's professional life so that the dust can settle, and the bigger truths can be become freshly visible to us.

EB [01:02:27] Yeah.

And the other assumption is that it will be connected to, what you go back to,

BC [01:02:44] the last one is the permission, which is the humility of knowing you don't always know what wisdom is available to you until you make space for it and listen. You recognize that you are not at the center of a universe of your own making, and you give yourself permission to learn from it. To encounter the flow. Which can be both celebratory and hard.

EB [01:03:54] And thank you for creating a platform where earnest aspirations like this can be shared with the community

Change the Story Change / The World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape blossom up regularly from the brilliant musical garden attended by Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration rises up from the ever-present spirit of UQ. 2 35. Until next time.

Stay well, do good. And spread the good word. And one last note. This episode has been 100% human.