1. On the Education of Artists and the Arts in our Society.
-Bruce Cohen, MFA
“Are you one of those…?”
Recently, in the scope of some casual conversation, I was asked if I was one of “those theatre
types." When I begged some clarification the response was, "Well, you know, you theatre people
are birds of a feather." The metaphor struck me as funny but also apropos. To the mind outside
of theatre we are often sort of bird-like. We are consigned as flighty, feather-brained and
ultimately unserious. And, arguably, we do gravitate together perpetuating a sort of exclusivity; a
flock. The metaphor, funny or not, is apt. And that question belied a significant lack on the part
of us theatre types when you examine the motivation behind it. To our neighbors who don't
consider themselves “artsy” (actually, an abbreviated version of the term this person used to help
clarify), we do seem like outliers. The very nice person that asked me this question was really
searching for some common denominator, some avenue of familiarity.
At the time I was working on one of those wonderfully vague requests to deliver a talk to a group
about a ‘current trend’ in theatre. Considering the ocean of choice that this cue presents I was
drawn repeatedly to a dictum from my early years as a graduate student researcher, that being
“Bring something entirely new to the field.” I began brainstorming: virtual reality, multimedia
interactivity, immersive aesthetic distance. I could focus on what Cirque du Soleil does. I could
corroborate what the video game aesthetic has done to live performance. I could reinforce the
transitory power of social media communication and concept a production of Hamlet where
Horatio live “tweets” the whole show in medias res. And, as fun as all this brainstorming was, it
occurred to me that this train of thought was leading further and further away from some
commonality with that nice person who pictured me and my “artsy” ilk as different. Theatre (and
us theatre folk) so often lead with device that gimmickry is usually the result. Live “tweeting” a
production in process is gimmick. When it truly boils down, multimedia, immersive performance
and virtual reality are also gimmicks. We get caught up in our cleverness and the result may well
be standing ovations, but also a real depreciation of the tangible value of our craft to society at
large. And when it comes time to kick someone off the proverbial island, the tribe is going to
keep the engineer and surgeon and set the “artsy” afloat. In this regard the question, “are you one
of those…?” is a delimiter of utility. One may as well ask, of what use are the “artsy” to society
and the greater good? Are you one of “those” or are you one of us?
Utility is the idea that brought me back to a current trend I would highlight and pursue, and it
would be the business world's creeping realization that creative capital (in the form of research
and development) has become the missing piece of the economic spur we have all been looking
for to shepherd us out of this perennial downturn. We artsy folk are well positioned to address
this need. Much attention has been paid to the fear of America's fading strength in the sciences
and technologies. Reinvestment and throttled up emphasis on those STEM fields have become
the education clarion call in legislatures across the country.

2. They tell us we must bring our students up to competitive levels in math and science. How in the
world can we be a superpower if the up and coming generations present so poorly in these
fundamental areas? I don't argue this. Americans do need better preparation in the STEM fields.
However, as the ongoing debate about primary and secondary education standards drags on. As
we collectively wring hands about No Child Left Behind and Common Core and whatever
modality might be next; the sad consequence has been a deficit and depreciation of critical and
abstract thought in favor of the concrete. Education’s traditional bastions of higher-order reason,
music and art, and certainly theatre have vanished from schools across the country. Our
disciplines have been, and are being, kicked off the island. Stressed and time-strapped teachers
wrestle with benchmark testing that emphasizes lower order thinking and recitation while fears
of funding cuts and job eliminations based on these results have heightened their understandable
paranoia.
I have taught the results of this policy shift for well over a decade. The majority of my recent
students have been freshmen and sophomores. I can say, with very little variation, that while
their test-taking skills are often excellent; their ability to operate on those upper levels of
Bloom's taxonomy (synthesis, analysis, and so on) is not. What is even more troubling, in recent
years I have noticed a genuine fear and discomfort with thinking abstractly. It is as if their pre-
collegiate training has inured them to be intellectually risk-averse. So, instead of developing and
refining their hunger to create, to fly with their imagination, and to challenge old orthodoxies; we
are instead laboring to coax these students to simply think outside of a doctrinaire box. And,
frankly, academe must aim higher than educating box-openers. We must develop and encourage
orthodoxy challengers and imagination flyers.
Over on the commercial side of town, trends are changing. Industry, once so ready to offshore
manufacturing and import much of their R&D brain trust, has slowly but surely been
repatriating. Skilled labor recruitment is, once again, tapping the domestic work force. But,
something essential is still lacking. Something, I would argue, that Americans have historically
excelled at but has received short shrift in recent generations; entrepreneurial creativity. Our
educational system is not creative-friendly, but it needs to be. Business realizes this and our
economy needs this going forward. Politicians and bureaucracies have yet to catch up, but they
will (although glacially). Most governmental change moves at a snail's pace when it comes to
progressive legislation, especially in education. I expect that waiting for the politicians to
recognize this shift in the wind and cast their attention toward encouraging creativity will find us
grey-haired, long-toothed, and left further behind.
Regardless of this institutional entropy, the numbers reinforcing change are already there. The
importance of arts programming is borne out by a recent report by the U.S. Bureau of Economic
Analysis (BEA) and the National Endowment for the Arts. In the public release (dated December
2013), the BEA declared that the arts and culture sector contributed $504 billion to the nation’s
annual gross domestic product in FY’11. This amounts to 3.2% of overall GDP which actually
trumps the U.S. travel and tourism industry contribution of 2.8%. The report goes on to detail
that gross output for the entire arts and culture sector amounted to $916 billion in the same
period.

3. There were eight leading contributors to this $916 billion and advertising was first. It accounted
for just over $199 billion. Arts education, however, is in second place, contributing $103,960
billion to the national economy. Arts education contributed more than radio, movies or
cable/satellite television. The "Creative Economy", “Creative Industries” and “Cultural
Economy” are all phrases seeing recent popularity as ways of defining and recognizing the
business potential and fiscal validity of the work of ideas. As the UK Government Department
for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) defines it; the “Creative Industries” are:
"those industries which have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which
have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of
intellectual property" (DCMS 2001, p. 04)
And there is the notion that in the great rush to shore up competence in STEM education we risk
losing sight of creativity, and by extension innovation. I would offer instead, that what we risk
losing sight of is the marvelous potential of cross-pollination from the creative side. Leaders of
business and industry have been calling for more attention and focus on the creative degree fields
of the Arts and Humanities side of higher education. Those much maligned and pitiably
underfunded areas like poetry, dance, sculpture or drama. This is because they understand; the
next big thing, the next blockbusting technology, the next cultural Phenom will come from a
creative and innovative thinker. These are the thinkers that arts education produces.
Shifts toward meeting this need have been happening. A few years ago I attended a theatrical
production at Midwestern State University (MSU). I was on hand as a respondent for the
Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival and considered the production one of the
best, if not the best show I responded to all year (and there were many that season). What made
that show special and laudable was cross-pollination. The title of the play is Bandersnatch. It
was an original work, co-authored and directed by Brandon Smith, a faculty member at MSU
and based on Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky. Taken alone, the script is solid, funny, and
workmanlike. It is by no means special in and of itself. But the wonder of this production, what I
and many others found captivating was the result of an unusual and unexpected collaboration.
Smith sought out a partnership with MSU's McCoy School of Engineering to create the fanciful,
nonsensical creatures that inhabit Carroll's work. Engineering students collaborated on designs
for mechanized, fully articulated and actor-wearable interpretations of the Jub Jub Bird and an
eight foot tall frumuous Bandersnatch, among others. Smith has mentioned drawing his
inspiration from the Handspring Puppet Co., a group that won several Tony Awards for War
Horse. The similarity is certainly present. The device of the thing is there and the gimmick is
quite good (as it is in War Horse). But that MSU production was more than gimmick. It was
creatively and entrepreneur-ally collaborative. It brought those seemingly so disparate STEM
and artsy folks together.

4. Electrical and structural engineers who might never have entertained that sort of application for
their designs, dancers, and actors who developed new movement vocabularies in order to bring
these constructions to life and even better than all of this, a spirit of partnership and collegiality
between students who, without this, might have remained ignorant of the others. Usually
balkanized in their traditionally defined roles and departments, a play allowed for common
denominators and avenues of familiarity and resulted in something that was not at all feather-
brained or unserious. It allowed tangible, universally appreciable innovation.
The bean counters and boards of education may ask how we might assess the academic success
of a project like Bandersnatch? How might we define a rubric to distill and apply these
techniques across institutions? How can we separate the creative, experiential wonderfulness that
seems so abstract and translate it into hard numbers and concrete judgments for the legislature to
consider? I am as frustrated with this outcomes inevitability as any other artsy person is. But
even in the seeming qualitative desert of assessment, things are yet changing. I’ve noticed a trend
in terminology in recent assessment trainings. The institutional verbiage being promulgated now
includes phrases like “Learner-Centered” approaches to instruction and reinforces a “Professor
as Facilitator” model. We are now being called to think in terms of an environmental learning
approach and to create an atmosphere where the student can self-determine their path toward
understanding and to be less canonic and dictatorial as a professor.
This is not new in education writ large. Lev Vygotsky’s Zones of Proximal Development posits
the value of students’ vicarious learning over the hierarchy of traditional lecture. Maria
Montessori’s very successful approach to primary education places the student within an option-
rich environment where a child is free to self-direct their intellectual searching while the teacher
acts as coach. Traditionalist university faculty may shake their heads at this shift. After all, it has
been comparatively simple to benchmark learning outcomes and lecture/test to those benchmarks
if the professor establishes both. Allowing the student to set their course and then attempting to
assess a set outcome presents much more challenge. It is much like hitting a moving target.
However challenging, it does work well with other age-cohorts. And it does seem to be the trend.
I say the trend is good. It is good because the learner-centric approach eschews boundaries in
favor of flexibility. I say it is good because it values the abstract over the concrete. I say it is
good because, frankly, it is part and parcel of how arts education (and theatre training
specifically) has been operating all along. Cross-pollination between traditionally separate
disciplines and student-centered classroom approaches encourages innovation and strengthens
learning. Finding opportunities to connect the abstract and the concrete, to repatriate the “artsy”
people back into the general population, does indeed result in entrepreneurial creativity.
I’ve read a number of articles recently that lament the decline of the Arts and Humanities in
education and larger society. In a way, this type of editorial has become quiet hip. It seems a
response to that wave of concern about STEM. And this would be understandable. After all, the
squeaky wheel of STEM anxiety certainly attracted a good deal of grease. Wouldn’t it follow
that weaknesses in Arts and Humanities education will also draw concern and ameliorative
response? However, there is a certain tone to this flood of obituary-literature that I find less than
helpful to the cause. There is an overlying patina of ‘poor-me’ to genre.

5. The take-away is, all too often, that the Arts and Humanities must be saved because of some
ephemeral specialness. And that specialness is not definable or universally applicable because it
is, well, ephemeral and abstract and ultimately very individual. The arts enrich our spirits. The
humanities broaden our world-view. These are surely valid statements but when the rubber hits
the road, the sciences have empirical utility in their corner. The arts and humanities do not.
Arguments for STEM reforms result in job-training programs and arguments for the arts and
humanities result in inspirational posters and internet memes. The difference here, I would offer,
is clarity of utility. It is pretty simple to express the societal value of science, technology,
engineering and math education. It is not so with the arts and humanities which are so often
subject to the zeitgeist and transitory in effect. I also believe that their immediate worth can be
best measured on an individual basis. However, I hold that their universal value is more
profound and necessary than science, technology, engineering and math. I believe this because it
is through exposure to and training in the arts and humanities that thinkers become critical. It is
by wrestling with the difficult work of abstract concept and counter-intuitive argument that
minds develop strategies of reason and facets of cognition. STEM training may strengthen the
useful brain but arts and humanities training will keep our minds supple and flexible by
challenging parameters. And, if we consider this cognitive flexibility on a larger societal level,
then the utility of an arts and humanities focus becomes much clearer. Where emphasis on
STEM will give us a population with practical skill; emphasis on the arts and humanities will
ground the use of those skills in a wise and flexible consciousness.
One of my favorite books written about the arts (and also humanities) is Robert Edmond Jones'
The Dramatic Imagination. Jones was a scenic, lighting, and costume designer and is routinely
heralded as the father of the modern American design movement. Among other things, The
Dramatic Imagination is a cautionary polemic. Jones recognized and was frustrated by the
tendency of theatre artists to focus inward, to gaze at our own navels, and dig around in our own
emotional viscera. Jones was responding to the new theatre of psychological realism so heavily
influenced by Stanislavsky, Strasberg and Freud. Where many others saw a captivating
expansion of the inner universe of individuality and internal motivations, Jones instead saw a
narrowing. Jones believed that although the inward focus may afford a more complex
understanding of the self, it also carries the tendency to exclude our place in the greater whole of
society. Indeed, Jones was championing a return to theatre's pre-classical roots as a communal
ritual, a celebration, not of the self, but of society. In the book, he writes:
Nothing can stop progress in the American theatre except the workers themselves. To
them I say: There are no limitations there except your own limitations. Lift it. Get the
personal you out of your work. Who cares about you? Get the wonder into it. Get your
dreams into it. Where are your dreams? (Jones, 9)
In calling for elevation of theatre to the realm of wonder and dream, Jones is also encouraging
universality and communion with our fellows. He saw in theatre, the expansive and necessary
power to connect with others. He believed it a misuse of this power, and a detriment to our
fellows, to turn inward too much. Turning inward will invariably lead others to ask if we are one
of “those?”

6. So, to any that might wonder if I am “one of those….” I would answer, yes and no. I am, as a
theater artist, a valuable and useful member of our society, and a challenging rebel. I am one of
those who raise the impolite questions. I am one of those who embrace uncomfortable
abstractions. I am one of those who debate the value of status quo. I am one of those who
recognize trends as positive progress to be embraced and pushed. I may seem different and
strange. I may seem like an outlier on the fringe of commonality. But, to be on the fringe still
presumes a definite connection to the whole. So, yes, I am one of those artsy types. But I’d offer
that it is the artsy types that exist as necessary change-agents in our society. I describe my
mission as an artsy type as similar to the speck of grit in an oyster. That grit is an irritant. But
consider the result of that irritation. The oyster reacts by surrounding, enveloping and embracing
that grit until what began as an irritant becomes a pearl. However, viewing that speck in the
oyster as an irritant is simply reductive perception. Try, instead, seeing that bit of grit as a
stimulant and agent of progress. What many may avoid as a simple conflict will, if allowed,
develop into a beautiful and lustrous pearl that is both oyster and grit; more lovely than either
individually and precious in combination.
Bruce Cohen, MFA