photo by Clemens Kalischer · Black Mountain College 1948, production of Ruse of the Medusa by Sati
Last night's conversation with Sophia after THE STRANGER and my experience today of the exhibition from Black Mountain College, NC at the Hamburger Bahnhof have inspired me to post for the first time (besides the pictures and artistic teams for the performances we've seen).
I asked you all on the first night why you were here. I asked the same of myself. I have kept asking. The answer changes. The answer always changes — with each performance, with each work of art, with each conversation. The answer should change. It's the questions that matter. What do I say before we start Global and often when I talk about a play I'm doing? It's all an experiment.
"Black Mountain is an experiment in education. It is an experiment in that its future form cannot be given in advance. It is an experiment in that it is in constant formation and re-formation. It is an experiment in that it is itself not so much an answer as a question." Albert Williams Levi (1947)
From 1933 until 1957 Black Mountain College gathered an extraordinary and influential faculty (including Merce Cunningham, Robert Motherwell, John Cage, Walter Gropius, Eric Bentley, Willem de Kooning, among many now notable others) with a goal to reshape, retool and revision American education using interdisciplinary and progressive methods. The students would go on to be just as influential (poet Jane Mayhall, artist Cy Twombly, director Arthur Penn, designer Deborah Sussman, etc.)
When I came to Rutgers I felt that what was being imagined by David Esbjornson was a reshaping, retooling and revisioning of conservatory arts higher education — a system of which I am a product, for good or for ill frankly. I started teaching at the university level at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU. There I was encouraged to innovate, expiate and deviate from the well-worn path, bring my professional self and treat the students as fellow scholars/artists and not children and charges. When I looked at all the photos of Black Mountain and the accompanying art created by so many I was stirred and excited again at the possibilities when two are more are gathered in the name of something greater than themselves.
Last night I got the sense of how much this trip is landing for each of you. I envisioned this whole experience (when I started it last year) as an experiment, one whose "future form could not be given in advance." You don't know the the place or performances in advance or the meaning you (we) will make of them. Too much context I fear here might lead you to static thought not imaginative play. There is a time for measured meaning and a time for meaning making. I could see deep meaning and kinship reflected in Sophia and her response to last night's conversation — theatre maker to theater maker, artist to artist, Portugal to the US. It was an inspiring discussion.
At the exhibition I looked for a long time at a photo of a discussion group, not in a classroom but around a tea table with empty dishes. Many in the photo would go on to shape visual art, music, dance, design and literature in the 20th century. The 21st century is actually still waiting to take shape. You game?
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