This past weekend, I and a group of fellow classicists voyaged to Ann Arbor for a research trip and chose a local Indian restaurant for lunch. After the meal, it took us more than a little concentration to gather our long-unused math skills and evenly divide the check, give money to the right person, and leave a decent tip.
Math is one of those skills I learned in high school that stays fresh and useful because I use it daily in everyday life. Keeping up with the arts is easy when regular orchestra and band concerts or school plays are readily available. However, outside an educational environment like high school or college, it takes purposeful investment and time. More than an occasional arithmetic sum scribbled on a dessert napkin, certainly.
This is why arts in the community is so crucial.
Without communal access to arts and individual initiative, the arts can phase almost entirely out of the life of the average person. Continued community support for the arts is necessary for keeping these ideas and understanding alive.
The summer of ‘12, I interned at the Wells Fargo Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, Calif., working and covering a variety of arts programs and performances as diverse as visiting performing artists, art, music, and theatre camps for children. Such productions and camps allow both adults and children to have anything from their first experience with an instrument or in the theatre, a return trip to try it again, or the pursuit of a passion for that art.
Local art shows, theater productions, camps, and symphonies like these offer more than a chance for experience and exposure to beauty and culture –– they offer an amazing chance to take part in them and learn to love them by personal experience, or to learn that the audience is the ideal place.
The Sauk Theatre in Jonesville, Mich., put on a production of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” this past week, which featured local actors and attracted an audience from both Jonesville and the surrounding area. Like in a collegiate environment, productions such as these unite the community and educate it as a whole by presenting a place for people to get involved and become exposed to local artistic effort.
Such exposure in the community does more than increase the knowledge of the select few involved –– it promotes interest in all the various art forms that surround. A theatre production points to a pit orchestra, that to a symphony. An art show allows creative minds to share their works and encourages them to continue to paint, draw, sculpt, and to share those abilities with others.
The cliché is that often local sports tie together a community, but the arts promote a pursuit of beauty not based on competition or negativity so much as a communal working together to succeed and healthy competition in order to improve.
In my home town, Sebastopol, Calif., we have a local artist, Patrick Amiot, who creates intricate art pieces dubbed “junk sculptures.” His art pieces have become local (and, more recently, nationally commissioned) landmarks, and his success and fame inspires aspiring artists from all around.
The prevalence of the arts and the effort of the community to take part in, support, and enjoy the arts increases and improves them, which in turn teaches the whole of society to appreciate and understand beauty.
It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a community to nurture the arts. To quote Professor of Music Renee Clark, “Art doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” it must be cultured, influenced by a community that contains and reflects culture.
