As I mentioned in an earlier post, I curled up in the roots of a great tree and heard Suzanne Carbonneau interview Rachel Maddow at Jacob's Pillow a few weeks ago. Afterwards, though, I kicked myself because I was too absorbed in listening to take intelligible notes. However, a few days later Debra Cash, one of Boston's most established dance writers, sent out some quotes from this talk on the Dance Action Network. Thanks to Mariclare Hulbert from the Pillow's Press office for transcribing Rachel's thoughts, granting permission to reprint these ideas, and sharing these photos with us.
"I know nothing about dance. I am a fan. I am a fan of dance and of Jacob's Pillow and a fan of people who know nothing about dance." - Rachel Maddow
"Sometimes we choose to serve our country in uniform, in war. Sometimes in elected office. And those are the ways of serving our country that I think we are trained to easily call heroic. Its also a service to your country, I think, to teach poetry in the prisons, to be an incredibly dedicated student of dance, to fight for funding music and arts education in the schools. A country without an expectation of minimal artistic literacy, without a basic structure by which the artists among us can be awakened and given the choic
e of following their talents and a way to get to be great at what they do, is a country that is not actually as a great as it could be. And a country without the capacity to nurture artistic greatness is not being a great country. It is a service to our country, and sometimes it is heroic service to our country, to fight for the United States of America to have the capacity to nurture artistic greatness." - Rachel Maddow
"Not just in wartime but especially in wartime, and not just in hard economic times but especially in hard economic times, the arts get dismissed as sissy. Dance gets dismissed as craft, creativity gets dismissed as inessential, to the detriment of our country. And so when we fight for dance, when we buy art that is made by living American artists, when we say that even when you cut education to the bone, you do not cut arts and music education, because arts and music education IS bone, it is structural, is it essential; you are, in [Jacobs Pillow founder] Ted Shawn's words, you are preserving the way of life that we are supposedly fighting for and its worth being proud of." - Rachel Maddow
No comments:
Post a Comment