Arts Soapbox

Today I'm thinking a whole lot about the value of the arts.

Our dear Governor's budget plan makes significant cuts to the arts in Wisconsin, both in direct cuts to the arts and also woven into the cuts to education. Schools - at all levels - will be forced to make huge budget cuts. And what is one of the first things to go? Why, the arts of course. Those silly non essential classes.

I grew up saturated in the arts - with a music teacher mother and parents who sang duets in weddings and planned Sunday church services together early on, I don't know anything but. I went on to meet my now husband in high school choir and theater, we both now make a living in the arts, and we joke about how we won't know how to function if Adah is an athlete (honestly, only sort of joke...). To me, the arts are not non essential. They are a life force.

I can't tell you how much I struggle with the idealogy that education is a right for only the most affluent children in our nation (which is the implicit message and tangible implication of severe cuts to public education). I believe not only that every person has the right to an education, but that an imperative part of that education is the arts. A part that is in severe jeopardy in this climate.

I'm not sure what it is, but I've long had a fire within me for the importance of making the arts accessible. In college, I struggled so much with the "ivory tower" world of trained dance and dance performance that I did my senior thesis on the subject and then went on to pursue another degree in something that valued the imperative role of movement in all of our lives and moreover made that movement accessible to the masses - not just those with years of privileged training. Dance/movement therapy emphasizes the fact that each of us is an artist of movement in our own way, with our own movement signature and story to be told through our bodies.

And now, through an unexpected process, I have had the joy of teaching in the elective dance program at the university level. My students come to my class from a hugely diverse background - some with prior dance experience, some with none at all, some exchange students, some dairy farmers, some biologists, some business majors. They come not because they have to, but because they want to learn about their bodies, to move, to find joy in something they've perhaps done in the past and for whatever reason they have a spark in them to do again. Their inherent movers come into my class just waiting to bust out. It's pretty amazing.

But the reality is, if this budget has it's way, the elective program (because it's deemed "non essential") will be cut. And let's be honest, once things like this are cut, they rarely ever are brought back. So all of my science and education and engineering majors - they will be denied the opportunity to directly experience the arts. Only those dance majors - those who grew up with the privilege of classes allowing them to audition into and be accepted to a program at the college level - will have dance courses. It sort of makes me want to barf.

This Friday my classes have their end of semester dance showing. I am so excited for them - admittedly, it's a bit of a frenzy to get it all put together, but watching them perform at the culmination of a semester where many of them had never stepped foot into a dance studio before it started, it brings a feeling that can't be explained in words. Their pride and self-confidence and new sense of embodiment makes my heart (and I hope theirs!) sing. How unfair to be taking that away.

Ugh.