EDEN PROJECT: ALIVE IN HISTORY

The learners involved in the Eden Project included a group which also participated in service-learning at the Belmont Mansion where they performed as docents and living-history interpreters, integrating their study of the Underground Railroad and the Abolitionist Movement with service to the Mansion’s Museum staffing and programming. During the residency sessions the artists engaged learners in experimentation with both visual and performance art techniques, incorporating themes relevant to the history they were studying as part of their interaction with the two historic properties, Eden Cemetery and Belmont Mansion.

In the performance component of the Eden Project our primary goal was to attempt to lend fresh relevance to historical information by activating the underlying themes through events and concerns in our own lives. We engaged in dialogue about social movements: what they are, what causes them, what sustains them. As a common cause we identified unfair treatment, or injustice. Taking this as a theme, learners engaged in a “story-circle”, relating to each other personal anecdotes about injustices they had either experienced or witnessed first-hand. Then the group together chose one story to illustrate physically in a frozen tableau, or stage picture. [The story-circle process came to us by way of Alternate Roots a consortium of artists, organizers, and cultural workers, based in the Southern United States. Of course the telling of stories in circles has old roots, but it is a practice currently being employed across the country in similar forms as a powerful means for communities to shape dialogue in participatory work with artists in multiple disciplines.]

Our work with themes throughout the residency also dovetailed nicely with basic concepts of stagecraft and performance. From our frozen tableaux we were able to discern positions of relative power and then emphasize these relationships physically by playing with alterations in height and position on the stage. This provided an opportunity to demonstrate the way directors and actors make choices about where objects and characters should be in any given moment on stage. Discussion of injustice, or the underlying cause of social movements, led to the question of what comes next. What are the possible reactions to injustice? Which reaction is most likely to engender a movement? Response: doing something about it, taking a stand, or taking action. So from our FROZEN tableau we move to ACTION. “Action” and “Movements” go together in the social realm. In the realm of physical performance we use the same vocabulary, distinguishing between slightly different meanings for this same pair of words. A MOVEMENT can be anything: abstract motion, walking around aimlessly, or flailing the arms wildly. By adding a single ingredient we can turn the same movement into an ACTION. That ingredient is INTENTION. If I flail my arms wildly with the intention of getting the attention of someone across the room, or with the intention of attempting to lift myself off the ground in flight, my movement has suddenly become a means of communicating something I’m trying to DO, and thus, an action. Actions are the building blocks of physical performance. In the video sample "EPIAUTOBIOGRAPHS" on the main page (hit the BACK tab at the top of this page), see if you can discern whether you are watching a movement or an action.

The final question we considered—what sustains social movements—is something we did not get to actively investigate in our 11-day residency. We need more time together for something to gain momentum, let alone sustain it. Hopefully arts education programs will not fall under the Pennsylvania budget axe this year—in a perfect world we would of course hope for a budget increase—so that the learners at the School of the Future will be able to experience what it is to sustain a course of action, or investigation through artistic disciplines. But this raises the question of what is required to realize such a “perfect world”—an Eden, if you will? In the spirit of social movements, we might consider also that for change to occur, we cannot simply rely upon “the state”, which is often perceived as some separate political entity we appeal to. Technically, WE are “the state”, although it doesn’t often feel that way. But WE need to decide what value we place on an “art-full” education, and what actions we might take, and encourage others to take up with us, to ensure that support for arts education becomes not a plea, but a groundswell. History shows us what is possible when enough people have a mind to change the state of affairs. To be ALIVE IN HISTORY means to ACT with INTENTION. To change history requires the crucial discovery of how to keep the action alive.

Brett Keyser