Date: 2005-01-25
To: the green room - part II
Miles today: 0.0

To talk about what I want to talk about next, in light of yesterday¢s entry about the arts and the outdoors, I need to provide some background, and it has to do with the job I worked last summer, at a highly-esteemed arts camp, and with the culture of the camp itself, which ¢ not incidentally ¢ was located in gorgeous, wild country, up in northern Michigan. This background may seem entirely irrelevant ¢ ¢I come to this site to read about backpacking, not your fruity past with a bunch of adolescents who play wind instruments and recite Shakespeare!¢ ¢ but it is going somewhere, I promise (though perhaps not until tomorrow). Bear with me.I¢ve managed to locate a letter I wrote at the end of that summer. Here it is:¢I've had an interesting summer - an ok one- neither wonderful nor miserable. I went to Interlochen Arts Camp in Michigan as a development intern, but I ended up switching jobs here after the first week and a half. I started out in the development office, sitting in a corner in the administration building, staring at a wall and doing data entry all day- I was ready to blow my face off. Then it turned out the director of stage services needed an assistant, so I switched over, and it¢s been a lot better since. A monkey could do either job, but at least the second one is somewhat social, and I¢m able to be a smartass without anybody getting their panties in a twist, since my boss has about as low a tolerance for BS as I do, if not lower. So I hang out in the log cabin that is our office, answering the phone, driving around in a golf cart to pick up the lost and found from all the stages, doing scheduling for people, running odd errands that need doing, drinking lots of tea and coffee and eating M & Ms, and reading and doing jigsaw puzzles when things quiet down. A lot of jigsaw puzzles. I think we¢ve finished 17 of them.There¢s a lot of down time.Interlochen's an interesting place, and I¢ve been seeing it from an interesting perspective. It's saturated - totally saturated - with music and theater and art, and all the musical theater kids wander around singing their songs to themselves, and the girl on the stairmaster in the workout room will have her eyes closed while she climbs, simultaneously practicing her cello bowings in the air, and you'll overhear one camper say to another, "GOD, Sean, I wish you weren't all like, OOH, I have to get to the Tuba Hut, I have to get it ON." These kids are really talented and also really driven and also really young - the kid in front of you in line at lunch may be a 12 year old piano prodigy, but he is still a 12 year old, and it¢s disconcerting sometimes to see the schism between the preprofessional drive a lot of these kids have, and the totally developmentally normal social skills they also have. Talented? Phenomenally. Awkward as hell? You bet.It¢s also been somewhat extraordinary to look at a given camper, who'll have just signed out a practice room for four solid hours, and think to myself, "Ok. I know how I feel about doing theater- I know what I get out of it - I know how I can spend four hours at a rehearsal and not even blink. And this kid - feels that way - about - the BASSOON. Whoa. Awesome. Who knew?" And then juxtaposing the very obvious passion these kids have for what they do, and the extraordinary talent they exhibit, with the nastier side of the competition and drive- campers who get sent home for suicide attempts, kids whose parents forced them to go to Interlochen, and so on.Mostly I¢m struck by a lack of perspective. In this place, your art form is your entire world. It's strikingly insular- even among departments - you rarely see kids collaborating across artistic media; for instance, I¢ve never seen the theater kids perform the writing students' work, and I¢ ve only rarely seen the dancers working with the musicians, etc. Beyond that there's little visible encouragement for innovation. A friend of mine here, who directs on the theater faculty and went to high school at Interlochen's year-round Arts Academy and then to a liberal arts college, said that her college campus was brimming with creativity, if it was a little short sometimes on artistic talent; and that Interlochen was overflowing with talent but rather short on creativity. These are the wages of serious training, perhaps; and in any case it's a trope that you have to know the rules before you can break them. But Interlochen is a rule-bound place and no mistake, from the curfews to the uniforms to the remarkably stringent expectations placed on the kids. As with anything, there's a constant give and take between the price exacted and the results obtained.There's a lack of visible awareness, too, of perspective as regards the larger world in which these kids are artists. I don't get the sense that the questions of why these kids have chosen the art forms they have are much raised, or of what role the kids believe their art plays, or should play, in the world they live in. To be fair, that isn't necessarily why they come to Interlochen for the summer - they want to learn to be better artists, not to re-examine art as a social and personal institution. And I can't fault that, exactly, except that I also believe that raising those questions, and being aware of them, even if they aren't concretely answerable, will help make an artist a better one. More than that - I think such mindfulness is essential. And I don't see it taught. Beyond that, it's difficult to perpetuate the notion of Art with a capital A as a beautiful universal singular entity entirely freed from social constraints for long when you (a) take a look at the price tag for this place and (b) scan a crowd of campers for racial and ethnic demographics. This is an expensive place, and a very white one as well, though not exclusively. It costs a lot to spend eight weeks practicing the oboe. And while Interlochen's not to blame for the fact that it has to charge tuition in order to run itself, it might be somewhat to blame for its apparent failure to engage with the social and political aspects of its activities. Of course, I'm not a camper, and I¢ve only been here for seven weeks, and I might be misstating the case; I'm also speaking as a recipient of my own liberal arts education, and from a personal and entirely biased belief that any art has an unavoidable social dimension.What¢s also been particularly peculiar for me about being here is that, abstract pedagogical discussions notwithstanding, there is absolutely a magic to the place - an aura that makes many of the campers, anyway, love the place passionately, return year after year, speak of it in glowing terms. Many of the faculty feel the same way. And I can see it. I can understand it. I know how exciting art can be - I know how thrilling it can be to find yourself in a community of like-minded people - I absolutely understand that this place provides that excitement for those people. I'm sympathetic to their passion; I understand it, because other places have had the same effect on me. But I don't share it. My understanding of that magic is intellectual, not visceral, because my job engages with the day to day mechanics of running this place, not with directly experiencing participation in a larger artistic community. I¢m very much an outsider looking in, with curious eyes. So ultimately I¢ve found myself, this summer, among artists but not acting as one of them, and that's a little strange, though not devastating ¢¦.¢There. That wasn¢t so bad, was it? (she says to the empty air.) And if you choose to come back for more, the next installment will (knock on wood) be a good deal more direct where the ostensible purpose of this site is concerned. I¢ll write something funny soon, I promise. Y¢all have earned it.