I get all warm and fuzzy when someone speaks about dance and the arts with a combination of passion and intelligence. MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, a neighbor of national historic dance site Jacob’s Pillow, recently gave a talk there and offered words like these:
“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. It’s 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 choice of following their talents and a way to get to be great at
what they do, is a country that is not actually as 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.”
Glad to read the excerpt from Rachel Maddow’s speech at Jacob’s Pillow. She is so right to draw the connection between our artistic life and our political life. Unfortunately, these days we see too much good art and good discussion simply drowned by lowest-common-denominator pop(ulist) sensibility.