Why the Live Arts Matter
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After what has now been nine months of closed theatres and live performing arts venues, with huge restrictions on our ability to gather due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are realizing now more than ever how essential these forms of human interaction are to our wellbeing, sense of community, and cultural awareness. The arts are not just a form of entertainment, they open us up to new perspectives and help us to better understand and empathize with the people around us. These skills are essential to every part of our life, from being productive and proactive in our places of work, to having healthy relationships with our family and loved ones, to contributing to our community as a whole.
Embracing Empathy
Citing numerous instances including everything from mass media messaging to subway train announcements where we are increasingly being told to view our fellow human being with hostility, fear, and suspicion, Ben Cameron shared how he believes in the ability of the arts to promote a more positive future, at a recent TED Talk. Program Director of Arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation in New York, Ben Cameron oversees a $13 million dollar granting program for the theatre, contemporary dance, jazz, and presenting fields. His passion for the live arts goes beyond simple entertainment. “The arts whatever they do, whenever they call us together, invite us to look at our fellow human with generosity and curiosity. If we have ever needed that capacity in human history, we need it now,” says Cameron. The importance of empathy cannot be understated, as it allows us to understand viewpoints other than our own which allows us to make decisions for the greater good of everyone - not just ourselves.
The arts have a well-recognized power to make sense of complex situations, concepts, and perspectives in a way that allows us to embrace them. And not only embrace but internalize that information and keep it with us. As most of our Indigenous and First Nation communities already know, storytelling is an integral part of how we communicate and how we pass collective knowledge on. The arts energizes this element of human nature through theatre, spoken word, and poetry, and even dance and music.
According to Olafur Eliasson, a world-renowned Danish–Icelandic artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art, “one of the great challenges today is that we often feel untouched by the problems of others and by global issues like climate change, even when we could easily do something to help. Art does not show people what to do, yet engaging with a good work of art can connect you to your senses, body, and mind. It can make the world felt. And this felt feeling may spur thinking, engagement, and even action.”
So why is it important of us to participate in the arts together, in person? Why don’t we reap the same benefits by watching a digital recording of a Broadway production, or listening to music on the radio? The answer is both more complex and simpler than you’d think. Digital forms of the arts do have benefits, but those benefits double when you add in one simple element.
The Human Connection
The reality is that individual loneliness was a societal issue on the rise prior to the COVID-19 pandemic (as supported by several high profile studies including this well-publicized survey by Cigna) and has only increased since we’ve been forced to lock down our lives and limit our social interactions for the safety of our families, community, and loved ones.
“The arts and culture represent one of the few areas in our society where people can come together to share an experience even if they see the world in radically different ways,” says Eliasson.
The shared experience of attending an arts performance creates a community of the moment. It breaks down feelings of isolation and loneliness. This shared community of the moment doesn’t exist is any other form of media and it cannot be replicated in digital form. We all know that watching a movie is not the same experience as seeing a live performance and the answer to why that is exists within the essence of human connection. There’s something intangible about being there live, and being there live with a group of people who chose to be there and share the experience together. There’s an unspoken understanding that this shared moment in time exists only for you and the other members of the audience and the artists on stage.
During a Pandemic…Now More Than Ever
As we move forward, and hopefully look towards a vaccine that will allow us to recover some sense of normalcy in the future, what role do the arts play?
“Long after we are all gone, it will be the arts that remain. They will be the chroniclers of our time, they will tell our truths, they will expose the lies, they will be how future generations learn about our present, from literature and music, architecture and design, film and the visual arts, it’s the arts that really, really matter,” says Anne Pasternak, director of the Brooklyn Museum. It was under her direction that the now famous Tribute in Light was created by local artists as a memorial for those killed in 9-11. “It reminds me all of time of the ways that art can be painful and challenging, but still bring us together in mourning, and in healing, and in sharing.”
She looks to the arts, in this time of turmoil, as the way that we will heal and revive ourselves after withstanding such a long period of illness, isolation, political and social upheaval, and personal sacrifice. Like the Tribute in Light, the art that allows us to heal could take many forms, such as an outdoor video projection montage of all of the lives lost due to COVID-19 - a project that Pasternak is hoping to facilitate in New York.
“The memorial is one idea, if we can get that done. We have an exhibition in the museum of TED prize winner JR right now, and JR and his team are out photographing frontline workers, in particular hospital workers in Brooklyn, and we will paste, on the outside of the museum, portraits of those people who have risked their lives to help other people,” says Pasternak. “We’re going to see a lot of extraordinary art [coming out of COVID-19]. Time will tell, and artists will have a lot to share with us as we imagine the future,” says Pasternak.
As we look ahead, it’s important that we embrace and support the arts, with the understanding of its power to increase our own sense of wellbeing and happiness, as well as empathy for those around us. Art will always be there for us; we just need to let it move us.
