Performers on stage? Soldiers ready for battle? Protesters lining the streets? That’s the thing about moments of transformation. There are usually multiple, simultaneous forces at work.
In a lovely black box theater on the sixth floor of the Hennepin Center for the Arts in Minneapolis, I simultaneously discovered something vital about my life as an artist and my life as a citizen. It was the winter that spanned 1990 and 1991, a momentous time for the world and, befitting a proper coming of age story, an important season for me, too.
That winter US military forces, along with an international coalition of allies, gathered strength in the Persian Gulf. Troops and supplies amassed to a degree not seen in decades. Dubbed Operation Desert Shield , this massive American-led military juggernaut bounced on its toes to pounce on bad-actor Iraqi forces under the auspices of Saddam Hussein. To recap historical headlines prior to the troop build-up: Iraq and Iran had already been at war for many years. While neither country had a record for good behavior, Iraq had recently made repeated actions to further destabilize an already volatile multinational environment. On August 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, an American ally. The United States and others nations decided they didn’t like the implications, and soon thereafter angry drums began echoing across the desert.
Clearly there’s more to it, and it won’t take a historian to notice some of my glaring over-simplifications. Suffice to say, and rather inevitably, this all led to war.
Here in the stubbornly unenlightened future, we could choose to debate the merits and malfeasance of that moment in history. We could undertake an analysis of variable costs vs benefits. We could make ethical evaluations about how the global community ought to deport itself in the face of aggression. We might even declare those events business as usual on the global stage.
Back then I was twenty-two years old and just out of college. The practically theatrical sound of crumbling masonry as the Berlin Wall came down, had recently shattered the public facing facade of the Cold War. Many in my generation couldn’t fathom any good reason for rushing into a new war in the desert beyond a need to stabilize oil prices for American industrialists and consumers. Call us naive, call us idealistic, or simply call us young and inexperienced in the ways of the world. To be clear, I knew there was valid room for debate about the policy choices that ultimately shaped events. I’ll also confess that my thinking about those events from my current perch in middle-age is more complex than what I could ascertain back then in my early twenties. Back then at least I knew this much: accelerating events could neither be dismissed nor ignored.
By early January 1991, Operation Desert Shield began to rear up on its hind legs and show its claws. The coalition issued an ultimatum for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait by the 15th of the month. The Iraqi army threatened to ignore that ultimatum. Above the desert, fighter jets raced back and forth waiting for “go” orders. Coalition troops massed in the desert watched the horizon. Back home, protesters and boosters began to gather strength in cities and towns around the country. Chants of “No blood for oil!” rang out in some, while in other spaces cheers supporting American troops rose up on winter winds. Sometimes those voices shouted at each other from across common streets.
Remember that black box theater in Minneapolis? While armies gathered in the desert sand, I spent my ice-covered January in Minnesota focusing on creative fires that only youthful zeal can stoke. That season, only a few months out of college, I had a rare opportunity to train intensively with a pair of extraordinary artists. Each morning meant physically grueling yet exhilarating classes with renowned choreographer Nancy Duncan. Under her guidance, she determined to rebuild everything I previously knew about moving my own skeleton through space. Each afternoon, I worked the other side of my brain with Melanie Lien, a former featured performer for the legendary Pina Bausch. Melanie’s artistic influence would extend into my creative life every day that followed, including right up to this moment.
School just behind me, I had a fresh degree in Anthropology and honors in medical ethics. I was working on writing a novel. I was immersed in developing my skills in the performing arts, an admittedly sharp swerve from what I had expected to be my professional trajectory, but a parallel passion that nonetheless had been gaining momentum for years. I had a girlfriend who was also in the arts, and other friends there, too. Life was colorful, impassioned, and full of energy and youthful promise.
And like everyone who’s ever been twenty-two, I thought I understood more than was actually true.
The drums of war grew louder each day. Each morning’s drive to the rehearsal space meant updates from NPR about overnight SCUD movements, coalition postures, and Iraqi chest thumping. Signs and banners suspended from overpass railings heaped praise or scorn on our national route forward. Pressure continued to build towards an uncertain future.
Then my colleagues and I would find ourselves at the start of our working day, working up a sweat, suffused in the vitality of intensely disciplined creative space.
Protests grew as January wore on. On January 14, the day before the coalition deadline, anti-war protesters promised to march through downtown Minneapolis, stop traffic and capture attention. Protestors promised similar scenes in cities and towns all over the country. The nation hadn’t seen anything like it since the Vietnam War era.
Hennepin Center for the Arts stood in the center of the city, right in the path of the protest. The day before, a big group of us discussed whether we would attend our workshops the next day or if we would instead be out on the streets as participants in history. It felt like we could not ignore the world stage, even as we focused our daily energies on theatrical stages. It probably goes without saying that most of us in the arts were not very much in favor of armed conflict, even as we also had no good alternative suggestions for national leaders to address bellicose Iraqi behavior.
That’s when it happened. Our instructor Nancy Duncan said something I will never forget. “You have to decide if you’re going to allow yourself to get distracted.” She spoke with upbraided annoyance, a pinched disgust that she hardly contained. She didn’t deny the significance of events literally right in front of us, but she also determined to invest in us her belief that only a singular focus in developing our performance skills would enable us to become anything beyond quotidian dilettantes.
That was my moment of transformation.
To be clear, I was not playing around that January. I neither regarded myself as a tourist nor a hack. But I was also not willing to devote my every-single-cell and breath to the performing arts if it meant being willfully ignorant of other forces in the world. In fact, my own creative interests practically insisted that I paid attention, that I did not simply stand adjacent to circumstance, that I did not remain neutral.
War began the next day.
Memories of that January stay with me like a private journal. They are always at hand, always ready to re-inform and re-invest themselves, and yet they never offer easy solutions.
Many of us didn’t go to the theater the day the war started. Along with my artist colleagues, I was on the street, dressed for intense Minnesota cold and the heated tempers of angry crowds. Kodak Gold 400-speed film loaded in my father’s Pentax that day—this was years before digital cameras and eight months before the world’s first web page!— I hardly got off more than a handful of frames considering the gelid temperatures and the need to move quickly as we navigated perilous crowds and cops. (Even my best intentions to capture the scene “on location” couldn’t rebut a Minnesota winter!)
We got back to work in the theater the following morning. Nancy Duncan glared at those of us who had chosen to be absent, and while her pedagogy was still extraordinary, her upbeat tone had cooled appreciably.
Melanie Lien presented a greater sensitivity. Afternoons with her stood in counterpoint to the morning’s barre and floor work. With Melanie we worked on the physicality of storytelling, sculpting the muscles and sinews of narrative propulsion that are vital for strong theatrical experiences. She deeply appreciated the need to know about the world beyond the theater, the need to be a part of events, the need to be fully present in the world. While she refused to get pulled into intense political debates— training time was precious and her focus equally intense— she also didn’t dismiss the world around her. We all knew she had been closely following the dramatic news of the season. Not long afterwards we would also come to learn that she, too, had been outside in the street.
Shortly after that extraordinary January intensive, I landed several paid performance roles —nothing particularly memorable with the exception of standing in for Jack Lemmon in the movie Grumpy Old Men (which also meant hanging out with Walter Matthau and Ann-Margret)— but paid nonetheless. I landed a number of small movie gigs and some cool theatrical projects around town. I met people. I finished writing what turned out to be a pretty bad, thoroughly unpublishable first novel, but I grew immeasurably as an artist.
Gradually, illuminated by whatever starlight guides each of us on our journeys through the night, I began to discover that I needed to be able to pay the bills with greater reliability than a performing career was going to facilitate. I needed more stability in order to maintain the level of creative discipline and focus that I craved. It’s a different balance point for each of us, of course, but for me, I needed to leave “the arts” to effectively stay focused on doing creative art work. I got a job at Minnesota Public Radio as a producer and finally-- finally--started my career.
Do I miss the rigor of the theater? The training at the barre? The life of being a full time creative? Do I miss hustling my screenplays and stories, miss being on set or backstage while trying to capture the spirit of a character or a performance? I miss it all the time. But show me somebody who doesn’t miss his or her own youth, and I’ll show you someone who isn’t paying attention to his or her own life.
It also occurs to me here in the strange churn of middle-age that I am a full-time creative. I make things for a living. I write every day and direct films and videos and multimedia and live events. I’ve walked a long circle around a center point, and along the way done more than simply taken in the sights. The irony is that I now spend more of my time in creative work than I ever did when just out of school. I am a better artist today because of the rigorous training I did when I was young, and to be clear, that singular January intensive is simply one standout month amidst years of other excellent and intense training. I also continue to be attuned to the strange vibrations that accrue whenever I meet people from whom I can learn, no matter where I may encounter them. When you train with experts, you come to appreciate the value of suspending your own precious ways of doing things simply so you can absorb something new
But January 14, 1991—the day before the Gulf War began—remains a singularly critical moment for me, a personal, transformative jolt that ripples even today.
Here in the precarious twenty-first century I continue to be fully conscious that intense discipline does not have to abrogate engagement. It’s easy to delude yourself that you’re bring disciplined, that you’re working hard, that you’re focused. You might be, but perhaps you’re not. Too much engagement with the world will get in the way of your focus. You’ll risk being a weightless butterfly, alighting from one creative blossom to another with hardly a lasting influence. There’s no crime in this, of course. Not everyone needs or even wants more from life than to land on a series of flowers in the afternoon
Creative focus is different. You can influence it, of course, but it also speaks through you unbidden. If you have something that must be said, it will either get permanently suppressed, or it will become a priority and compel you to act. If your discipline is real, then you’ve already made a life choice. There will be moments you miss that you really wish you could experience, holidays you might not be able to share on occasion, certain parties you can’t attend, certain moments of pleasure that you might otherwise enjoy. That’s the cost. That’s simply how it is. Show me a working Broadway performer who’s not working over the December holiday week, and I’ll show you someone who’s not telling the truth.
The great Japanese film director Akira Kurasawa famously said that “to be an artist means never to avert one’s eyes.” I think what he’s saying is not simply to insure we are witnesses to public and private histories, but that engagement with life is the wellspring of invention, the fuel to empower ideas so they can endure the hard process of becoming real.
This dialogue never ends, this tension between living and creating. What also never ends are events of the world, and sadly, many of those seem to be persistently bleak. Here in the pernicious present, war again looms close. Pandemic stalks us all, with more than 900,000 dead in the United States alone at the time of this posting. People in power seek to suppress those with whom they cannot even find notes of basic civil comity. The carbon soaked atmosphere we stubbornly refuse to address threatens to broil life on Earth.
It’s all fuel for the artist’s engine, of course. Art, even in its most bleak expression, always concerns hope. We create the things we wish to see, including those things that sometimes cause us distress. Expressions of challenging creative work—even ugly or disturbing—are often reflections of those things that move us to feel.
That’s why on a fateful day in 1991 I did something I almost never do when I’m in an educational space. I skipped class. I skipped class and went outside to the street, because in order to be true to myself as a creative person connected to a world bigger than myself, I needed to be part of current events rather than adjacent to them.
I did not stay in the streets. I stayed informed and I stayed attuned, but I did not take to the metaphoric barricades. The work of art in civil society is remarkably similar to the work of civics in civil society. Both of them require focus and dedication, but —more importantly— both require a willingness not to become so frustrated that work turns to anger followed by fulmination and despair. The work of repairing the world starts with moments of creative inspiration. Creative inspiration comes by paying attention to the world. Transformation of that inspiration into anything that lasts and matters, even fleetingly, comes from a determination to stay with the hard work of creating.
PS — I make things… and there are things that need to get made! Get in touch if you want to discuss investment opportunities for new media products, including recent screenplays and more.