Uncategorized

As an artist, curator, and artistic director, Kristy Edmunds has headed up theater organizations starting in Portland, Oregon, then Melbourne, Australia, and then at the Armory at New York City. All those programs, when Kristy left, had been revolutionized. One piece written about her is titled, HOW KRISTY EDMUNDS HAS SHAKEN UP CONTEMPORARY ART!

At UCLA since the 2012-13 season, she’s created seasons like none other in Los Angeles. Where our respected institutions present  productions that mostly are tried and true, with commercial success in mind, the seasons offered by UCLA at The Center for the Art of Performance, or CAP, is an explosion of originality and creativity. Some presentations are by well-known artists in a range of categories from theater, to dance, to music, to spoken word, and some are the product of years of Kristy working with artists she discovers. As she says about what she presents, “Artists disrupt our conscious and unconscious tendency to feel complacent about any number of things going on in society writ large…the organization that I run has to work within the same spirit of acting from the position of integrity, compassion, and the usefulness of disruption.”

Being as much a creator of performances as she is someone who books them, as well as being the shepherd of a large flock of donors where the warmth of her engaging personality makes us all feel like we are her friend, she also is a marvel in the talks she delivers to audiences before many of the performances. She settles people in, letting them know the value of the arts in general and readying them for whatever they need to know about what they are about to see.

This spring she was named the inaugural recipient of the Berresford Prize, a $25,000 annual award, founded by United States Artists, to honor a cultural practitioner who has significantly contributed to the advancement, wellbeing and care of artists in society. Kristy got it “for her work as a thoughtful and groundbreaking cultural producer and advocate for artists.”

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST EPISODE

Share and/or leave a comment

Seeing what a big world it is out there, I’d understand people being skeptical about my evaluation of Jodie Evans, but that wouldn’t shake my conviction that if she wanted to she could become the president of the U.S. If America knew her, I bet they’d elect her. She would be the one we have been waiting for, who would get us off our primitive commitment to making war.

Peace is her game and she has all categories covered. A political activist, author, and documentary film producer, comfortable from board rooms to war zones, she’s smart, historically astute, well-informed, beautiful, gracious, and kind. Best if all, she doesn’t want power. I met Jodie in the early ‘90s when she was Jerry Brown’s campaign manager and I hosted breakfasts for this maverick politician who early on was preaching environmental awareness and campaign finance reform. Some 40 years later, on leaving his second round as Governor, he appointed Jodie to the California Arts Commission that she helped him found during his first term from her advocacy for art as what ennobles the human being. She’s most publicly known as a founder of CODE Pink, a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. wars and militarism that was started in an effort to prevent the US invasion of Iraq.

To know Jodie is to love her. She has a warmth that doesn’t stop. You can see it. She shines. She gives herself to so many causes that it doesn’t seem like one person could do all that. However, when a philanthropy organization we both belong to gave her a 3-year term as its president, she did the kind of job you’d have thought was her only one. She is our mother hen, hatching a new society where we radically reimagine and transform our relationships so they are defined by love, by care and compassion and sacredness, by the qualities that nourish our souls and enrich our humanity.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST EPISODE

Share and/or leave a comment

Jane Goodall does a star turn. She is so on it for our bottom line. When I listen to her I think that if everyone in the world were listening we’d change our ways.

My favorite quote for this moving video:
“It depends on changing attitudes. If we could just get a critical mass of us who start to think about the consequences…We just have to get it through to our thick heads that what we do as an individual certainly in the big scheme of things doesn’t make a difference, but what we do collectively as billions of human beings making the right ethical choices, that’s going to move us in the right direction.”

Share and/or leave a comment

I feel funny issuing commands to my Google Assistant without my saying please and then my not saying thank you after it talks to me with a man’s voice as if it’s a person. What is there to say about this absence of civility? Is graciousness being programmed out of us in these meeting places where machines behave like humans and humans behave like machines? Is a mechanistic type of humanity what we are becoming?

I think we should be talking about this. It should be on our minds. We may want to deal with it. But, first, we have to realize there is something to be dealt with.

We no doubt can’t change what is reducing our humanity, but, to counter those things, we could be doing other things that add to our humanity.

One idea I have is about a connecting grid all across the world. Think of an app you can get on anytime you have 10 or 15 minutes to spare to randomly connect with someone somewhere who speaks your language. You’d have some prompts for what to talk about. This is a deck of talking topics I made that would invite meaningful sharing.

These engagements are just for that one connection – no ongoing pen pals or anything besides that little exchange. There would be a map of the world that gets another light wherever there’s a conversation.

Any other ideas out there?
Share and/or leave a comment

The world and I are one. It hasn’t always been so. For a long time, Earth was for me to live on and to do things on. I was a very high achiever in an upper middle class family where my parents expected a good performance and cheered me on. As a child, I saw the world through the eyes of my lawyer father, the closest thing in my life to God, who would explain what I needed to satisfy my limited curiosity. I never felt involved in any of it. Wars were good guys and bad guys doing their thing, and disasters around the globe were like movies and not meaningful in my life.

I am a 180 from there now. Maybe it was psychedelics that burst my materialist bubble. Or, the Human Potential Movement when encounter groups pushed me out of my comfort zone. I do remember a long time of being in-between worlds, when I tried to convince my parents that curiosity was in order. It was a hard sell.

I am unconscionably old now, something I never expected. Concern with self and caring about oneness are playing out in one theater now and I’m the audience, wondering what the drama is all about. While the curtain is up, something has to be going on, but “so what” is a haunting question.  

It’s odd to be stuck in reality when the curtain is coming down. Omg, so much trouble humans are in and I’m the achiever so it’s my job to fix that. How can I not knock Trump off his soapbox? He’s depraved. This drama we are in, where people pretend he’s acceptable, is surreal. We argue about his policies, things we can get our teeth into, or the tweets he sends or the laws he breaks, but, with him mean-spirited and endangering the world, the nightmare is being slept through. My job, dammit, is to get him removed.

Closing thought for this riff is some gratitude that I care. I guess. If I didn’t, I could concentrate on having a good time. I could paint again, and read books. I could eat out and find whatever else sweetens a life more than full-time calculation does. But oye, oye, oye, oye, I am stuck in you being me, motivated and despairing, not knowing how to get the world fixed in my time.

Maybe start a club. The Fixers. Big job. We take it on.

Lex Hixon, my superstar friend who died young, left me with this membership qualification. If it fits you, be in touch and let’s see where we go from here:    

A coalition already exists in spirit. It is coming together now in the social context by the attraction of its unconventional intelligence and compassionate form of high-mindedness. This natural coalition is drawn together by the recognition that the elevation of consciousness is our fundamental life work. This is a genuinely democratic, self-organizing force, flowing through persons of all descriptions. This force does not flourish as any highly structured form. It is not an institution or a foundation or a non-profit company or anything conventionally named. This coalition is a living organism — natural, wild, free. It is made up of individuals devoted to serving the world and developing themselves as finely tuned instruments of service. They learn to gather in the energy of will-to-good, from which authentic goodwill flows out subtly to the entire world.

Share and/or leave a comment