This is from writer, Rebecca West:
“Art is not a plaything, but a necessity, and its essence, form, is not a decorative adjustment, but a cup into which life can be poured and lifted to the lips and be tasted. “
Why art now? Why artistic practice now ? - in this time
of profound uncertainty; this time of known overt injustice, oppression and brutality; this time that urgently demands action?
We know that artistic practice can ground us, can teach us to listen:
listen more deeply to what needs to change in OURSELVES;
listen more deeply to life experiences unlike our own and hear what is needed.
It can be an opportunity to do an accounting of what needs to go, and to build our ability to empathize and imagine new ways forward.
Visionary James Baldwin said,
“ …everybody’s hurt. What is important….is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive.”
At Freehold we are committed to the deepening the transformational power of theatre.
It is crucial to seek to be better than we are.
We aspire to organic artistic practice : work that demands the practitioner reveals the truth in themselves rather than putting on something to hide behind.
We invite people in to this practice in which we attempt and fail, and attempt again, and fail again - fail better; and in which giving up is the only real trespass, the fatal offense.
This practice takes the most and best we have to give every time, wherever we are on our path. And we are never done: there is always further to go to be clearer, truer, deeper, more specific, more present.
Does this sound dismal?
It isn’t – what could be better?
Toni Morrison (Rest In Power) said,
…”…My faith in the world of art is intense but not irrational or naïve. Art invites us to take the journey beyond price, beyond costs into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be.
…Art reminds us that we belong here. And if we serve, we last. Its conversation….is critical to the understanding of what it means to care deeply and to be human completely.”
-Thank you,
Robin Lynn Smith
