how to change the world without even knowing it.

***This is an essay I wrote for a humanities event paper, but I think it applies to this project

Activist Theater and the New Renaissance:

how to change the world without even knowing it.

While I have attended a lecture by John Waters, a concert by The Misfits (a legendary punk rock band), and the play The Jugal Book, all of which I would think would be fitting cultural events for this course, I want to write about something else. I want to write about the idea of art changing the world. I am in a play called Thousand Kites, which is about super maximum prisons and the effects they have had on the communities involved. During last night’s rehearsal, we had two members of Appalshop, the source for this play and coinciding documentary, come to visit and film our rehearsal process. What they are involved in inspired me, and gave me a sense of the way that the arts can change peoples lives. They work at a place in which the community comes to make art of all sorts, from film to music to theater to poetry, which often focuses on community and world issues.

This is why I want to write about Thousand Kites for a class about the medieval and renaissance world. Because the artist during the renaissance were doing the same thing that we are trying to do now: through their art, they were changing the way people looked at the world, even if they didn’t know it. I think that’s what art in its highest form does. It offers people a different way of looking at things, thereby expanding their consciousness about the world. So while my focus as an actor is narrowed to try to truthfully convey a character’s story, that process is a microcosm for what is happening at places like Appalshop. By connecting to other people’s stories, music, art, message, our perspective on the world is changed.

During the renaissance, people began to view a focus on nature not as a pagan activity but as an act of devotion itself. Doubtless, this shift was encouraged by the Christian artist whose own perspectives were changing. In the same way, it is the through the changing my own mind that I express a different way of seeing the world in my art. My experience last night to me is a perfect example of this. For a long time I have had doubts about how much art can have an effect on the world. I have felt that theater is something I am passionate about, but not something that could necessarily change people’s lives. By meeting people who have done what seemed to me improbable, changing lives with art, I was changed. They have a belief in the ability of art to change the world, and through that belief, I was changed. So I am then inspired to change others not through telling them what I think the truth is, but by acting and living from that place.

We learn in class that the term “renaissance” is really just a made up term. The people from this time didn’t see themselves being “reborn”, or believe that the world of the past had died. Yet, there was a huge shift in thinking during that period, and much of it was influenced by the writers and artists of that time. So, I wonder, what if we were to have a renaissance of our own? What if we are in the middle of it, and we don’t even know it? My mind was changed last night. A seed was planted, unconsciously, in my heart. Perhaps I will plant that seed, unknowingly, in someone else. This is how changes in thinking occur. I have read that it takes 11% of people to create a massive shift in consciousness. That is the critical mass at which point knowledge spreads like wildfire. So perhaps we will soon reach a point in which 11% of people come to believe that we can use our creativity, our art, to profoundly change the world for the better. Perhaps then we will have our own renaissance.