This wide-ranging anthology begins with an anecdote about the power of the arts to heal political division, and includes a chapter by pioneering theater artist Anna Deavere Smith that, with its mix of fascinating memoir and memorable theatrical insights, rewards any theater lover who picks up “Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness” (Viking, 592 pages) edited by Renée Fleming.
I picked up the book at a time of pending political upheaval, and uncertainty about what it will mean; what the reaction will be…and can be…and should be. One question that hovers: Can theater play a role in helping us deal with what will happen – both as individuals, and collectively?
Most of the dozens of essays in “Music and Mind” – by scientists, doctors, therapists, educators, artists et al — explicitly focus primarily on music (rather than theater or any of the other art forms), and most of the research the various authors discuss is implicitly about its beneficial effects on the health of individuals (rather than about the collective use of the arts to process changes in society or to make change happen.)
At the same time, Fleming, best known as an opera singer, is also a Tony-nominated Broadway actress, and has become a leading advocate for the arts who demonstrates an expansive understanding of its breadth, its significance and its power.
In the foreword to the book, Dr. Francis S. Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health and collaborator with Fleming on the Sound Health Network, describes how Fleming broke the tension in a Washington dinner attended by three Supreme Court Justices who had been on the opposite sides of the decision the majority had made the day before in favor of same-sex marriage: She got everybody singing together, including the Justices — folk songs like “Shenandoah” but also (at Collins’ sly suggestion) Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’”
“The many of us who appreciate, create or perform the arts intuitively understand the therapeutic effects on our lives,” Fleming writes in her introductory chapter. “For me, experiencing art – whether musical, theatrical or visual – can evoke bliss, a heart-filling satiation, and the gift of being fully present.”
That gift of being fully present feels key to the notion that theater can prove an antidote to the urge to tune out what’s happening in the world.
The artists Fleming has invited to contribute essays to “Music and Mind” include, of course, singers and musicians, such as Yo-Yo Ma, Rosanne Cash, and esperanza spalding, all of whom are also plugged into the world beyond music, but she also invited architect Liz Diller, dancers/choreographers like Mark Morris, novelists Ann Patchett and Richard Powers, even a creator of video games Adam Gazzaley…and Anna Deavere Smith, whom Fleming introduces as “someone who has created her own unique place in our cultural landscape…She amplifies voices of those marginalized by racism, violence and inequality…”
In her essay “Healing Arts,” Smith traces step by step the journey that led her to her groundbreaking work of documentary theater. The best known among her fifteen one-person shows are probably her first, Fires in the Mirror and Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 two years later.
For “Fires in the Mirror,” Smith interviewed more than one hundred people involved in the Crown Heights riot of 1991, and presented more than two dozen of them as characters on stage, portrayals that reproduced verbatim not just their words, but their verbal tics and gestures.
She recounts a seminal moment that led to those plays some two decades earlier – a piece of music that made her sick…or at least feel sick. She was studying acting in a conservatory but feeling as if she didn’t belong, until she happened to attend a concert in a cathedral that featured Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.”
She reacted so strongly that the next day she asked one of her teachers: “Can a performance give you the flu?” Her fevered reaction, she tells us, was because for the first time she felt “a sense of oneness” with the music, with the world, “with voice.”
That experience with Beethoven made her open to absorb the lesson that followed from a class she took on Shakespeare, which focused on the rhythm and meaning of Shakespeare’s words. This was in sharp contrast to the prevailing acting philosophy of the Method — that the truth of a character came from inside the individual actor portraying him: “There’s a Hamlet in YOU.” But nobody would see a Hamlet in “a Black girl like me.” It’s the words that mattered – and their sound – an approach that required “a reach toward” the character rather than a prior identification with him.
Smith tells us that she started to study acting as a “fluke,” that she had planned to “join the revolution,” but by that time “the revolution was over.” The reader can clearly discern a revolutionary, or at least political, foundation to her aesthetic approach. At one point, she tells us, she wondered whether her methodology of using a tape recorder to get close to strangers was “an antidote to the scars left on me from growing up in a segregated town? Would this allow me to get closer to America? My grandfather had said ‘If you say a word often enough, it becomes you.’ I would try to become America….”
The play that Smith spends the most time explaining in her essay is a later one, “Let Me Down Easy,” which is about health care and American attitudes toward death. That makes sense in the context of a book with lots of MDs and PhDs contributing, and an emphasis on the connection between the arts and health.
But the points that Smith makes about healing aren’t restricted to the so-called healing professions. She recalls attending Lena Horne’s solo show on Broadway and seeing the legendary performer as a healer, because she made people feel at home. “Ideally, that is how one would be welcomed into any arts institution, not with well-embossed mission statements about how they change the world, or chandeliers the size of airplanes, but with a resounding ‘You are home now.’”
