Let me tell you, as a little girl growing up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, everyday life was full of spectacle. In the months leading up to Mardi Gras, people from all over our community knit beads into dresses, stirred steaming pots of gumbo, shaped chicken wire into grand, majestic carriages stuffed with brightly colored tissue paper.
On the day of the parades, grownups would walk out of their homes as mermaids and alligators and kings and queens. You could see your second grade teacher suddenly a peacock with beautiful sparkly feathers. We would paint our faces and flow into the street where all day long, the city sang and danced together. Regular people of all ages, races and classes who stepped outside of their daily life and into a collective radiance.
In my world, pageantry was not just reserved for Mardi Gras. Every Sunday at church, voices lifted together, inviting the holy down into daily life. Our church staged epic annual Christmas pageants, complete with real, smelly sheep. And down the road at LSU football games on Saturdays, the stomp of the roaring crowd, led by the marching band and the color guard, registered as an official earthquake on the Richter scale when I was eight years old.
Big surprise, I became a theater director. I did so with the belief that these spectacles were more than just fun, that something profound was happening when our community came together in the realm of the imagination. Pageantry and spectacle are in fact ancient, universal aspects of human experience. Going back as far as we can trace the presence of humans on this planet. Religious ritual and celebration, or carnival, provided our ancestors much needed joy, and the unique kind of group bonding necessary for facing their daily challenge of survival.
The question is, what do these spectacles mean in our day, when the interconnectedness of our survival is less immediately visible and technology offers the constant opportunity for isolation?
As a theater director, I search for what a communal gathering in the realm of the imagination can mean in our time. And that quest led me to wonder, inspired by the Mardi Gras of my childhood, would it be possible to create the feeling of a whole city on stage together? Well, what better way to try than to stage a production of "The Odyssey" with 181 people in the cast, drawn from all over San Diego? I chose "The Odyssey" because as an epic story of a journey towards home, it felt large enough for us to all find ourselves inside of it.
As I wandered around San Diego, I started to wonder, what if that amazing gospel choir played the goddess Athena and those salsa dancers, what if they created Cersei's lair and that amazing high school drumline? What if they took care of the big archery contest that saves Odysseus at the end? Sort of like medieval passion plays when it was like, "Bakers, you take the Last Supper, butchers, you do the crucifixion."
When "The Odyssey" opened in 2011 at the Old Globe, even I was not prepared for the wave of joy it unleashed. Look, I'm not a social worker. I'm an artist. But the show surprised me. I did the show thinking it would be beautiful, but it was so much more than that. People were overcoming the challenges of fear and self-doubt in the imaginary process, and somehow it was making them feel equipped to face the challenges in their real life.
After the show, we stayed in touch and I started hearing anecdotally what I would later learn scientifically. Students who had been part of the show were doing better in school. Some of our elders experienced noticeable health benefits like better blood flow and increased mobility. A remarkable man in his early 50s who had come to us through a homeless shelter, got a job, a steady job, for the first time in his adult life after the show. And ten years later, he was still employed. He traced it back to performing in "The Odyssey." Why? I asked him, and his answer was simple. He said being part of the show reminded him that he had value, and he knew that if other people were counting on him, he could show up.
Well, the Public Theater in New York was willing to give me a home for this work. And in 2012, I started Public Works, a program that brings together community members from all over New York City, including children and senior citizens, domestic workers, military veterans, men and women rebuilding their lives after prison, and Broadway stars, all to create 200-person pageants annually at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
(Applause)
I want to share with you for fun the quick math of how we put a city on stage through Public Works. In, for example, our production of "The Winter's Tale," we had 107 community ensemble members, ages 2 to 92, 34 choir singers, 16 bhangra dancers, 12 ballerinas, seven "Sesame Street" characters, six stilt walkers, five Broadway actors, four Capoeiristas, three park rangers, two Chinese lions, one bear puppet and one Big bird.
(Laughter)
And that's how we made a city.
(Applause)
But why stop there? This July, 18 cities and towns across America will simultaneously premiere their own large-scale public artwork, responding to the theme "No Place Like Home." Local artists partnering with their municipality and their local community health centers to manifest what is possible when the arts belong to everybody.
(Applause)
The beauty of this type of art-making is that people who might not encounter each other in any other aspect of life, except jury duty, gather together around life's deepest questions. This collaboration reinforces that we all deal with the same emotions. We have all known love, fear, frustration, joy. And because we meet as equals in the realm of the imagination, something is possible that's often not when we're separated and boxed into our social roles.
Whereas in San Diego, my observations about transformation were anecdotal, with Public Works, we brought on a linguistic anthropologist from the very beginning to trace the impact of the work over many years. And the results were the same.
In my now 20 years of directing theater, everywhere from prisons and shelters to Broadway, I have seen seniors recover from strokes and surgery more quickly than their doctors said was possible. I've seen children diagnosed with autism who had been told higher education was not an option, go on to thrive in college and graduate. I've seen a homeless man in Philadelphia suffering from severe AIDS-related complications, show up at our rehearsal immediately after leaving his hospital bed because he wanted to dance in our production of "Don Quixote" that night.
So after all of this, I am not surprised to learn that the World Health Organization pooled 3,000 studies on the relationship between arts and health, and found that arts interventions have a significant role to play in the reduction of ill health, the promotion of good health, and the management and treatment of disease. The good news is that this type of health benefit comes from things as simple as joining a choir, going to a museum, being part of a weekly drawing class.
Loneliness is now an epidemic in our world, and the growing belief that we have nothing in common with people who believe differently from us, politically or religiously, is tearing our social fabric apart. Participating in something much bigger than yourself, working hard towards a shared good, this restores our sense of connection. And in the realm of the imagination, perhaps even behind feathers and sequins, what becomes visible is the divine spark in every human being and in our one collective humanity.
Friends, the sociologist Emile Durkheim says something I love and believe in. "They find a remedy because they seek it together."
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you. It was so fun to talk to you all about that. But now I want to give you a little taste of it. So I do notice an unused piano here. That's never right.
I want to bring to the stage now, my good friends, Broadway legend Brian Stokes Mitchell and Todd Almond, my frequent collaborator on many of the things you saw on that screen.
(Applause)
(Piano music starts)
Brian Stokes Mitchell: (Singing) To dream the impossible dream / To fight the unbeatable foe / To bear with unbearable sorrow / To run where the brave dare not go / To right the unrightable wrong / To love pure and chaste from afar / To try when your arms are too weary / To reach the unreachable star /
This is my quest / To follow that star / No matter how hopeless / No matter how far / To fight for the right / Without question or pause / To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause / And I know if I'll only be true / To this glorious quest / That my heart will lie peaceful and calm / When I'm laid to my rest / And the world will be better for this / That one man, scorned and covered with scars / Still strove with his last ounce of courage / To reach the unreachable stars / This is my quest!
Audience member: This is my quest!
BSM: To follow that star!
Audience members: To follow that star!
BSM: No matter how hopeless!
Audience members: No matter how hopeless!
BSM: No matter how far!
Audience members: No matter how far!
BSM: To fight for the rights!
Audience members: To fight for the rights!
BSM: Without question or pause!
Audience members: Without question or pause!
BSM: To be willing to march into hell / For a heavenly cause /
(Marching band starts)
And I know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest / That my heart will lie peaceful and calm / when I'm laid to my rest /
And the world / Will be better for this / That one man, Scorned and covered with scars / Still strove with his last ounce of courage / To reach / The unreachable / Stars!
(Music ends)
(Cheers and applause)
