Mark Branner
Assistant Professor
Department of Theatre + Dance
University of Hawaii, Manoa
branner@hawaii.edu
808.956.2931
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Submitted for Hawkins Award, 2016
So I live in Honolulu, Hawaii. At this point, readers in other parts of our United States, many of whom may be suffering under blizzard-like conditions, may start cursing under their breath. “Just great,” the reader says, “Rub it in, buddy...go sit on your beach, sunning yourself in the middle of February while sipping a mai tai!”
There’s only one problem. That picture of a “care free life of ease” is often further removed from my reality here in Honolulu than in almost any other place I’ve ever lived. Why, you ask. What could possibly be wrong in paradise?
Well, try $7 for a gallon of milk. I’m serious. I’ve got three growing kids and I often pause when buying them milk. Can we really afford this? I’m an assistant college professor. I make an okay salary...if I lived almost anywhere else. But the financial realities of living in Hawaii with $7-a-gallon-milkand $5-a-gallon-gasoline (when the rest of the country is paying half that) causes me financial stress like I’ve never experienced in any other place in our United States.
I’m not alone. In a 2014 “State of Homelessness in America” report, Hawaii ranked highest among the 50 states for homeless people per capita. Despite the tourist marketing of Hawaii, there are actually huge swaths of grimy housing projects where kids probably live without milk, and a whole host of other necessities. Certainly there are large swaths of communities here where kids live without art. Who can afford art when you’re just trying to make ends meet?
So there is an amazing disconnect here in Hawaii between the HAVES and the NOT HAVES. The haves send their children to private schools that cost – I kid you not – up to $23,000, from Kindergarten through 12th Grade. The NOT HAVES attend schools where the teachers are apparently more underpaid than in any other state, resulting in a general populace that places about 40th in “reading ability.”
Recently our University’s Department of Theatre + Dance has been partnering with the Educational Theatre Association to produce an ITS High School Theatre Festival. The first year we had about 80 students attend. This year we nearly topped 140.
Most of the kids who attend the festival (which we offer at only $5 per student) come from the NOT HAVES. We offer over 20 workshops, covering a wild and wide array of performing art topics such as physical comedy, the application of burns and bruises in professional makeup application, or an introduction to the traditional Japanese storytelling form Rakugo. Students attending the festival look like kids in a candy shop. They are filled with wide-eyed-wonder.
These students are seeing firsthand that what they love to do and watch and experience isn’t just about the ten “weird” students in their tough public school, where football dominates all other cultural activity. There are others like them. There is even a place for them at the public university on the island. They are also seeing that art is not limited to the HAVES. Indeed, they are surrounded by peers who are equally gifted and passionate about art...and who don’t attend 23K-a-year schools.
I am beginning to see that a central part job as a professor of theatre at the local university is championing the life-affirming value of the arts for the next and future generation of students.
James Baldwin is attributed with saying:
Life is more important than art; that's what makes art so important.
Perhaps Baldwin means that the stuff of art highlights the importance of life in a way that other activities may not. Perhaps his quote suggests that art is not some highbrow event that separates the haves and not haves. Art is not something we attend if we can afford a ticket, but something essential and humanizing, an activity that makes us more human and less bound to the harsh realities of $7-a-gallon-milk. Because when our spirits soar, when our minds and hearts are struck with beauty, we connect with the deepest parts of ourselves and others, parts that can transcend the boundaries of our socioeconomic realities, our financial constraints, our “I-can’t-afford-that-activity” selves.
In order to better contribute to the ongoing work of providing beauty to all residents of our State, I would like to attend Arts Advocacy Day.