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Out to Lunch with Tom Hart, professor, former program director for Colorado Mountain College, mine, actor----Nov 26, 2003, Summit TimesIn this series of interviews, I talk to Summit County residents about how they feel and think about politics. This week I had coffee at Mountain Java with Tom Hart, an actor, mime, director and educator who directed programming for the arts and other subjects at Colorado Mountain College for more than 20 years, but has now retired. Hart grew up in Rochester, NY, studied acting at New York universities, went on to Julliard, where he learned to dislike acting, and then moved to Breckenridge in 1975. He left this hamlet to study mime in Wisconsin, where he really learned about acting. Hart currently teaches a weekend degree program at the Denver extension of Leslie University. Talty: Your classes combine creativity and education? Hart: The whole program is creative arts and learning; it’s a masters in education, both curriculum and instruction, and this particular Masters focuses on creative arts. And the class that I teach is using drama as the medium to teach through. Talty: What will you do during your next class? Hart: We do a lot of physical warm ups, a lot of mine. Then, we’ll do a true-false game because it’s their second class and the group isn’t bonded yet. A true-false game where everyone has to come up with one true story and one false one - like storytelling, and people have to guess which is true and which is false. By the time you get around the group, people get really good, and get really good at lying - making the false one better than the true one. Then we’ll do 13 scenes from David Mamet’s play Duck Variations. They partner up and come back and do the show. Talty: You do that all in one night? Hart: Yes. We do a lot of understanding, the first weekend, with the role of the actor, the performer, and what’s it like to be in theatre. I do some short term activities to model and have them experience using drama as the context in which the content or subject matter can be explored. My view is that is doesn’t have to be drama, but drama draws in pretty much all of the arts, and all the intelligences. I see drama being able to give people the experience of the learning process. In other words, John Dewey, who was really into experiential education, his ideas were to have people actually go through the process of baking bread, so they can see how it works. I think you don’t have to actually go out on that covered wagon to experience what a pioneer’s life is like. You don’t have to go out and do it, if you open up your imagination you can imagine what it’s like, and get different viewpoints. Drama is all about roles, so you can get different perspectives. You learn the material as a byproduct of doing drama. The outcome - we’re going to do a little skit - isn’t really important. But you wouldn’t get there if you didn’t have the outcome in mind. You start doing a project: you’re in American History class and you start studying Abraham Lincoln. You could read all the books you want, ask someone to play Abraham Lincoln and they think “oh my gosh, I better know who this guy was. And all the people watching, you put them in roles, too. ‘You play the newspaperman, you’re the blacksmith that just had your shop used as a hospital after Gettysburg and you’re listening to this guy give a speech. What are your viewpoints?’ It becomes contemporary, what is it like listening to George Bush, if you just got back from Iraq? Drama gives you that perspective. Talty: Can you understand history writers? Hart: You start becoming more objective about what you read in the history books because you realize it’s one person’s viewpoint. And there are a lot of viewpoints. Talty: I’ve been reading Adrienne Rich, who said if poetry didn’t exist today, we’d invent it today. Hart: Theatre is the same. It’s heightened language, it’s condensed. You get to say things in theatre that you just don’t get to say. Of course, if you look at Shakespeare then you really get it. If you decipher it, it’s really wonderful stuff. Nine times out of ten there’s no better way to say it. He said it right. He’s one of the only playwrights that’s been able to look at each character from each character’s viewpoint. We have trouble figuring out what Shakespeare really thought because each character is so honest to the character. Talty: What’s your Shakespeare favorite? Hart: I like them all because every one of them is different. I’m doing this spring at the Backstage, William Shakespeare’s own version of his compete works, and it’s called Cymbeline. Don’t look for any philosophies and hidden meanings. Talty: Wasn’t there a play like that written in the last few years? Hart: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. He wrote his own version of that. It was at a time when the playwright known as Shakespeare realized tragedies and comedies - what he did - were no longer popular, and two new playwrights had appeared on the scene: Beaumont and Fletcher, and this thing called pastoral or romantic comedy was starting to become popular. And he wrote this play Cymbeline, and the only way he could do it was by drawing in every single one of all his previous plays, except the history plays. There’s a character from Othello, from Romeo and Juliet … they’re all there. It’s a cast of thirty and it’s all plot. It’s the most bizarre play and its experiencing a revival right now. I’m going to do it with six people. We’re going to use puppets, projections, audiotapes, anything. Talty: What’s contemporary theatre look like? Hart: There’s a real divergence. There has always been two strong factions in theatre. One is the popular Lloyd Weber, big musical, big production. Oklahoma has a big revival going on. The stuff that was going on in the ’70s, experimental theatre, I don’t see that much anymore. I don’t see that theatre that deals with political issues, that’s in your face about whatever the social issue is. I don’t see much of that theatre being written. The Pulitzer prizes went for Wit, Proof, Anna in the Tropics, those were the last three. These deal with personal issues. It’s looking at what’s going on on TV, all that sitcom stuff, all these interpersonal relationships, not what society is doing, not the Bertoldt Brecht that we did in the ’70s. That stuff you don’t see it anymore; it’s not being written. If you do, it’s in movies. Talty: Where is theatre going? Hart: It’s not going to die. Humans love watching humans. It’s a basic thing. Movies maybe do it, but we have this desire to be out in front of people doing things. I don’t know what type of plays are going to come about. We might be getting more into a poetic stage. It depends on what happens in this country with our political situation, and whether there will need to be an outcry from the public. Talty: And that will be a poetic time? Hart: I think the arts will come back pretty strong, if we have to react. Complacency will go away. Talty: You mean if Bush is reelected? Hart: I think there will be a rising from complacency. But we’re so split 50/50 in this country with nothing in between, which I think is really odd. It’s like what George Bush says, either you’re right or your wrong. But we just talked about how there are all these perspectives. And people don’t get a world perspective on theatre. Talty: We don’t have a world perspective? Hart: Zero. George Bush never went out of this country until he was president. And as it is, he goes to Iraq and is surrounded by Americans, telling him that he’s great. Blinders. The poor people in Iraq, if you work on that role work, that perspective thing, you open up so many wonderful ideas. You start looking at an event from an Iraqi viewpoint, not from an American’s viewpoint looking at Iraq and saying ‘why can’t they be like us.’ You look at AlQaida, and you ask what’s making people think like that. It takes a lot of inquiry to really look at that. Then, you might be able to help, understand the situation. Talty: Is it suppression of the arts that’s made us to narrow in perspective? Hart: No. We’re content where we are. Look at how many Americans, people you and I grew up with, that were all rebellious in the ’60s and ’70s, and that are now driving SUVs. What happened to the idea that we could have a car with great gas mileage that doesn’t even depend on gasoline? The same person that was rebelling against the Vietnam War is now driving an SUV and is going to church every Sunday and thinks George Bush is the greatest person in the world. What’s wrong with this picture? Talty: You get more complacent as you get older? Hart: Of course you do. Security is very important. I’m not driving an SUV, but I’m retired, I get a pension every month. Talty: What scares you? Hart: Prior to George Bush’s election, there was this group of people, the Neo Conservatives, that had formed a government in waiting. The idea of that is the most frightening thing. In waiting, waiting for someone to be elected, so that they could just put a new government in place. It was already there, and all they had to do is get a new person elected, and boom, Karl Rowe all the way. In waiting. Talty: They had an agenda? Hart: Oh yeah. It was formulated over the ’80s, and through Clinton’s administration. Talty: One of their targets is higher education. Hart: Sure it is. Listen to Rush Limbaugh talk about people in colleges. He’s saying that all the people at universities, all these teachers, are liberals, and it’s because they’re all liberals in there and they keep hiring liberals. He doesn’t think that, perhaps, the educated people in this world think that way for a reason. Talty: Why are educated people liberal? Hart: Probably because they look at all sides of the issues. |
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