Aquila Theatre’s NEH Programs
by Peter Meineck, Professor of Classics in the Modern World (New York University)
By now we have all heard that the proposed White House budget is calling for the complete elimination of the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. This very bad news has been further compounded by the abrupt resignation of Bro Adams, the Chairman of the NEH, former college president, and Vietnam War combat veteran. Adams had been busy reinvigorating the NEH with a new focus on public outreach, and their budget was even increased this year. One can only hope that a program of intense lobbying and public pressure might have an impact on some members of the House and that it is not yet too late to save the NEH and NEA.
I have been involved in both NEA and NEH programs for many years now, first obtaining NEA funding for Aquila Theatre’s classical drama programs on tour and in New York, and then as a founding member of the Shakespeare in American Communities program. This reached all 50 US states and started a fruitful relationship between the endowment, arts organizations and the US military with Pentagon funding in 2004 for classical theatre on military bases. As part of this program, which sought to highlight the NEA’s impact to all Americans, everywhere, Aquila performed at the White House, the first NEA event there for the George W. Bush administration and I like to think we had a positive impact on Bush’s decision to continue support for the Endowments. Surreal though that experience was (I received a Bush shoulder rub on my way into the East Room for the performance), we are now completely off the map when it comes to how to navigate the present administration. Yet, I must believe that all is not lost for the endowments, and that Aquila’s Benthamite mission statement - that the greatest works should be accessible to the greatest number - can still hold true. John Jay made it clear that the survival of the republic was dependent on the light and knowledge of the people, so I believe that offering people access to the classics together with programming that explores what classical works mean to us today should continue to be an essential part of government funding. One way this ideal has been productive in practice is with Aquila’s public and veteran’s programming which has been regularly funded by the NEH since 2007.
This funding originated because after many years touring classical drama and literature from Homer to Heller we convinced the NEH of the usefulness of performance to anchor public programs based on the classics. Consequently, in 2007 were funded for a new program called Page and Stage, which worked with 16 public library systems in 12 states. Here we united a performance of The Iliad: Book One with reading groups, public talks, workshops and book donations, and worked with the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies) on recruiting and training local classics scholars to work in each library. This program helped change the way American public libraries thought about public engagement at a time when the existence and relevance of libraries was under threat. Using public libraries were the audiences we were not reaching at theatres and performing arts centers: people from places underserved by the arts and humanities, immigrant communities, families and veterans. We based this first NEH program around Homer’s Iliad and created broad thematic units which helped spark deep conversations about tensions in American culture, such as inequality, democracy, immigration, and of course, the then current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
We learned a great deal from this early program, especially the value of partnerships with scholars, institutions and other organizations. In several cases the local public library system had never worked with the nearby college or arts center and the program helped create some valuable new inter-community relationships. As our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were intensifying we sensed the need to create programming that put the veteran community in conversation with the public, as Vietnam Veteran and actor Brian Delate put it “to help make Americans more literate about the ramifications of war”. Several venues on the Page and Stage program were aimed at veterans and in April 2009 Aquila presented the fledgling Theater of War program at the Lucille Lortel Theater in New York as part of this NEH program. Theatre of War went on to organize as a for-profit defense contractor soon after this performance with a focus on celebrity readings on military bases. However, we felt that a strength of NEH funding was that a humanities-based program staged in public spaces allowed for the free flow of uncensored discussion and a level of complexity that the ancient texts served very well indeed. In these current times of the tweet, the media sound bite and the self-fulfilling pings of social media, perhaps a program based on live performance embodied presence and collective discussion on complex issues might seem a bit Quixotic, but in 2010 Aquila received a $800,000 NEH Chairman’s Special Award to expand the program. This became Ancient Greeks / Modern Lives and visited 100 communities in 42 states over the next three years and hired over 50 classics scholars to work on the local programs.
Ancient Greeks / Modern Lives and the following program, You|Stories placed an emphasis on the veteran community and we were starting to see new veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan attending the events speaking out and creating relationships with veterans from other conflicts and time periods. You|Stories then developed a new video story capturing app where people could explore ancient material and upload their own responses. This was the first story capturing app to use video upload features and received a 2015 Communicator Award of Distinction. We also chose to highlight women combat veterans and staged a version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes at Brooklyn Academy of Music entitled A Female Philoctetes, with Julia Crockett and a chorus made up of combat veterans. The project was then funded by a global grant from the Theater Communications Group to perform in Athens at the Cacoyannis Foundation. While there, the veterans participated in an incredible Greek drama workshop with refugees from Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq.
The current program called The Warrior Chorus (http://www.warriorchorus.org/ ) has just been refunded with a two new NEH grants totaling just under $300,000. The focus here is on training veterans in arts and humanities public programming so their own voices can be added to the public dialogue. This is vital as the experiences of veterans are varied and complex and the veteran community is as diverse as America itself. We are also responding to the over simplification of the veteran experience. For example, the issue of veteran post- traumatic stress is justifiably by now well known, but this also runs the risk of becoming a one-dimensional trope. Many people, not just veterans suffer from PTS and not all veterans do, so we need to be mindful we are not marginalizing the very community we are trying to serve. Veterans can also contribute a great deal to the public’s understanding of these works, they share a good deal with the audiences of antiquity in having experienced war first hand, and although we would of course never claim that every war for every culture is the same, it is nevertheless remarkable how the words of Homer, Aeschylus or Sophocles can profoundly affect men and women who have experienced combat, war and homecoming.
The ancient texts, their performance, and the discussions they inspire can provide a context for the open examination of themes that many Americans might find difficult to expound on and share with others. They can help foster understanding and empathy. They can also articulate the kind of issues that our program participants want to discuss now such as, leadership, democracy, immigration, misogyny and racism. In this way, classical literature as part of a public program can be a form of political activism in that it can being people of differing views together in a contextualized, productive discussion. This is what I think the Greek theatre was also trying to do - present alternate perspectives and differing viewpoints. Surely the ability to understand another’s perspective is essential for the democratic public? Veterans can help foster this kind of dialogue – listening to a US Marine who fought in Fallujah speak openly and honesty about the treatment of refugees, or that he fought for the right for people he does not agree with to protest and hold elected leaders accountable can be very powerful to hear. This can be made even more profound if accompanied by a reading from Aeschylus’ Suppliants or Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus.
The overall aim of these programs has been to demonstrate how ancient works can speak to and be interpreted by us all. For many, the stories they tell and the themes found in them resonate powerfully with their own experiences. For the people participating in this program and hearing or reading these ancient words, sometimes for the very first time, they are not somehow diminishing a mythic Greek legacy or debasing their status as noble old poems, but instead capturing something of the spirit of these works that helped make them a classic in the first place. With this in mind, The Warrior Chorus will soon be heading to Washington DC to perform for members of Congress and then visit representatives from their districts to make their argument for the survival of the NEH. The new phase of the program will then be expanding the definition of “veteran” to include civilian survivors of war, refugees and the displaced, a concept developed by the veterans who have been involved in the program.
The National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities are expressions of the value Americans place on the importance of what John Jay called “light and knowledge” - their very existence reflects this ideal and their funds have had an enormous impact on American arts and humanities. Without them we shut down an important and prestigious source of public funding, a source based on merit and decided on by public appointees. This is important in that much private funding, important and appreciated though it is, comes from a very small sliver of American society - the top 1%. If the rest of us also want to have some say in what kind of arts and humanities programs get funding then now is the time we all need to speak up and fight for their continued existence. Please contact your representative, e-mail, call and write and encourage all your friends to do so. We need to save the NEH and NEA.
More June, 2017 Newsletter Content
For Helen Cullyer's statement about the history of NEH funding at the SCS, see this page.
For Casey Dué's piece about the Homer Multitext Project, read her article here.
For Kristina Killgrove's article on the funding complexities in Classical Bioarchaeology, go here.
For a list of resources you can use to learn more about proposed NEH funding cuts and how to get involved, check out this page.
