ROOTS

The Earliest Roots Go Deepest
The lines between work, art, and everyday life have always been thin for me. I grew up hanging around rehearsal halls of the New York City Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. Before I entered kindergarten, opera directors cast me when they needed "a kid" because I fit the two highest qualifications of a child performer: I was compliant and convenient (my oldest sister was a singer with City Opera).

Some of my earliest memories include sitting on Beverly Sills' lap during a production of The Ballad of Baby Doe, feeling the vibrations of her voice surge through my body. I remember being carried, perched like a parrot, on Gian Carlo Menotti's shoulders as he directed his chamber opera, The Saint of Bleeker Street. I listened attentively as he explained to me precisely how each of his staging decisions would influence the audience's perception of his characters. It was a lesson, tailored to a nine-year old, on how to manipulate non-verbal communication for artistic purposes.

In junior high I shepherded a live sheep in Falstaff and danced as a frog in Hansel and Gretel with the Metropolitan Opera Ballet. From the wings I watched Margot Fonteyn coach Rudolph Nureyev in a rehearsal of Romeo and Juliet.

Most of the adults in my childhood who were involved with opera lived their lives passionately in the service of making skillful art. On the other hand, I have always been passionate about making art in the service of living a skillful life. An adult who modeled a conscious approach to life was my teacher, Margaret Craske, one of the most prominent ballet teachers of the twentieth century, and a close disciple of Meher Baba, one of the most prominent spiritual masters of the twentieth century. For more about this, click on

There were some intense sociopolitical implications for growing up as an opera brat in the early sixties. My family lived in Newark, New Jersey, a city of the eve of the race riots that would soon burn through America. Several times a week we made the forty-minute drive from our home on the edge of town, through the boarded up neighborhoods of “down-neck” Newark to the opulence of the Metropolitan Opera house. With each car ride we drove past clusters of dark-skinned men drinking from brown paper bags, to clusters of fair-skinned men and women, decked out in furs and jewels, chatting outside the opera hall. The disparity was so blatant that even as a child I knew something was wrong. Much later I came to view this "wrong" as a manifestation of the classism and racism that underlie the elevated, dissociated role of "high" art in our society. See Some Assumptions About Power and Rank in Community Arts.

Branching Out
As a teenager I was intuitively drawn to Asia to find a way of living that had more social integrity than the classical western professional model of "High Art." I found my model in Bali, a society where everyone is a painter, dancer, musician, rice farmer and keeper of the village children. Being in Bali showed me that it was possible to live a human life that blended ordinary everyday-ness with artmaking, community and spiritual expression. For an image, click on

In the seventies I returned to the United States resolved to create a life that felt as integrated as life in Bali. I wanted an everyday life that flows easily between artistic expression, community engagement and spiritual presence. Although I carried a felt sense that such a life is possible, I had no images of how such a life might look in the United States given the extreme individualism of American society.

I chose to settle in Minneapolis because there was more likelihood of building an integrated life here. Minnesota has historically been a stronghold of the cooperative economic movement, and the spirit of cooperation pervades political, social and economic structures in a way that is unusual in America. I was attracted to a Midwestern work ethic that was diligent, but less ambitious than my East Coast upbringing. There was a vital arts scene and life was not as hard as in many other American cities. In the Twin Cities it was economically viable to spend a significant amount of time making art and still own a home, spend time with family, tend a garden, be involved civically/politically, and even have health care. For more about this period, click on Interpersonal Communication Skills in Community Art: The Awareness Wheel

I chose Minneapolis because it seemed like a good place to explore how to make art, stay connected to others and build a life of some balance. I approached my exploration using the best tool at my disposal: the creative process.

Continue on to art as inquiry