The Richness of the Arts

Zellerbach Playhouse, UC Berkeley
April 15, 1998

The Richness of the Arts

By Robert M. Berdahl
Chancellor,
University of California, Berkeley

Thank you. I know this event is titled Making Theater. And I am honored that you thought to ask me to speak. You've really given me some hard acts to follow. Anna Deavere Smith, Tony Kushner, Studs Terkel and so many other impressive artists. So, I will be completely honest with you. I am afraid, as much as I enjoy and treasure the theater, and the arts in general, my place in a theater belongs on the other side of the stage, in the seats you now occupy. Tonight, the best I can do is share with you a few thoughts on why I love the theater and then talk a bit more about the role the arts play here at Berkeley and the larger role many of us wish they would play and how we might get there.

I love to go to the theater because good, live theater confronts us, in a very compressed moment, with dilemmas and issues of the human condition in a way no other medium does. Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun is just such an example. Her play brought us, in the most humanly compelling way, a profound truth about the power of family, and about the reality of racism in America. Near the end of the play when Mr. Lindner, the man from the so-called community welcoming committee, shows up at their new home we have a pretty good idea what is coming next. And it is so painful because we know before Walter and Ruth do and we ache for the moment they will know what we do. And then the words finally come. Mr. Lindner tells the family, "And we also have the category of what the association calls -- uh -- special community problems."

But that night, sitting in this theater, it was more than Lorraine Hansberry's truth that was expressed. In presenting her story, it became your truth, and in experiencing it, it became my truth. That is why theater can be so powerful. The basic condition of theater, after all, what sets it apart from film and television, is that a play is a constant process of re-creation.

When I think about great theater, the playwright who comes to my mind first is Arthur Miller. To me, there is no more compelling confrontation with the American condition than Death of a Salesman. And there is no more reflective critique of freedom than The Crucible. I suppose you can guess that Miller is my favorite. I don't think there is a greater playwright, although Shakespeare is pretty good too.

Miller is an American playwright who has made the oldest of American theatrical traditions, the exemplary drama, his own. The action of his plays, whether they are set in a modest home in the 1940s or a dank forest in the 1690s, is concerned with the fate of human beings and the decisions they make. He uses his talent as a playwright to explore the moral values of his characters and also of the society in which they live.

This is how Miller, in the late 1950s, described his purpose. He said, quote:

The social drama, as I see it, is the main stream and the antisocial drama a bypass. I can no longer take with ultimate seriousness a drama of individual psychology written for its own sake, however full it may be of insight and precise observation. Time is moving; there is a world to make, a civilization to create that will move toward the only goal the humanistic, democratic mind can ever accept with honor. It is a world in which the human being can live as a naturally political, naturally private, naturally engaged person, a world in which once again a true tragic victory may be scored.

In both plays and in nearly all his works Miller aligns himself with those who believe in the playwright as a thinker and the stage as a forum for the discussion of ideas.

That sounds to me an awful lot like what is supposed to happen at a university, and I suppose that's why I find Miller such an appealing playwright. It is also why I believe the arts, whether it is drama, dance, music, film or art, are so important to the fabric of a fully engaged education. They bring a richness to the human experience, a broader sense of meaning. Without the arts in our lives and as a part of our learning, we are shortchanged.

Berkeley has a great deal to offer our students in the way of the arts and has produced great artists in many fields. Our faculty in the performing arts, arts scholarship, and arts criticism are among the very best in the country. Professor Wilkerson, after all, was not only the dramaturg of this spring's production of A Raisin in the Sun, but is also Lorraine Hansberry's biographer.

Cal Performances is nationally renown as a performing arts presenter. It has brought to this campus the dance of Mikhail Baryshnikov, the jazz of Wynton Marsalis, the compositions of John Adams. Similarly impressive programs and exhibitions and lectures on the arts are presented all across campus. We have the Townsend Center, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Center for Theater Arts, and the College of Environmental Design, among others, to thank for this.

Our Music Department is one of the oldest and most prominent in the county. In about a week, on April 23, the Music Department is hosting a special concert to help celebrate my inauguration, for which I am especially grateful. I will also put in a plug here for one of the performers -- my son-in-law John Baldwin will play at the concert. Music has been one of the great pleasures in the Berdahl family ever since our girls were little.

I know that many of our students do appreciate the arts. You can see that when our Men's Octet or the women's Golden Overtones gather at Sather Gate for an impromptu performance. In the cacophony of the plaza, the unamplified, unaccompanied harmonies of their beautiful voices instantly transform the scene. It always amazes me. It doesn't matter that some preacher is ranting or that skateboarders are rumbling by. In no time, students gather in a semi-circle and that magic connection between performer and audience takes hold.

But as rich as our arts scene can be, many of our students, especially our undergraduates, fail to mine it. Too many go through their university experience without ever attending a Cal Performance offering, or a noon concert in Hertz Hall, or a production here in the playhouse or next door in the dance theater. They may find their way to the Pacific Film Archive, but I wonder how many cross the street to explore the work of fellow students in the Worth Ryder Art Gallery. This failure to engage in the arts is a great loss.

But I also agree with those who believe the university has a role and responsibility to the arts that goes beyond its internal educational needs. In an era when commercialism and the cult of celebrity have had such an overwhelming impact on the arts, there needs to be a place where art, for its own sake, is appreciated. Where criticism goes beyond "two thumbs up." The university should be a place where the artist is nurtured. And it should be a place where creativity can thrive free of the pressures of politics or the marketplace.

The arts, after all, have as much to do with social change as do politics and social science. Who can watch The Crucible without understanding its parallel with Senator McCarthy's communist "witch-hunts," and the continuing struggle of modern man to strike the balance between a desire for individual freedom and the necessity for an ordered society. More recently, no one has better given voice to the erupting social and community rage that occurred in the early '90s following the incidents in Los Angeles and in Crown Heights than Anna Deavere Smith, who you wisely brought to campus in the Making Theater Series.

It is for these reasons that this campus has taken a closer look at the role of the arts at Berkeley and how we might strengthen them. To this end, The Vice Chancellor's Arts Council has proposed a new Center for the Arts at Berkeley. I would like to share with you this evening the council's proposal. But first, let me tell you who is on the council.

The members include:
Wendy Allenbrook, chair of the music department
Charles Altieri, chair of art practice
Jacquelynn Bass, director of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Robert Cole, director of Cal Performances
Harrison Fraker, dean of the college of environmental design
Tony Kaes, professor in the film studies program
Edith Kramer, film curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Harvey Stahl, chair of the art history department
Linda Weimer, assistant vice chancellor for public affairs
and, Margaret Wilkerson, chair of the Center for Theater Arts

The rationale behind the proposal is that the campus, for all its fine programs, finds them scattered among many units and departments. The council reports that this lack of a focal point has an impact on our students and faculty. Students, as many of you here well know, have no place where they are likely to interact with students in other areas whose interests and talents could overlap and amplify theirs. And while our faculty in the arts is among the very best in the nation, they too are hard pressed for possibilities for collaboration.

Further, the council members point out, student sophistication in the arts is at a surprisingly low level and there is a great deal more to be done in relation to inspiring and educating our students, who will, after all be the future for the arts.

Even for the students who are engaged fully in the arts, the council said, few get the opportunity to spend time with the truly impressive range of visiting artists who are brought to campus because financial constraints limit their visits to a day or two.

What then would a Center for the Arts look like at Cal? The council proposes ultimately a structure similar to our successful Townsend Center for the Humanities with a faculty director, an executive director, and an advisory board with members from each unit on the campus that deals primarily with the arts. A community council is also proposed. At the outset, however, the center would be incubated at the Townsend Center.

Among the center's proposed goals would be:
-- To develop arts programs that foster innovation imagination and invention in all fields of study and research on campus.
-- To provide students a more meaningful understanding of the arts, whatever their background or major. The center would also provide opportunities to engage in the arts actively on campus and within the larger community.
-- And finally, among the center's goals would be to stimulate research and dialogue on the arts and to formulate new critical approaches and avenues for understanding that provide insight into the creative process.

This is an exciting and ambitious proposal and I can tell you that I very much support the idea of strengthening and focusing our programs.

I started out by talking about Arthur Miller and I'd like to end with a few words of his that describe what it is like to stick your neck out to create something and then to be rewarded when your creation means something to others. He said:

The success of a play, especially one's first success, is somewhat like pushing against a door which is suddenly opened that was always securely shut until then. For myself, the experience was invigorating. It suddenly seemed that the audience was a mass of blood relations, and I sensed a warmth in the world that was not there before. It made it possible to dream of doing more and risking more.

I would like Berkeley to be a place where our students can learn to create whatever it takes so that they too can "sense a warmth in the world that was not there before." I would like Berkeley to be a place that will help them "to dream of doing more and risking more."