Kids Team Up For Art Story

The idea behind Kids Team Up For Art came from Brian Stanley Morgan, Kansas City artist and board member of the Westport Center for the Arts. At each workshop, children come together under the leadership of two trained artists to create both an individual art project they can take home, and a group collaborative project which often remains at the public library where it was created, to be displayed there. During the year when the Kansas City Public Library chose as its theme DREAM BIG, one collaborative project was to decorate huge foam core letters: D R E A M and B I G. Each letter was as tall as a child, and each was painted with bright colors and creative designs.

 

When the letters were all finished, the children admired their work, but one little girl wasn’t happy to hear that the letters would remain at the library. “But I want to take my letter home,” she said. “I want the E, because my name is Eve!” Eve learned that her letter was needed to complete the theme, and she could come to the library often and see her letter there. In this way she saw that her letter was an important part of the whole idea, and was needed to make the idea complete. KTUFA (Kids Team up for Art) and the other programs of Westport Center for the Arts emphasize that when the community creates art, the arts create community. Eve was part of a creative community making art!

by neil_ryan

Doug Talley Quartet Story

The Doug Talley Quartet first played for a Westport Center for the Arts Brown Bag Concert on the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Holiday in the year 2001. The year before, the quartet had recorded Doug Talley’s composition Kansas City Suite, comprised of ten movements depicting landmarks in Kansas City: 1600 E 18th Street (The KC Jazz district), the City of Fountains, The Sleeping Child (statue on the Country Club Plaza), “The Buck Stops Here” in honor of President Harry Truman, Stockyard Blues (KC Strip), Basie and the Prez, Sky Stations, Plaza Lights, the Shuttlecocks, and Pendergast. The suite was recorded live in 2001, and the quartet performed it fifteen to twenty times over the years. They found, however, that people outside of the Kansas City Metro did not understand all the references to the various places, and the suite wasn’t often performed in its entirety.

 

The quartet was scheduled to play a Brown Bag Concert on the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in 2012, but on December 29th, 2011, a catastrophic fire gutted the usual venue ~ Westport Presbyterian Church ~ and the quartet generously adjusted to a different venue with little notice. During the 4 ½ years of rebuilding the church, the quartet remained faithful to being part of the Brown Bag Concert Series, performing at Community Christian Church. They looked forward to returning to 201 Westport Road, and when asked to participate in the Westport Rising Concert Series in celebration of the rebuilt church, they happily agreed. On June 24th, 2016, the quartet performed the complete Kansas City Suite, with an eleventh movement which Doug Talley created for the occasion: Westport Rising.

 

After the performance, Doug told the President of WCA, Scott Myers, that it was a thrill to be able to play the complete Kansas City Suite for an appreciative audience. It’s clear that WCA provides an opportunity not only for audiences to enjoy good music, but for the performers themselves to enjoy playing works they don’t often get to do. The Doug Talley Quartet’s concert at noon on Dr. Martin Luther King’s Holiday, January 15th, 2018, will feature music by African-American jazz composers, and will be the 18th straight year the quartet has been an important part of the Brown Bag Concert Series. When the community creates art, the arts create community!

by neil_ryan

Brown Bag Concert Story

Marian Thomas, who founded and directed the noon-time Brown Bag Concert Series for 21 years, was a preschool music teacher for 32 years. She was convinced that very young children benefitted from hearing good live music, so she made the children of Willow Woods Child Development Center, housed next to the church where the concerts took place, feel welcome. One day as she shopped in Brookside, she heard her name being called: “Mrs. Thomas, I want you to know that my daughter, who’s now in middle school, still talks about going to the ‘Big Church’ to hear the wonderful music.” A memory was born in that little girl, a memory which stayed with her as a positive influence. The concerts, free to the public, are about creating beautiful memories and a sense of community. When the community creates art, the arts create community.

by neil_ryan

Arts Reflection Story

Marian McCaa Thomas

Each month on the Westport Center for the Arts web site an “arts reflection” is posted which aims to inspire those who create music, poetry, choreography, drama, visual art, or literature. A Kansas Citian friend of mine recently applied to become Executive Director of a national organization which encourages group singing in places of worship, as well as the composition of new words and music to be sung by those groups. She told me that on the plane flight to go for her final interview, she went to the WCA web site and read the “arts reflection” posts in preparation, to remind her of what matters most in furthering the creative arts. The interview went well, and she was hired for the position. Sometimes the pebbles we toss into the pond create ever-widening circles of the lively arts, and more communities are created.

by neil_ryan

Barry Lopez

Written by Brian Doyle in The Xian Century (editor of Portland Magazine)

I believe an artist has to remind herself or himself that when you write or paint or compose music, you draw in mysterious ways on the courtesy and genius of the community. It is this sensitivity to gifts welling up unbidden, this awareness of the fate of the community that divides art from commerce. The role of the artist, in part, is to develop the conversations, the stories, the drawings, the films, the music – the expressions of awe and wonder and mystery – that remind us, especially in our worst times, of what is still possible, of what we haven’t yet imagined. And it is by looking to one another, by attending to the responsibilities of maintaining good relations in whatever we do, that communities turn a gathering darkness into light.

by neil_ryan

Howard Thurman

Don’t ask what the world needs, ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. What the world needs is people who have come alive.

by neil_ryan

Bob Sabath

Friends of Silence e-letter, July 18, 2016

In a time of mass shootings, refugee crises, and environmental degradation it is hard to speak of the need for art and creativity. One wonders what, if anything, they have to do with changing the heart-break of the world or serving a greater good than personal growth and pleasure. Yet why is it that those who would control and bully us feel threatened by musicians and artists and poets? How can we envision a better way if not by searching deep within the imagination and stirring creative reservoirs into a provocative, life-giving “re-presentation” of the world and our place in it? It seems important to tap these wellsprings for the sake of our own souls’ transformation. But it is also time to send these creative energies out into the world because we are in desperate need for resistance, for saying no to death and destruction, for boldly setting forth an agenda of life and love and respect. That these works are beautiful and inspiring and authentic is what arrests attention, what causes people to listen and see, to stop and think. We need soulful media, less rhetoric and more poetry, less shouting and more music. Photographers would say their draft is all about capturing the light. And we are all desperately in need of light. Annie Dillard speaks of the art of writing: “Why are we reading if not in hope that the writer will magnify and dramatize meaningfulness, and will press upon our minds the deepest mysteries, so we may feel again their majesty and power?”

by neil_ryan

Simon Callow

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World

To enter a theatre for a performance is to be inducted into a magical space, to be ushered into the sacred arena of the imagination.

by neil_ryan

Vanessa Redgrave

attributed, The Redgraves: A Family Epic

Of course we all come to the theatre with baggage. The baggage of our daily lives, the baggage of our problems, the baggage of our tragedies, the baggage of being tired. It doesn't matter what age you are. But if our hearts get opened and released -- well that is what theatre can do, and does sometimes, and everyone is thankful when that happens.

by neil_ryan

John Lahr

“Questions for John Lahr,” The New Yorker, January 23, 2009

Any play that makes an audience think out of the box, that makes connections to life and names our pain and by doing so makes our pain subject to thinking and the process of understanding, is doing something inherently political. By promoting understanding, by putting experience in context, by making connections between the normal and the rational, theatre is an act of anti-terrorism. It stimulates courage and a survival spirit. In that sense of political, there are a lot of serious plays doing their work in the world"

by neil_ryan