Building Community with Art

Each spring and fall for the past five years, I have been a teaching artist with a program called Building Community Through the Arts. My job is to help create a feeling of community among high school students in the Bangor, Maine area. Since the shootings at Columbine High School, BCTA was created to enhance the social environment in our states’ schools. The idea is that by ushering high school students through a creative process in the area of performing arts, they invest in one another as people. To whatever degree I am successful at bringing these strangers closer to one another is beyond my control. What I can do is to help these students create and perform art. It’s a powerful relationship between art and society that I am here to engage. And by the time we are finished, a community will be created from the stuff of imaginations.

On the first day of these residencies, I like to perform for my students. I might dance an excerpt from To Kill a Mockingbird or tap out Bubba, the Tap Dancer, a thinly disguised autobiography. As a teacher, I need to give them a reason to do this scary thing I’m asking of them. As an artist, I demonstrate skills but more importantly, by performing I open myself to them. This is a smaller version of what they will be doing themselves. By performing, the energy in the room rises and I’ve found that this is the best space in which to begin. My art work combines dance and storytelling. This is not a common combination of talents but a pretty good match for the creative abilities of high school students. They can all talk and move around.

We begin by pushing the desks to the sides and stand in a circle. We say our names. We look at each other out of the corner of our eyes. Even though we are strangers, I know from experience that that will change very soon. I open my bag of creative tricks and immediately, we are laughing. We run and trade places. We pass imaginary balls and heft invisible suitcases. We mix ourselves up in a scramble and freeze when iceberg is shouted. We balance with one leg in the air; with our arms around each others shoulders. We touch. We fit ourselves together like puzzle pieces. We turn each other into showers and lamps and bananas. We float across the room holding each others gaze. With broken legs, we run from dinosaurs and chase the moon.

Essentially, we play and we remember how good it feels to play, but these are young adults. With so much change happening physically and emotionally, their defenses are strong, especially to the kind of openness I‘m suggesting. Resistance is completely understandable if not entirely expected. It‘s not a surprise. Enthusiasm is unfashionable among teenagers, and as we work on creating, my major battle is not with the creative stuff but with the toxic fear that is released before creativity can happen.

Often, these are English classes I’ve invaded. One assignment I might give is to pick a favorite part from the books they’ve been reading or a line of poetry that appeals to them. Whether it’s Boo Radley or Robert Frost, these positive responses to their reading holds the key information for this project succeed. For whatever speaks to us in art, tells us a little bit about ourselves. By creating art from these fragments of these students, a very personal expression is formed. They create gestures from the text and teach them to each other. The movement and the words may stay attached or music may be added to bring in a new dimension. As our time together draws to a close, we spread their creations out like jewels on black velvet. After examining each one, we string them together like Christmas lights. On the last day that we meet together as a class, the performance piece is rehearsed again and again until the bell breaks us apart.

At the same time that my groups are turning and twisting, there are other teaching artists like myself working their own brands of magic in other high schools nearby: actors, playwrights, mask artists and physical comedians. On the conference day, we all meet in a church in downtown Bangor; artists, teachers and two hundred high school students. Every fifteen minutes over the course of that day, dancers make their debuts and original plays are premiered. Art reigns supreme.

To create is to open oneself. It is to dare and to choose. When we create we are saying I thought of this or this touches me. In performance, this part of oneself is offered as a gift to whoever is there to receive it. When that part is received by an audience, it becomes part of them as well. When two hundred high school students give each other little pieces of themselves, the barriers that divide them come crashing down.

At the end of these conference days, when all the dancing is done but before the buses have taken them away, I see these students shine. For me, these are moments when the world seems to transform just for an instant. Time stops and the atmosphere rings with a high frequency. As I make my way among them, their enthusiasm fills me. They look years younger than they did just a few weeks ago. Or is that just because they’re smiling? A few of the boys who were the hardest to convince say thanks and goodbye. Every pair of eyes I meet is like an open door to the beautiful part inside each of us; no longer hidden but visible for all to see.

Then the buses are moving and they are gone. And the fullness I feel is a complete saturated happiness. By creating art, we arrived together in a single moment of union, communion, community, perhaps heaven. That reward is not just for these students, but for all of us to feel good about. And we did this by creating art.

Follow Your Bliss

If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Wherever you are - if you are following your bliss, you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you, all the time.

Joseph Campbell



I found my bliss early in life in the back of my sister’s tap dance class. Reaching back into the body of my six year old self, it was a small effort to stand up and move forward onto the dance floor with my sister and the other girls but I remember it felt so big to me at the time, like discovering a secret treasure. I knew then that I had discovered something about myself. There was a clear, magical feeling within me that said yes, this is the right thing to do.

As a kid, you simply do the things you like to do. No real mystery to it. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that it’s ok for girls to dance and less ok for boys, but by the time I came to that understanding, it was too late. I had already been dancing for years and I loved to do it. When I put the feeling of dancing next to the thought of it not being ok, the feeling was much more real and that’s what I followed.



I loved to dance so much that I danced all over the place…in the driveway and the old folks home. I would drive my mother to distraction by dancing in the kitchen while she was trying to get dinner for eight on the table. It was a beautifully simple and unselfconscious time. I didn’t think about what I was doing because I was too busy enjoying myself.

As I got older, things changed. When the neighborhood boys turned out to see me perform at the school pumpkin sale one fall, I started getting bullied around the neighborhood and at school. I thought I would be the “star” of the neighborhood, but that was not the case. When I entered middle school, I had to quit dancing for awhile and withdrew to my room. By that time, dancing had became a big part of who I was. Life didn’t seem right when I wasn’t dancing. Sometimes, not following your bliss is as important as following your bliss. When you’re off track, you know it and when you come back into alignment with your bliss, you are rewarded with the relief of finding your way again.



In Bubba, the tap dancing rhythms are the indicator whether Bubba is on track or not. At the darkest part of the story, the steady rhythm is broken as Bubba quits dancing and leaves his path. The piece sags and the space becomes heavy with the absence of lighthearted tapping.

To follow your bliss, you have to know what your bliss is. Not everyone in every life finds their bliss. Sometimes life lessons are more general and we struggle with trials that seem less inspired. If you know what you love to do, you are very fortunate indeed. Many (or can I say most) people don’t have a specific passion in their lives and struggle to know which way to go in life. Whether its rock climbing or origami, when you find something that you enjoy doing so much that time stands still, that is your direction. You might have to try out a bunch of different activities before you land on fertile ground.

Although there were hard times, my life as a dancer has been a joyful, easy to follow adventure. By following my intuitive knowledge as a child, I trusted that each turn in the road would be shown to me by the same inner feelings. This turned out to be true and by listening to my intuition, I have been perfectly guided throughout my life. I am thankful for the gift of a life rich with friendships, culture, and not to mention many wonderful adventures.



Bubba, the Tap Dancer is an homage to my six year old self; that boy who found the path and the insight to follow an intangible feeling of personal truth. In the end, Bubba is redeemed by his journey and is welcomed home with honor. Although no one has come to shake my hand in congratulations for a life well lived, I know that by “following what was in my heart” my life has been lived in the way it was meant to be lived and I believe that has to be the greater honor.

If you would like to watch more Bubba, click here or here.