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Chapter 9 | Leon Bernier (continued) Youth who devote themselves to the arts are not necessarily lonely. Emulation can become a factor in the contagiousness of a taste for arts within the group. Several say that their encounter with the arts was on the occasion of an artistic activity performed by peers, at school or elsewhere. This indicates that as far as being stimulated to devote oneself to the arts is concerned (not to be mistaken with the ability to become a critical audience), an amateur presentation in which people of their age perform can become a more efficient stimulus than a highly professional show. The desire to devote oneself to the arts often begins in a casual way. Perhaps it’s no different for adults. 3. the artistic creations of young people are partly a result of school As suggested earlier, there are special occasions when young people choose to devote themselves to the arts. Those occasions often arise in school or through extracurricular activities, but also through any activities designed for young people, whether private lessons, festivals, or other municipal and community leisure activities. Let us look, first at the school and the role of the teaching of the arts as a point of contact with artistic creation. The importance of that sort of teaching varies greatly from school to school. It can range from a course given once a week by a teacher who did not have real training in the arts to a programme concentrating on an artistic discipline (theatre, music, dance or the visual arts) where one can find a number of specialized teachers. Regardless of the state of art teaching, our interviews indicate the introduction to the arts through pleasurable activities at school is important. This does not mean that every youth will derive pleasure from the arts. We are speaking here of those who choose the arts at school or those whose choices take into account the pleasure to be found. We know that the relationship between students and school is one of necessity. They go to school not mainly because of what they are going to find there, but because it is necessary for their livelihood (Cournoyer, 1985). From that point of view, the teaching of the arts to those oriented toward becoming practitioners seems, on the part of the youth involved, to be at the meeting point of pleasure and necessity or, to put it differently, to introduce non-school into school. The following testimony of a girl studying dance puts the emphasis on what it brings her, personally and globally, in the context of other activities at her school: When I have “dance” on my schedule, it’s wonderful. I very, very much like my dance lessons. I am highly motivated. When I come out of a dance lesson, I am beaming. Really, dance is doing me a lot of good. It is total well being. It’s cleansing. I feel, when entering the dance studio, as if I’m entering... a cocoon. Then, I forget everything else, including conflicts, exercises, everything. I just stand there, totally in the moment. The students stimulated by the arts are not necessarily weak in other disciplines. The process required to register in a program specializing in the arts, as in any other discipline, tends to exclude weaker students. On the other hand, more than one testimonial shows that the arts often motivate those students; sometimes they become a major argument for staying in school — an argument that could be used more often by those who teach the arts in school). But there is a counterpart to this association of the arts and pleasure. Some students have difficulty with the more academic aspects of the arts. For example, one girl studying dance in secondary school had always believed, because her teachers told her so, that she was extremely talented. But she hit a wall in college, where she was confronted by her technical weaknesses and her work habits, a corollary of any serious learning in the arts. At the time of the interview, she questioned the pursuit of her college level diploma in dance; she thought of going into theatre, believing, rightly or wrongly, that she would find more freedom of expression there. And extracurricular activities? Traditionally, the artistic activities of young people have been developed through extracurricular activities. There is, of course, a dimension of liberty, of less constraint, that favours the learning of the arts and especially artistic expression. Different festivals provide occasions for young people who devote themselves to the arts in order to perform before an audience. This dimension of performance is not minor. Despite what one might believe, devoting oneself to the arts is a highly social gesture, particularly for the young. If artistic activity takes place in private or introspectively, its inclination is still fundamentally public. Thus the importance of those occasions in which young people say, “see, I am an artist,” or “I want to become an artist,” or else “I’m trying to become an artist.” Hélène Beauchamp who has written several studies based on field work with young people in theatre, stresses that point: doing theatre, is the process of playing in front of an audience, of saying something publicly. It is finding oneself on a stage, under the lights, whereas others in the hall are viewing and listening. For the former, playing is choosing to show publicly what is in their womb while having fun and bursting (1988: 47). |
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