Gauguin's Shadow, by Fred Curchack

Greatly enjoyed a play at the Undermain Theatre (www.undermain.com) last weekend. It was a one-man show about the painter Paul Gauguin, based on his letters and other writings. The performance was a collage of recordings of the letters and of music, slides of Gauguin's paintings and family photos projected onto a gauze screen and onto the actor and his puppets. As a collage artist I loved the layering of collected images and sounds.

I also loved the basement performance space with exposed structural supports, pipes, and wires. The effect made me wonder again about the cave paintings of Lascaux. I imagined shamans dancing in torchlight before the marvelous animal images.

What I got out of the play was a strong reminder that the aesthetic experience for each art viewer is as much a function of the accumulated experiences that viewer brings to the performance as it is a function of the experience of the performance itself.

This is important to me. As a teacher, I am always bringing different experiences and observations to an art example than my students. One of my main goals is challenging kids to increase their observation of the sensory world. If they have never paid any attention to a tangerine harvest moon in a Prussian blue sky, how will they marvel at the beauty of complementary color schemes? If they have never seen a time-lapse photograph of car lights in an intersection, how will their race car paintings be limited? If they have never looked out the window to see a rose sky reflected in a river, how will they ever get beyond drawing those damn smiling suns in the corners of their pictures?

One of our biggest challenges in teaching art and drama is working with kids who have not experienced books and stories, music and museums. They do not know story themes, sequencing, plot conflicts and resolutions, life in other cultures, anything beyond their personal experience and tv viewing. They are bringing a very limited bag of experiences to their viewing and making of art, and that bag is overloaded with adult-theme shows, lyrics, and images. Still worse, the kids are bringing a serious shortage of curiosity. They are not noticing and wondering.

Think about it. Are the kids on the airplane looking out the window observing the curvilinear variations of the earth's surface and the geometric marks of civilization, or are they playing their Gameboys? Are they looking out car windows at the homeless person on the corner, or are they being jollied by a video in their SUV?

Our experience of a play, art work, or musical performance is as much a function of every aspect of our life up to that moment, as it is of the art event. Our kids need lots of enrichment. They also need time and space to do their own observing and wondering.