Chapter 4, Death is an Everyday Thing, talks about a collective that comes together to create a medium of art. The group created this work of art in order to reduce “prejudice and separation” (page 37). Despite their struggles and hard upbringings, these refugees and immigrants are always able to overcome the unbearable. “It requires a leap of faith for performers to trust that I’m steering us towards something worthwhile, even when I do my best to translate my vision for them. It takes an even bigger leap of faith for a group of immigrants or refugees to trust an outsider director with the essence of their imagery and to trust that their stories will be well translated. I now have great respect for the magnitude of this act, and I'm quite humbled by it”(Page 45). One potential application for this community-engaged arts practice is listening to every party involved. Every party involved is just trying to create something meaningful that will open the eyes of society around them. Chapter 9, Steal the Stars and the Moon, tells the stories about Polish prisoners from the Bemovo prison. “Positive medicine in the morass of darkness” (Page 107). The Theater of the Witness is one way to help all kinds of people. “... hoping that one day his self image would expand, allowing him to move beyond his limited sense of self worth” (Page 108). This quote really resonated with me because as an artist, sometimes we get in this mindset that we are giving something to society and we sometimes forget about ourselves. Chapter 13, Beauty Born from Ugliness, talks about a project that lasted multiple years. Reading this chapter helped me realize that not all projects are done quickly. Sometimes the process of creating art and creating community-engaged arts can take longer than expected. “I came to listen, learn, bear witness, connect, and, I hoped, help to give voice to some of the hidden stories. I didn’t know that I would also come to heal myself too” (Page 153). Similar to the previous chapter, this chapter talks about how art is for everyone.
Issues that have been impacting my life and the ones around me mainly revolve around environmental issues. One of the pressing issues that affects the agriculture community in California is the State’s distribution of water. Now a tactic that the State Government has had for many years is to take water from Northern California and send it down to the South. The south is in need of water as they do not get enough to support themselves, but the issue is a bit larger and encompuses the states refusal to create more reservoirs to store water to be used during the dryer months. But the main issue is that the focus is uneven and falls heavily on the side of sending it to the south instead of distributing it evenly so farmers in all regions but mainly central and southern california have the proper amount of water to grow their crops. California is one of the leading states in the production and exporting of agriculture products due to our vast and wide scale of geological environments, but ...
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