The arts are important to the community

By Marc Strauss

I want to take this opportunity as a Cape Girardeau resident to respond to a number of points and issues brought up in Mark Bliss's Sept. 5 article, "Entertaining new revenue," concerning the Southeast Missouri State University, Cape Girardeau, Missouri and River Campus School of the Visual and Performing Arts developments.

First of all, I am encouraged that the university is continuing to work to educate the Cape Girardeau community and region on the benefits of a campus devoted solely to the visual and performing arts, as such benefits are never an easy notion for people to acknowledge and understand even in the best of economic times -- and especially in these difficult days of terrorist fears, monetary downturns and tenuous international relations.

Dance, music, theater and the visual arts do not often engage us on the everyday levels of struggle for survival, food, shelter, clothing and safety. Nevertheless, the arts are, as most people who attend or participate in one or more of their activities agree, at least as edifying as mud wrestling, rodeos and demolition derbies -- in fact, more so, for dance and music and theater and the visual arts work from the inside out, intimately engaging us as individuals and thoughtful members of society, and not from the outside in, such as the spectacles mentioned above. Rodeos and demolition derbies may make one marvel over our capacity for achievement, but generally they encourage and reinforce us (and take our hard-earned money) to sit and watch, as television so effectively does, and not be active participants.

On the local, regional, national and international levels, the arts demonstrate that, as the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid once said about nature, "the more we discover of their structure, of their mutual relations, and of the laws by which they are governed, the greater beauty, and the more delightful marks of art, wisdom and goodness we discern." They also stimulate us to involve our whole selves, stretching and challenging our sensibilities and critical thinking skills, and encouraging personal enrichment. In fact, the arts are consistent with and integral to the American ideals of individual life, liberty and happiness.

In the article, Jim Drury is quoted as saying that most area residents aren't interested in the arts. I do not believe that this statement is true. Juxtaposed to his comment that audiences to the River Campus "would just be locals, because they have bigger and better stuff in St. Louis," I will remind Mr. Drury of his personal enjoyment in attending a performance by the Cleveland Ballet Dancing Wheels in 1999, a nationally esteemed dance company that involves what the company calls "stand-up" and "sit-down" dancers (people in wheelchairs). Their performance not only sublimely demonstrated the overcoming of restrictions and challenges in life, but deeply touched the audience's hearts with both inspiration and awe, including, I believe, Mr. Drury's.

This past spring, a nearly sold-out Forrest H. Rose Theatre was treated to the internationally acclaimed Miami City Ballet in our tiny, apparently backwoods hamlet of Cape Girardeau, but I didn't hear anyone of the 500-odd audience members scream out that they would have preferred to have a demolition derby on display instead.

Neither did the sold-out audience for Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo run for cover the year before. On the contrary, I have never experienced such an outpouring of artistic appreciation by an audience anywhere, and I've seen some great dance and music and theatrical performances and arts exhibitions all over the world.

The "Trocks" are an all-male ballet company, internationally beloved, and they humorously, artistically and engagingly broke the stereotype that men cannot dance well in pointe shoes for a predominantly family-style, G-rated audience, right here in little old Cape Girardeau.

These are just three examples of grateful, appreciative, and large audiences in our community -- including not just university and Cape Girardeau members but regional folks from our four-state service area -- for dance performances. I could name dozens more similar instances of music, theater and visual arts programs.

By appointing himself spokesperson for the entire area and saying that "we like mud wrestling, rodeos and demolition derbies," Mr. Drury is bizarrely implying that the majority of regional residents prefer to ogle half-naked women in prurient forms of mock-battle undress. I trust there is a much larger contingent in our community who love and engage the arts with more open-minded hearts, spirits and bodies. The numbers, in fact, support this.

Don Dickerson, president of the university Board of Regents, is correct when he says that, especially in a weak economy with lagging sales tax revenue, a River Campus is a good thing from an economic perspective for our community. Gerry McDougall, Bruce Domazlicky and Pauline Fox's computer model estimates are indeed conservative in their assessment that, with 500 new students enrolled at the university's River Campus, direct and indirect employment would involve at least 159 persons, direct and indirect personal income would total $5.7 million, and local sales-tax collections would reach nearly $100,000. Not bad numbers at all to put into our community coffers. Their estimates are conservative because, on a national level (National Endowment for the Arts Web site), spending on fine arts performances is roughly 125 percent of spending on spectator sporting events, a fact that all too often surprises sports fans but makes sense to the silent majority of arts lovers.

A 1997 Missouri Arts Council publication entitled "An Economic Activity Survey of Missouri Nonprofit Arts Organizations" (Card, 1997) concurs with this evaluation, demonstrating that, with the "ripple effect" in ancillary revenue sources such as hotel stays (something one would think Mr. Drury would both welcome and support), restaurant dining, gift-shop and transportation-related purchases, and the under-appreciated contributions of volunteer services to the labor force (such as backstage and front-of-house theater work), the total attendance for the 88 organizations responding to the study came to 11.3 million patrons in 1996, more than double Missouri's population and nearly twice the number of admissions to all professional sports events in Missouri during the same year. These figures continue to grow, as a follow-up national and state study showed.

The not-for-profit arts industry in Missouri contributed more than $386 million to the state's economy in 2000 and is a $36.8 billion business that supports 1.3 million full-time jobs throughout the country (Dyer, 2001; National Governor's Association Center for Best Practices). Americans may be realizing, perhaps still somewhat unconsciously, that there must be something missing in their lives that the World Wrestling Federations of the world cannot provide.

The qualitative value of the arts, of course, cannot be estimated. Once again, they function on a personal, often intimate level. The visual and performing arts raise and broaden one's understanding of one's self, one's community and one's place in the world on a local, regional, national, international and even cosmological level. No one can put a price tag on such an education. Cape Girardeau is as good a place as any -- dare I say, just the right kind of community -- for a River Campus to be developed that is devoted to the growth of students' visual and performing arts sensibilities, sensitivities and expertise.

Everyone deserves such an education, and Cape Girardeau has such an opportunity. Let's not blow it for ourselves, our children and our true wealth.

Marc Strauss of Cape Girardeau is an associate professor of theater and dance at Southeast Missouri State University.