Evan Sanderson
My first role was as a knight. I was eight. The audience consisted of my friend, Steven, also playing a knight, and the various woodland creatures that inhabited the backyard of our house in suburban Maryland. You see, I had recently been to the Maryland Renaissance Festival, and like many young boys and girls my age, had fallen in love with the costumes, the swords, the accents, and the meat on a stick. And so, back at the castle (my house), I was determined to recreate the excitement, the vivacity, and the magic of the experience … if only in my head.
I grew up, but I never stopped imagining things. In fact, it became my profession. I studied theatre, became a young professional actor and playwright, and have inhabited and dreamed up a frankly dizzying number of worlds and scenarios. Now, as a Masters student in American University’s Arts Management program, I’ve taken on a new role: arts advocate. I like understanding the “why” of things – if something is broken, I want to know what broke it, and how it can be fixed. And there’s nothing I love more than the process of making stories. That’s why I wanted to become an arts manager – to understand why this thing I love, the formal process of storytelling as a culture, is the way it is.
I think imagination gets a bad rap. We tend, as a society, to associate it with absent-mindedness or naiveté. An imaginative person is someone who likes Star Trek, or who invents weird things in their garage, or who stares off out the window and wonders what the world would be like if everything were upside down. I don’t think there can be a more destructive or civically damaging mindset than to write off imagination as something not worth cultivating. That Star Trek lover will be the next Steven Spielberg, that inventor will design the iPad, and that man staring out the window will do who knows what. But you can bet it will be marvelous.
The primary processes by which imagination is cultivated, to me, is through the arts. The arts, in this context, include digital media, movies, cartoons, and video games as well as dance, theater, visual arts and music. Herein lays one of arts most potent developmental facets, because imagination is developed through the enjoyment of the arts and through participation in the arts. Go listen to a group of middle school students after they sit through a production of The Tempest. I guarantee they will be talking about how awesome it is that Prospero does magic, and how they would love to do something similar. And then watch when middle-school students get a chance to be a part of The Tempest. That is magic, itself.
It doesn’t just apply to children, although the development of imagination through the arts has the potential to yield enormous benefits to a younger population. At the National Center for Creative Aging, where I work, we talk about “life long learning.” The cultivation of imagination isn’t reserved for youngsters. In fact, as we grow in life experience, so too does our capacity to engage with the stories of culture. It’s a sad fact that the potential of creativity and imagination is often lost as we age. But it doesn’t need to be that way.
Imagine a land where children are encouraged to day-dream, where we build our imaginative capacity as we age, where we use the arts as a means to cultivate an ever expanding network of stories and ideas. That’s a world I’d like to live in, and one I’m trying to build.
