With pizza and copies of The New York Times in hand, this past Thursday students joined professor Ken Stevens in the Student Center for “Times Talk.”
The Talk, sponsored by Student Government, aims to connect and engage students with current events.
Professor Stevens created Eastern Michigan University’s graduate and undergraduate programs in arts management, for which he now serves as adviser. Stevens has directed more than 100 musicals and plays at EMU and for stock and regional theatres.
Stevens is a 10-time recipient of the Faculty Recognition Award and winner of the Gold Medallion Award and the Teaching Innovation Award.
Art and culture were the topics of discussion in the Kiva Room.
Professor Stevens opened up the talk with a story of his own, a story more reminiscent of a secret agent than someone involved with the theater. After being banned from the Soviet Union, a friend of Stevens’ asked him to go there and deliver books and letters to members of the theater. The professor recalled going to deliver a letter to a theater head in the Soviet Union, only to be told the woman he was searching for was “gone.”
“I had no idea that this business I had gotten into, theater, was so important – so important that people disappeared,” Stevens said.
During the days of the Soviet Union, outlets such as the arts, music and theater were often repressed.
“I don’t think a lot of us think art – then revolution – we don’t live that way,” Stevens said. “Be thankful to live in a place with the 1st and the 14th,” he said referring to the amendments in the U.S. Constitution.
“The art is telling the story of these folks,” Stevens said when trying to impress upon the audience the importance of art in society.
The importance of art in society also led Stevens to discuss the politics of identity. Where a large group of people are able to be governed, there must be unity, and that unity can be derived from language, religion and art.
Art has often become a part of nationalism, a nation’s sense of pride and loyalty. However, the professor warned of the dangers of nationalism, and how it could lead to unwarranted xenophobia.
“Art allows people to understand more, the arts fend off parochialism.”
The professor laughed off the conventional wisdom that the U.S. beat the U.S.S.R. in the Cold War.
“We spent more on bombs than they did,” Stevens said. “Cultural exchange is what took down the Soviet Union.”
At the end of the discussion, Stevens asked audience members of any piece of art from another culture that influenced them or changed their world view.
Students listed off famous titles, such as “Schindler’s List” and “Do the Right Thing” by Spike Lee. The mural by Diego Rivera was highly praised by students and Professor Stevens, who said the communist symbolism associated with the painting didn’t make it any less fantastic.
