Since the pandemic started, I’ve been spending at least three days a week wearing my gray hooded sweatshirt with the grungy Interlochen Center for the Arts logo. It’s six years old now, and it’s been in my constant wardrobe rotation since I bought it at the campus store as a shield against Michigan summer nights that were cooler than I expected. 

Most of my former school-year students would all recognize this sweatshirt. I think I wore it to most of our open studios and all of our weekend work sessions. If it wasn’t covered in clay at the end of a Saturday, I often wore it to sleep. The fleece is ridiculously soft and comfortable, a lot more so now after maybe a thousand tumbles in my dryer. But there’s more to my non-fashion choice than its coziness.  

Minus metaphors, the northern Michigan summer days are long from sunrise to sunset, too. In mid-July, the last glint of daylight is nearly at 10 p.m. I’d walk to the studio to check on a kiln after an evening performance, then across the road to a campfire, while the sunset performed its own symphony and the pines rustled admiringly. That lingering daylight, those nighttime performances, the conversations about motivation and creativity as a fire crackled and we stretched the day thin. All of this was how we drew the energy to get up the next morning for another round of three-hour studio classes, shift, grab a cafeteria sandwich, repeat, stay up too late, do it again.

Those summers were not paradise. Did I make it sound so? Sore muscles, kiln meltdowns, headaches, heartaches, and insecurities were all part of the equation, too, for students and for me. There’s a particular energy that builds up and crests over when you put hundreds of artists together on the same few streets. Everything intensifies, even the disappointments. Teenagers cried on my shoulder when they got sharp critiques or ended summer romances. I cried, too, and got angry about things about which I can’t remember anything but the emotion. We channeled the intensity into our determination, our teaching, and our making. In places like Interlochen, fervor is the norm.

I know that I packed away whatever emotional energy was still boiling over at the end of those summers, stored it up in journals and memories, and used it to get through duller days back home. I still feel that intensity every time I wear my gray sweatshirt, even five years later. It’s weird but powerful stuff.

I was wearing my aging Interlochen gear last week when I heard the news that the program would ‘pivot’ to virtual learning this summer. I’ve come to hate the word pivot. I’ve heard it too many times when administrators or “thought leaders” would decide that we needed to change our educational approach based on something they read in a blog post. Yet prior to last week, if I associated the word “pivot” with Interlochen, I imagined dancers twirling or actors choreographing a fight scene. 

My heart breaks for the redefinition. My heart also wants to give it a chance.

Scenes from the summers

Interlochen, even when it was hard, was a place of possibilities. While I was there, I (mostly) set aside the realities of the program’s price—roughly $6000 for each three-week session, a tag that would have been impossible for my family when I was the age of my students, and still would be impossible now. Once students unpacked their bags and dressed in uniforms, they became campers. You could forget that their families were able to indulge the price point. You could believe that these talented, quirky teens were torch-bearers. Watch that girl with the pink hair strike up her viola, you could imagine the future of city-sponsored orchestras. See those dancers pirouette on the roof, you believed that live performance, even in all its frequent impracticality, is a direct way to stir our souls.

So I want to hope that for the now-reduced $2950 price tag, Interlochen Online will still be that hub of possibilities. We certainly need some new ones. In the arts and in arts education, the pandemic has left us in crisis mode, and I have a lot of questions. 

Promotional video, hosted here

I question whether it’s healthy for students to spend any more time on screens this summer than they’ve already been forced to spend this spring. How do you replenish the experiences that we make art from after spending months tethered to a Chromebook? 

I question whether finding ways to persist in hyperlocal art making, inspired by one’s immediate community rather than a global or ‘premier’ one, might be a more conscientious approach. It’s a choice: support the teachers and co-makers in your own community, or pay your tuition into a more prestigious one? (I suppose this question is not a new one.)

My musician and career-artist friends are questioning how they are going to pay rent with galleries and venues all closed up, and I’m running out of resolve in talking them out of applying for jobs with Amazon. “Frequent ‘real-life’ sessions will connect you with professionals in your chosen field, who will share guidance and insight into life as a working artist,” the website states. I imagine those Q&As will have to be carefully vetted.

I question what our new post-pandemic models for creating, performing, and sharing the beautiful and impractical stuff of art will be. And to close this ramble on a hopeful note, I think it’s this last question that Interlochen might be best suited to explore. 

Escape from practicality, indulge in hard work, create beauty in community—young artists are really good at all of this when the door is opened to them. I was so lucky to experience the hope, innovation, and passion that can spark at places like Interlochen, and I finished those two summers hungry for more of it. Can that door be opened in the same way via Canvas, Zoom, and up-to-par system requirements? I’m not sure. But if anyone is equipped and invested to explore the question wholeheartedly, it’s IAC. 

This teacher will be wearing her beloved sweatshirt, humming the theme, and watching closely. If the arts are going to survive this crisis, we need to ignite that lifelong passion and keep it lit—no matter the pivot and no matter the operating system.

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