Arts academy good move

Arts activists have been pleading for such a school for years. The University of the West Indies has already established its Creative Arts Centre, which focuses mainly on theatre and visual arts.

But the UTT’s Academy will have a wider curriculum. According to Tertiary Education Minister Mustapha Abdul-Hamid, not only theatre but also festival arts, which will include Carnival, Hosay, Phagwa, Ramleela, and Best Village, will be taught. All local dance forms, as well as extempo, and robber talk will be included, in addition to the classical European traditions in theatre, dance, and music.

This is all to the good, if it helps professionalise the practice of arts in TT. There is an attitude in our society that all a person needs to be an artist is “talent”. If you have that — a good voice to sing, or the gift for playing or composing music, or the coordination and rhythm to dance, or a gift for mimicry — then formal training is often seen as unnecessary. Indeed, some people even go so far as to see formal training as a corruption of natural talent.

The reality, however, is that few creative persons ever attain excellence without hard work and lots of training. The only reason an arts academy is even possible is because there are rules and principles which have been established because they are known to work.

Certainly, the arts being the arts, the truly gifted individual will always seek to bend and even break those rules. But it is not possible to improve on a practice unless you are first familiar with that practice. Formal training provides the talented with the tools they need to express themselves fully.

Just as importantly, professionalising the arts helps make the practice more economically viable. While the final judge is always the audience, the fact remains that art is an industry. By teaching folk arts in a formal setting, the UTT’s Academy clearly has the intention of placing tradition on a formal level — which often happens when tradition is declining. But a university has two related responsibilities — to produce trained individuals who will add to the country’s productivity; and to produce educated individuals who will add to the country’s human capital.

It is axiomatic that economic diversification must include the development of the arts, since the main tourist draw in our country is not our sun and sea, but our festivals, especially Carnival. If the Academy helps nurture talent and helps create an environment in which artists can make a living, then that investment will be repaid.

As for human capital, the argument has long been made that the arts are crucial for social cohesion, even to the extent of arguing that the teaching and practice of the arts can help reduce crime. There is, in fact, little scientific evidence that art has such social benefits, although some studies do show that art can help certain individuals control their own anti-social or self-destructive behaviour.

But, if the Afro-based arts are taught alongside the Indo-based ones at the UTT, it may help to bring about a cultural fusion that is devoutly to be wished in a plural society still struggling to create a national identity.