As part of a two-year national study, Investing in Creativity, which is being supported by 38 private and public foundations, several dozen artists and arts supporters met at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, September 17-19, 2002. The meeting was hosted by the Urban Institute, Washington, D.C., and the Center for Rural Strategies, Whitesburg, Kentucky. In preparation for the meeting on support systems for artists working and living in rural communities, Dudley Cocke was asked to reflect on the differences and similarities of urban and rural places as contexts in which artists pursue their careers. Following are his reflections.

Introduction
Not based on any systematic research, these remarks reflect the 26-year experience of my rural theater company as it has traveled across the United States, performing and conducting residencies in communities in 43 states and developing intercultural plays with diverse artists whose mission is to serve low- and moderate-income people. In my experience, artists serving this audience are different from artists serving a more exclusive audience. I think that it is fair to say that the majority of artists serving low- and moderate-income communities live in the communities they serve. This paper's approach, then, will be to link theater artists practicing in poor and moderate-income rural communities (not Vail or Steamboat Springs) to theater artists in inner-city (not gentrified) communities by discussing some of the similarities between their values, needs, and support systems and by contrasting them with the values, needs, and support systems of artists serving the more exclusive audience.

To lend some perspective to this focus, it is worth noting that the audience for not-for-profit professional theater is the wealthiest 15 percent of Americans. This group presently represents a little more than 80 percent of those who regularly attend. (I expect that a significant part of this audience is actually suburban, and perhaps one could make the case that wealthy rural communities, like Vail, are also suburban, measured by lifestyle, etc.) In my view, this elite audience bodes ill for the artistic vitality of professional theater; I don't think great theater can rise from such a narrow social base, especially in an epoch when democracy is the ideal and diversity is its renewable source of energy.

I think that it is also worth noting that my focus on rural and inner-city artists serving low- and moderate-income people occurs in a policy vacuum: currently there is no social contract with the rest of the nation spelling out why rural and inner-city communities are important to our national future.

Shared Values
My theater's most recent collaboration was with a black theater company from New Orleans and a Puerto Rican teatro from the South Bronx. Someone asked me, "How in the world did you find each other?" "Wasn't so difficult," I answered. "There we were-the Black Belt South, central Appalachia, and the South Bronx-all bunched up at the bottom of most every government poverty study. It seemed like we were long-lost cousins."

The general issues for poor and low-income people and their communities, whether urban or rural, are well documented: poor schools and low educational achievement, the fact that the poor pay higher prices for food and other necessities, limited health care, environmental degradation (guess what community hosts the New Orleans Superfund site?), and so forth. I'm reminded of a story from the Depression. Several hundred men are standing in a breadline. One of the men, a Negro, turns to his buddy and says, "Notice, white folks are still in the lead."

What isn't so well documented are the cultural values that these seemingly disparate communities share, and how these values affect artists.

Tradition
Inner-city and rural artists have a similar conception of their relationship to history: they see themselves as a link in a chain that includes the dead, the living, and the unborn. This is a different conception of time and memory than that embraced by the many artists who think of themselves as the "cutting edge" of the urban contemporary culture.

To slice it another way, rural and inner-city artists think in terms of both individual and collective genius, whereas their counterparts think mostly about individual genius. By collective genius, I mean the accumulated wisdom and expressions of a people distilled and passed along by tradition. Rural and inner-city artists know that for traditions to live, they must be made new-renewed. Such artists, fully realizing the collective source of their art, blur the line between individual genius and the genius of the culture.

Several stories might help illustrate this point. Thirty-odd years ago, a very famous folksinger from California came to the coalfields of central Appalachia to perform in a high school auditorium. A big crowd was on hand as a local string band opened the concert. The local band, rising to the occasion, had the audience's rapt attention. I'm told that you could hear a pin drop. The famous folksinger followed with some success. Backstage, she made a point to congratulate the local band on their performance, noting that she, too, often sang from the Appalachian songbook. She went on to say how keenly the audience had been listening to their music and wondered what their secret was. "What is that little something extra you seem to have?" she asked repeatedly, each time more emphatically. The local band kindly looked at the floor as she pressed for an answer. Finally the fiddle player spoke up, "Well ma'am, the only difference that I could tell was that you were playing out front of them ol' songs, and we were right behind 'em."

Ralph Ellison deftly spins the fiddler's point:

There is a cruel contradiction implicit in the art form itself. For true jazz is an art of individual assertion within and against the group. Each true jazz moment (as distinct from the uninspired commercial performance) springs from a context in which each artist challenges all the rest, each solo flight, or improvisation, represents (like the successive canvases of a painter) a definition of his identity: as individual, as member of the collectivity, and as link in the chain of tradition. Thus, because jazz finds its very life in an endless improvisation upon traditional materials, the jazzman must lose his identity even as he finds it. (The Charlie Christian Story, Shadow and Act, page 234)

Wendell Berry summarizes the dichotomy:

Individual genius of the modern kind never has courage equal to its essential loneliness, and so it commits itself passionately to clichés of individualism and a uniformity of innovation, ignorant of what precedes it, destructive of what it ignores.

But the real genius of a country, though it may indeed fructify in great individual geniuses, is in the fine abilities-in the minds, eyes, and hands-of tens of thousands of ordinary workers.

Coming to Ireland has reminded me again how long, complex, and deep must be the origins of the best work of any kind.

As Wendell Berry advocates, rural and inner-city artists often set their projects to a different clock. In 1985, my theater and traditional Native American artists in Zuni, New Mexico, agreed to a 25-year collaboration. Given the cultural gulf (not to mention the history of warfare) between our two peoples, we thought it was a realistic interval-and this has proven to be correct. With work clocks often deviating dramatically from standard artistic time (in regional theater, for example, assembly-line projects are the standard), it's no wonder that the work of rural and inner-city artists strikes many people in the arts world as unfashionable.

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