Podcast — EP 67: Building community and conversation through the arts

Intro (00:04): 
Trailblazers in research, innovators in technology, and those who simply have a good story; all make up the fabric that is George Mason University. We're taking on the grand challenges that face our students, graduates; and higher education is our mission and our passion. Hosted by Mason President Gregory Washington, this is the Access to Excellence podcast.

President Gregory Washington (00:27): 
It was famed sculpture, Henry Moore who said, "to be an artist is to believe in life." My guest today embodies a passion for the arts that echoes this sentiment. Rick Davis is the Dean of the College of Visual and Performing Arts at George Mason and the executive director of the Hilton Performing Arts Center. He has directed numerous theatrical and operatic productions across the United States, authored four books, co-written an opera and an oratorio, and has become really famous around campus for his signature George Mason baseball cap.

Rick Davis (01:07): 
<laugh>.

President Gregory Washington (01:08): 
Rick, welcome to the show.

Rick Davis (01:10): 
Thank you so much, Mr. President. And, and just for your listeners benefit, um, I'm wearing the cap right now, so you just have to imagine a, a yellow hat here on the podcast.

President Gregory Washington (01:18): 
Outstanding. Outstanding. So you're one of the people who have a continuity here. Your continuity at George Mason is amazing, right? Came here in 1991.

Rick Davis (01:31): 
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (01:31): 
Right, when you started as an artistic director of Theater of the First Amendment.

Rick Davis (01:37): 
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (01:37): 
And a member of the theater faculty. So it's kind of like a three part question. What brought you to George Mason? What was George Mason like? And what has kept you here for 35 years?

Rick Davis (01:52): 
Well, what brought me here, let's take 'em in order. What brought me here was Theater of the First Amendment. It was a brand new experiment, uh, in founded in 1990. Um, when the Institute of the Arts was founded here, the the year that I like to call the Big Bang at Mason for the arts, because we opened the Center for the Arts in October of 1990. The institute was founded, you know, in August, basically to, to create a new way of teaching the arts at George Mason. And part of that was, uh, creating a professional theater: professional, meaning paid actors and, and designers, members of actors', equity, you know, the actors' union, and, and then incorporating students throughout the productions as as appropriate. So a student might be cast in a role, uh, but they would have to compete for that role. But we had some of the best actors and designers in the whole DC metro area, which is a great theater town, uh, coming to campus three, four times a year, and staging professional productions right in the middle of this brand new theater program.

Rick Davis (02:50): 
And I thought, I was very happily engaged up in Baltimore at Center Stage. I had not heard of George Mason University at this time. When I saw this opportunity, I said, here's a chance that, where I can practice everything I love. I love directing, I love education. I love the theater world. I love the liberal arts. And, and I, I, this was a chance to try to be a professional theater artist in a liberal arts environment. Wow, you know, what's this about? So I came down, did the interview, got the job, and it was really amazing what was going on here at the time. The place was, I think, maybe 17,000 students. I think I remember that number correctly, approximately that in, in '91 it was a commuter school, you know? Absolutely. The weekends were dead as door nails <laugh> around here. But the Center for the Arts and the Theater of the First Amendment, TFA for short, we were trying to change that, trying to give people a reason to stay on campus. We did primarily new work, new plays. We commissioned a lot of plays. We did plays on all subjects, even though we were called theater, the First Amendment, which made some people think we were doing like constitutional dramas and everything. Well, we actually <laugh>

President Gregory Washington (03:54): 
That is exactly what I thought I'm thinking. Did you come out in your, you know, three pointed hat? You know, and...

Rick Davis (04:01): 
To, to be fair, we, we did a couple of, of dramas on that theme. Uh, not necessarily the tricorns, but we did a play about Oliver Wendell Holmes, uh, which is actually beautiful plank called The Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay uh, by Paul D'Andre, uh, who's a, by the way, an Emeritus Robinson professor in at George Mason. Um, and it was really the founding guy, the guy who thought up the idea of, of the Theater of the First Amendment. And by the way, on the name Dr. D'Andrea, Paul, named it because George Mason was the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which led to the Bill of Rights, of which of course, the First Amendment is the one that is the most celebrated and arguably the most essential. And so it was like an honoring sort of, in a not quite direct way, but a, I think, a meaningful way that the, uh, idea of, of George Mason, the man.

Rick Davis (04:48): 
Anyway, the theater had great success for probably, well, we, we lasted 22 years, uh, but it was quite successful. And we won a lot of Helen Hayes Awards. We got a lot of great press. We originated plays that went on to many other productions at other professional theaters around the country. Uh, we had cast albums. We produced a video, uh, that went on to PBS, actually called Nathan the Wise. And then in 2010, '11, '12, we began to realize two things. One, that the theater department, which was by then called the School of Theater, had probably quintupled in size since the days when we all started in the early nineties, from about 30 majors to about 120 or 150. And there wasn't room on our stages anymore for three or four fully staged professional productions if we were gonna serve our students properly. So space, time, and frankly, budget all made us keep, we sort of shrunk the season, you know, from four plays to three plays to two plays to the occasional play <laugh>.

Rick Davis (05:50): 
And then we said, you know what? This, let's just wind this down, you know, because it did its job. It, it created a great school of theater. It produced a lot of work that went on into the world and is still being performed. And we all had to sort of get on with the business of now running a college of visual and performing arts that was growing incredibly fast. So that's kind of the, the short story of that arc. I tell you what, I, I have had multiple, and I'm not exaggerating multiple people who remember, or just multiple people who see, uh, you know, some sort of record of it. Hey, wouldn't this be a good idea to, to bring this back? And I say, yes, yes, it would. And it, and you know what? It wouldn't have to come, let's make policy on the air here. It, it wouldn't have to come back as a fully, you know, whole season of, you know, four plays. It could come back as the occasional instance.

President Gregory Washington (06:35): 
The occasional one-off.

Rick Davis (06:37): 
Yep. All right. Let's do it.

President Gregory Washington (06:38): 
<laugh>. There it is. There it is. Amazing. Amazing.

Rick Davis (06:42): 
I like this meeting. This is a good meeting. Let's, let's keep, let's keep this going,

President Gregory Washington (06:45): 
<laugh>. Let's keep going. <laugh>. So last year, uh, you gave a presentation to the Board of Visitors, and you began that presentation with your mantra, the arts, create community. Talk to us about the tagline, what inspired it and what does it actually mean?

Rick Davis (07:05): 
Oh, thank you. I call it my forward elevator speech because it encapsulates basically everything I believe about the value of the arts. And I'm going back historically, you know, to, to ancient civilizations that that created, you know, theater and dance and music and, and cave paintings and, and sculptures and everything that, that the way the arts have always expressed themselves. Why were they born and why do they exist? Because people need occasions to come together. And for a lot of people, religion forms that function and the religion in the arts have a, a strong connection, sometimes very tense connection, but, but a very strong connection in terms of ritual and in terms of, of symbolism. For some people, sports frankly, create that opportunity for me as well. Uh, I know for you, you know, we love to go to a, a sporting event because it's a ritual, right?

Rick Davis (07:55): 
It's a, it's a collective experience. We all see the same thing and react, maybe not in the same way, but if everybody reacts right, you can be booing and cheering, uh, at the same play depending on your team. But you're reacting and you're reacting as part of a community. Same thing happens in a, in a play or an opera. The same thing happens quietly in an art museum, because people are walking by a, a painting or, or standing in, in front of a sculpture, and it catches them and it stops them. It interrupts their day a little bit. And great paintings, one person stops and then another person stops, and then another person stops. And suddenly you get a little audience <laugh> right in front. And it's amazing what happens there, because everybody's concentrating on the same thing for a little while. You know, in the case of a play, it might be two hours or three hours, or God knows, four hours, uh, <laugh>.

Rick Davis (08:41): 
But the value of bringing people together in, in common contemplation, or having a common experience, I think is really vital to civilization. And I'm not being hyperbolic here. I think civilization requires opportunities for people to come together and witness things collectively, and then form their own conclusions. But when you go to a play that's working, whether it's a comedy or a tragedy, or anything in between, and you feel that unanimity or that variety, but also people breathing together, laughing together, crying together, you are part of a temporary community that actually reminds us all of our common humanity. And if I might, I'll, I'll give a quick example from Theater of the First Amendment's days of how this worked in a, in a time of crisis. Um, and I'm talking about, I'm talking about late September, 2001. At that time, we had on the stage, quite accidentally this production called "Nathan the Wise", adapted by Paul D'Andrea.

Rick Davis (09:37): 
He adapted it from a German play written in the 18th century by Gotthold Lessing, who had written this play called "Nathan the Wise" to set in Jerusalem in the time of the Third Crusade, where the, the Muslim ruler Saladin was the leader of Jerusalem, where the Christian forces, the Knight's Templar and, and the Crusaders were knocking at the gates of Jerusalem. And there was a Christian patriarch tending to the religious life of the Christians in Jerusalem. You had Saladin ruling, you had Nathan the Wise, who was a Jewish merchant. Uh, and we brought together Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in one city at a time of enormous crisis, and showed through the action of the play how the three Abrahamic religions can actually converse with each other and can actually reach common understanding. And we were doing that play just 'cause we thought it was a cool theme, right?

Rick Davis (10:32): 
And it was an 18th century idea that was still resonating. Well, September 11th happened, and we were gonna open September 28th, I think. And, you know, we actually had a conversation, can, should we do this? Can we do this? And unanimously we said, yes, we must do this. So we put the play on, and it caught fire. Quite literally. It, people came over and over to see it, especially members of our local Islamic community. The Egyptian ambassador came several times. Uh, he said to us later, and I quote directly, "this play is a bridge to the point of rescue for our people." Because it affirmed the value of religious acceptance and religious tolerance. Not religious identity, not religious collapse into one viewpoint, but the idea that all these great religious traditions have a place, and there's no way to tell which is the, the true one or the best one. And to think that that idea came from a German playwright writing in the 1780s, and had been adapted by an American playwright in 2001, and was being produced in Fairfax, Virginia. And then that's where the PBS video came from. This play was taped, and those tapes are in every public library in Egypt. I mean, it's just, it just had an amazing worldwide impact. And that's creating community on a, on a big scale, because it gave...

President Gregory Washington (11:57): 
Oh, without question.

Rick Davis (11:58): 
You know, it gave people something to, to help them understand the moment.

President Gregory Washington (12:02): 
No, without question. And when you're bringing this up, I'm like, wow. A, that's amazing. B, it made me think how timeless the general issue was.

Rick Davis (12:13): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (12:13): 
But then I started to ask some questions. It seems to me that there would be some modification to deal with that, the issue that was at hand at the time. Right. You know, you, you had 9/11 hit. You had this play that was literally put together before 9/11.

Rick Davis (12:32): 
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (12:33): 
Right?

Rick Davis (12:33): 
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (12:34): 
Not with 9/11 in mind.

Rick Davis (12:36): 
Correct.

President Gregory Washington (12:37): 
9/11 comes, do you modify it to take into account some of the aspects of what was literally playing out in front of our eyes? Did you all do that?

Rick Davis (12:50): 
We didn't have to change a word.

President Gregory Washington (12:51): 
Amazing. Amazing.

Rick Davis (12:52): 
Partly because Paul D'Andrea, the, the playwright translator adapter had already adapted the play with a 20th century 21st, early 21st century lens. It was still very much Lessing play. But Paul had already given it a contemporary still set in, in ancient Jerusalem. I mean, it was a period, you know, setting and costumes and everything. But the, but the story was already, you know, adapted to a certain extent. The one thing we did immediately was start looking for ways of creating how to process this. So, you know, a lot of post-play discussions, we had seminars, we had panels, and then after the run of the play that continued in all kinds of settings in, in Islamic centers, in interfaith centers, uh, in, in community centers around the Northern Virginia region, there were several, if not many encounters that people asked us to help facilitate. So the conversation continued well after the play closed.

President Gregory Washington (13:47): 
That's amazing. Well, you can't talk about community without talking about the two pillars of bringing folk together in that community. And so I want to talk about 'em separately here, but what makes the Center for the Arts a critical part of the arts community for both George Mason and for the region?

Rick Davis (14:07): 
So the Center for the Arts in Fairfax is of course, our signature facility here on the, on the Fairfax Campus, where we do the vast majority of our, of our instruction. The Center for the Arts was created out of the mind of President George Johnson, quite literally, uh, and his wife, Joanne, to say, let, let's put George Mason on the map as a place where the arts are happening, and how are we gonna do that? 'cause we don't really have big arts programs yet. So we have to bring in, we have to bring the world to Fairfax. We have to bring Yo-Yo Ma to Fairfax. We have to bring Michael Feinstein to Fairfax. We have to bring these incredible artists. We, uh, you know, Roberta Peters, Denyce Graves: great top level artists, right, who came to and are still coming every year to Fairfax. And that was something that changed the campus culture.

Rick Davis (14:53): 
If you talk to visitor Horace Blackman, former rector of our board, who was a student here during the opening, he, he started in the late eighties, graduated in the early nineties. So he intersected with the opening of the Center for the Arts. He will tell you, he's told me that the opening of the Center for the Arts changed George Mason completely, because all of a sudden the world was coming to Mason. You had a place to go on the weekends. You had meaningful things to do. You had the opportunity to be part of the world conversation about music and dance theater. And that gave everybody, not only on campus, but in the whole sort of Northern Virginia region, a rallying point. It literally created a community. And from that, we have built the academic programs because the presence of all these wonderful artists that come in over the course of a season has also benefited our students tremendously through master classes, through, frankly, through faculty recruitment, <laugh>. We've, we've recruited a bunch of faculty sort of off the road, uh, when they're, when they're ready to leave their touring performing career.

President Gregory Washington (15:59): 
That's cool. So they come here, perform, then you recruit 'em later to be faculty here.

Rick Davis (16:04): 
Yep. Our, our whole School of Dance practically answers that description, uh, and it, and it's just, just amazing.

President Gregory Washington (16:09): 
That's really, really cool.

Rick Davis (16:10): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (16:11): 
That is fabulous.

Rick Davis (16:13): 
And it's still happening. So that, that center has, is still doing the work. And, you know, of course, it's, it's showing its age. You know, it, it was open in 1990 and it's, it's been lovingly taken care of, but it hasn't been updated. So we have a, a major campaign ongoing. We're calling it Give Voice. We want, we wanna give voice to the Center for the Arts and make it a modern, technologically rich and more student-friendly facility. Because when it opened, we didn't have the students to fill it, but now we do. So we're hard on that job right now.

President Gregory Washington (16:42): 
Look, the reality is it does need a facelift, an update, so to speak. And we're gonna work with you to make that one happen. It is time.

Rick Davis (16:53): 
It is time. Yep. <laugh>

President Gregory Washington (16:55): 
It, it was time 10, 15 years ago.

Rick Davis (16:58): 
<laugh> That's right. That's right.

President Gregory Washington (16:59): 
So, talk to us a little bit about the other core facility we have for bringing the community together to Hylton Performing Arts Center, and that's on our Science and Technology campus in Manassas.

Rick Davis (17:13): 
Oh, I'd love to. Um, you know, the, I had the pleasure. You mentioned it in the intro. I had the still have the pleasure actually of, of having the title of executive director of the Hylton. And, and that was my only job here for a few years, <laugh> between 2011 and, and 2015 when I, when I became dean. Uh, so I have a deep, deep connection to that facility. Um, we built the Hylton Center, and by the way, for everybody listening on the podcast, that's H-Y-L-T-O-N, right? <laugh>. It's, it's not the, not the hotel chain, it's the Hylton Foundation and a man named Conrad Hylton, uh, who is a major developer in, in the Prince William County area. Uh, they gave the naming gift for that back in the mid two thousands. The facility opened in 2010, and we built that essentially as an expression of George Mason's commitment to community partnerships, because Prince William County and the City of Manassas essentially asked us if we would partner with them to create a distinctive, representative, inspiring cultural facility that would help their city and county, and that region, take the next step into the community that they wanted to become.

Rick Davis (18:19): 
So we, we bill ourselves, I, this is a term I use a lot. We bill ourselves as a symbol of change and as an agent of change, we're doing both of those things in...at SciTech. This is one of the most beautiful theaters anywhere on the East Coast. The architecture is distinctive from the moment you walk into the lobby. Every space is designed with architectural distinction in mind. The acoustics in the main hall are praised by every single artist who comes in, whether they're a classical conductor or a pianist, or a jazz player, or a bluegrass musician. Everybody loves playing in that hall. And perhaps most importantly, it has uplifted the local and regional arts community to a very high degree, the Manassas Ballet, the Manassas Chorale, the Manassas Symphony, Prince William Little Theater, a youth orchestra that's going by the name of the Onyx Project now...CPAC, the Creative and Performing Arts Center from, from Woodbridge, these entities, which all pre-existed the Hylton, but were doing their work in middle school, auditoriums and, you know, church basements and everything. Now they have truly a world class facility to play in. And over these 15 years that we've been operating, their work has gotten bigger and better and more popular, and they've attracted more people in the audience. But just as importantly for them, they've attracted more people on stage, more people to participate in these community-based artistic expressions. So it's been a, it's been a huge success for the community and for George Mason as well, because people see us as the purveyor and the partner that without us, this, this thing wouldn't have happened.

President Gregory Washington (19:53): 
And I'll, and I'll be honest with you, this, the acoustics, the layout: first of all, it looks like a classical theater.

Rick Davis (20:01): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (20:02): 
It has that, uh, classical theater look and feel. But the acoustics there just seem to be outstanding. I mean, there's no echo. It's great sound wherever you are in the facility.

Rick Davis (20:15): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (20:16): 
People sound so clear.

Rick Davis (20:18): 
And if you're on stage in that theater and you, you're a singer, whatever player, you get just the right amount of sound coming back to you so you know that it's, you know that the hall is embracing you and that people just love playing there. And, and that, that means a lot because they play better.

President Gregory Washington (20:34): 
Well, every, every single performance that I've seen there has been spectacular. It is, it's a gem, right? It's,wWe're trying to make it less of a hidden gem.

Rick Davis (20:45): 
Right. Well, we're, we're building around it. Right.

President Gregory Washington (20:47): 
It is definitely a gem.

Rick Davis (20:49): 
Yeah. That, and that's the other thing. I mean, I want to give an a shout out to my predecessor, founding Dean of CVPA Bill Reeder, who really had an incredible amount of vision and amount of energy focused on the Hylton Center during his time. He really did a lot of the groundbreaking fundraising and "friend"-raising that allowed that to happen. And it was his vision to have that shape, that sort of Italian opera house shape, because he was an opera singer, <laugh>. And, and I, he sort of knew that, that that sort of classical horseshoe, you know, balcony shape would be effective. And the great thing about that was we didn't build a 3000 seat theater. We built a 1200 seat theater, so that it is a friendly theater, right? You don't have to go in there and scream your lungs out. You can, you can go in there and, and if you're an actor, you can have a, just a, a good performance with your normal voice. If you're a singer, you don't have to work so hard. If you're a violinist, you don't have to be scraping away. You, you can make your beautiful tone. And a lot of that comes from Bill's musical background and his, his understanding that the community needed a place where they would shine.

President Gregory Washington (21:54): 
This is both an amazing history of the two facilities and really, really great feedback in terms of how they use and how they engage the respective community. Do you have a feeling that they serve different communities or do they serve the same community?

Rick Davis (22:13): 
Yeah, increasingly that's the case. That was not the case when we opened the Hylton. They really had two separate audiences. Uh, but we have found over the years that there's, now there's a lot more people who are subscribing to both venues. Uh, a lot more of our student work is finding a home at the Hylton, which we love because the students look great there. And the, the community out there really embraces our students when they come out, uh, primarily music and theater, but some dance as well. So there's a greater, greater overlap. And I think that fits the whole idea that the leaders of Manassas and Prince William had back in...the idea, actually started in the 1990s, um, for this thing to happen. It just took 20 years to realize <laugh>. Uh, but they really saw that Manassas and Prince William County were becoming part of a metro area. And the, the divisions were being slowly but surely erased between, you know, the, the close-in suburbs and the, and the outer suburbs, and the exurbs and the rural area. There's a, that sort of westward flow that is really making those communities more, uh, accessible to one another. And I celebrate that. I think that's really, really cool.

President Gregory Washington (23:20): 
So you also speak about how artists abhor deficits and that their work serves to fill the holes they see in the world.

Rick Davis (23:31): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (23:31): 
Talk to us about what you mean by deficit.

Rick Davis (23:34): 
Yeah. Well, <laugh>, thank you for that question. Uh, it's one of my favorite metaphors, um, and I use it because I'm being a little tricky, actually. Um, when a lot of of people think about artists, they think about deficits being like, you're not making enough money. <laugh>. Right. Because.

President Gregory Washington (23:51): 
That's what I originally thought when I saw it. <laugh>.

Rick Davis (23:54): 
Yeah. Because it, you know, it's a hard business, uh, whether it's institutional or, or personal. But what I mean by that is every work of art at any level is made because of something. It, it's never random. There, there's, there's a, uh, a myth. I think that sometimes creativity just happens because somebody has an idea. Well, yeah, sure, that's true. But where did that idea come from? Why was that idea given space in a person's life, to take the time to create something about it? So the deficit is an artist looks around and sees something missing in the world.

Rick Davis (24:31): 
And that's something can be, if you're a visual artist, it could be something as simple as, there's not enough blue in our world. Right. I'm being a little bit, you know, general.

President Gregory Washington (24:43): 
I, I hear you.

Rick Davis (24:43): 
But, but there are artists who paint like only blue things, right? Or Mark Rothko paints like only red things, right? Lots of shades of red and black, and then red, but mostly red. Or if, if you're a, if you're a theater person, uh, maybe there's a deficit of celebration, or maybe there's a deficit of, well, I like to say deficit of community. Maybe there's a deficit of harmony if you're a musician or dissonance, if that's the voice you wanna project, maybe you think the world needs to be a little more dissonant so it can sort of argue its problems out. Right? Um, and sometimes that's very conscious on the part of the artist.

Rick Davis (25:16): 
A lot of times it's unconscious. But I think it always happens. You, you have an intuition that if I paint this painting, or make this sculpture, or write this play or play this song, I'm going to be adding something to the world that the world needs, even if they don't know that they need it. And even if I'm not being utilitarian and saying, yes, I'm, I'm diagnosing a particular condition and I'm creating a particular pill for it through making work, it's really more on the inside. It's really more saying, why am I gonna take the time to create if I'm not trying to fill a hole? That's the, you said that, that phrase fill a hole in the world, a hole. I think artists consciously or unconsciously, and it's often more unconscious than conscious, are looking around and feeling, you know, um, Ipsen, you, you opened with that great quote from the sculptor.

Rick Davis (26:05): 
I have a quote from my favorite playwright, Henrik Ibsen, one of my favorite playwrights who said, "to be a poet is, most importantly, to see", "to be a poet is most importantly to see." So it's like, artists are our job. Our, the, the reason the world puts up with us is that we take the time to actually look around and actually see and actually feel, and we have these antennae that are tuned to what's happening in the world. Again, not necessarily in a particularly specific way, but in the, in the zeitgeist, in the, in the flow of feelings, in the, in the atmosphere. And our job is to talk about that. And, you know, sometimes it's right on the nose, you know, like Nathan the Wise turned out to be right on the nose accidentally <laugh>. Right. Uh, but sometimes it's very abstract. You, you go to a Beethoven's 9th or, or, you know, go to go to any great symphony, and you might just be transported out of your day-to-day flow for a couple hours. And that might be exactly what you need on that night.

President Gregory Washington (27:06): 
Hmm. That is interesting. I, I didn't think that we were gonna go there. So that, that is, that is really interesting. Let me, let me switch gears a little bit. In the early 2000s, the acronym STEM entered the general lexicon. And as you know, I'm an engineer, right. STEM is shorthand for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. And then around 2010, right about a decade after, a new movement began to update the acronym to include the arts and change, the acronym to steam. Science, technology, engineering, arts and Mathematics. And since then, it's gone to Steam M <laugh>

Rick Davis (27:50): 
Yes.

President Gregory Washington (27:51): 
Medicine.

Rick Davis (27:51): 
Or Steam H. Steam H.

President Gregory Washington (27:54): 
Right. And so, so it has, it continues to morph. And we have arts as a requirement in our core curriculum, even in general. So what is the importance of putting arts into science and tech?

Rick Davis (28:08): 
Oh. Oh, wow. How much time do we have <laugh>? It's a great question. It's a great question. Uh, I'll, I'll tell you a couple quick stories right around the time you were talking about there, we were approached, we were approached by Boeing. That doesn't usually work that way. Right. <laugh> Right? But Boeing came to us, the arts at Mason, and said, you know, our current crop of engineers needs more creative thinking. Well, boy, were they Right? Right. <laugh>. Uh, and so the Boeing Northern Virginia headquarters office gave us a, you know, for us, a really sizable grant at the time, $50,000 to create educational programming, but also artistic programming on the STEAM theme. So we did a, a couple things with that money right away. We created something called the Steam Table, you know, 'cause who can resist a pun? Right

President Gregory Washington (28:59): 
The Steam Table? Wow.

Rick Davis (29:00): 
And we brought, we brought together our artists and scientists and engineers in a series of very interesting conversations. Uh, and out of one of those conversations, or a parallel conversation that somebody else convened, I can't remember right now. I met a guy named Paul Glenshaw, who was an aviation historian and a jazz historian, and also a very, very fine visual artist himself. Interesting. Really interesting guy. And I heard him give a talk about how aviation and jazz have had a parallel evolution in America. It's really amazing. 1903, the Wright Brothers, Buddy Bolden; 1925, Louis Armstrong; Charles Lindbergh, 1927. It's like, oh my God. And you start laying it up, you know--

President Gregory Washington (29:43): 
Look, I, I hear you Rick. You know, I've worked with aerospace companies a significant portion of my career. Yeah. That's one area where you try to do things the same way.

Rick Davis (29:54): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (29:55): 
Algorithms work the same way. And, you know, but I'm also a jazz lover.

Rick Davis (30:00): 
Yep.

President Gregory Washington (30:01): 
And good jazz. Great jazz has that improviser.

Rick Davis (30:07): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (30:08): 
Where you, where you see these folk live in concert and they just take off in a direction. And you're like, whoa.

Rick Davis (30:16): 
So I can bring that back to aviation.

President Gregory Washington (30:18): 
Yeah. Bring it back to aviation. Because I don't see how those two fit.

Rick Davis (30:21): 
Yeah. So, so aviation progressed somewhat linearly, but also with conceptual leaps. Right. There, there, there were moments when, like, when the Wright Brothers sort of figured out wing warping, right? That was a big deal. 'cause nobody was doing that before. So they could control the airplane. And they also figured out power to rate ratio. So they, they actually built an engine that could actually lift the thing which nobody had done. Then you move on. I'm gonna leap forward to a really cool thing that, 'cause we actually did a piece about this. This is where I'm going with this. So, bebop comes in, in the 1950s, late 40s, early 50s, right? At the same time as the jet age was coming along. And at a time when if you were designing a fighter plane, you didn't wanna be stable anymore. You wanted to be unstable. You wanted to have the ability for that plane to have a roll rate and a pitch deviation rate that was almost uncontrollable.

Rick Davis (31:10): 
And then figure out ways to tamp that down so that it, it wouldn't kill you. And bebop is like that. If you hear, you know, Charlie Parker, you put on Thelonious Monk, I mean, you, you were talking about an unstable fighter plane, but it's a fighter plane that doesn't crash <laugh>. Right. So we did a piece on this called, "To Swing Through the Sky" that had our Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra, which is our professional jazz band that we put together, uh, and had actors and dancers. And Paul wrote a script for us. And we did this incredible video montage. We started out back in '03 with the Wright Brothers, and we ended up in, in the Space Age, and showed how jazz and flight were taking these conceptual leaps in parallel at like six or eight different junctures. And it was so incredible. We played it at the Hilton, then we played it here at Center for the Arts. We had, we've had requests to do it elsewhere. That was a Steam project because it showed everybody in the audience, which was, you know, a thousand people each time. It showed people that these two subjects actually are deeply connected in, in the case of jazz and flight, they're very American subjects. These, I mean, these are things we can legitimately celebrate as American inventions.

President Gregory Washington (32:17): 
So the university has had some, some major gifts.

Rick Davis (32:22): 
Yeah.

President Gregory Washington (32:22): 
For our arts programs. Those have come from families who have historically supported Mason in a big way. Right. Why are they so compelled to give to the arts? What has arts brought to them?

Rick Davis (32:36): 
Oh man, we are so lucky, so blessed, really at George Mason to have the founding energy. Really, I mean, we're still young, right? So we're young enough that the founding families <laugh>, uh, that were, that were building Fairfax County at the time, and, and Prince William as well, they're still with us. Some, some of the, some of the first generations still with us. And, and their progeny very much still with us doing that work. And I think the founders realized that, first of all, the whole idea of putting a university in a community is to build that community. I mean, it, the, the explicit intention of putting George Mason in Fairfax was to build Northern Virginia and the Peterson family, the, you know, George and Joanne Johnson, the Dewberry family, the Hazel family, they have all recognized from the beginning that the arts were one of those building agents.

Rick Davis (33:29): 
Right. And so they have stepped up, uh, over the decades, really, the Petersons and the Dewberrys particularly, but there are many other names we could advance, have committed in, in really significant amounts. And starting back in the nineties. So it's been a long tradition of giving. The great little story is the, the late Sid Dewberry, uh, of, of, you know, Dewberry Companies became a piano student of our own Dr. Linda Monson, who's the director of the Dewberry School of Music now. She started giving him piano lessons when he was 75 years old. I mean, she gave him piano lessons pretty much up until, you know, the month he died. Uh, and he loved playing the piano, and he loved Linda and her students. And to me, that was a, a trigger for the, they were already very generous, but that was the trigger that gave him a personal experience of the value in, in one's own life, of having expert instruction in music.

President Gregory Washington (34:26): 
You know, I, I got a, the opportunity to spend time with him before he passed away, and he told me, he said, look, my goal is a hundred songs.

Rick Davis (34:37): 
Oh, yes.

President Gregory Washington (34:38): 
It, it was inspiring to me. I mean, I was like, 'cause he told me that he learned to play, then he had some health issues where he lost the ability to play and he had to relearn all the songs again. And he, and he did that. And I was, I'm just kind of blown away by that. And yeah, this guy can do it twice.

Rick Davis (35:00): 
<laugh>, how are your lessons going, by the way?

President Gregory Washington (35:03): 
Yeah, let's not talk about that Better than me. <laugh>. He can do it twice. I should be able to do it once.

Rick Davis (35:11): 
But you, but you, you know, Carolyn Peterson is an, is another one, uh, Carolyn and Milt Peterson, the late Milt Peterson, another, another great developer in our area. Uh, Carolyn grew up playing music and, and acting and singing, and we have an event at her home every year called The Taste of ARTS by George! That's kind of our, our preview of the, our fall fundraiser. This event happens in the spring at, at her lovely home in Fairfax. And at the end of this event, she loves to and has done the last few years, she loves to sit at her beautiful baby grand piano and play a song or two, uh, and get the whole audience up and singing. And, and she just loves, and I talked to Jon, her son, Jon Peterson, about this waiting in line at commencement last year, I think it was. And he said, yeah, they do that anywhere. If there's a piano and there's a group, you know, like they're up in Maine with their friends and neighbors up there, Carolyn will sit down and, and start playing because they recognize that that brings people together. So it's kind of, the arts create community all over again, but in a living room,

President Gregory Washington (36:10): 
It brings people together and a actually creates joy. I've seen one of those sessions and it's just fabulous. Just fabulous. As we wrap up, I want you to talk about our future generation and young people who we have been bestowed the privilege, uh, to educate, to train, and to lead. Talk to me about what legacy, relative to the arts, what legacy would you like to leave with them?

Rick Davis (36:37): 
Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, I'm coming at this from a perspective right now. The day that we're recording this podcast, I'm in the middle of rehearsing a student production of Shakespeare's "The Tempest". And so I'm with students, you know, till till 10:00 PM uh, every night, these, these past few weeks. And I say that because it's the greatest joy that I can have in my life is to be in that setting. And I'm, I'm with these students for hours and hours and hours for six weeks. So I, I have a really contemporary perspective on this. Uh, these students are hungry, particularly the, the pandemic generation, which is still working its way through the educational system. They are hungry for interactions, they're hungry for real things. They're hungry for working together on things, uh, in the room, sort of working it out in the room. And to me, that's what a, a good artistic process is about.

Rick Davis (37:31): 
An artistic process is not unlike an engineering process in that it is recursive and iterative. You, you have to try something, see if it works. If it doesn't work, you try something else. If it does work, but not as well as you'd like, you, you keep on that path. But you adjust it, it, it's a, it's a cycle of critical thinking, really.

President Gregory Washington (37:50): 
I agree.

Rick Davis (37:50): 
That where you keep developing, keep developing, and finally you have opening night. So that's your, that's your deliverable. If it's a show, if you're a individual artist, you know, you might not have an opening night so you can keep working on it 'til you to get it right. <laugh>. Uh, but, but you probably do have, you probably have a gallery opening or something you have to shoot for. But the idea is that the artistic work is never really done. You know, we're gonna, we're gonna run this play, uh, The Tempest for six performances, I think, in Harris Theater. It will be different on performance number six than it was on opening night. And I hope it's different in a better way, but it's gonna be different <laugh>, right? Because the, the students are gonna keep learning from each other. They're gonna keep trying things. And to me, that's the great value of the arts. And it, it kind of goes back to your earlier question about students from around the university taking arts courses. In a good arts course, you learn that iterative process. You learn that critical thinking process. You learn about sort of testing hypotheses, but those hypotheses might be language or music or images. And what does this image say to you? And, and how can you make it better? How can you understand it differently? And that circular thought process really is the essence of artistic creation, which is why I think students, once they experience it, they love it.

President Gregory Washington (39:03): 
Outstanding, outstanding, outstanding. And what a legacy. And what a legacy, indeed. Well, Rick, we're gonna have to leave it there. Thank you for continuing to bring the arts to the George Mason community and beyond. And of course, I would be remiss if I didn't do a plug to support the arts in Northern Virginia, and to encourage our listening audience to come enjoy a show, check out an exhibit, or donate for a lasting legacy through our Mason Now campaign. So, I, I just want to thank you for all that you've done and all that. I know that you will continue to do Rick

Rick Davis (39:41): 
<laugh> right back at you, Mr. President. Thank you.

President Gregory Washington (39:43): 
Outstanding. Well, I am George Mason, president Gregory Washington. Thanks for listening. And tune in next time for more conversations that show why we are all together different.

Outro (40:00): 
If you like what you heard on this podcast, go to podcast.gmu.edu for more of Gregory Washington's conversations with the thought leaders, experts, and educators who take on the grand challenges facing our students and graduates in higher education. That's podcast gmu.edu.