TheaterWorks, which calls itself “Hartford’s Off-Broadway,” celebrates its 25th anniversary this month. Over a quarter century, this little arts engine that could has made its basement theater an essential venue and transformed the historic Art Deco building above it into a cultural epicenter that’s home to a variety of arts organizations.
In step with the theater’s milestone, founder Steve Campo has issued a kind of credo, titled “Art for Life.” The one-page document cites recent media stories on research that partially debunks the much-touted benefits of crossword puzzles for retaining cognitive agility. “Doing crossword puzzles seems to assure continued ability at one thing,” he reports: “doing crossword puzzles.”
However, he goes on, there is one activity that enhances brain power on multiple levels, and that’s cultural experience. “When one sits (awake) in a theater, virtually every area of cognitive function is ‘turned on.’ Storyline, character, emotional, visual and auditory content all trigger different parts of our brain. We are called upon to engage the processes by which moral and ethical evaluations are made, to empathize with others, and to relate to circumstances and personalities both familiar and foreign.”
It’s not only the relatively passive activity of attending (but paying lively attention to) a theatrical performance that keeps our brains supple. An area of research Campo doesn’t mention gives even higher marks to active participation in theater arts. The research team of Helga and Tony Noice observed what they call “the active experiencing principle” in an acting class for retirees. After just a month of theater games and scene work, participants showed improved cognitive performance in 10 key areas, from word recall to problem solving.
Now, don’t stop reading this if you’re under 60. Researchers are increasingly relating brain function throughout life to the notion of “cognitive reserve.” It’s like a savings account: the more you put in early on—exercising your imagination, curiosity, empathic and critical faculties—the more mental assets you’ll have to draw on later.
Campo extends his own argument by pointing out “another facet to live cultural experience that helps us think, feel, and be better,” whether as spectators or participants: “We partake of it in the company of others. It is the collective experience of breathing the same air, seeing the same images, hearing the same sounds, vicariously living others’ lives—all in exactly the same moment—that elevates what we call ‘the arts’ to something almost sacred.”
For me, that connection is the heart of the encounter—and the crucial difference between live performance and on-screen entertainment. For the moment is shared not only among the attendees, but with the performers as well. It’s that ritual of transaction, in which the players are animated by the crowd’s collective energy as much as the groundlings are delighted and stirred by the spectacle before them, that makes the theater such a life-giving space.
With a twist on the old rallying cry “art for art’s sake,” Campo concludes, “Perhaps the wisdom of our species was inventing art for life’s sake.”
The full text of Steve Campo’s “Art for Life” is available at theaterworkshartford.org. The regional premiere of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage is playing through Dec. 19 at TheaterWorks, 233 Pearl St., Hartford, (860) 527-7838.
