The Performer: Art · Life · Politics

The Performer: Art · Life · Politics

/

RICHARD SENNETT Centennial Professor of Sociology · London School of Economics · Fmr. Humanities Professor · NYU
Author of The Performer · The Fall of Public Man · The Culture of the New Capitalism · The Craftsman

We look at creative work as though the very creative process itself is something good. These are tools of expression, and like any tool, you can use them to damage something or to make something. They can be turned to very malign purposes, for instance, in the operas of Wagner. So I wanted to do this set of books, I want to show what is kind of the basic DNA that people use for good or for ill. What are the tools they use, if you like, of expression that they use in the creative process?

GUILLAUME LAFORTUNE

GUILLAUME LAFORTUNE

/

Vice President · Head of the Paris Office
UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

The SDSN was set up to mobilize research and science for the Sustainable Development Goals. The development goals were adopted in 2015 by all UN member states, marking the first time in human history that we have a common goal for the entire world. Out of all the targets that we track, only 16 percent are estimated to be on track. Currently, none of the SDGs are on track to be achieved at the global level.

JEFFREY SACHS

JEFFREY SACHS

/

President of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network
Director of Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University

The US signed several statements in 2021 confirming that NATO would enlarge. Russia massed troops on its border and put on the table a draft US-Russia security agreement on December 17th, 2021 based on no NATO enlargement. The Biden administration formally replied that it was not willing to negotiate over that issue in a response in January. Then Russia invaded on February 24th, 2022. Four weeks later, Zelenskyy declared that Ukraine was accepting of neutrality. In other words, the initial Russian invasion brought Ukraine to the negotiating table, and during the second half of March, with the Turkish government being the mediators, Russia and Ukraine hammered out a peace agreement. Incredibly, the United States blocked it because the United States told the Ukrainian government: you fight on.

The Club of Rome

The Club of Rome

/

& The Limits to Growth with Co-President PAUL SHRIVASTAVA

Less than two weeks into the new year and the world’s wealthiest 1% have already used their fair share of the global carbon budget allocated for 2025. Climate change is here. It's already causing devastation to the most vulnerable populations. We are living with an extractive mindset, where we are extracting one way out of the life system of the Earth. We need to change from that extractive mindset to a regenerative mindset. And we need to change from the North Star of economic growth to a vision of eco civilizations. Those are the two main principles that I want to propose and that the Club of Rome suggests that we try to transform our current organization towards regenerative living and eco civilization.

ALAN POUL

ALAN POUL

/

Emmy & Golden Globe-winning Executive Producer · Director
Tokyo Vice · Six Feet Under · Tales of the City · My So-Called Life

I think all great work comes from the need to say something. And so this is the challenge for young artists and also maybe one of the essential elements that can never be completely taken over by AI because there has to be something you feel has not been said, and you feel an urgent need to say it. In fact, you can't not say it. That need to express is what gives birth to unique expression, which is where all of our visual, performance, and creative arts come from. 

JONATHAN YEO

JONATHAN YEO

/

Artist

What are you trying to do with a portrait? On a basic level, you're trying to communicate something about the essence of who someone is. You're trying to figure out who they are, not necessarily who they present themselves as. The two things can quite often be different. You're trying to find ways of showing that through their face, their posture, or any other context. My instinct is always to try to reduce down to the essential elements. We read faces. It's obviously very, very deep in our DNA, really our survival instinct. We are programmed to read faces in a very fine-tuned way.

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE

TIOKASIN GHOSTHORSE

/

Founder · Host · Exec. Director of First Voices Radio
Founder of Akantu Intelligence · Master Musician of the Ancient Lakota Flute

We have not adapted to Earth. She needs us to do that. Instead, we've tried to adapt Earth to our needs. Which is always an extraction, take away. Earth doesn't exist because of technology. Earth will always be here. So when it comes to animacy, I think it's a Western term also, and so we get away from the Western terms. We start seeing that, oh, we are becoming Earth as we're born into this physical dimension. We are becoming Earth. And then as we are living during this time, we're alive. We are becoming Earth. And when we are finished with this body, we are becoming Earth. 

JEFFREY ROSEN

JEFFREY ROSEN

/

President & CEO of the National Constitution Center
Author of The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America

That idea of planting seeds for future generations came from the Tusculan Disputations. There’s something especially empowering about Cicero. And it's very striking that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and so many in the Founding Era viewed this manual about overcoming grief as the definition for achieving happiness. And I think it's because it's a philosophy of self-mastery, self-improvement, and self-empowerment.

Female Desire · Sex & Intimacy

Female Desire · Sex & Intimacy

/

Emmy-nominated Producer, Writer, Playwright LAURA EASON on THREE WOMEN

I think the show conveys to the women watching that their lives matter. They don't have to be some gorgeous aspirational person, although Sloane absolutely fits that mold. But for others living in the Midwest, struggling and feeling unseen, hopefully, the mirrors of Lina and Maggie will help them not feel so alone and remind them that their stories are important and matter.

ADA LIMÓN

ADA LIMÓN

/

24th U.S. Poet Laureate · National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Poet

This poem was written when I was having a real moment of reckoning, not that I hadn't had it earlier, but where I was doing some deep reading about the climate crisis and really reckoning with myself, with where we were and what was happening, what the truth was. And I felt like it was so easy to slip down into a darkness, into a sort of numbness, and I didn't think that that numbness and darkness could be useful.

CHRIS BLACKWELL

CHRIS BLACKWELL

/

Founder of Island Records, which launched the careers of Bob Marley, U2, Cat Stevens, Grace Jones, Roxy Music, Amy Winehouse…
Author of The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond
Winner of the Polar Music Prize · A&R Icon Award

I think you need to be aware and see people be open to what can happen and get a feel, get an instinct. I think I've been blessed with instinct. I mean, I did not do well at school. I passed zero exams. I'm unemployable, but I've been blessed with having instincts. The instinct of U2 was seeing their determination, the fact that the music itself initially wasn't close to what most of my music was because most of my music was bass and drum. And most of their music was vocal, so it wasn't a certain kind of music that I like all the time. I like music from all different kinds of levels…I absolutely felt for Bob Marley to really make it worldwide as it were, he needed to change something a little bit. I didn't want him to change what he was doing, not his lyrics and everything else like that. It was more the instrumentation of it. I felt for Bob to be able to reach a wider audience that he needed to move away a little bit from that and focus more and more on his lyrics. When I finally met Cat Stevens, and we just sort of sat down and then when he played the song ‘Father and Son,’ then suddenly the lyrics of the song and what it meant and everything, I suddenly felt this guy is fantastic.

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

CHARLIE HERTZOG YOUNG

/

Award-winning Climate Activist
Author of Spinning Out: Climate Change, Mental Health and Fighting for a Better Future

There's that old saying, “blessed are the cracked for they shall let in the light.” For a lot of people like myself, I think it's true that losing your mind can be a proportionate response to the climate crisis. Those of us with mental health issues are often branded as being in our own world. But paradoxically, being in our own world can actually be a result of being more connected to the outside world rather than less. And in the context of climate change, it may be fairer to describe people who fail to develop psychological symptoms as being in their own separate anthropocentric world, inattentive to the experiences of the billions of other human and nonhuman beings on the planet, unaffected by looming existential catastrophe…

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

FLORIAN HOFFMEISTER

/

Academy Award-nominated Cinematographer
HBO’s True Detective: Night Country starring Jodie Foster · Kali Reis · Fiona Shaw

I drove for like a half an hour into absolute nothingness, and I left the car. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was minus 17 degrees and it was absolutely still. I've never experienced stillness such as that. I mean, it's like you feel like you can feel your atoms move or not move because it's so cold. And the sky is full of the Northern Lights. So you are already in a remote place, but you want to go further. And I think maybe those themes of going out into the wilderness are motivated by the urge to connect. And I think Issa López has really incorporated it beautifully into the script. And the show tells of this great disconnect between people. So not only are we disconnected from our environment, but we are disconnected from each other.

DON McKELLAR

DON McKELLAR

/

Co-writer · Executive Producer · Co-showrunner of HBO’s The Sympathizer
with Hoa Xuande · Robert Downey Jr.

I think it's central to the message of the show and of the book. This idea that there's another side to every question. That's the central quandary. There's this problem with the whole Vietnam War. It's saying, to Americans at least, put yourself on the other side, the Vietnamese side, and then recognize that that side also has two sides and then within that, there are further divisions. And if you do that, I think what it's proposing is that you have to step back. It forces a sort of objectivity and humility, and it asks you to step back and allow the bigger human questions to resonate.

DAVID FENTON

DAVID FENTON

/

Author of The Activist’s Media Handbook: Lessons From 50 Years as a Progressive Agitator
Founder of Fenton Communications: The Social Change Agency
JStreet · Climate Nexus · The Death Penalty Information Center

It sounds like a cliche, but it really is true that history moves in pendulums and waves. And whatever is happening today is not going to last. It will change. So you have periods of concentrations of wealth and power, and then you have periods of rebellion. And I'm quite sure we're headed for another period of rebellion. You can see it a little bit now in the labor strife in the United States and the strikes. You can certainly see it in the massive demonstrations in France and Israel. Excessive concentrations of power breeds rebellion, and that's just inevitable. And the climate crisis is going to cause a lot of rebellion as people figure this out. And I think it's coming very soon, actually, because as you've noticed, the weather is getting very bad. It's become a non-linear accelerating phenomenon. And people will wake up to that. I just hope they wake up in time.

DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP

DAN FUTTERMAN & ADAM RAPP

/

Award-winning Screenwriters · Exec. Producers · Directors
American Rust · The Looming Tower
Capote · The Outsiders musical

We're all culpable in some way of being both good and bad, being virtuous and also questionable at times in our own lives. And I think when you start answering questions on either side of that too firmly, I think it allows the audience to disconnect from it. And then you just have this sort of a good and bad guy narrative that is oversimplified all too often in our culture. I think viewers will relate to this nature versus nurture versus DNA, raising all the questions of psychological and biological inheritance.

BENOIT DELHOMME

BENOIT DELHOMME

/

Award-winning Cinematographer of At Eternity’s Gate starring Willem Dafoe
The Theory of Everything starring Eddie Redmayne · The Scent of Green Papaya · Minamata
Artist Painter · Director

If you want to do your art well, you need to have some pleasure. If talking is not a pleasure, it's horrible. And when filming on a set is a bad experience, it's one of the worst things in life. As a cinematographer, if you can't make what you do personal to you, there is no soul. You need to make it personal. I certainly like a handheld camera, It's a bit like playing a saxophone. It's like the pace of walking or how I stop or I decide to go closer to the actor or to take more distance is so free. No one is telling me to go one step forward or one step back. I have to decide on the spot. So there certainly a freedom like a painter with a brush. It's nice because you have even the vibrations, your rhythms, the actor's rhythms. It's this dance.

CHAYSE IRVIN

CHAYSE IRVIN

/

Award-winning Cinematographer
Blonde starring Ana de Armas · Beyonce: Lemonade · Spike Lee’s BlacKkKlansman

That's all I can do on a movie. I can't really make a movie good or not because that's decided by the spectator. That's not in my control. All I can do is give it everything that I have. Like that's just the love I have to give. So why bring in all these other things? Just set it up so you can give it everything that you've got each time. In those theoretical considerations about how a scene can function or be rendered or shot or executed or all these things, just think of it as, "Oh, this is the challenge." I want authenticity. How do we create an environment where that's more likely to happen? Because it's never going to be something that I can enforce, and the more I try to enforce it, the less likely it'll happen. For me, the more risky things, the more things that defied expectations are really important to me. I guess it even goes down to just novelty. How do you create a need or a yearning? And the spectator, you create a particular rhythm and then you change that rhythm, and then it's almost like you try to sensitize your spectator to these ideas by defining a particular rhythm that you've set for them.

JASON deCAIRES TAYLOR

JASON deCAIRES TAYLOR

/

Sculptor · Environmentalist · Creator of Underwater Museums

The sculptures get claimed and almost owned by the sea. And the textures that form the patterns, all things that could never be reproduced by human hands. And it's entirely unpredictable in many cases. I go to some of the "museums" expect to see this type of colonization or this type of growth, and it's nothing like how I've seen it envisaged it. It's completely different. Other times something has been made at its home, and there's an octopus that's built a house around it, or there's a school of fish that have nestled within the formations. There have been many, many different surprises along the way. I first started in the West Indies on an island called Grenada, which has a tropical reef system. And I expected the works to be sort of colonized. And I knew hard corals took a very long time to get established, to build their calcium skeletons, but actually, they were colonized within days. We saw white little calcareous worms, pink coraline algae, and green algae literally appeared sort of overnight.

DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE

DR. RUPERT SHELDRAKE

/

Biologist · Author
The Science Delusion · The Presence of the Past · Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work

The idea that the laws of nature are fixed is taken for granted by almost all scientists and within physics, within cosmology, it leads to an enormous realm of speculation, which I think is totally unnecessary. We're assuming the laws of nature are fixed. Most of science assumes this, but is it really so in an evolving universe? Why shouldn't the laws evolve? And if we think about that, then we realize that actually, the whole idea of a law of nature is a metaphor. It's based on human laws. I mean, after all, dogs and cats don't obey laws. And in tribes, they don't even have laws. They have customs. So it's only in civilized societies that you have laws. And then if we think through that metaphor, then actually the laws do change. All artists are influenced by other artists and by things in the collective culture, and I think that morphic resonance as collective memory would say that all of us draw unconsciously as well as consciously on a collective memory and all animals draw on a collective memory of their kind as well. We don't know where it comes from, but there's true creativity involved in evolution, both human and natural.