AADL Talks To: Peter Sparling, Lecturer, Poet, Essayist, Dancer, and Filmmaker

Fri, 08/09/2024 - 10:00am

When: July 22, 2024

In this episode, AADL Talks To Peter Sparling. Peter is a lecturer, poet, essayist, dancer, and filmmaker. He is the Rudolf Arnheim Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Dance at the University of Michigan. Peter talks with us about his career, from his start as a member of the José Limón Dance Company and principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company through his time in Ann Arbor as director of his own Peter Sparling Dance Company. Peter talks about his activism, the changes in the Ann Arbor dance community over the years, and his current work after retiring from the university 6 years ago.

Transcript

• [00:00:09] AMY CANTU: [MUSIC] Hi, this is Amy.
• [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: This is Elizabeth. In this episode, AADL talks to Peter Sparling. Peter is a lecturer, poet, essayist, dancer, and filmmaker. He is the Rudolf Arnheim Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Dance at the University of Michigan. Peter talks with us about his career from his start as a member of the José Limón Dance Company and principal dancer with Martha Graham Dance Company, through his time in Ann Arbor as director of his own Peter Sparling Dance Company. Peter talks about his activism, the changes in the Ann Arbor dance community over the years, and his current work after retiring from the University six years ago.
• [00:00:43] ELIZABETH SMITH: Welcome. Thank you for talking to us today, Peter. Where did you grow up, and what brought you to Arbor?
• [00:00:51] PETER SPARLING: I grew up in Detroit. My parents both spent most of their childhoods in the Motor City. I'm one of six kids. I was born in '51. Grew up until I was, I'd say about 12-years-old, in Northwest Detroit Schoolcraft, Southfield area. Used to play in the ditches they were building, digging for the Southfield Expressway. It was a rather idyllic childhood, [LAUGHTER]. I have fond memories.
• [00:01:21] AMY CANTU: Your education--we understand you went to Interlochen and Juilliard. Can you talk a little bit about your background?
• [00:01:26] PETER SPARLING: Yes. I'm a product of the Detroit Public Schools, at least the elementary schools, Dawson Elementary. The folks moved us to Plymouth, Michigan as I went into junior high. I spent two years there, and then hated every minute of it. Luckily, I had begun playing violin in third grade in the Detroit Public Schools. The music programs in Detroit at that time were just excellent, superior. I studied with a very well known string teacher, Ara Zerounian and was part of the string community there, pretty serious about the fiddle. That got me to Interlochen to the National Music Camp for summers. My tenth grade year, I started Plymouth High School, and at the end of the first week, my mother got a call from Interlochen Arts Academy stating that they needed violinists for the orchestra, and that I was recommended having been there the previous summer. I packed up the foot locker and fled north and spent three divine years at Interlochen Arts Academy. My first two years I was in the orchestra. I was also studying dance. First of all, to get out of Phys Ed. I just became so enamored with it. The idea that my body could be the instrument. I didn't have to hold a fiddle under my chin. I could create music with my body, and I could also create architectural shapes in the space. It fascinated me. By my senior year, I transferred into the dance program as a dance major. I actually got a larger scholarship as a male dance major since they're a rarity. That then led me to audition at various dance programs. I was fortunate to have been accepted at the Juilliard school. In '69, I fled yet again to New York City from the north woods of Michigan. It was pretty radical. But I loved it. It was just a fascinating ride. The Juilliard Dance Division was the first institution to have a degree-granting dance program in the United States. I was becoming a part of a legacy or a history, a fascinating history of American modern dance. I was fortunate to study with some of the greats. I was working with José Limón, who was a famous dance personage, born out of the mid 20th century, dance boom. Then I was with Jose's company the last two years I was at Juilliard, touring the world, barely getting my course work done. When I graduated from Juilliard, I was invited into the Martha Graham Dance Company. At that time, Martha had stopped dancing, had been through a bit of a rough spell, and the company was just being rebuilt. I joined that new Martha Graham Company in '73. Rode that steadily for six years. At a time when dance was experiencing quite a boom, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Dance Touring program, were featuring dance companies all over the country. Then also the State Department was sending both the Limón and Graham companies around the world as cultural ambassadors. I was experiencing the world as a dancer in a dance company, an incredible way to see the world. It really was an extraordinary time. The subtext of all this, or what was also going on, was that I was stretching my wings or whatever as a young choreographer, as a fledgling choreographer, because that's really what initially interested me in dance was the making of movement and what that meant. Whether it related to a musical score or to an idea, to a narrative, to an abstract concept. While I was dancing professionally with both Limón and Graham, I was also doing independent choreography wherever I could get it. I knew by '79 that I wanted to form my own company. I left the Graham Company and had my own Peter Sparling Dance Company. That lasted for five years, and I would freelance all over the world to raise enough money to do one season in New York City per year. When I first started, it seemed like the only and the best thing to do. But after five years, I got burnt out. Leaving New York for London, I taught at a very well known dance company and school in London for a year. Then I was back in '84, visiting my parents in Plymouth, came to University of Michigan to visit my friend Gay Delanghe, who was pretty much running the program at the time. What did I do? I lectured in with Madcat Ruth and myself in the dance building. I found out that they were looking for faculty members--for a new faculty. I asked Gay if she thought that the dean would consider my doing halftime thing, where I wasn't sure I was ready to leave New York. From '84-'86, I worked one semester here in Ann Arbor. By the end of that second year, I was offered a full time tenure track position, and I didn't even hesitate. I said, yes, I want it, because New York was just becoming too much of an effort. Looking back, the rents made living as a young artist affordable in Manhattan, whereas now it would be impossible. That said, I was pouring every cent I earned into either rent or sustaining a company, and it just became too much. The idea of a full time position with a pension. A pension. [LAUGHTER]
• [00:08:00] PETER SPARLING: A tenure-track position was very attractive. I might be getting ahead of us here.
• [00:08:08] AMY CANTU: No that's fine.
• [00:08:10] PETER SPARLING: But that brought me to my full-time position, which I began in '86 here in Ann Arbor.
• [00:08:16] ELIZABETH SMITH: Did you always have an interest in teaching or know that that was one of your goals in life, or did that just happen?
• [00:08:23] PETER SPARLING: It's great you would ask that because I remember as a kid, a 4, 5, 6-year-old, I would go down the street to play with my girlfriends, and we would always play school. I was really into being the teacher. But no--I think it's still the case, but if one has aspirations towards being a young artist or a dancer, at least in the '70s, it was mandatory, or it was just accepted that you not only know how to dance, but you know how to choreograph, you know how to write grants, you know how to run a company, you know how to teach, you know how to direct, you know how to collaborate, do PR, marketing. You had to know everything because it was just taken for granted that, as a modern dancer in the United States of America, in the mid-20th century, you weren't going to be getting a lot of help. You needed to know it all. Teaching was a no brainer. I had to do it to pay the rent. That said I loved it. I just loved the communication with students. Again, once I realized my third year at Juilliard that I was part of this living legacy that I was carrying on what the masters had taught me, or what I was stealing from them, I had a responsibility to carry that on through my teaching. I continued to teach until I retired from U of M six years ago in 2018, and I loved it. It's the thing I missed the most about retirement is that connection with the students.
• [00:10:04] AMY CANTU: That's really interesting that you mentioned that you needed to have PR and marketing skills and all of these skills. When you were with Juilliard, when you were with the Martha Graham company, did they specifically teach you those skills, or did you just pick it up along the way? How did you learn all that and who were your mentors?
• [00:10:21] PETER SPARLING: I would say that the curricular offerings, coursework to prepare young dancers to be entrepreneurs and business people, that didn't really enter the picture until maybe 10, 15 years ago. Back in the day, you just had to figure it out for yourself. I had the good fortune of studying under William Hug at Interlochen and my senior year, I was doing what we call lecture demonstrations with a quartet of dancers, where Bill Hug would take us various places, and we would learn to perform excerpts of dances and then talk about the dances to educate an audience to what modern dance was. Very early on, the light went off. If I'm going to become a dancer in America, I also need to be able to advocate and to speak about what I do in this setting, in this lecture demonstration. Fortunately, I had incredible instruction at Interlochen in English and writing. I knew how to write. That was a big bonus. Finances, never--was very poorly educated in terms of keeping a bank account and that kind of thing. I had to pick that up. But people skills and collaborating and being able to read people or groups to get a sense of where I could step through or into the minds of these folks, such that I didn't come off as an elitist, as a snob, as trying to appropriate or colonize, or very early on, I was figuring out what it meant to communicate with different groups, not only in America but all over the world, because oftentimes I would be in front of a group of Taiwanese dancers or Portuguese dancers or German dancers or French, Mexico--the traveling, I think, taught me a few things. One that there was something about the arts and in particular dance, that was really a universal language. Body language, call it anthropology, call it sociology, whatever. As Martha Graham used to quote her father, "movement never lies." The idea that we read each other through our body languages. Dance is a glorification or an amplification of all that body language. If it's a phony, fake, audiences are going to pick it up immediately. There was something through all that traveling and all that experiencing of different audiences that taught me something about what authenticity was. How do I remain true? Yes, there are different styles of dance that accent or highlight different aspects, whether it be form, rhythm, pop music, cultural references, etc, but something about the language of motion. I remember Interlochen, there was a big quote in one of the large halls. Was it Kresge? "In the arts, there are no enemies," and something about the universal language of the arts. For a while, I thought this is just propaganda. This is bullshit. But then, over the years, it was I'll buy this.
• [00:14:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about the experience of moving your dance company into Ann Arbor and what that transition was, and what the reception was around town and how that played into your career broadly.
• [00:14:18] PETER SPARLING: I had to give up my dreams for my own company when I moved to Ann Arbor in '84, '85, permanently '86. Immediately, I formed a collective of dancer choreographers within the faculty at U of M. We called ourselves Ann Arbor Dance Works. We were all choreographing and performing together. That satisfied my craving for making dances, along with making many dances for the student company. In 1993, a company that had been under the directorship of Parker Copley was looking for a new direction. I spoke at the time with the head of the board, Linda Greene, who, Linda and Richard are really the prime supporters of dance in Ann Arbor, and should be celebrated for that. I discussed a plan where the company that also had dance gallery, the studio, become Peter Sparling Dance Company in its rebirth. In 1993, '94, we had our first year, and the audiences were very receptive. We did annual fundraisers. At that time, had a studio in the old Performance Network Technology Center, where the Y is now. It was a rundown, rickety place, cheap rent. We had a beautiful sprung floor in the dance studio, so that was a real plus, godsend. From 1993 until about 2002, we thrived. We had a great time in the old space, traveling through the states, through the State, through Michigan, occasionally Ohio, and setting up wonderful collaborative relationships with the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, occasionally doing projects with University Musical Society. In a sense, I was wearing two hats, many more, probably, one being a full-time tenured faculty member at U of M and the chair of the dance program, as well as being a director of a non-profit dance company in Ann Arbor. It was a real town and gown experience, i.e., what can I get from the Ann Arbor community that is unique to that community that I couldn't get through the university's generosity. I was scrambling and juggling for support, funding, space, between town and gown. Again, wonderful collaborative experiences with the Symphony Orchestra. At the time, Ann Arbor and its arts organizations were gathering together, whether it be the first Ann Arbor Arts Alliance. There were the annual Annies, the Awards, there was a lot of civic pride around its inherent, its local art scene. I must say, and tell me if I'm getting ahead of myself. I saw starting in 2005, 2006, a gradual disintegration of that. It was it 2002 or 2003 that technology center burnt down. Anyways, we were all evicted. I found us a space up on Wildt Street near Summit, the Ann Arbor Ball Bearing Factory, and we raised $250,000 to convert it into a really lovely space. We were able to keep that going for five years with the unwritten agreement that we would be able to buy the space in five years. I had many discussions with the landlord. Then the worst happened, the recession. I found in '07, '08, suddenly, it did feel like it was suddenly, there was no funding. My backers no longer could fund. On top of that, the offer to buy the building, suddenly the landlord upped the amount and would not budge. I was left without a board, without any money and was actually taken to court by the landlord and sued.
• [00:18:56] PETER SPARLING: Fortunately, the judge deemed this poor nonprofit during a recession. How would you say this? Not guilty. We were able to ease ourselves out of that situation. Let me be honest here, it left me embittered and angry, and with a lot of feelings of abandonment, I remember calling the mayor at the time and begging. I remember talking to other colleagues in town, members of other arts organizations. It became apparent to me that everyone had their hands tied. There was no money and that I had to give up. It was a moment of reckoning where I had to take a deep breath and figure, it's hard, its time. Again, fortunately, I had this full-time tenure track position at the U that floated me through it all. I had already become obsessed with video with the possibilities of moving bodies on screens and what that meant in relationship to all of my experienced choreographing bodies in a live space. I was teaching with Terri Sarris a course at the university called Screen Dance. We were having a wonderful time watching young people and ourselves rediscover the moving body and what it could do with a combination of elements into this alchemy. One, it's how dancers perform for a camera. To what the camera can do in terms of its mobility, it's zoom in out, etc. Three, what then we could do in editing? I always say it was the perfect seamless transition from making dances for the stage to the screen because everything related. Whether it was how you have dancers enter and exit a stage from the wings and how that relates to bodies coming into the screen and off the screen, how you exaggerate depth and multiplicity and foreground versus background, etc., etc. The whole bit. I fortunately had plenty to keep me busy upon the demise of Peter Sparling Dance Company and Dance Gallery. It came--once I was able to admit it to myself, it came as a relief because here I had been carrying on two full-time jobs, my poor husband, John Gutoskey. Somehow he supported me through those few decades of having too many jobs than I could really handle, plus be a husband and a partner in a home. From 2008-2018, I maximized what I could do at the university, which is maybe another story or another chapter or another question, because my life at the university took quite a trajectory, and one that six years after retirement, I looked back on in wonder that I was able to do so much.
• [00:22:26] AMY CANTU: Definitely want to hear about that. But before we go there, I want to go back just a little bit. You were a leader in the arts, and you interacted with so many other artists and institutions in Ann Arbor. I'm curious, number one about how the dance community and dancing changed over the years and the support. Aside from the funding issue, was there a real moment for dance and did that change, and how did you handle the transitions? I know there were you mentioned J. Parker, there was People Dancing. There was so much going on. Tell us a little bit more about the reception for dance specifically and how that changed.
• [00:23:05] PETER SPARLING: I was very impressed when I moved to Ann Arbor that there was a fair amount of dance going on in the mid-80s, Whitley Setrakian, Parker, a few other groups, as well, Jesse Richards. In a way, it was just a smaller-scale New York City. There was the competition, there was the vying for venues and for funding. There was also, aesthetic differences, where we all had different styles, different ways of making dances. In a sense, different visions of who our audiences were or might be. But that said, we all got along, and we found that we had to share our audiences because it was relatively small. The community was small. It was not wise to become territorial and to become exclusive and to create vendettas and wars against each other. It just wasn't appropriate at all. Also, people were pretty nice. We got along well, and we danced in each other's works. We shared the stage with each other on showcases, etc. I would say that the '80s and '90s was a a boom time. The wonderful film that Terri Sarris and Amy Anderson have created for Ann Arbor's 200 says it all. It's a great little nugget of that history.
• [00:24:36] AMY CANTU: We'll be sure to link to it from here.
• [00:24:38] PETER SPARLING: Good.
• [00:24:40] ELIZABETH SMITH: What about the venues? You mentioned Performance Network. Were there other venues in town that you frequented?
• [00:24:46] PETER SPARLING: There were so many funky little venues that people kept creating. The Ann Arbor Civic Theater took over the roller rink there on Platt. For a while, we were dancing there. Performance Network then moved into fourth and Huron.
• [00:25:01] AMY CANTU: Courthouse.
• [00:25:01] PETER SPARLING: Yeah. We danced there. Washtenaw Community College's space. We would take whatever we could get, dancing outdoors, in parks, etc. Because of my relationship with the university, I also had access to the Rackham. We did some amazing multimedia pieces there where with Internet too, we linked up the Duderstadt North Campus video studio with Rackham and had live projections of dance going in different spaces. Of course, the Power Center has always been the center, the best venue for dance, and we maximized that space. The Mendelssohn Theater, the high school spaces, occasionally, the auditoriums, and the high schools, Greenhills. I'm sure I'm forgetting some, but we would take whatever we could get and train the people and bring in our floors, and it was roughing it, but that's what we did.
• [00:26:08] AMY CANTU: Tell us a little bit about that trajectory you mentioned of your career at the university specifically.
• [00:26:15] PETER SPARLING: Looking back in retrospect, I see certain threads that sustained me and that involved my sticking my neck out and having a voice, finding a voice, representing factions or groups within the university. One such was as a gay man. I didn't come out until I moved to Ann Arbor. I must have been about 36, 37. It was about '86, '87, '80. It became apparent to a handful of us gay faculty members at the U in '92, '93 that we needed to band together to take care of ourselves and to ensure that the university was putting its money where its mouth was. We asked that sexual orientation be included in the university's anti-discriminatory bylaws, and the deans immediately said yes. Shortly thereafter, we were given partner benefits. But that--it wasn't as easy as that. Then with a Republican legislature in Lansing, numerous times, we were threatened with the removal of those same-sex partner benefits. The university very cleverly, just continued to recalibrate the criteria so that people could still have partners or people they were not related to living with them and sharing their benefits. That was a fight. Fortunately, the university didn't offer the resistance, but they supported us in that fight. Another area was salary equity, where dance has always been the orphan child of the arts, and the salaries reflected that. It was a cause for me to try to up the profile of the dance department, the dance program, and the arts in general in the university. To be specific, grants from the Office of the Vice President for research. Could we be sure as artists to have our creative endeavors considered equivalent to scientific and academic research? Could we get the same money as our colleagues in the sciences and engineering and literature, LS&A, etc.? It happened. We all had to really get smart quickly and learn how to write grants. More specifically, to write grants that could be understood by non-arts faculty who were on the panels selecting who was worthy of the funding. That was another trajectory of ensuring that the university understood what we artists were doing. Call what we do research if that's going to be a way of understanding the process of the creative mind. Other battles. Interdisciplinarity. I call it the I-word. Back in the late '90s, Lee Bollinger was the president, and there were various mandates from above, which is rare that funding be set aside for collaborations or for artists working with scientists or poets or composers, or complex systems experts. I was very much at the center of that. I mean, the year I arrived here in the mid-'80s, I was working with an architect and a composer to make a new work. Every year I would be doing a different collaboration to the extent that my last ten years at the U, I was an unofficial resident artist at the new Life Sciences Institute. I did a collaboration there with Dan Klionsky, who's a cell biologist.
• [00:30:14] PETER SPARLING: It was this idea of crossing boundaries, or borders, of working against the silos on campus of the disciplines to shake up the tyranny of specialization. There was this idea that, how can we have dilettantes or people professing to know something about other areas at a major research university, where expertise is the thing. That was a challenge. Fortunately, I giggle, but I'm pleased that finally, after all these years, the arts, whether it's an arts initiative, it's become institutionalized, there are new programs and new divisions and institutes that are supporting these endeavors that we were struggling with in the '90's, so it's good.
• [00:31:21] AMY CANTU: That's interesting. You'd mentioned early on, you talked about the authenticity of dance--is the organic coming together versus this academic kind of institutionalization? Is it better? Is it different? When you're trying to work with other people and you're trying to do your art?
• [00:31:38] PETER SPARLING: I think I understand your question. The first thing that comes to my mind is you can throw a lot of money at a lot of groups of artists and academics, and it doesn't guarantee that anything good is going to come of it. But it certainly increases the odds that projects will happen and that people can try things out. I mean, it's a big experiment, and with the largesse of the U of M, you'd hope that they would provide for those experiments, because out of those experiments, extraordinary things can happen.
• [00:32:10] AMY CANTU: Is it still ongoing and it's pretty vibrant?
• [00:32:13] PETER SPARLING: I think it is. I think things happen in waves. Again, there's the trickle down mandate from above, but my experience was that most of the hot stuff happened from the faculty and students up. Where through subversive activity or just stubbornness or determination or defiance, my partner, my husband accuses me of being too defiant and stubborn, and I think it's a good thing I had that in me while at the university. Well, through my entire life, actually.
• [00:32:51] AMY CANTU: Isn't that part of the definition of what art is, though?
• [00:32:54] PETER SPARLING: I think so. It's not a very practical thing, you have to be a rather stubborn nutcase I think [LAUGHTER] in the best way.
• [00:33:03] ELIZABETH SMITH: [LAUGHTER] I was curious about what courses you taught while you were at the university, and which of those were your favorites to teach?
• [00:33:12] PETER SPARLING: Without question, it was always a technique class. You get 20, 25, up to 30 people in a large studio, and you teach them at different levels what technique is, i.e., how do you put together a dance class, and how do you build in a logical meaningful organic sequence? Movement sequences or repetitions that will train the body, the way violinists study scales and arpeggios, the way any craft requires training. It was the technique classes, and I often taught Martha Graham technique, which is a specific technique evolved over, it's still evolving, actually from '26. One of the most organic and systematic modern dance techniques there is. I would teach that. My favorite courses, I think, were in dance composition, is guiding the students into their own creative endeavors without imposing my aesthetic. It was really a challenge to seduce them, to goad them, just to get them excited about what they themselves were coming up with. I loved that part of it, mentoring young choreographers. I taught cultural concepts of dance at the grad level, which has since the '80s, grown into something we call dance studies, i.e., there are now Masters and PhDs in dance that did not exist back then, that deal with all contextual aspects of dance, dance and anthropology, dance and culture, dance and gender, dance and politics. The science of dance of a moving body, dance medicine, somatics. That early cultural concepts of dance took the students into more academic areas in ways that they could develop threads of research that would allow them to move into faculty positions and even to go on to get PhDs, i.e., how do you write about dance, something that's so ephemeral, and that seems to resist it. Then I also choreographed for the students, university of dance. That was such a pleasure to be able to make dances for groups up to like 25 bodies. I remember choreographing for the U of M football halftime. We did a whole thing to Madonna. That was fun to watch 25 odd dancers out on the football field. [LAUGHTER] That was probably the largest audience and venue I've ever choreographed for [LAUGHTER] Oh and Screen Dance. Terri and I got a grant to start that in about 2000. We taught that for 20 years, actually before 2000. That was a pleasure, because that was truly interdisciplinary. We had kids from the visual arts from architecture, LS&A film, video, dance, music, everyone learning together what it meant to move for the camera, to edit. That's where I got hooked on making videos through teaching it.
• [00:36:37] AMY CANTU: One of the things I'm curious about, a lot of the people we've talked with have mentioned, there was the heyday of the Film Festival still going on. But say campus cinema. There's the Film Festival, of course, we have the Summer Festival, and various arts, and you mentioned that there was a period of time when dance was big, and music has always been huge in Ann Arbor, we've got the Folk Festival and the Ark and so many venues, the UMS. What is your view on the state of the arts right now in the city and where do you think it's heading?
• [00:37:08] PETER SPARLING: Good question. Let me go back, you mentioned UMS. I shot myself on the foot actually back in the mid '90s when I went to Ken Fischer and Michael Kondziolka at UMS and said, guys, you need to up your dance offerings. I took them to New York and introduced them to the people at Graham, Tricia Brown, Merce Cunningham, Alvin Ailey. From that time on, UMS really began to diversify and increase its dance holdings.
• [00:37:37] PETER SPARLING: What it did, and it was also a recession, but it in a sense diverted all the interest in funding away from local dance to UMS import dance. My thought was that it would just educate and increase the audience for all of us, but it didn't work that way. It came along with the gentrification of Ann Arbor and the gradual demise of civic pride for the local arts. I think the local arts in Ann Arbor are in a dismal place in terms of individual artists, independent artists, the larger institutions, the symphony, etc. They've lasted with incredible support from their memberships and through the efforts of many hardworking arts advocates who have been around Ann Arbor for quite a while. You ask me what it looks like. Since I retired six years ago, I literally physically have not been on campus or in town nearly as much as I was when I was on the faculty. I built myself my own painting studio in my backyard. Four years before retiring, I became obsessed with painting. When the pandemic hit I became a real hermit. I no longer associated with the town. I mean, we were living, as most of us were in our little hermit lives and I did a lot online, but post-pandemic I look around, I see the high rises go up, the development, which I think is inevitable, particularly with the green belt around the town enclosing the town and limiting development elsewhere. I think it is inevitable. Will the infrastructure support so much building, remains to be seen. Already, the traffic drives me nuts, parking, etc. I see Ann Arbor trying to figure out what its identity is. It always has had this identity crisis between town and gown, between what it is apart from the university and what it is along with the whale and the fish tank, which is the university. It's a tough dynamic and people assume that Ann Arbor is an arts and culture mecca and hub, and it's true to a large extent, but it's mostly because of the university and because of a few of the sustained arts organizations, it's the real estate. Independent artists, young people can no longer afford to live in Ann Arbor. I think that really limits things. I saw it happen in Manhattan as well, where the gentrification of Manhattan booted out all the young artists. It becomes a theme park, celebrating itself, as a city, as a mecca, where the artistic organizations that can sustain themselves become the destinations and the makers have to become even more subversive and clever about surviving or living elsewhere. In Manhattan, it's the boroughs, New Jersey, Ann Arbor it's Ypsi, Saline, Milan, etc., Brighton. 10-20 years from now, we'll look back and say it was inevitable. Growth, period. It's growth. That's what happens. Gentrification, call it what you want. Is there something that we could call arts gentrification? I think that is true if you chart the progress of the arts in a community as either becoming more diverse and more accessible or more elitist. I see some of both of it happening, but I think it's moving more towards the elitist. Is that what people want? What do people want? I'm 73, I'm retired, I'm working on my paintings, my writings, my videos. I'm doing most of my gigs out of town. Oftentimes, I no longer ask the question. I pay my taxes, but I'm no longer as invested and part of it is just the way things go. I also think it's the change in the city and its ability to generate and support this grassroots community. It doesn't have the ability to be that diverse and to offer different levels of survival and of economies to allow for a broad range of creatives to flourish.
• [00:42:55] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about, you kind of mentioned your writing. You wrote a memoir. You've written poetry and essays, and now you're doing painting, which you also mentioned. What was that transition like going from being a dancer to doing all these other forms of art, or were you doing them simultaneously?
• [00:43:12] PETER SPARLING: Pretty much simultaneously. I mean, if you were to chart it on a graph, when you get as old as me, you can actually put your life on a graph and keep laughing about it. I mean, I always loved to write. I always loved to sketch, but I had to get to a point where I had the time to invest in the painting, where the curriculum at the university offered me this opportunity to move more into video, and I dove right in. I just became fixated on the possibilities of editing on Final Cut Pro. I wrote poetry as a kid. I've had poetry in various publications. The memoir I wrote about ten years ago, thinking, I'd better write all this down while I still have a memory. What comes of it I don't know, but at least I need to write it all down. It's there. It's all on a file on a laptop. I have a collection at the Bentley Historical Library on campus, where they've got decades of photographs of reviews, of notes, of videos that have been digitized, writings, etc. What comes of it I'm not sure. But to answer your question, I think if I were to get up on a soapbox and do a TED talk, it would be about transferable skills. Well, I'll just say this when I'm painting, I'm dancing. It's all dance. When I'm making videos, it's making pieces for the stage. When I'm writing poetry, it's like assembling movement in a phrase. It all comes from the same place. It's all very muscular, visual, visceral. It moves, and the imagery that blasts through my mind as I create is interchangeable. The stroke of the violin bow on the strings, it reminds me of a dance movement. Everything comes from the spine from the center of gravity and emanates outwards. I mean, I could go on and on, but is this something that can be taught this transferable skills idea? Is it something that is unique to my DNA? Is it something that most people don't consider because our culture is almost against it in that it demands that we specialize in order to get degrees and jobs? Unanswered questions.
• [00:46:03] AMY CANTU: Peter, you won an Annie Award in 1993 for Excellence in Dance, and the Governor's Michigan Artist Award, 1998, and a U of M Distinguished Faculty Award, considering all that and all that you've done, what are you most proud of?
• [00:46:18] PETER SPARLING: I think back at that moment, putting together a gay faculty alliance at the university and meeting in the basement of the old dance building, looking at each other and saying, what are we going to do here? What do we need to do as human beings? Had all of us gotten tenure by then? Probably. I mean, it was a matter of how far do you stick your neck out unless you already have tenure. There was that game that we are all playing too. I'm very proud of that, of being part of that and of sustaining that over a period of time. I'm very proud of my part in elevating the profile of the arts within the university, and of helping to mentor hundreds and hundreds of young artists. [MUSIC]
• [00:47:14] AMY CANTU: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library. [MUSIC]