Giant Windmills and Broken Lances

2012 was not my year. The giants were overwhelming, my tilting skills felt dubious, and my lance proved weak and ineffectual. There were many factors that contributed to my grip weakening, and finally slipping altogether – a misstep here, a realization of futility there – but one event stands out in causing my giants to begin to resemble windmills.

I parted ways with a performing arts school that I greatly admired.

This was not much of a financial blow. Nor was it a blow to my pride, or even my ego. I stood my ground on a legal and ethical issue, and was told my services were no longer needed. I was able to walk away with my head held high.

And yet . . . it was a blow. It undermined my faith in myself, in my place in the world of theatre, in my belief that while I may be in a minority, I was not alone.

To nutshell the occurrence – I was given a script that I was to use in the classroom, both as a learning tool for my students, and as rehearsal for a full-scale production that would be mounted in a theatre in front of a paying audience. While I knew ahead of time the script would be based on a well-loved children’s novel, I was not prepared for the script that was handed to me. As I read it through with my class, my heart sank lower and lower.

The script was stuffed with lines, dialogue, lyrics, all lifted verbatim from one of three popular re-creations of the novel – 2 movies, and one stage musical. I’m not talking elements, concepts, or ideas from these re-imaginings of the original. I’m talking plagiarism. All three of these sources were protected by copyright, and no rights had been purchased, no permissions had been granted. Just to add a little dose of irony (?) to it all, the original novel, the inspiration for the movies and stage show that had been pillaged, was firmly in the public domain. If it was vital to do that particular story, the script could have legally and ethically been written using the original material.

If you’ve read my previous blog entries, you can probably guess where I stand on this sort of thing. I do not walk the fence on this issue. At all. Artistic integrity is vital to me, and there was no integrity to be found in this script. I was ill.

Those of you who know me in person - chiefly those of you who know me in theatre – are familiar with the . . . er, passion . . . I tend to display when it comes to issues of artistic integrity, and thus are probably imagining that at this point, I stormed the head offices, threw the script down like a gauntlet, declared it a travesty, and washed my hands of the entire thing.

Alas. Perhaps my inevitable defeat would have been less painful if I had waved the white flag, instead of attempting negotiations. Here’s the thing, though. I loved that school. I loved what they were doing. I had immense respect for the woman who ran it, and her vision of releasing artists and lovers of art into the world, instead of mere performers. In the months that I was there, she seemed to do more than pay lip service to this mission. While I didn’t always agree with her approach, I admired the motivation behind it.

So instead of being buoyed by righteous indignation, I was gnawed by disappointment and sorrow. I was losing sleep. I was dragging myself to work. I was hating myself. Desperate for a compromise that would allow me to keep my integrity and my job, I refreshed my knowledge of copyright law, hoping for a loophole. I found one. Sort-of.

I approached the head of the school and laid out my concerns in detail. I prefaced the discussion with the acknowledgment of the great work she does with the kids, and that the school itself is an important addition to the community. Then I told her that I could, with a semi-clear conscience, rehearse with the children in the classroom, as that is a legitimate use of the copyrighted material. I could not, however, be a part of the actual production.

It was a long, painful discussion. She acknowledged that what she was doing wasn’t ethical, but insisted there was no other way for them to pull off their end-of-year performance. She cited the expense, the difficulty of working all the students into a production, the amount of effort it would take to write a script from scratch. I sympathized, but pointed out that none of these were insurmountable obstacles. I offered my experience from my previous job of writing and producing original musicals with a group of students, tailor-made for the cast we had. She countered that the students wouldn’t want to do material that they weren’t already familiar with. I disagreed, and felt children, especially, welcome the opportunity to embrace new stories and characters.  I won’t hit every point that we covered during that first discussion, but in the end, although she hadn’t let go of the notion that, while technically wrong, her approach was justified, she agreed to my proposed compromise.  My stomach unknotted, and I began to breathe easier.

Sadly, the compromise lasted mere weeks. She no longer felt she was justified – she felt she was absolutely in the right. I was accused of caring more about the letter of the law than about the children. I pointed out that a good portion of what I wanted to teach the children as artists is artistic integrity, not only in respecting other people’s work, but in respecting their own, and respecting themselves as artists. The previous discussion was repeated, almost verbatim. I stood my ground. She stood hers. I was told that my principles precluded me from being a good teacher, as I was willing to abandon the students during their production rather than participate in something unethical.  She politely informed me that they would no longer be able to use me as a teacher.

I was at sea.  I had close ties with my students, particularly the teens, and I was being cut off from them with no chance to say good-bye, and no confidence that the head of the school would explain my abrupt departure in neutral terms.

And that is when my lance slipped. When I began to question my own perceptions. When I began to wonder if I was alone in my belief that art must have integrity. When I finally asked myself if I was fighting a battle worth fighting, or merely tilting at windmills. It was a gradual, and wholly unintentional progression. I didn’t lay down arms, discard my armor, and ride from the battlefield in surrender. Instead, I froze in place. I loosened my grip. I let my armor grow rusty, my steed wander off. I didn’t notice, and I didn’t try to counteract it. I just stood. I sunk. I forgot where I was and why I was there, and I didn’t try to remember.

It took months for me to awaken to the fact that I had, essentially, quit the fight. That my lance was half-buried in the mud, my armor useless, my horse long gone. As daunting as it can be to become conscious to the stagnation I must climb out of, I am heartened by the fact that as I survey my personal landscape, windmills are once again beginning to take the shape of giants.

I wish I could declare that I am now fully charged to don new armor, wrest my lance from the mud, and once more into the fray. Still, while I may be questioning my personal ability to fell giants and windmills, I am steadfast in my belief that they must fall.