As a Teaching Artist, one of my favorite exercises is called “Shake It Out.” It’s as simple as it sounds. I ask students or workshop participants to shake out whatever parts of their bodies they can. If you can shake it all at once. Cool. If not, still cool. Just shake. And I don’t mean in a sexy, dance-floor kind of way. I mean, in an unselfconscious let it all go as free as you wanna be way. It’s amazing to see people get out of their heads and start to play. By now, many of us know that play isn’t necessarily simple or insubstantial. It’s a cliché that tech companies have embraced the Google campus-ping-pong-in-the-breakroom vibe. When I have spoken to other Teaching Artists, they all come to the same conclusion: play can change lives and become a deeper process of discovery and creation. Another fave is “Toss the Sound.” People stand in a circle and throw abstract sounds and motions around the room to other people who “catch” the sound, change and it toss it someone else. Weirded out yet? Great! The point is to let the discomfort and fear be a whole part of taking a risk. The goal is to liberate the mind, body and soul- to free associate and come up with concepts, ideas and expressions that don’t necessarily match. Fully immersing in this weirdness isn’t all there is to creative work. But it can be a start to embracing the artistic process.

Thus, when I think (free associate) about what it means to be a Teaching Artist, I am happy to say that two seemingly disparate things come to mind.

The first: Over the Summer, I saw the movie Sing Sing. Its main characters were incarcerated men serving sentences in the titular Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison in Ossining, New York. The movie explored how these men were transformed by the power of theatre. Their work as writers and actors was created through Sing Sing Prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program.

The second: In December, I conducted a workshop that aimed to transform people through the power of comedy. My workshop was called “From Controversy to Comedy: Making Difficult Moments into Moments That Make Us Laugh”. The workshop was part of the Living a Creative Life Congress hosted by Calgary Arts Development. The congress was held at the Calgary Public Library. Nevertheless, both experiences drove home to me the importance of arts education- for adults. Yes, we know that youth learners, when exposed to the arts in their curriculum, experience better outcomes in grades, socialization and college entry. But the benefits for adults, while not as fully documented, is probably greater in my estimation. And the benefit for a world run by adults immersed in the arts? Immeasurable. Who knows? We might come up with all new way to deal with just about… everything. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The characters in Sing Sing were in the same age range as the participants in my workshop - about thirty-five years and above. They were also actually real inmates. The similarity might seem to stop there. We - my workshop participants and myself- we have freedom, plain and simple.

And yet, the men and women who are behind bars aren’t necessarily that different from us. Many of us deal with traumas that we keep hidden away. We have more opportunities and better outcomes, but we all carry wounds. We can all feel stuck.

Enter the Teaching Artist.

The star of the movie Sing Sing, Colman Domingo, received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. Domingo portrays real life former inmate, John "Divine G" Whitfield. Whitfield, framed for a crime he didn’t commit, spent 25 years in prison.

During his incarceration, Whitfield guided other inmates, of various races and backgrounds, to write, produce and act in their own plays. These inmates are, as you would suspect, men with broken parts of themselves. They are also powerfully alive, beautiful and gifted. In short, they are a reflection of everyone in the whole world. Whitfield evoked many of the wonderful teaching artists I have known and worked with throughout my arts career.

But, let’s take a breath and circle back. I’m talking as if this term – Teaching Artist - is as familiar, as say, “Art Teacher.” Often times, the roles of a Teaching Artist and Art Teacher overlap. According to Google, Teaching Artists are "practicing, professional artists who have dual careers as educators. They come from every field- music, dance theatre visual art, writing-and work in many settings, from schools to museums to hospitals to prisons.” www.Berklee.edu

You will note that the aforementioned locations are not just places for kids. Adults are beautiful students because the richness of their “stuck” can emit pure creative gold. Teaching Artists, because of their own practices, share ways to access this gold.

When I moved to New York after college, I apprenticed as a Guest Artist with gifted Teaching Artists in the Write on the Edge program at Manhattan Theatre Club. We went to schools and taught play creation to kids who had to go through metal detectors to get in the front door. The schools, like the prisoners in Sing Sing, had bad reputations. And like the guys in Sing Sing, the kids at these schools were human kids. Not monsters or stereotypes. They were sweet and funny and great. I remember one class in BedStuy (way before gentrification). The kids almost pleaded with me to remind the world that these kids were not stereotypes. “We’re not how they make us seem on TV,” they told me. It was sort of heartbreaking, in a way- this plea for people to see them past the plexiglass, the metal detectors and the stats.

I could relate. I grew up in Baltimore, Maryland. And as soon as I share my origins with people, their eyes narrow and they bring up “The Wire.” Even before they mention the show, I can already see the “visions of drivebys” dancing in their heads. Sing Sing moved me because the language, rhythms and humor of the folks in the movie did evoke Baltimore. Not their crimes, or incarcerated history. Their humanity. Their vulnerability. Their resilience. Their joy.

My high school years at the Baltimore School for the Arts were where I encountered kids who had initially been failed by the then underfunded, struggling Baltimore school system. I witnessed these same kids, through arts training, finally become who they were at their core - some of the most profound, prolific and gorgeously creative people I have ever met.

Sing Sing brought me to this strange, vivid, liminal space- the porous border where deep laughter and deep sobs meet. When I proposed my comedy workshop, I did so from that same place. Mark Twain, a crazy, big white-haired genius up there with Einstein, shared a formula that guided my workshop. Except Twain elucidated algebra I’ve actually been able to use- C= P+T. Comedy equals Pain plus Time.

It's true. The “hu” in humor stands for humiliation. And that’s why the first exercise I gave my participants was to anonymously write down an embarrassing moment in their lives. My job was to share a crucial fact- learning comedy is more than just how to write a punchline. It’s a part and parcel of compassion, of empathy. I always say, “Before you can properly laugh at other people, you’ve got to laugh at yourself.”

I paired these stories of cringe and shame with another list I had them make. The list consisted of each individual’s most disliked public figure. And we had an absolute blast improvising people we didn’t like experiencing our experiences.

Because the work we do as professional artists who teach is also about transmitting our practice. The why we do art, as well as the way we do art. We are not just instructors in craft, but transmitters of passion, of meaning. Where does a good, comedic sketch come from, and what purpose, ultimately, does it serve? My life partner, oft-times my writing partner, is fond of saying that comedians are the “philosophers of the modern age.” (He actually says, “The French Intellectuals of the Modern Age,” but we’ll just forge ahead). Comedians and comedy writers sometimes have the difficult task of telling the emperor and the rest of us watching on TV, that we have no clothes. Or bad ones, at least.)

Teaching Artists sort of stage interventions. When an improv team shows up at corporate retreat, they can break colleagues out of the rut of seeing each other in limited ways. When a professional actor coaxes a stay-at-home dad to “shake it out” or “toss the sound” it might not be clear that something transformative might be taking place. She might be guiding him to release the terror of taking up space. The muralist might be helping that senior citizen to “see” even if their eyes are failing. She might be help folks realize what’s been missing their whole lives is… fun.

Teaching Artists are not just showing you how to say… draw a picture of the magpie sitting in the parking lot. We are sharing why to draw that magpie. For you. For your growth, your soul, your purpose, your own meaning. And how that meaning could impact someone else, not just for the better but for the more profound, the more generative. Hell, we don’t even want you to draw the magpie if it doesn’t resonate within you, if it doesn’t make you laugh, think, sigh, yearn, breathe and/or transform. Draw something else. Or sing something else. Embody that something else and show me how it helps you heal, transcend, connect. You might just exchange your idea about what it means to be a grown up for a new vision of yourself - as a person who brings a rich, full, creative bit of your artistic being to the everyday parts of your life.

Interested in hearing more from Melanee Murray-Hunt and other local artists? Head over to our friends at The Scene and discover more great interviews, artist features, and highlights from Calgary’s arts and culture scene.