Yes, and...Ripples of Reform
Yes, and...Ripples of Reform
Chicago's Hull-House Museum: The birthplace of improv and so much more!
Greetings!
Please allow me to offer a hearty welcome to new subscribers and deep gratitude to all who are here with me. I appreciate your time and support very much.
I’m writing this from a very windy Chicago today. My favorite tree is stripped bare, I have a new-to-me dark grey sweater to keep me warm, I visited a graveyard to honor the season, and the first pot of soup of the season was cooked a few days ago. Ahhhhhh! I do love autumn!
Many eyes are on the US election as we travel deeper into the fading light of this season. My eyes are looking in several directions, as always. I’m seeing into possibilities for the future which I’ll be talking about in future missives, considering how to care for myself, love, and life in this present moment, and taking a look at history as a teacher and inspiratrix. We’re covering the last bit here today in the Wednesday Deep Dive.
Today, I’m wrapping up my four-part series on the legacy of Jane Addams and Hull-House. In part one, we talked about Jane Addams and part of her legacy, part two highlighted weaving women, art, and justice, last week, in underscoring absence we talked about how several of the reform efforts at Hull-House made an impact on the city of Chicago (and beyond) and brought forth the polyphony of immigrant voices through art and craft and today, we’re wrapping it up by talking about hearing some of those voices come to life and how Hull-House was the birthplace of improv.
Animated Voices
I have the good fortune of being in Chicago at the moment so I was able to visit The Hull-House Museum again during Open House Chicago where the museum was hosting an event that included historic looms activated by The Weaving Mill—which my daughter and I both weaved on!—and got to see the marvelous Fiona Maxwell bring stories of the settlement to life. Fiona is a storyteller, theatre artist and educator, and History PhD candidate at the University of Chicago. These are a few of the titles of the wonderful stories she told:
Through the Plate Glass
The Surprise Party
Much Ado About Mutton
Thanks to the Hayseeds
The event was hosted in the Residents’ Dining Hall where they used to host dinners for people in the settlement house to offer food and time for connection after a long day of work and before their evening work.
The stories were colorful, engaging, and helped me imagine the way life was when Hull-House was in full swing. We meet children, Russian garment factory workers, a woman who carried a spindle beneath her skirts, and a Syrian woman who has her 200 year-old spinning wheel brought to the US!
These stories helped me feel the tremendous impact that Hull-House had on the people of Chicago and beyond.
Theater
The founders of Hull-House wanted to enrich the experience of the people in tenement life. Addams saw Hull-House as an education forum. As a place to exchange ideas and knowledge among various classes as a way to bridge social divisions. Part of that effort included creating a theater in the settlement. I appreciate this first-hand account from Wilfred R. Clearly. Here’s a pull quote:
Jane Addams was still alive in 1933 when I became associated with the Hull House Players. In the glory days of the “Little Theatre” movement, the Players enjoyed a national and even international reputation, sometimes taking their productions on tour to Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and a score of other cities. The first community theater in the United States, Hull House traces its thespian roots back to 1889 when it began enriching the lives of neighborhood audiences under the inspired leadership of Jane Addams and the extraordinary Laura Dainty Pelham, the group’s first director.
As the face of American theater is dramatically changing in late-stage Capitalism, I look to these women for inspiration. Not just the founders but the many people who continue to bravely tell stories either from the past or their own lives.
We need more voices heard not just onstage but in the audience.
Improv
As we’ve talking about in this series, the reform movements at Hull-House rippled out to the city, the country, and some cases the world. Something we learned by talking with Fiona Maxwell is that improvisational theater started at Hull-House with Viola Spolin.
Spolin was the young daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants and worked at Hull-House in the 1920s where she assisted social worker Neva Boyd who used play in education and social work. Spolin learned the games she would later go on to write about from Boyd.
Spolin later taught theater at Hull House as part of the Great Depression reform program where she rounded up neighborhood kids and put them onstage. The games she used to put them at ease and spark their creativity.
Those theater games became her life’s work.
Spolin is now considered the mother of modern American improv and, as the author of Improvisation for the Theater, the renowned improv company Second City wouldn’t exist without her.
Would we have Saturday Night Live without Hull-House? That’s a question that is explored in the excellent NPR piece that offers more history: From Hull House to Second City: How Chicago immigrants helped change theater.
So if you dig Stephen Colbert, you can thank Jane Addams.
“The heart of improvisation is transformation.” ~Viola Spolin
The Future of Stories
The heart of transformation is opening to change. To saying, “Yes, and…”. To integrating new ways of knowing, being and seeing. To listening. In the Introduction of the booklet “Architectural Encounters" that we received at the event, there is a quote from John Berger that says, “Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one.”
Reading that made me light up because it’s something I am very passionate about. Having grown up in a rural environment in a patriarchal society, I have had the stories of the overculture beaten into me repeatedly. It becomes tiring and defeating sometimes. But I feel that shifting as I find my existential courage.
We must also not be naive about the power, privilege, and politics at play in realizing the John Berger quote at the top of this Introduction as an axiom of our preservation efforts. It is not simply a question of making visible the invisible, or giving voice to the voiceless. Arundhati Roy has reminded us of the following: "There's really no such thing as the 'voiceless.' There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard." The stories of so-called ordinary people are compelling and challenge authority, and they have the capability of transforming people, institutions, and societies. "Architectural Encounters" calls for us to renew the field of preservation and recognize the interpretation of the built environment as nothing less than a truly liberatory practice.
~ Lisa Yun Lee, PhD, Director, UlC School of Art & Art History
Consider reading that again. I’ll wait. ;)
In the short time I’ve been in Chicago and the *ahem* considerably longer time I’ve been alive, I’ve heard way too much about the greedy, murderous drug addict and dealer Al Capone whose life overlapped chronologically with the founders of Hull-House. How is it that he’s gotten so much ink but so few people know about the legacy of Jane Addams? Is it because she was a woman? A lesbian? Someone who cared about people and exhausted her considerable fortune making lives better for people? Who else’s stories aren’t being told? How can we change that?
This reminds me of the Ted Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story” from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who issues a warning but also an invitation. Our lives and cultures are composed of many overlapping stories and if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. I can’t think of a better time in human history to live out the question of who we might be misunderstanding or whose story we might be not be hearing and why.
It’s a lot like weaving on a loom, as I think of it. We add our thread(s). We make something stronger and more colorful. What a thing to behold!
This exhibit and the many stories I’ve heard were enervating for me. I’m using some of the time and energy I have on this earth to share them in hopes to offer that to you as well, dear reader, in hopes that we will remember that we can build a world with more voices heard and more hands on deck.
Next Wednesday: “Whose Story? Her Story!”
I hope you’ll join me.
Join in the Conversation
I would love to hear what you think. Here are some questions to get started:
Whose voices would you like to hear in theater or film?
What was the last play you saw? Did you feel represented?
Thanks for being here.
All my love,
Kymberlee
PS, At the event I mentioned, they were handing out the postcards pictured below. If you would like one, please send me a message with your name and mailing address and I’ll send you one. :)
PPS, The Radical Craft: Arts Education at Hull-House 1889-1935 exhibit is currently available for viewing and offers participatory art projects. Go see it if you can!
Really enjoyed reading this! I found the whole discussion on one of the major foundations of improv, “Hull House” so interesting! I have been studying a lot about improvisational theater techniques and its history, but have not learned about Viola Spoilin’s link to “Hull House” until now. I appreciate you covering stories of those who often get/got overlooked; it is incredibly important -as you stated- to do so. Though this story is not solely about improv, I wish there was more information about the starting history of “Hull House” and its connection to improv through Viola Spoilin. I wonder if that came with any further struggles that could be deeper delved into. Then again, that would be incredibly hard to find, being that these stories were hardly covered in history for a reason *cough* to overlook powerful minorities who produce powerful stories *cough*
Excited to read more! :)