Studio

"A Fable for our Children”

This year the studio urges students to harvest stories that demand reiteration: compelling tales that students can identify with; accounts relayed because students develop an intellectual empathy with characters and sense that others will identify with the same narrative arcs; transmissions of universal terrestrial truths that are not fabricated but real.  What is “the story” of how we treat each other? Why is “hate” so readily named and adjudged when “love” is so often misunderstood, diced and castigated? How does love impact our impulse towards socialisation, our instinct for communication, the spaces we can and cannot occupy? What is love? “If you can’t love you are dangerous because you have no way of knowing humility or that other people suffer.” James Baldwin, Mavis on 4 (1987) Fall 2024, a hundred years after James Baldwin’s birth, students have an opportunity to consider the author’s take on the joys and hazards of love, its intimacy, its social consciousness and its communitarian empathy. Through performance, design and authorship, students will unpack and recalibrate the Baldwin mission.  James Arthur Jones was born on August 2nd 1924 to Emma Berdis Jones, a young Maryland crab picker and oyster shucker, who moved to Harlem, New York at nineteen where she met and married a preacher from New Orleans, David Baldwin, James’ stepfather. As an author, dramatist and essayist, Baldwin used the name David often. It was the name of his stepfather, his brother, his character from a 1940s short story, The Outing, the preacher’s son in The Amen Corner (1954), and haunted protagonist in Giovanni’s Room (1955). It is therefore noteworthy that David is an ancient Hebrew name that translates to “Beloved” in English. Two years after Baldwin’s birth, on September 13th, his parents would witness a terrifying march on Washington D.C. by thirty-thousand members of the Ku Klux Klan, a white nationalist, terrorist organisation revived during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson and committed to the subjugation, lynching and segregation of Black Americans. In 1924, African Americans had no civil rights in the United States. They were there because ancestors had been kidnapped in Africa, trafficked to the Caribbean, Europe, Asia and America, and enslaved, particularly in the Southern United States. Their civil rights were withheld until the tumultuous 1960s.  And yet, In a 1964 polemic, Nothing Personal, James Baldwin commented on Plymouth Rock - a site of disembarkation for the Mayflower pilgrims, traditionally credited with the founding of the nation -  “The inertness of that rock meant death for the Indians, enslavement for the blacks, and spiritual disaster for those homeless Europeans who now call themselves Americans and who have never been able to resolve their relationship either to the continent they fled or to the continent they conquered.”  “I am distressed for thee, my brother, Jonathan… thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.” II Samuel 1:23 The Old Testament tale of David and Jonathan is often considered an early biblical example of queer love. Baldwin, a voracious reader and former teen preacher of a storefront church in Harlem, knew the passage well. Its appearance as the name of the troubled protagonist in Giovanni’s Room, and the inclusion of Giovanni – the Italian form of Jonathan - shows that Baldwin was referencing the biblical coupling.  Baldwin who left America for fear he would murder or be murdered by a racist, wrote the story in Paris under the working title A Fable for Our Children. It was a second novel and caused a fuss with its “queer” plot, but Baldwin countered that it was a story about, “What happens to you if you’re afraid to love anybody.” One of the many remarkable things about Baldwin was his lifelong effort through writing to love America and its citizens despite everything.  At a Cambridge Union debate in 1965 promoting another exploration of human relationship’s Another Country (1962), he compared a white southerner who would press a cattle prod into a black person’s chest with the victim. He wrote that what happened to the victim was “ghastly” but believed that what had happened to a person who would inflict such a punishment was disastrous. “What happens to the woman is ghastly. What happens to the man who does it is… much much worse.” From sources including Giovanni’s Room (1955), The Fire Next Time (1963), The Price of the Ticket, Nothing Personal (1964) and Baldwin’s debate versus William F. Buckley Jr. at the Cambridge Union in 1965, students will take inspiration for new spatial design and performance projects that cross-fertilise Baldwin’s ethos with post millennial challenges. The AAIS continues to build the foundation for a new generation of creatives who create meaningful, thought-provoking, socially conscious design. Through the lens of "compassion," incorporating the methodology of "intellectual empathy" and alienating theatre, we aim to provide an immersive and transformative applied network for our students. The AAIS has a rich history of collaboration with renowned institutions throughout the UK and across Europe as a network of intercultural exchange. Past collaborations have encompassed partnerships with Trinity Laban, The Place, Shoreditch Ars club, Matadero Madrid, Las Heras in Girona, Teatro Aberto in Lisbon, MaMo MAMO Centre dart de la Cité Radieuse in Marseille,  DQE in Cologne, and Krakow Design Biennial among others.