News From Britt Hill – August 2022

I love the performing arts. This isn’t a secret—I chose it for my career! I think the arts have so much to teach us: how to feel, how to express ourselves, how to engage our creativity in joyful ways.

The arts can also teach us how to exist alongside other people in public spaces.

This can be tricky, don’t you think? There’s something intimate about our relationship to a performance, yet we’re surrounded by thousands of other people having their own experiences. While it’s incredibly unifying, it can also feel complicated. Perhaps I’m here to sit silently and reverently, while my neighbor is here to dance. Or maybe I have invited longtime friends, while the next blanket holds a couple that’s waited years to see an artist they adore. Or maybe I’ve brought my young kiddo to their first concert, and I’m sitting behind a group of adults who’ve been excited for a night out without kids. In every one of these examples, we’ve arrived at the performance with different expectations, and now here we are, right next to each other.

Whether it’s an issue of a chatty neighbor when you’re trying to listen to the music, someone who is blocking your view with their cell phone, or some other annoyance, I encourage you to first directly ask your neighbor to help you out. I usually say something like this:

“Hi! How are you tonight? I was wondering if you could help me out with something. I can’t help but overhear your conversation, and I was really hoping to focus on the performance. Would you mind please lowering your voice? Thanks so much!” Substitute your own request for those middle two sentences, and voila! Most of the time, this works like a charm.

But sometimes it doesn’t. At that point, please find an usher or house staff member to help you out. And never engage with someone who is making you feel unsafe. We have plenty of security personnel at Britt to help navigate those situations, so find someone in a white Event Staff jacket to help you.

The arts also teach us radical empathy. Part of why we love the arts is that they allow us to step outside of our daily lives and be a part of something bigger than ourselves, alongside other people. Again, it’s about discovery and community, and I hope you’ll agree that negotiating shared space is a worthwhile part of experiencing this together.

See you on the hill!

Best, Abby