Three+Weeks+that+changed+my+life.

"How 3 weeks can change a life," Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 25, 2004

Fellowship spurs a love for challenge

by Kathy Janich

"You can't have change without exchange."

In this simple, charged sentence, theater artist John Malpede talks about how humans of different hues and hubris get along in the world and how art can lubricate their connections.

Malpede was talking — in his high, shy, raspy way — to arts journalists on an 80-degree day in downtown Los Angeles last month. He likely had no idea that this exchange was already changing one of his listeners.

I was there that day, one of seven lucky 2004 USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellows, at the start of an amazing journey. In three life-changing weeks we would meet more than 100 people working in theater, opera, architecture, classical music, visual art, dance, performance art, poetry and community activism. In the end, we even had time for a late-night swim in the Pacific Ocean.

We met Malpede on Day 2 of this great adventure, one that swirls around a single conviction: that by midcareer, arts reporters and editors need change, challenge and new terrain as well as new teachers, discomfort and the unknown.

What we got was a wild ride — only I didn't know that yet. I did know that Malpede, founder of the Los Angeles Poverty Department, a theater group for the homeless or formerly homeless, was expressing ideas that resonated in my gut and bubbled in my brain.

That would happen again and again: when we met poet Kamau Daaóod, who rhapsodized, James Earl Jones-like, in a storefront jazz club where neighborhood kids learn to play drums; when we experienced the spare highs and lows of the L.A. Opera's "Madama Butterfly"; did a one-on-one dance of awe with Titian's 16th-century "Portrait of Alfonso d'Avalos" in its cosseted home at the Getty Conservation Institute; and were charmed by the blatant optimism of theater director Peter Sellars, the former wunderkind who's still so excited about telling stories and touching lives that risk doesn't faze him. (His latest project: a world tour of "The Children of Herakles," an updated Greek drama that casts immigrant children in each community it visits.)

We met people who work with the smallest of budgets and the unlikeliest of collaborators (Malpede and his LAPD, muralist Pete Galindo and Central American refugees) and the largest (Barry Munitz, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust). We spent time in poor places (Skid Row and East L.A.) and affluent ones (Brentwood, Beverly Hills). We heard from people frustrated by their lack of coverage in the city's mainstream press (Self-Help Graphics, a 30-year-old institution for Latino artists that hasn't been mentioned in the L.A. Times in 18 years). And more.

We wondered what stories we were missing back home. Did groups with similarly worthy complaints exist in Atlanta? If they did, why didn't I know about them? Wasn't it time I found out?

How would I find time in an already chockablock schedule to do so? To see everything that needs seeing, talk to everyone worth a conversation and do work that touches more people, digs deeper and makes more of a difference?

How would I make sure, as former Joffrey Ballet dancer Carole Vallesky so nobly requests, that we simply reach every performance "ready to receive."

So many questions. As yet, not enough answers. But I can promise you that when you reach out to me, or any other arts journalist touched by the magic of Sasha Anawalt, founding director of the Getty fellowship program at the University of Southern California, you're getting someone who cares as much about the arts as you do.

"Art can't change bad situations, but it can change us," Anawalt says. "It can change how bad situations affect us, how we as human beings handle difficult times."

She's right, I think; so is Malpede. Change — and exchange — is good for all of us, for those who make art as well as those who champion and challenge it.