The role of art and forgiveness in democracy | Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Wendy Whelan

0:08You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today's speaker, cultural visionary Mark Bamuti-Joseph, asks us to consider some profound questions. Is it possible to remember and forgive in our society today? And if so, how does art make that possible? In his 2024 talk, Mark shares how his work digs into these questions. With the help of dancer and New York City Ballet artistic director Wendy Whelan, This talk looks at how creativity and empathy are fundamentally connected and why art is necessary for our humanity. That's coming up.

0:53About five years ago, I moved to Washington, D.C. to become one of the vice presidents of the Kennedy Center. For the last 25 years, I've made a living writing everything from poems in Oakland to operas in Amsterdam. Living in D.C., though, has made me obsessed with forgiving and also with forgetting. Forgiving requires a deeply personal commitment to healing, but forgiveness is also a political animal. Like, how do I, as a citizen, forgive what happened on January 6th? How do I reconcile what I think is a national injustice, which is that since the pandemic, through the jungle of managing a national trauma in public health, we haven't really invested very much in public healing, which leads me to forgetting.

1:50It seems like when you start banning books in a country, you're asking us all to forget a bunch of things. Historical erasure in schools is how forgetting happens in a systemic way, but forgetting also happens through disputed realities and a disruption in disinformation through a culture that manages to produce multiple options of facts. It says, yeah, maybe it was a riot, but also maybe it was a feral tour of a federal building, as if we're all supposed to forget what we actually saw. So is it possible to remember and forgive? And let's say we can remember and forgive. How does art make that possible?

2:39My job at the Kennedy Center is not social passivity. It is social impact. People ask me all the time, What can art do to help create an equitable society? But that's the wrong question, and it puts the onus on the wrong people. The actual question is, why aren't our healthcare systems more like music? Why doesn't our political apparatus operate more like the flow of a poem? How do we elevate the stock of art that helps create an infrastructure for both remembrance and forgiveness? Chasing these questions led me to a piece of classical music called The Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns. Historically, The Carnival of the Animals is performed as a series of 14 mini-suites, each inspired by a different being in the animal kingdom.

3:30Our version of The Carnival, which has a mix of Saint-Saëns music, some new music, some a cappella moments, asks a different set of questions. we ask what if the carnival of the animals took place in the capitol building on january 6th who were the animals that were present on that day we ask can our democracy survive if we don't manufacture the empathy it takes to forgive this country uses alloys to manufacture cars? We use brick to construct buildings. Can we use art to manufacture empathy as an intentional aspect of our economy? As an example, we want to share with you our version of the cuckoo.

4:19Now, our piece premiered in an election year when one of the candidates running for president was indicted in federal court for his role in the riot. That said, the cuckoo is not about crazy. It's about cycles. It's a moment in our work that remembers the toxic cycles that led to January 6th. It's a piece that asks, how do we forgive the actors of chaos if we don't remember the cycles of inaction that propagated them? Here to help me is the great Wendy Whalen. The Carnival of the Animals is a parable about structure, structured in parallels about animals. I want to bring one of those animals to life.

5:13Joining me is New York City ballet icon, the artistic director of the New York City Ballet. This is Wendy Whelan.

5:26Elise, here again. And I wanted to take a moment to describe what's happening on the TED stage right now. Mark is continuing to tell a story and dancer Wendy Whelan walks on and begins to dance. Together, they perform a piece from a larger work of theirs called Cuckoo. Mark speaks and joins Wendy in movement at key moments during the rest of his story. His words and their physical movements come together to form one unified piece of art. So with that in mind, here's the rest of the talk. About 2.30, maybe 2.45, my mom texts me to see if I'm safe. That's a lie. I text her to see if she's okay. My mom is from Haiti.

6:15She's seen this before. A riot, a coup, a despot, his crew. I ask her if she's triggered. She's seen this before. The cuckoo flies above and after a while falls slowly to the earth. It has a slight speech impediment. The human ear thinks it's called repetitive. The human ear thinks it's called repetitive as if humans could be the arbiters of another species song. Though in this case, the human ear is not wrong. The cuckoo repeats herself Like each leaf on the branch upon which she perches Is a rosary bead Or a Tibetan mala The human ear doesn't hear the slender bird's prayer No matter No matter She attends to other concerns Laying eggs in other birds' nests Eating insects Learning French Le cuckoo vole en haut Et après un instant Elle tombe doucement par terre because her mantras strike the ear as monotonous drone humans clone her tone in their clocks the hour comes the hour comes like clockwork the song that we recognize as time does not stop the cuckoo is no yeoman laborer singing like the incessant swinging of a mountain sculptor's chisel her song is not relentless work it is incessant prayer humans think her crazy repeating herself, repeating herself.

7:49They use her name in pejorative vein, call each other out by slurring the sound of cuckoo, cuckoo, expanding her striped feathered breast and giving the sky her mouth. Cuckoo comes in many colors, mad styles, got family in Europe and the tropics, tragic and romantic, like unrequited love on a North Pacific island. And for the record, for the record, clock fabricators and American gift makers, she is not simple-brained. She happened to be outside the window when George Santayama coined the aphorism that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Condemned to repeat it. She's been there for trickle-down economics, for TV personalities running for public office, for athletes rapping, for European peace treaties with Native people, and for 14 different ends to the COVID-19 pandemic.

8:42Remember the past. Remember cuckoo.

8:48Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Matter of fact, she's noticed that in the cyclical strain on the infrastructure of public health, there hasn't been very much attention being paid to public healing. Like the act of intentionally and collectively acknowledging the social and psychological trauma of loss and divisiveness, acknowledging that the planet has endured a rift and being intentional about healing together from that rift in public, public healing. Cuckoo. Repeating, cuckoo. The song on the automatic rifle, mediocre and entitled, tantalizingly bland, middle class, white supremacist, disconnected white man is on the premises, American terrorists thinking and praying and thinking and praying like American senators or American Second Amendment defenders neglecting the context of the weapons that the framers were suggesting.

9:46They was talking about muskets. Yo. They was talking about muskets. Yeah. The cuckoo repeats herself. The cuckoo flies above and after a while falls slowly to the earth. Cuckoo.

10:20Cuckoo. Cuckoo. Cuckoo.

10:37That was Mark Bamuti-Joseph and Wendy Whelan at TED Next 2024. To watch the dance piece performed during this talk, and I highly recommend you see it, visit TED.com. If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today's show. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Sarmanivon. It was mixed by Christopher Faze-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezzo. I'm Elise Hu.

11:15I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.

11:28Thank you.