BA in Individualized Studies Program
I am always writing. And I believe you are, too. That is, if writing is call and response - concurrent acts of creating and replying to life experience. Writing is physical gesture, hieroglyph, spoken phrase, typed page, bound book, lesson taught, lesson learned, a startling correction, a rant, a manifesto, an apology, a well wrapped gift, a solitary word that is a seed of hope. Writing, like life experience, can be meaningful, arbitrary, inconsequential, Earth shattering, erotic, irritating and good old-fashioned hard work. My job as a writer is to practice. When I work with students of writing, my central goal is to assist in the cultivation of their own conscious, rigorous practice. This includes deep engagement with language, from the rules of grammar to the literal contour of type in a field (paper or virtual), from the population of words in an internal emotional territory to the representative symbols necessary to convey such a landscape to a new reader or listener.
I am an interdisciplinary artist. I write plays. I create performance art. I direct theatre works. I paint and draw. I cook. I devise happenings. I teach. I study. I sing. I discuss. My roots go back to a so-called ‘interracial’ family, from the working-class, Black culturally centered and integrated McKnight neighborhood of Springfield, Massachusetts in the 1970s. The vibrant collage of that place and time honed my bones and informs my personal politics, sense of social responsibility, love of dignity, decorum and celebration and my deep-seated rejection of white supremacy in all its guises.
I was educated in the Springfield public school system, at Vassar College (where I received my B.A. in Africana Studies) and at Brown University (where I received my M.A. in Theatre.) After graduate school I entered an intensive apprenticeship with master artists from the avant-garde tradition of Black American Theatre. I have lived across the U.S., and performed or presented work in New York, Boston, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Austin, Seattle, London, Manchester and Dublin among other cities. I have played to audiences of one and of one thousand. My work provokes intense response from audiences and critics and has been supported by many of the major arts-funding Foundations in the US, including Creative Capital, The Rockefeller MAP Fund, The Jerome Foundation and The McKnight Foundation. I received the prestigious Alpert Award in the Arts in Theatre in 2006. I have also shared thousands of profound conversations with audience participants, collaborators or others who have been involved in some way in the creation or presentation of my work that have further tempered my sense of purpose as an artist and underscored the importance of responsibility at the center of my practice.
I have always shared what I have learned, and have taught workshops in most of the places I have performed or presented work. In the academy, I have taught at MIT, The University of Texas at Austin (where I am currently a Lecturer in the Department of Theatre and Dance,) and at Goddard College, where I was a faculty member in the MFA-IA program before joining the BFA/IBA program. I take teaching and advising quite seriously.
My philosophy of teaching and advising is weighted on the side of experience. I believe in sharing experience through dialogue as a way to open up spaces for mutual discovery, and as a tested technique for nurturing curiosity. I am less interested in the ideas of knowing or not knowing than I am in the ideas of experiencing and seeking. Simultaneously, I believe, wholeheartedly, that we are responsible to our journeys of discovery – we must sustain, protect, engage, consider, reconsider, synthesize, refine and clarify as we practice.
I am not an ‘anything goes’ sort of person – a bit too much Yankee in my blood. But I am a fierce believer in the right of an individual to choose his or her own path. My work as a teacher or an advisor is to work with that individual to clarify his or her own goals and to challenge them to work as diligently as possible to achieve them. And I believe it important to set and nurture healthy boundaries between all members of a progressive learning community.
My work suffuses my day-to-day. And there are other ingredients, too. I live in Manhattan, when not teaching or making work elsewhere. I live with my love, a brilliant scholar/artist, and our dog. I adore music and film and the outdoors, and exercise (weightlifting; yoga; running, when my back allows and Pilates.) I love galleries and museums. I love long internally quiet walks through my externally raucous city. I love travel. I love bad jokes and a dash of fashion forward representation. And a sudden smile when it’s least expected and most needed.
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Daniel Alexander Jones, MA