Why the arts matter

Alfonzo the Conjuring Fool—the clown alter ego of Thomas Atwood.

Art is strong medicine. In a technical, “data-driven,” rules-based society dominated by structure, art exercises your imagination. If you can express yourself in poetry, essays, music, drawing, painting, dances, circuses, or plays, you might be better equipped to thrive in a culture that divides people into winners and losers. We need art because it reminds us that we are alive. Fools recognize that at the moment where we can laugh at our own absurdities and brokenness, they no longer have power over us.

The programs that Fools Mission offers do not represent the final solutions that we seek. Kathy Curran, Executive Director of San Francisco’s Healing Well, spoke in solidarity with fools everywhere when she said,

“The most common question we hear is: ‘You’re teaching yoga and poetry to homeless and poor people? Shouldn’t you be focused on helping them find housing, secure jobs and complete their education?’ The answer is, ‘We are.’ Only when people are mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually able to cope with the challenges of their everyday lives, and there are sufficient resources to address long-standing community needs, are these goals attainable.”

Herbert Marcuse once said:

“Servitude can be broken only through a political practice [that] involves a break with the familiar, the routine way of seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding things … so that the organism may become receptive to the potential forms of a non-aggressive, non-exploitative world.”

Members of Fools Mission created this chalk art in July 2019 as part of Redwood City’s Chalk Full of Fun event.

Theater of the Oppressed

One of our most important programs is our quarterly series of workshops in the Theater of the Oppressed. This provides an improvisational approach that teaches tools for dealing with oppression in all its manifestations, including individual/intrapsychic, interpersonal, institutional, and ideological. See more about the Theater of the Oppressed here.

Other arts programs

Music

A program we offered in 2016, Compassion Through Music, brought immigrant families and established citizens together to sing old favorites in English and Spanish, participate in drum circles and gong ceremonies, and learn basic music literacy. Many of the school-age children in the program rarely (if ever) saw a music teacher in school. In a culture focused on “performance excellence,” we were able to offer a musical experience that emphasized fun, strength, and mental health.

At one of our Music Jams, we were surprised to see that no Latino families were present. We learned that a beloved uncle, Jesus, had passed away and that the family was stricken with grief. When we learned this, we recorded one of our favorites, John Lennon’s Imagine, as a tribute to Jesus, and this video was the result. In a matter of days after posting the video on Facebook, over 800 views were logged from locations as distant as Mexico.