The bell rings, and it leads me upstairs to class. As I walk up each step, it has me thinking. Having an aunt who is a teacher can sometimes make life complicated. My aunt, Mrs. Balliet, runs the LISA (Loveland Integrated School of the Arts) program at MVHS and uses her compassion to advocate for opportunities for the LISA students, but this class marks the end of the LISA program for me. Being a senior means this is my last year to enjoy the program that I love.
In most “artistic” classes, creativity destroys the truest forms of art and the most authentic expression of individuality. If you tell me to be creative in the box you put me in, it covers my eyes, stealing me from my art and my passions, and it kills it. If you tell me to make a house, I may want a tent, a burrow, or, honestly, I can be the kind of person to sleep in a random hole dug in the ground like a dog on an energy spree.
Maybe I want to be like a rabid animal that sleeps in a drainage tunnel?
If you break their code, their style, or their illusion of creativity, you get punished. But the LISA program does the opposite. I get to be Jake; maybe I’ll make my whole presentation in Comic Sans and neon colors. It allows me to stand out with what I want, as long as it’s not entirely off-topic for what it is supposed to be.
But why should I care about the freedom of creativity? Well, buckle up and sit back in this coaster of an observation, and let it take you to the place you fear. What’s the scariest place of them all? The back of your mind, where the real version of yourself lives.
Art comes from enlightenment, from the truth and depth of the world. In the dark, I saw a man walking from the back of a shed, his hair in a handful, screaming as he ripped it out, a battle in his mind that he was obviously losing. In downtown, a man screamed in anger, claiming me to be the police, then trying to rob me of my socks using his disguise of himself, becoming a monster that hides among the normal people. Screaming and crying in the horror of your mind, where it shows you what you don’t want to see, as it tries to erase the person that you are. Art allows you to confront your inner demons.
Some of the best art comes from a dark part of our brains that many people try to hide and bury under the mask they call a personality. If there is a new form of identity, everyone must know it and the color of the mind that comes with it. Can you see through the blinding mask that is making you perceive a new ray of colors?
With LISA, you don’t need the colorful mask; you have the mask torn off the faces of the kids who used to need to hide behind their own camouflage, which inspired them to make their own skin, draped in paint. With this, it brings me to the end of this class. A lot of memories in the rock tumbler of LISA. The changes made as people shed their masks and shape the world’s future. For art, for music, for theater, and in the end, everyone is an actor in their own life.
