Why Eliminating the NEA Would Be a Disaster For Our Country
A guest column in The Hollywood Reporter by NDI alum Pauline Chalamet:
The effects of slashing arts funding would ripple far beyond grantees.
If it weren’t for the National Endowment for the Arts, I don’t know if I would have pursued a life as an actor.
My first time on stage was with the National Dance Institute, or NDI, a nonprofit that benefits directly from funding from the NEA. Created in 1976 by Jacques D’Amboise, a star dancer of the New York City Ballet, NDI provides dance classes built into the public elementary school curriculum along with free summer programs. When I think of my time with NDI, my strongest memory is when a group of us were standing around a piano, clapping our hands, as we learned to keep the beat to the song “Cement Mixer Putti- Putti.” (We were young.) We couldn’t really find the beat; there were always a few of us a little out of sync. So the teacher had us close our eyes. Within a few claps, the entire group was synchronized. The key was to focus purely on what we were hearing and feeling as opposed to watching everyone else.
Once we got it and opened our eyes, we were ecstatic. We had connected. We were a team. Now we got to concentrate our energy into our common goal: the performance. I remember the pure joy of being on stage at that performance after such hard work rehearsing — a feeling not unlike what some children describe when playing a game after months of work in the gym.