A World in Tune

by Michael Woodworth Fuller

PROLOGUE

My relationship with ISOMATA is deeply personal. 

In 1972, I was midway through the doctoral program in drama at USC and was working at South Coast Repertory as a director and founding, performer-member of its children’s theater wing. 

At the same time, I was acting in commercials for television and seeking other directing work in repertory and the Los Angeles theater scene as well as writing low budget Westerns, free lancing and writing promos for television, and working on a novel that eventually would be published under the title, Legacy and receive the Book Publicists Of Southern California’s Best Fiction Award for 2014.

In 1972, Legacy was not completely formed, nor was I. 

In the writing, the directing, the performing, the driving 100 miles a day to and from South Coast Repertory and the studying for the PhD., I was attempting to achieve that economic and career balance so many artists must find in a society that does not honor the arts, considering them frivolous unless they can be marketed profitably. 

Artists who have not acquired the name and fame to make their work marketable remain underpaid. Artists in this situation must find venues that will fund the work they are impelled to do; often, teaching at the college/university level provides that funding. 

Such funding, however, is limited, for colleges/universities offer positions without benefits or tenure. Contracts are either short term (for one semester) or long term (yearly or longer), and without benefits or tenure are equivalent to an hourly wage – much higher than the minimum hourly wage, to be sure, but an hourly wage, nonetheless. 

College/university positions are as highly competitive as professional work. The more credits one has, the more likely the opportunities for work, but without the requisite graduate degrees, the more short-term the opportunities. 

Colleges and universities expect working professionals in the arts to teach an undergraduate and graduate student body. The degree is analogous to a union card: no union card, no union job. The PhD. is the ultimate union card for long-term, untenured positions at the highest hourly wage. 

Such was my life in the arts. 

It was a life of survival where looking for work predominated the work itself. Spinning my wheels became its own purpose; I had no vision beyond the mud-spattered windshield. 

Such a life becomes self-centered justification for one’s existence in the existential void that constitutes the arts in America. The nature and spirit of The Work are often forgotten. 

In 1972, all that changed. 

March 1972: Bill White,, an older, tenured faculty member of USC’s Drama Department, asked me if I would be interested in running the summer theater program for junior- and senior-high school students at USC’s Idyllwild School Of Music And The Arts. 

Students? I had never worked with students – only professionals, forgetting that I had directed USC Drama students. When he told me they would pay me $250/week for ten weeks, a large amount of money in those days, I said yes, not knowing I was saying yes to something far beyond the money. 

April 1972: I was notified that a planning meeting would be held on the ISOMATA campus in Idyllwild. 

Idyllwild? Where was that? 

And ISOMATA? What was that? 

Wherever and whatever it was, I had to go there, so I went to that place. 

To reach ISOMATA, I drove a straight line for ninety-six miles due east from the City of Los Angeles. 

At the town of Banning, I turned south. The road changed: I could no longer take it for granted. Its curves demanded my attention. 

Eventually, twenty-six miles into the San Jacinto Mountains was the village of Idyllwild, three thousand feet below Tahquitz Peak and one mile above the desert floor. 

I continued beyond the village, turned right at Toll Gate Road, and proceeded beneath the pines until I crossed Strawberry Creek. 

I had arrived.  

But upon crossing that little bridge, I had done more than arrive at a different geographical location.

 I had entered a different consciousness. 

The consciousness of the artist, an awareness of experience and time distinct from the predictable world I had left behind 5,000 feet below. 

Down there, time was next, not now. Down there, it was the next deadline to produce the next product for the next person who in turn was obligated to produce yet another product for yet the next person again – a processed process of human creativity mechanically demarcating life’s precious moments into mundane minutes between coffee break and quitting time. Like classes where the visions of the ages are crammed into fifty minutes of paraphrase, so my hurried life had become a paraphrase of my dreams, crammed into a time permitting no time to live them. 

Up on the Idyllwild Plateau high above the smog, time did have a stop. The time was now. 

Now: time for a life to be expressed, not merely expended. 

Now: time for the blood to pulse in rhythm to the immediate moment, time to explore, to work free from the fear of failure and the obligation to produce, to proceed towards an individual summit of accomplishment, to rediscover one’s own perceptions and follow the impulses that render them into form. 

Exploration and the changes wrought by discovery were themselves the product – experience. Such experience was its own time. 

And ISOMATA was its Place. 

ISOMATA: more than an acronym for Idyllwild School Of Music And The Arts. In the profundity of its spirit, a mantra uttered with joy by its founders, its teachers, and its students. 

That April meeting which, anywhere else would have been a gathering of reluctant non- participants being told who would go where and when with no why beyond the convenience of the planners, was, at ISOMATA, a partnership with the excitement of why who needed what, when, and where. 

The enthusiasm of the people at that meeting for The Work reminded me that the nature of the work is always its nature no matter where you do it or with whom. It is not you; it is It. 

After the meeting, I returned to Los Angeles, bereft. I was returning to a lie that still had to be lived but could not be lived as it had been. 

June 1972: I returned to ISOMATA. Chakras long closed reopened. The spirit of the place pulsed in the people I met there. Tough, crass, courageous, and supremely accomplished, they were more than joyful in The Work – they were transcendent. 

Their welcome was so exhilarating it was terrifying.