Connecting the world of arts to the world of nature
Jeannie Hacker-Cerulean has always wanted to bring stories to life. When she was five years old, she put her dolls in long dresses as ugly stepsisters and directed her sister to play Cinderella. By the time she graduated from high school in Austin, Texas, she understood what the arts can do for a city.
At Louisiana State University she studied acting, directing and speech. She dabbled in a variety of arts while in Taos, New Mexico where she was a writer, assistant director, and playwright for Taos Children’s Theatre. Her love of nature led her to establish her own New Mexico Nature Theatre.
“People have a need to be creative,” says Cerulean. She points to the Kennedy Center national surveys showing that children want to go to school when it’s art day and that they will choose a story over a cookie.
From her professorial perch at UTC teaching courses like Public Speaking, Advocacy and Debate, Interpersonal Communication with Improvisation, and Reader’s Theatre, she has been instrumental in providing space for students to blend nature with the arts through creative process.
Real life issues are addressed with emphasis on life’s journeys, communication and how to get positive outcomes for ideas. Students had an idea to have a farm on campus and now there is a vegetable garden.
The Green Dorm competition challenged students to track their water use and share ideas to use less. Her Reader’s Theatre courses require reading novels like “Fahrenheit 451” and discussing how future outcomes can be impacted.
Now, for Cerulean, bringing arts to nature does not mean painting landscape scenes or sculpting birds and bunnies. There are social justice and caring for the Earth components. She has conceived of festivals combining arts and nature with an environmental theme. She formed the organization We Are Nature Lovers’ to provide services for festivals and plays.
The three years of Cool Down ChaTTown festivals provided a way to bring environmentalists and artists together while enticing festival visitors to delve into sustainability issues and take action. For Cerulean, the arts become a way to connect people to nature and cultural history.
She wrote and directed “Robin Coming to a Forest Near You” presented during the 2017 festival. The message communicated the importance of saving trees, having them in a city, and ways to make it happen.
“If you are in a play, you relate to it and later have ‘cognitive embodiment’,” Cerulean maintains. “If you’re in a play, you can believe in the message and take actions later.”
That same festival provided opportunities at Moccasin Bend for people to hike, bike, paddle, and play outdoors. These days we call that Placemaking.
Other community work included collaboration with the Beehive Design Collective, an organization that uses visual images to tell the story of mountain top removal with its devastating impacts on Appalachian mining communities. Cerulean coordinated presentations and raised funds for Beehive to travel to Chattanooga.
“Arts can pull down money for the environment,” she declares.
Her community work with Teaching Artists Program and CoPac brings visiting artists to local schools. The program encourages bonding and friendships through an interdisciplinary approach and the hope is to expand this program to recreation centers.
Cerulean believes that the successful group creative process means having ideas connected to timing. She says theatre skills are valuable in bringing arts to the community.
Through theatre experiences, one learns how to express ideas, how to work with others and how to ask questions that lead to a desired outcome: What does social justice look like? What would make a given situation better? Who should be involved and what do they want?
Never short of creative visionary ideas herself, Cerulean becomes more and more animated as she speaks of arts and environment and the need to do something to protect our resources and protect quality of life on the planet.
Always inclusive, there’s a sense of grapevine values as she encourages telling others. Together, she believes that environmental resiliency through the arts can keep us going even in these difficult days.