Where the Light Comes From
Art saves lives.
Jane Golden, muralist
Shreya Ghoshal's ethereal voice filled the room, floating above the pulsing beat. I slid my shoes off, and two grinning children pulled me into the crowd of dancing bodies. One girl twirled round and round. Another boy broke out his funky moves. Our foreheads glistened, our eyes shone. Seven-year-olds to fifty-year-olds, from rural India, from America’s suburbs, with hearing, without––all dancing and laughing together.
Suddenly, I realized that these children couldn’t hear what I was hearing. How could they experience the same exhilaration I did, solely from the vibrations of the bass? I’d arrived at The Tirupur School for the Deaf braced to meet sad-eyed kids who couldn’t hear or talk, like the emaciated children I’d seen on India’s streets. I’d expected to learn about the tremendous challenges they faced. Instead, they were shining.
Where was this light coming from?
Suddenly, I was back on stage at the Kennedy Center dancing the stories of Siddhartha, living the stories of my culture through my body. As a brown girl growing up in a sea of white, I’d often wanted to step out of my skin. But when I fluttered across the stage as the bird in that parable, I was no longer Indian, no longer female, no longer Other. I was truly a winged creature.
And then I was back with my choir in the National Cathedral singing a South African song about grief, goosebumps running along my arms. Though none of us spoke isiXhosa, the way our lips shaped the syllables, our lungs infused each phrase with a breath of sorrow, somehow we became full-bodied South African mourners.
As I stood in that makeshift dance hall, watching joy light each of our faces, I began to understand. Though these kids could communicate through sign language with only a few, through the shared language of music and dance, they could step out of Otherness and express themselves fully. Just the way I had. The more intense our experience of the dance, the drumming, the music, the more we became electrified by a profound sense of coming home, to ourselves and to each other. The more we registered this ecstatic energy coursing through us, the more our bodies came online; the more transcendent the moment became.
If I could connect so fully with these kids, whom I’d assumed I had nothing in common, what else was possible? I returned home and began diving into a whole new world of music. Kendrick Lamar’s album To Pimp a Butterfly invited me to feel the indignity of his experiences as a Black man in America. Demi Lovato’s music opened my eyes to the suffering of addiction. Sid Sriram’s depth of emotion connected me to my Tamil roots and unfurled a bridge between me and my grandparents that I’d never before experienced.
Long after I’d left that school for the deaf, it was so clear: art illuminates. The more I interacted with the arts, the more I felt my world expand. I saw that art invites us to glimpse the mysterious, the mystical, outside the realm of the mind. From this extraordinary place, it is possible to trace the threads of connection, even amidst the greatest seeming differences. In other words, the arts feed a core human need.
All of this exploration became a catalyst for launching my organization, FosterFriends. I recognized that I’d never interacted with kids in the foster care system, and I wanted to build community among us. I longed for us to form strong connections with others of very different backgrounds, to forge a bond through the shared language of the arts. I wanted us all to experience the gift of watching our lives expand, through the power of the arts. Today this transcendent power continues to broaden my understanding of myself and deepen my connection to the communities around me.
College application essay shaped through Elizabeth Alina’s work in voice and story development, for a student admitted to Tufts University.