After blogging a couple days ago about starting to write an opera/musical verse play with Marian about the Antioch college student strike of 1973, I got a comment from Tim at the Antioch Papers, an open-source archive of Antioch materials, who sent me to this extraordinary 22-minute video, the senior communications project of 1991 Antioch graduate Kirsten Ervin.

She documents the chronology of strike events in a heartbreaking deadpan narration. Most moving to me was the original recording of students singing a takeoff on Sitting by The Dock Of The Bay:

“Well, I left my home in Harlem,
And I came to Yellow Springs –
They called me New Directions,
And they promised me all kinds of things –

But now I’m sitting on the picket line…
Sitting on the picket line…
Sitting on the picket line,
Wasting time…”

The song cut through me. I felt like I could hear the 60s ending. It also confirmed to me how right we both are to think of this as a play with music.

A bit more research this morning also led me to Alexandra Kesman’s blog about trying to save Antioch from its current funding crisis.

Although I’m dying to dive into all of this right now, I think I have to learn from my past overcommittment mistakes and promise to not begin researching, or even looking at, this material until after SAGN opens on April 5th. I need to be in the world of Ken Kesey. I’m going to email Tim and tell him as much, too. But maybe I need to schedule a trip to Ohio in April, before going to New York.

I can’t wait to get started. It’s such an American project, with so much in it about good intentions gone wrong, and the different paths individuals and institutions take for social change.

Marian’s and my ideas also excite me from a formal point of view. Trying to write an opera / musical verse drama that uses formal elements, that has a chorus (the strikers, of course? Yes?), that has both monologues and arias, both verse and prose – with writing and music both of a high artistic level – a project with as much formal diversity in its text and score as political and ethnographic diversity in its cast.

Here’s a summary of the events of the strike and the events pulled from a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article in 2007, part of the national press coverage of the projected closing of Antioch College.

“In April of that year [1973] , school President James Dixon and trustees were confronted by poor, inner-city students, known as the “New Direction” class, who worried that the school would renege on its promise to fully pay for their education. When Antioch officials couldn’t satisfactorily guarantee financial support, the students rebelled.

The school never recovered, physically or financially, from the spring of 1973, former students say.”