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The Cleveland Arts Prize
Robert P. Bergman Prize Winner
Bill
Rudman
Innovative
Arts Educator
In
a time and environment in which the arts were seen as elite activities,
he was a pioneer in advancing the idea that the arts—at their highest
and best level of expression—should be available to every person
in the community, and that if people could not get to where the art was
being offered the art should come to them: in their schools, their local
library, their workplace.
During the late 1980s and ’90s, as Great Lakes Theater Festival’s
associate director in charge of education, he supervised the development
of two programs that have become path-breaking national models for community
outreach, collaboration, and integrated arts education. One is GLTF’s
School Residency Program. The other is the annual community festival surrounding
a main stage production.
Light years in concept beyond the stand-alone student matinee performance
accompanied by a study guide that most regional theaters produced, GLTF’s
educational programs brought teams of young, bright, actor-teachers skilled
at making art relevant to the lives of K–12 students right into the
classroom for week-long residencies: an early model of the arts-infused
curriculum now becoming so popular among educators. Today GLTF’s
school program employs more than five teams of actor-teachers and makes
more than 100,000 student contacts each season.
Rudman also played a leadership role in forging new, mutually beneficial
partnerships among Greater Cleveland’s arts organizations and between
the arts and other sectors of the community by producing collaborative
“surrounds.” In 1988, for GLTF’s first surround, “Festival
Fantastico,” 48 different area organizations created and hosted more
than 130 events over a four-month period, to celebrate the rich gifts
of Hispanic arts and culture in conjunction with GLTF’s production
of Garcia Lorca’s classic play, Blood Wedding. Other surrounds
focused on Jewish arts and culture or difficult human issues such as those
explored in Euripides’ The Bacchae. Each was a lesson in outreach
and synergy from which this community and its cultural organizations continue
to benefit and learn.
Rudman’s gift for opening up the riches of our cultural heritage
derives from a personal passion for the classic American song, a repertoire
he has skillfully mined and brought to a new generation in fresh and engaging
settings. Somehow he has found time to produce more than a dozen nationally
distributed jazz and pop heritage recordings. (Maxine Sullivan: The
Great Songs from the Cotton Club by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler was
nominated for a Grammy.) Two years ago Rudman conceived, wrote and narrated
an original cabaret-style revue for GLTF, called Brother, Can You Spare
a Dime: The Social Conscience of the American Musical, which was performed
in more than 25 colleges, libraries, community centers, churches, and
temples across the region before being expanded for a full production
earlier this year at Cleveland’s Ensemble Theatre. And, every week
for the past 17 years, he has written and hosted a series on Broadway
and Hollywood music, “Footlight Parade,” airing on WCLV-FM 104.9,
that is now nationally syndicated. He also hosts a weekly radio show on
WCLV-AM 1420 called “Life Is a Song” that celebrates classic
American song.
In both his professional contributions and his private enthusiasms, Bill
Rudman, the first winner of the Robert P. Bergman Prize, powerfully exemplifies
its criteria.
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