BRATTLEBORO — Peter Gould wears many hats.
In a long and distinguished career, he has worked as a writer, a director, an actor, a mime, and a clown.
Nonetheless, first and foremost, Gould considers himself an educator.
And in recognition of his longtime dedication to education, he has recently won the 2016 Ellen McCulloch-Lovell Award in arts education from the Vermont Arts Council.
“Teaching is such a responsibility, such a trust,” says Gould. “It informs everything I do. In fact, all the things I do become a form of teaching.”
Named in honor of the former executive director of the Vermont Arts Council and retired president of Marlboro College, the prize is presented each year to individuals who have made “a sustained contribution to learning in and through the arts and/or has had a positive impact on the quality of education in Vermont.”
In selecting Peter Gould for this award, the Arts Council recognizes his creativity, passion for the arts, and his more than 40 years of dedication to young people through various forms of arts in education.
Receives award on Nov. 15
A teacher of young people at all grade levels, from elementary kids to graduate students at the School for International Training, Gould will receive his award, along with other 2016 Arts honorees, at a special event hosted by Governor Peter Shumlin on Tuesday, Nov. 15 at the Putney School.
All Gould's teaching, from theater to meditation to creative writing and even to Spanish-language mastery, is based on physical training - on an awareness, he says, “of how our minds, our bodies, and the environment we live in, are all deeply connected.”
His own career as a student is extensive.
Gould was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow at Harvard University, studying Sanskrit and Indian studies. He received all his post-secondary degrees from Brandeis University.
There, he taught physical comedy and clown theory to undergraduate and graduate classes while working on his doctorate: a study of the life and work of Victor Jara, a singer-songwriter tortured and killed in the Chilean fascist coup of 1973.
Gould's studies in physical theater have taken him to Maine to work with teachers Tony Montanaro and Avner the Eccentric, and to Mexico, where he studied and toured with the international master teacher Sigfrido Aguilar.
Gould has taught Spanish at Marlboro College and SIT Graduate Institute, and he also developed courses in arts for social change at Brattleboro Union High School and SIT.
Gould, whose Shakespeare work with young people has won him three major expansion grants from the Vermont Community Foundation, has taught Shakespeare at Vermont's Governor's Institute on the Arts for 11 years.
He and his wife, State Representative Mollie Burke, are parents of three grown children and three grandchildren, and Gould has inspired thousands of young people in sponsored school residencies in every corner of the state, ”in practically every town in Vermont,” he says. “Sometimes, I claim that the whole state is my backyard.”
Gould is the founder of “Get Thee to the Funnery,” a Shakespeare enrichment program in the Northeast Kingdom which has now branched out to other locations.
Each summer, more than 150 young Funnery actors gain clarity of voice, positive self-esteem, leadership skills, and empathy in a rarified atmosphere of intellectual stimulation and physical training.
“At the Shakespeare camps, we encourage great growth in the heart, the mind, the body, and the voice,” Gould says. “We call that 'the Sign of the Four.'
“The heart means empathy, as we encourage kids to learn to feel for each other. The mind begins by refusing to patronize students, and I have never spent a moment in all my years of teaching dumbing things down for kids. The body means, rather than sitting still at a desk, getting up and moving around.
“I do this even in my Spanish intensive at SIT, which can be very intensive indeed, because I keep the participants moving,” he adds.
”Finally, I hope to develop students voice in strength and power,” Gould notes. ”A stutterer myself, I have a deep appreciation of what the voice can do. This is a very important thing to understand when my students go on stage.”
Director of 'ambitious' works
Gould, a veteran stage performer himself, has appeared in more than 3,000 shows across the U.S. and in other countries, both as a solo act and with his stage partner, Stephen Stearns, also of Brattleboro.
For 15 years, Gould has worked as a faculty member and a director at New England Youth Theatre (NEYT), which was founded by Stearns.
There, Gould has directed young actors in numerous productions, including “The Crucible,” “The Playboy of the Western World,” and many of Shakespeare's plays.
“I am drawn to directing work that is ambitious,” Gould says. “I want to raise the bar for my actors, to do something for them with, say, a new political perspective, or by choosing mature works, like 'The Crucible' or 'Playboy of the Western World.'”
Above all, Gould is committed to performing the works of Shakespeare.
“When we put on a work by Shakespeare, what we perform are the actual words Shakespeare wrote,” he explains. “I may edit the text of the play, for Shakespeare's work unabridged can run over four hours, which is too long for kids. But I do not edit to make his plays Shakespeare-light.
“I go through every line of a given play with my actors until all the students understand the work. If a line is too obscure or is ridiculously stupid, which can happen in any work over 400 years old, we will take it out.
“But that kind of cutting is pretty rare. People are often amazed at our productions, and they tell me that for the first time they have understood a Shakespeare play. But that happens because our young actors have understood it first.”
Gould has written countless plays for NEYT, often taking classic works and retelling them from an unusual angle - for example, “a feminist rewrite of the stories of King Arthur and the Round Table.”
He has made the best of his plays for students, including his versions of Shakespeare's dramas, available for anyone to perform for free at the Shakespeare Free Library (www.shakespearefreelibrary.com).
This open-access public library has a mission to support “the work of building this new constituency around the world by providing workable scripts, and staging notes, essays, articles, and papers that truly support clarity in Shakespeare performance.”
Gould has also written an award-winning drama, “A Peasant of El Salvador,” which has been performed on every continent. He describes its purpose as “to clarify the major political and economic issues behind the Latin American violent conflicts of the late 20th century.”
“It's the simple tale of an unlettered peasant in El Salvador's highlands who finds within himself the perfection of understanding and solidarity - and his own authentic voice to express it - in the moment before his death, at the funeral of Archbishop Oscar Romero.”
Also the author of several books, Gould's first novel, “Burnt Toast,” published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1972, is a very fictionalized account of his years as a communal farmer at Packer Corners in Guilford during the back-to-the-land movement.
“Every now and then, people will come up to me and ask if I really was the author of that fantasy novel,” he said. “I think it might have something of a cult following.”
Gould has won Vermont Arts Council creation grants for fiction, and his young-adult novel “Write Naked” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), published in 2008, was awarded a National Green Earth Book Award the next year. The award encourages environmental stewardship in young readers.
His newest novel, “Marly,” was published in 2015 by Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press, which will also publish his communal farm memoir, “Horse-Drawn Yogurt,” in April.
Connecting with today's youth
Gould is convinced that he has received the Ellen McCulloch-Lovell Award because of his philosophy of teaching.
“Kids are different today than, say, 20 years ago, and that requires a different approach to teaching,” he explains. “I believe the best way to reach this group is through the arts.”
“Kids today are easily distracted, but they also know a lot more,” Gould continues. “They kind of find the answer to most academic questions on their mobile phone.”
“Consequently, they are reluctant to learn by rote, simply thinking there is no need,” he says. “They are also victims of the media, with its onslaught of trash talk and cynicism.”
Gould avidly works to connect with today's youth.
“When I teach, I mark down an x on the floor,” Gould continues. “I tell my students this is the center of the universe. I really want them to feel that they would desire to be here rather than anywhere else in the world. But this means that I have to have more energy than everyone else in the room, and know my Shakespeare more than anyone else.
“The people who students have the most respect for, who can cut through the hypocrisy, are artists,” Gould adds. “I truly believe that a half day of education should be spent on the arts. The arts make students more discerning, active and healthier. The arts invite them to engage in problem solving.”
Gould is convinced that while everyone knows this, in our culture there remains the reluctance to give the arts its due.
“Perhaps the struggle over arts funding is a struggle about what kind of people we want our students to become,” he says.
“Do we want to produce drones who are satisfied with less - or seekers?” Gould asks rhetorically.
The answer, he says, “should be obvious.”
“I believe artists make the best teachers who deserve to have more of a presence in our schools.”