Teachers are talent’s midwives.
They can’t make a dancer out of someone with two left feet or singers out of the tone deaf, but they are absolute necessities for people with artistic potential.
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The best teachers put their own egos aside to pass on an art form and nurture students whose eventual careers may outshine their own.
The best teachers are not motivated by money, because they’re unlikely to amass a fortune in their line of work. They do it for love–a love for their art form and a love for helping others grow artistically and spiritually.
In an era when dubious celebrities too often reap society’s rewards, good teachers are rarely given their due. They’re unsung heroes.
With that in mind, we’re shining the spotlight on four of Chicago’s finest arts teachers.
LENA MCLIN: VOICE
She taught crooner Mandy Patinkin how to hit a high note and pop star R. Kelly how to sell a song.
And though vocal coach Lena McLin isn’t nearly as famous as her most successful students, she’s revered by literally thousands of musicians lucky enough to have studied with her over the past four decades.
“Miss McLin projects love and warmth always, every hour of the day,” says singer Kenneth Gray, after a lesson in McLin’s spacious South Side apartment. “She doesn’t teach you only about music–it’s spiritual teaching. She teaches you about life.”
Indeed, to McLin, there is no point at which music ends and everyday life begins. The two are inseparable to her, which is why, in a single breath, she’ll freely tell a student how to phrase a melody line and how to take charge of a personal problem, how to dress for a concert and how to treat a fellow human being.
“Music isn’t just a way to entertain yourself or somebody else–it is the way for young people to find their inner selves,” says the 68-year-old singer-pianist-composer, who taught music in the Chicago Public schools for 36 years (the last 26 at Kenwood Academy on South Blackstone Avenue). She retired in 1992 and has run a flourishing private studio ever since.
“A lot of kids, you know, are historically dislocated–they think they’re the only thing that’s ever been on this planet,” she adds. “A lot of them have no sense of the immortal–no understanding of god and of spiritual life.
“By teaching them about music, I can teach them about those things too.”
Thus when a teenage Robert Kelly turned up in McLin’s music class at Kenwood Academy, music–and its deeper spiritual message–wasn’t exactly high on his priority list.
“He wanted to play basketball, that’s what he talked about the most,” remembers McLin of the young man who would become R&B superstar R. Kelly.
“But I took him off the basketball team, because he was a born singer.
“I looked at him and said, `You’re going to be the next Stevie Wonder.’
“He jumped, and said, `No, I’m going to play basketball.’ “
Shortly thereafter, however, Kelly found himself working his way through 17th Century classical arias.
By the time Kelly had left Kenwood, “He had learned how to breathe the way a real singer breathes,” says McLin, “he had learned about the bel canto technique, he had written close to 500 songs, which I made him copyright. Music is also a business, you know.”
When Patinkin came to McLin, “We were doing a production of `Cavalleria Rusticana,’ ” she remembers, referring to the 19th Century opera by Pietro Mascagni.
“Mandy wanted to be in the show, but I had to tell him that he didn’t have the vocal power to sing in it.
“I said, `You’ve got to learn how to breathe right first.’ “
Considering the critical and popular acclaim that has come to Patinkin, Kelly and dozens more (including jazz singer Maggie Brown, gospel artist Calvin Brunson and operatic baritone Mark Rucker), McLin must know what she’s talking about.
The $64,000 question, though, is how does she do it? How does she bring out talent hidden so deeply that even a student may not know it’s there?
“You have to let the student understand the music on their own terms, in their own language,” explains McLin.
“Most students can’t appreciate classical music, for instance, because they can’t deal with it in time–it’s music from another place and era, and they can’t understand it. So you have to explain to them in ways that mean something to them.”
As if to illustrate the point during Gray’s lesson, McLin interrupts the young man while he’s attempting to sing a classical aria. His sound clearly is too pinched and shrill, he’s singing from the throat and not from deep down inside.
“`Now, would you sing `Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ that way?’ ” asks McLin, who promptly asks the young man to switch to the Harold Arlen classic.
Almost instantly, Gray’s tone becomes wide open and warm, his delivery sweet and easygoing. And when McLin abruptly brings him back to the classical aria, he applies the same luscious sound to a piece of music that only a few moments ago seemed well beyond his reach. Voila–McLin has worked her magic.
“Miss McLin is the most beautiful person in the world, and the greatest teacher too,” says baritone Charles Taylor, in explaining her ability to reach a student.
McLin learned this brand of musical wizardry during a blessed childhood, which she spent living with her uncle Thomas Dorsey, the legendary creator of modern gospel music in America. In his Pilgrim Baptist Church, on the South Side of Chicago, McLin heard him coach, train and inspire no less than Mahalia Jackson, James Cleveland, Sallie Martin and other giants-in-the-making.
After earning a bachelor’s degree at Spelman College in Atlanta, where she was born, McLin moved back to Chicago and launched an influential career as teacher.
For all of her passion to inspire and enlighten her students, however, she knows artists are born, not taught.
“Not everyone is going to be a great artist–there’s only a little room at the top for the best,” says McLin.
“But who’s going to direct the church choirs, the children’s choruses, the small orchestras?
“There’s a place in music for everyone.”
– Howard Reich
NANA SHINEFLUG: DANCE
As a dancer, choreographer, artistic director and teacher, Nana Shineflug possesses such joie de vivre, faith and strength that much of her most valuable teaching must be done by example.
Shineflug danced so vigorously as a child that she caused plaster to fall in her family’s home. She started formal ballet training at age 11 and continued through high school.
But at that point it was quite clear that she had neither the body nor the moves of a ballerina. So she enrolled in Northwestern University, earned a degree in math, started teaching at New Trier High School, got married, honeymooned in Europe and had two children.
But she still took classes and joined a suburban dance company and did lecture-demonstrations in schools.
When the tumultuous 1960s hit full force and such modern dance troupes as Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham came to Chicago on tours, Shineflug experienced an epiphany, realizing that sort of energetic style of dance was exactly right for her.
She bailed out of her marriage and at age 32 embarked on a professional dance career. “It’s perfectly stupid to think you’re going to do that but there was something in me that told me I needed to do this or I wasn’t going to be happy,” Shineflug says.
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The years that followed were tough ones. Shineflug started a modern dance school, importing teachers for two-week stints and using her abstract mathematics skills to analyze “what they were really trying to teach.”
She still wanted to dance and once made a foray into New York with her children–and no money. She quickly returned home and, in 1972, started her own dance troupe, The Chicago Moving Company. She also opened a dance studio.
When she decided to stop doing repertory in 1981 to concentrate on her own choreography, the major dancers left her company. Shineflug soldiered on with apprentices. Two years later her dance school went belly up.
But these days Shineflug is happy–and solvent. She teaches full time at Columbia College, teaches dance at the Hamlin Park fieldhouse where her dance company is based and gets paid as an artistic director for the first time in 24 years (she previously was paid only a dancer’s salary). At age 60 she still dances and will perform solo in Philadelphia in January.
“I just love to dance, and it’s interesting for me to dance into my old age because in our culture you’re not supposed to do that.”
And Shineflug still adores teaching. “I love bringing people into insight. I love to solve problems. It’s my mathematician aspect.”
Her teaching methods have always been highly influenced by Eastern thought. “From the time I was little I could see chi (life force) flowing in people. I watch people and I can see when it flows and where it gets blocked. I ask myself, `How am I going to teach this person what they’re supposed to be doing?’ and I try sometimes seven or eight ways, trying to figure out what’s wrong.
“Teaching is solving a puzzle until people come to an understanding, and interacting with that process. I love interacting with people. I don’t raise myself above the students. I look them in the eye and say `I’m no different from you. I just know something you don’t know, so if you want to learn let’s figure it out together.’
“I have a lot of fun watching people grow. One of the best things about me as a teacher is that I never really learned about modern dance from any particular person. I had to figure it out for myself.
“I teach people how to be energy stars: how to find their center with visualization, how to power their energy out, how to use their physical body to engage their power at a very fundamental level.
“As you get there you find out that everything that is true of your art is true of your life.”
– Connie Lauerman
JIM TAYLOR: FILM
What makes a great teacher? Knowledge? Dedication? Love of subject? Outstanding communication skills? Successful pupils?
In the case of Chicago’s Jim Taylor, it’s all of the above. Plus one thing more: his willingness to teach for a quarter of a century without accepting any pay because that was the only way to keep his school alive.
The original executive director and still chairman of the Community Film Workshop at 1130 S. Wabash Ave., Taylor is a legend in Chicago film circles, although his school remains, as he ruefully says, “one of Chicago’s best-kept secrets.”
But, since 1971–when it was one of six schools nationwide in a long vanished federal program for minorities–the Film Workshop has turned out dozens of successful students each year. Under Taylor’s tutelage, and that of current executive director Margaret Caples (a pupil in Taylor’s first class in 1971), these students learn everything they need to know to make films, from scripting to sound editing, cinematography to direction.
“We teach filmmaking, basically,” Taylor explains, “from the inception of the idea to the final conforming. Everything about it: all the ancillary jobs around it.”
And Caples adds: “We have done it on sheer will.”
Taylor’s roster of graduates is glittering. The more than 800 alumni since the school started includes Portia Iversen, Emmy-winning set-designer on the old “Tracey Ullman Show”; videotape editor Kevin Gist of the “Oprah Winfrey” show; WGN-Ch. 9 cameraman Richard Isaacs; WTTW-Ch. 11 videotape engineer Oshun Mugwana; and experimental filmmakers Steven Foley and Katherine Nero. Taylor estimates that more than 52 percent of his students have gone on to successful film or film-related careers. Others have become teachers themselves.
Probably only a handful of those graduates–like Gist, an insurance company junior executive before he switched careers–could have managed film school without the workshop. Formed initially to give chances to women and minorities from modest-income families, the workshop charges fees substantially less than the $10,000 to $15,000 film school norm. For the first 10 years, at its old location at 441 N. Clark St., it charged no tuition at all.
Taylor, 74, is an empathetic but tough teacher. His students are required to attend six film screenings–of classics like “Blowup” and “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”–and write five research papers before they even start on filmmaking. And, he adds: “If you miss one, you start over again.”
Although it began as a minority program, workshop classes have been integrated since 1972, with students coming from as far away as France, England and Iran. Taylor, who supports himself by his outside filmmaking and college teaching jobs, took only one sabbatical from the school. In the early ’90s, he taught for three years at Florida State University, leaving operations here to Caples, his wife; he returned after suffering a heart attack three years ago.
Ironically, despite its success, The Community Film Workshop is now in its biggest crisis since its troubled early years. The reason: congressional attacks on the National Endowment for the Arts, which, since 1972, has supported the workshop to the tune of about $15,000 to $20,000 annually–making up a fifth to a sixth of its modest operating budget. (The NEA contribution was sliced to $6,000 last year.)
And what of teacher Taylor, in the eyes of his students? Graduate Mugwana says: ” `Life is not easy.’ That was what I learned from him. That you need discipline in whatever it is that you do in life.”
– Michael Wilmington
EUGENE BALDWIN: PLAYWRITING
Up on the one of the smaller stages at the Chicago Cultural Center, a swarm of teenagers buzzes around Eugene Baldwin. He sticks out right away: 48 years old, white, thin-haired, and casual in a 1960s sort of way. The kids–all students of his at Gallery 37–are of many races, and are about to see their plays performed by professionals.
“I never even thought about writing a play until I was in his class, but he made it seem so exciting,” says Kathy Bardales, a freshman at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Under his tutelage, she produced a script called “Aguadito,” which went on to the Pegasus Players’ Young Playwrights Festival.
Among his many teaching gigs, Baldwin has been teaching playwrighting at Gallery 37 for four years. Since he began, 30 percent of the finalists in the Pegasus fest have gone through his workshops. He’s placed winners in the last three years, and of the three 1996 winners, two were his students. The festival draws about 1,500 applicants.
All this for a man who fell into teaching by accident. “I’d been a professional singer and did lots of musical theater,” says the soft-spoken Baldwin. “And then in 1980, I stopped performing. I simply lost my nerve.”
He began writing without ambition, simply as a way to keep in touch with his creative spirit until his nerves calmed down enough to get back on stage. He has a bachelor’s degree in speech and performing arts from Northeastern Illinois University, but his biggest professional triumphs have been with writing: plays at Victory Gardens Theater, at Organic Theater, at the Quaigh Theatre in New York, and a rock opera for Performing Arts Chicago in 1973. He’s currently working on a novel, a collection of short stories and a film.
But when he applied for a position with the Artists in Education program run by the Illinois Arts Council (which places working artists in classrooms throughout the state), he didn’t have any writing published except one poem. “I was absolutely amazed I got on,” he says with a laugh. “And that first residency, I’m sure, I was awful.”
Since then, Baldwin has had 75 continuous residencies–short-term teaching assignments–in art education programs throughout Illinois, teaching writing to thousands of kids. It’s a transient teaching life, moving from one school to another, and one he had imagined would be temporary.
“But during my third residency, I was at Pontiac (Ill.), teaching 2nd graders how to write poems,” he says, “and this little boy’s mother comes in and says he doesn’t want to play with toys anymore, that he just wants to read and write. He used to call me `Poet Man.’ He reminded me so much of myself at that age. His mother asked, `What do I do?’ I said, `Get him some books and paper.’ And that’s when I knew, I’m a teacher. Now it’s a vital part of me. If I had a book come out, I’d still want to teach. If I hit the lottery, I’d find schools that can’t afford me and give it away.”
He thinks of teaching as a calling, a means to a greater good. “I think artists are usually born creative, but teaching, for me, is about a process of discovery, about kids empowering themselves and discovering that power,” he explains.
The bond he develops with his students is such that, for years now, anybody who goes through a program with him and wants to keep writing can take an informal workshop with him at Sulzer Library on Saturdays–for free.
“They don’t have any money,” he says, “so what am I going to do?”
The kick of seeing his students make it is for him an indescribable high. When Jay Kiecolt-Wahl, who had taken writing and improvisation with him, starred as an actor at Steppenwolf Theatre in 1995, he came down during the curtain call and high-fived Baldwin in the audience. “I’d been slunked down in that seat, in a birthing position, watching him, amazed!”
How does he manage to get along so well with these kids? Baldwin shrugs. “I grew up in Southern Illinois,” he says. “In the 24 years that I’ve been in Chicago, I’ve never written a word about Chicago. All my characters are from Springfield and `below.’ It’s all a mystery to me, and to them too, I think.”
Veronica Sansing, however, has it figured out. She had Baldwin at Gallery 37, where he helped her hone a Pegasus winning script this summer. “He really cares about who you are. It’s not just a job to him. He pushes you to excellence and you don’t mind because you’re having so much fun in the process.”
But Baldwin admits it’s not all rosy. The teaching sometimes gets in the way of his own writing. The emotional and physical demands of the job sometimes leave him so exhausted at the end of the day, the last thing he wants to do is work on his own writing.
And the pay is just plain awful. “I’m middle-aged and I don’t have a retirement fund; it’s foolish, I know,” he says. “Right now, I don’t have the slightest idea who’ll employ me in four weeks.”
But he’s not worried about that. Right now, he’s got a much bigger concern: A friend has asked him to sing at his wedding. “I haven’t performed in 15 years,” says Baldwin. “And I’m terrified.”
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– Achy Obejas