Season 2, Episode 11: Jackie Hurwitz

Gillian Rhodes
Jul 20, 2017 · 10 min read

Note: This is a transcript of a recorded interview — all speech as is, except for common filler words removed. The full episode is available here.

The first question is always the same and that’s just to briefly introduce yourself.

Sure, so my name is Jackie Hurwitz. I live in Brooklyn, New York, I’m originally from Chicago and I have been doing the arts my entire life. I grew up in the theater world, and then spent most of my career making documentaries, particularly documentary television series, and now as of the last year and a half I’ve kind of moved from documentary into virtual reality. So I started a company about a year and a half ago to start making VR projects and I’ve been doing both 360 journalism type stuff and also interactive 3D stuff on unity.

Okay, interesting. So you’ve been in the arts your whole life, so I guess you don’t really know a life without it, but what makes you continue coming back to the arts?

That’s a good question, you know, growing up doing theater, the message that so often came across was that you have to be very lucky and work very hard to be successful in the arts and even if you are both of those things you still might not make it unless you’re a diamond in the rough and just extraordinarily lucky in your life. And for me, I didn’t do the arts growing up just to be successful in my career, I did it because it gave me fulfillment in my every day life, and because it was really the best way to see the world and to interact with other people. Most of my strongest relationships have come from some kind of an arts driven context, I think when you’re creating things with somebody that forces you to think in a non-linear way, then you discover things about each other and you build things with each other that form the basis of your relationship and I’ve always just gotten a lot out of that my whole life.

Do you consider yourself an artistic person?

I hope so! Otherwise I might be a bit of a fraud! Yeah, that’s a good question, what the distinction is between an artistic person and just somebody who does art. I think everyone, even people that aren’t working in the arts for a living have some kind of artistic inclinations and yeah, I do consider myself an artistic person, I think that the way that I approach problems and what I seek out for enjoyment and in other people is building things that are creative and fun. I’m trying to think of a good example, even like my birthday parties all throughout my life, it’s never been enough for me to just put people in a room and have them talk to each other, I always come up with some ulterior context that allows people to have new and different conversations they never would have had before, so as a result I’ve thrown speakeasy parties and murder mysteries and masquerade balls and everything across the sun, and to me, that merger between — I mean for a lot of people I think art is more performative, but for me I think it’s more integrated in every day life, it’s something that I seek out far beyond the stage and try to use in my work and in my creative process all the time.

Do you have a particularly memorable experience of the arts, some moment that really stands out to you?

Well, very formative time for me was in high school. I think for a lot of people, actually, that’s a time when their artistic sensibilities are the most poignant because of course we’re going through so many transitions then, and I remember just being in the theater community there, there were just some times performing on stage and even being on crew and just building stuff onstage with the stage lights on and the rest of the theater dark and seeing the motes of dust floating above you and realizing that all of these people around you are working towards this one thing in a place that becomes kind of a sacred space, because you’re all dedicating so much time and energy towards it — those were the first times I think I associated art as something that’s not just performative, not just something that you do for recognition and for fun but something that creates this community around you for your entire life. Yeah, I remember just coming off stage after performances in high school and I felt like I was on drugs, I felt like I was on cloud nine because there’s something beautiful about the fact that theater and performing is ephemeral. Everybody is working so hard for this for so long and then it happens, and it’s over. You know? It’s not something that lives on and is repeated again and again, it’s something that was just special in the moment that it was experienced and then it disappears and is gone forever, and I think there’s something really beautiful about that that we might not have in other aspects of our lives because these days things are so incredibly documented, all over the place.

Yeah, I know that a lot, it’s the same with dance. Do you on a very daily basis, going to work, or in your apartment, do you think that you experience the arts on that really daily level?

The one thing that I think that keeps me the most connected everyday is that in the mornings a lot of times in lieu of other exercises I just turn on music and just freestyle dance for a half hour before I go to work. It used to be when I was in my early twenties a lot of people at that time were starting to run, and I felt like oh, I should probably be running, like that’s the way to keep in shape, that’s the thing to do, but I hated running, I hated every minute of it, it didn’t speak to me, I didn’t feel comfortable and after a few years, I decided why don’t I — why am I trying to reinvent myself and do these new activities when I’ve completely neglected physical activities that I used to love, in particular dance, which I really loved as a child, so I just said, screw it, and now I just dance all the time, I dance in the morning before work, I dance on the way to things, and it just makes me happy and it doesn’t have to be an end product or something that looks good, it’s just a matter of checking in with my body every morning and seeing what is going to feel good to move today and then doing it.

Nice. In a world without art, what do you think people would lack the most?

We were just discussing this recently, we just took a trip to Greece and I was introducing the people that were traveling with me to geometric period where — you know Greece had their dark ages at a different time than the rest of Europe, the dark ages in Greece are like the 12th century BC to the 7th century BC and one of the big definitions of the dark ages is that it was a period where there was no art, there are several hundred years in there where we just have no creative documentation of anything that happened in that culture, and when art finally did emerge, it was just very linear and mathematical, it was more shapes than figures, and I think there’s something to be said in that for the fact that art is a symptom of society flourishing. It’s a symptom of societies that are not struggling to survive, but have the resources they need and can then go a step further and create things purely for enjoyment and for fulfillment, so I think a world without art would necessarily be a world that’s just trying to get by, and I think you see that even today, you know the communities where the arts are the most struggling often are just communities without a lot of resources, I mean is always the first budget that gets slashed whenever school boards are looking to cut down or governments are looking to cut down on excess costs, and that’s really a shame, but that seems to be just the way it is.

So do you think it’s something that people are unable to deal with the arts when they’re struggling to survive?

Yeah, I think it’s just the focus is different. I think in many ways culturally in societies I think art is a luxury, I think it’s something that people first of all if they have free time, and you have free time only if you’re not spending all your free time trying to find food and shelter and safety, and I think it’s something you do if you have the infrastructure to nurture it. Most people who do art had some kind of art education whether it was formal or informal, whether it was through school or specialty programs in various art forms, or even just through friends and families and churches or other less formal introductions to art, but everyone has something, so when you’re just struggling to make ends meet then I think often the arts just get lost, and you see that in communities across the world today that the ones that have access to some form of excess or wealth are the ones that usually have the resources for arts programs.

Yeah. So, there’s a lot of noise around, when it comes to art. It seems it’s quite saturated in the sense that there’s music everywhere, in cafés and in shops, and there’s paintings everywhere, even in the dentist’s offices, there’s ads in the subway, there’s art that is happening constantly as this background noise, do you think that if it wasn’t there, that we would miss it? And how do you think and if people should engage more? So the second part is should they engage more, and how could they do that?

I mean, I do miss it when it’s not there, so the answer is yes! One of the most wonderful artistic communities I was ever a part of — this probably sounds silly to a non-American, but in the US we have Renaissance Fairs, which are giant recreations of 16th century or 15th century England, and one of the most wonderful things about it is the performers aren’t really getting paid much, people do it to be a part of the community, not because they’re profiting from it, and as a result you get all kinds of niche musicians and artists coming from all across the country and my favorite thing about it that there is nowhere you can walk in the entire vicinity without hearing live music, and it’s not even formal concerts on a stage, often it’s just like a single guy playing a reed flute by a tree. And it’s kind of jarring at first because we’re not used to hearing live performances and live music just kind of integrated with our everyday experience, but after — I don’t know, it’s just really beautiful to have that when you walk around, and in New York, life in New York is always a series of random events and you always come across things you don’t expect and some of the most wonderful New York moments are people responding and reacting to art in different places. Recently, I was walking by on the subway — this was, I’m trying to think, a day after a terrorist attack of some sort, I forget which one. Isn’t that sad, there are so many now that I can’t even distinguish, but there was a small quartet of young African American children from one of the public schools that was in the subway and they were playing Hallelujah and it just drew so many people from out of the subway, and they were just standing around and it was just an impromptu and really beautiful thing that brought people together and even though the attack wasn’t mentioned, it was a very clear undertone to the performance, and yeah, just things like that just changes the color of your day, it changes what you’re thinking about and it changes the way you look at everyone else from then on, and in many ways I think that’s what art gives to us, it gives us new frameworks and influences how we perceive and respond to everyone else that we encounter from then on out. For me, the way that I experience performance, there’s a certain element that happens in the moment when you’re there, but then parts of it kind of come and poke back at you when you’re not expecting them. You know, you’ll remember it like a week later, like a certain moment that you hadn’t really even thought about will just pop up when you’re in the middle of doing something else, and that’s what makes art powerful, is that it sticks in us in a way that our every day lives don’t, and forms a filter over how we can perceive and go through our lives.

Hm. So what do you think it means to live an artful life?

Well, I assume you mean artful in the artistic sense and not artful as in deceit, which is also a definition of it, but I think I living a life full of art means just being open to — I think there’s a few things. First of all, I think going to live performances, and actually incorporating the fine arts into your life, if we have the most amazing cultural institutions in New York City, and to not take advantage of that is crazy. And then, I think also to — a lot of our lives are very externally motivated, we are motivated by what people think of us, we’re motivated by what’s going to get us certain results, and I think living an artful life means living from the inside sometimes and not thinking about what’s going to get me this, or what’s this going to look like and thinking, okay, how do I want start on this process, and just approaching things from that perspective of process rather than destination, because I think that’s one thing that all of the arts have in common, I think they’re very process focused rather than simply outcome, and that allows you to uncover and explore parts of yourself that maybe you didn’t even know were in there, and develop a style.

Cool. That is all the questions that I have, is there anything that you’d like to add or comment on?

I don’t think so, those were good questions.

Well, thank you for taking the time to chat this morning!


“It’s an artful life!” is an experiment on how people see and experience the arts on a daily basis. New interviews are released weekly on Mondays. Be sure to follow the podcast on Soundcloud or iTunes.

It’s an artful life!

“It’s an artful life!” is an experiment on how people see and experience the arts on a daily basis — or don’t! Join host Gillian Rhodes as she explores this question by interviewing people from all over the world.

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Gillian Rhodes

Written by

Dancer/choreographer causing magic and mischief somewhere in the world. Currently based in Lahore, Pakistan.

It’s an artful life!

“It’s an artful life!” is an experiment on how people see and experience the arts on a daily basis — or don’t! Join host Gillian Rhodes as she explores this question by interviewing people from all over the world.

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