Theater-On-The-Walk™ has now become a recognized group by the student body of Dartmouth College. In addition to this, the departments of Public Safety and local Hanover police have also accepted my presence as a public performer. This acknowledgment had been an uphill battle since I first began in early September of 2009 and has taken a tremendous amount of time, patience, and effort to achieve.
When I first began my project many students were confused by what I was doing and some were even frightened by my presence in costume. As a result, I had to launch a massive advertising campaign necessary to inform the student body and citizens of downtown Hanover of my project. I circulated the school’s bulletin boards with dozens of artistic flyers and also created a large movie poster - placed in the central kiosk of campus. While this was taking place I also made a special effort to show up in costume during popular campus-wide events. I attended football games, went on hiking raids, joined the street march of the 2009 Bonfire parade, and even attended the inauguration of Dartmouth’s new President Jim Yong Kim. By this time my presence had become well known throughout the town but newspaper critiques of the Dartmouth Press were hard pressed to think so.
I soon found myself being mocked in a series of comics from the school newspaper. The slanderous narration and crude drawings seemed to focus heavily on articulating the author’s personal dislike of my presence on campus. Online articles from “The Little Green Blog” rapidly published their own set speculative insult. The author of these insensitive blog articles labeled me with a variety of names and judgmental remarks referring to me as a “loner”, a “drifter”, and even a “creepy groper”. In addition to this, I began to take notice to the increasingly unusual pursuit of Public Safety security vehicles who relentlessly followed and watched me everywhere I went. The combination of all these reactions made for an unpleasant atmosphere both for me and the students who were genuinely curious to learn more about Theater-On-The-Walk™. Despite all the negative karma, I knew in my heart I was doing the right thing so I refused to give up.
My persistence remained firm and eventually I was given an interview opportunity to explain the details concerning my project. The published content of the article, entitled “The Sun God Also Rises”, primarily concerned itself with the reactions from my appearance in costume at President Kim’s inauguration. In his address to the student body Kim stated that,
“Your generation must dream, dream more ambitiously than any who have preceded you. But just to dream is not enough. You must deliver on the dream where previous generations have fallen short...The passion I want you to find takes work. It represents less an emotional sensation than an intellectual achievement. You won’t find it by sitting passively in the classroom or surfing the web. You have to work hard at finding something you can tackle with passion for a big chunk of your life and find meaning in it. That’s an active and an urgent task. You need to start it now...Each one of you has the ability to achieve great things. But beyond a certain level of talent, the difference between those who achieve great things and those who don’t is usually not talent, it’s persistence.”
Kim’s speech validated my attendance because I truly felt as if I was the living personification of his words. In addition being able to articulate my passionate mission, the publication of the article inadvertently created the official name for my character now known by my audience as “The Sun God”.
