Creativity Quote by Holly Near

You can hear the friction in that sentence: collective urgency colliding with individual hesitation. Kent State wasn’t an abstract headline; it was state violence made televisual, four students shot by the National Guard in 1970, a national wound that instantly demanded a response from anyone with a microphone or a stage. Holly Near frames the moment as a workplace decision - “the cast voted” - which quietly reveals how political expression in performance spaces often runs through committees, group dynamics, and the pressure to be publicly correct.

The key word is “abstained.” It’s neither cowardice nor endorsement; it’s a refusal to join a symbolic gesture she doesn’t fully own. That’s the subtext: activism can become theater, and theater can become activism, but the overlap is never seamless. Near’s choice reads like an artist’s insistence on integrity over unanimity. She doesn’t say she opposed the demonstration. She says she couldn’t vote for it. That distinction matters. It suggests discomfort with performative solidarity, with the possibility that a “demonstration from the stage” risks converting grief into programming.

There’s also an implied power calculus. A cast demonstration can be brave, but it’s also buffered: the institution still sells tickets, the audience still claps, the show still goes on. Abstaining hints at the question Kent State forced into every cultural room: is this act meant to disrupt, or to reassure ourselves we’re on the right side? Near’s candor preserves the messiness, and that honesty is its own political act.