Volume 24 · Number 4 · Summer 2008
Have you seen the scene?
The Beat Goes On
We may be called Aggies, but that doesn’t mean the arts aren’t alive and well — and drawing crowds — at UC Davis.
You’ve heard it all before and you will hear it again, maybe for forever or for eternity, whichever comes first: UC Davis is a vet school, an ag school, a science school, a cow college, a hole in the loamy dirt of Central California.
Funny though, how the student experience — at least mine (and possibly yours) — has been entirely different.
Naturally, most of us know that such generalizations are only partly true. The other part, however, the one that too few pay attention to, concerns the artistic lives led here and the pretty diversions that exist if one knows to look for them or has the initiative to start them up.
That’s what a good number of us, myself included, have done, and we’ve had a pretty good time doing it. We’re the ones who found their liberal arts education and, more impressively, our liberal arts lifestyle out here in the verdant fields. Oh yes, it can be done.
Start a design club, a record label, a band — who cares what genre — or a theatre group and they will come. I’ve seen it happen with awesome results.
My freshman year, a friend, Gregory Gaye, and I set out to create an improvisational and sketch comedy troupe. We were a mixed group of majors and ages, pooling what we knew about improv in an empty classroom on Sunday afternoons.
It’s three years later, and Birdstrike Theatre’s shows sell out. People sadly have to be turned away at the door. You know what they say, 400 are a crowd, 401, a fire hazard, and then the cops show up.
We have followers that we have earned the old fashioned way, by making them pee their pants over closeted cyborgs, feuding a cappella groups, Wikipedia addicts and the like. Hardly any of those audience members are, you know, just our roommates and the odd stranger or two that we cajoled into coming with promises of cute, single Birdstrike players. And all of them are cute, very cute.
Maybe you remember it or maybe you were a part of it, that intimate underground arts scene that lives in Davis but receives little note when listing the pluses of the university community. I mean, why bother when we have a good viticulture program to brag about, right? It’s easy to overlook maybe groups like The CO/LAB (Collective Laboratory) art and design collective or those music aficionados down at the local radio station, KDVS.
It’s easy to find an artsy happening where kids with Euro-haircuts, excessive accessories and tight fitting everything have assembled. You’ll find them at the Coffee House, Wright Hall, on the Delta of Venus Café patio or anywhere else a makeshift stage has been erected. These are the kids who aren’t always about science and who have to constantly remind family friends at parental parties that, yes, they go to UC Davis. But no, they are not studying veterinary medicine.
The arts, that truly happening but so often unmentioned undertow, can be the answer for those who don’t see cheap, hard liquor or ennui as any kind of solution to the ever-important question, “So what do you want to do tonight?”
What do I want to do tonight?
Easy, tonight I want to achieve that other college experience, and I want to do it with creative people in this dynamic place.
Rachael Bogert graduated in June 2008 with a bachelor’s degree in English. Now an intern with The Sacramento Bee, she plans to pursue a career in print journalism and online publishing. She continues to perform improvisational comedy, now with ComedySportz Sacramento.