HER Feature

The Muses Project is housed in a grand old building with tall, white, Greek columns — practically a temple.

For the project’s “mothers,” Toni Spears and Deleen Davidson, this could not be more appropriate.

With a background in mental health, Spears serves as the resident life coach, troupe manager, and educational outreach coordinator, while Davidson is the general director and a classically trained opera soprano.

“The Muses are the mythological goddesses of inspiration. They were the classical Greek understanding of the spirits of creativity, and they were the nine female deities that kept poetry and drama and love stories and music and dance and literature and history and sciences. They were the spirits that whispered in the ears of men and women of any ilk, and it goes to the universal human question of where do good ideas come from? So there’s a very strong femininity in the concept of the Muses, the muses as a female entity. For us because this is a project of blended creativity, all aspects of the classical arts, the Muses seemed the perfect keepers of that,” said Davidson.

Founded in 2007, the Muses Project is a professional arts 501 (c)(3) nonprofit that serves as an educational experience for young artists through collaboration with experienced, professional artists and exposure to classical arts, as well as raises awareness in the community of the value of the arts.

The troupe can be divided into thirds: nationally touring professionals; “Muses’ Young Artists,” their term for college students and recent graduates who have been training but haven’t been able to practice profession yet; and high school students.

“It’s polished, refined, and I’m bragging on us, but up there with some of the best that you will see. Particularly in this area it’s rarity. It’s very unique,” said Spears.

Though each show takes three months of preparation, performers only have six weeks to rehearse. Davidson and Spears say this is possible due to the troupe’s core of experienced professional artists.

“The theory being that all of this music, because it’s classical in nature, it’s healthy, it’s legitimate, it’s strong, it’s good, educational music for them, but they will be able to do it if they can do it with other stronger, more experiences in position to protect them, basically. They can come so much further faster. You put younger

dancers with two professional dancers and all of sudden everyone can go further,” said Davidson.

“The focus is experiential learning. It’s not a didactic sort of situation where you’re getting a lecture. You’re on stage with these high-level performers, and you sink or swim. So when you see the best, you bring your best. And so even if you will never be what they are, you will be the best that you can be, and you can stand proudly and recognize that you’ve been able to accomplish something that you never thought you could do,” said Spears.

Though the “Muse mothers” have high expectations for their protégés, they guide them with a maternal hand and their overall well-being in mind.

“That is part of the feminine energy, in that compassion is really a powerful trait. And it’s all-encompassing. We are not an exclusively female-driven project. We’re women in leadership. However, that energy embraces all. And so the men that we get coming in feel that draw. And we give them permission to stand in that and be themselves and embrace that part of themselves that may not have been fostered in other places,” said Spears.

“We expect a lot from them, and they have to rise to it. There’s a lot of bravery associated with it; risk. You may never have done this before, but we will protect you. We will not set you up for failure. We will make sure that you are safe, but that when it comes out in the end it’s going to be beyond what you thought you could do when you started,” said Davidson.

Along with fostering talents and honing skills, the Muses Project also helps artists, particularly women, learn the business side of being a professional.

“We help them figure out how to price their services, how to not be taken advantage of by other groups,” said Davidson.

With this in mind, the Muses Project practices what it preaches and pays each and every artist for their work.

“As a professional musician particularly, people will allow you to give away your services as long as you allow them. I’ve experienced that my entire life, and I refuse to run an organization that exploits artists in that fashion,” said Davidson.

“That’s part of the modeling of the business profile here, is that you have a product, you are the product, you are the producer of this product, and we value it, so we compensate accordingly,” said Spears.

Davidson shared that she feels people tend to build up, then tear down young women who gravitate toward the arts.

“What I say all the time is we celebrate all these young girls as they go through grammar school, ‘Oh, my granddaughter brought home this wonderful painting,’ and ‘Oh, she’s in ballet class,’ and ‘Oh she’s taking piano,’ and ‘Oh, she writes so beautifully.’ But that same child that you’re celebrating all the way up to the age of 18, when she comes home and says that she wants to be an English major in college, you are shocked and horrified because you think she’s going to be homeless. People think she’s going to be destitute. And we say no, she can very successful. But she needs to know how to value those skills. Our message to these young women is the arts are not frivolous and that they are not just decorative. As individuals, they have every right to treat it seriously and to expect to be taken seriously. They must treat

their gifts seriously before anyone else will take them seriously,” said Davidson.

To help show that their gifts are indeed a serious matter and potential avenue for a career, the Muses Project gives over 30 performances each year around the state, including at Texarkana, El Dorado, Jonesboro, Bentonville, Fayetteville, Mena, Helena, Little Rock, Arkadelphia, Hot Springs Village, and Gurdon.

The performance calendar is based on the four seasons and their natural rhythms.

Celtic Spring is the troupe’s most recent show, which included Irish harp, flute, drums, piano, and dance.

“Celtic Spring is traditionally, as Deleen developed and designed it, a Celtic women’s style concert in that we had male voices augmenting the female voices, but the focus was the female energy and the female voices,” said Davidson.

The next Muses show, a Broadway cabaret, will be performed from June 12-16. It will showcase selections from “Cabaret,” “My Fair Lady,” “Hello, Dolly!,” “42nd Street,” “Company,” “Wicked,” and others. Three professional musicians from New York and two from Oregon will be featured in a pit orchestra, along with a cast of 12 dancers.

In September, the Muses will perform the full opera of Mozart’s Magic Flute in German with English supertitles and will include eight professional opera singers from across the country.

The Christmas season will see their traditional “Voices of Angels” program.

“It’s a sacred, classical, choral program, and it is for Christmas. It was designed to be a meditative experience. Christmas season in America particularly is very stressful. It’s commercial, it’s secular, and it’s also just wild and heavy and loud. And we wanted one place where people could come and it transport them to a place of silence and meditation,” said Davidson.

Even after 12 years of nurturing young talent, performing professional quality shows, and showing women that the arts can be a viable, fulfilling livelihood, the Muses Project’s maternal magic continues to inspire.