Bela Legosi in the Daytime

Bela Legosi’s Count Dracula, perhaps the most famous creature of the night, was filmed entirely during the daytime. The same movie set for the daytime Dracula was inhabited at night by an entirely different cast and crew to shoot the Spanish language version of Bram Stoker’s classic tale.
National Public Radio recently aired a terrific interview with Lupita Tovar, now 97, who played the character of Eva (the female ingénue) in the nighttime Dracula - though ingénue may not be quite the right term here. Ingénues are traditionally sweet, earnest, and sexless. Tovar’s Eva may have been sweet and earnest, but sexless she was not. And a sexy object of desire makes for a much better movie than a bland object of desire. The desirability (and implicit desires) of the heroine moves the narrative beyond simple melodrama. It makes her complicit with the conflict. It gives her complexity.
Bela Legosi always performed with a diamond hard intensity. He was described by actresses that worked with him as one of the sexiest men they had ever met. But the daytime Dracula’s Helen Chandler, though praised for her performance as the female lead, did not supply the great Legosi with an acting partner performing at the same pitch as his combustible Count. Tovar would have matched Legosi’s heat, calorie for calorie.
Some consider the nighttime Dracula to be more artistically successful than the daytime Dracula, despite Legosi’s brilliant performance and the nighttime crew’s limited budget and schedule. Why is this? The nighttime crew looked at the daytime rushes and rethought camera angles and lighting. More care was given to plot development. And Lupita Tovar was sexy.
The dialectics of the daytime/nighttime Dracula are not entirely unlike what the Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE) encounters when simultaneously designing in-school and after-school arts education programming. Same set, same characters, same basic script, but a different movie. Different camera angles. Different emphasis. A different language.
Dracula is a tale of domination, desire and bloodsucking, quite unlike the story of our public schools (although some would argue with me on this point). But both are the basis for alternative creations from the same basic materials.
CAPE’s after-school programming, made possible by a grant from the 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program of the Illinois State Board of Education, recasts the after-school environment as a curriculum laboratory for teachers, artists, and students. A place for innovation and professional development, rather than just a place for distracting and warehousing kids until their parents come home from work. The initiative conceives of after-school programming as curricular, rather than extra-curricular- field-testing approaches to teaching and learning that allow educators to teach in ways that they’ve always dreamed of. Teachers and artists explore strategies and content that expand the breadth and depth of their in-school curricular work. Thematic units are given the time they need to bud, bloom, fruit, and ripen. Students learn how to work in groups, to negotiate differences, to embrace challenges, and to take responsibility for their own learning.
The student work has been sophisticated and satisfying. For example, students at Williams Elementary created an exquisite performance piece that explored the human longing for flight, performed on the steps of Chicago’s downtown Cultural Center. Telpochcalli Elementary students researched activists from many cultures, designing and painting an extraordinary mural bringing these leaders together into a strong visual and social justice statement. At Waters Fine Arts Academy, students engaged the arts to track changes in their neighborhood and to document the use and misuse of natural resources. At all three schools, in-school programming is balanced with after-school programming in ways that move students from seeing themselves as being IN communities to seeing themselves as being OF and FOR communities.
This is a good thing, because children have only one life. Not an in-school life and an after-school life. One life.
As do we all. So how can we design coherent educational programs that connect the dots and fill in the spaces between all the broken lines? First of all, we need to recognize our own coherence as teachers and artists. And secondly, we need to support learners as leaders of their own learning.
It’s not that easy to do at first, but there are signs in the firmament to guide us on our way. We’ve got the sun in the morning and the moon at night.

Arnold Aprill
Founding and Creative Director
Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE)
www.capeweb.org