Former Manahawkin resident Kevin Bott’s life journey was a mix of exploration and perseverance as he tried to make his way as an artist. Having grown up directing and performing in Our Gang Players and Surflight Theatre productions, he assumed he would go on to be a big New York City actor. But after graduating from Southern Regional High School in 1991, he quickly dropped out of Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University to receive a bachelor’s degree in Italian.
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| Photo via Kevin Bott Bott uses his educational and artistic journey as focus for his mayoral run in Syracuse, N.Y. |
Although Italian did not necessarily bring music to his ears, either, Bott wound up directing a play for the Italian undergraduate department. To help keep the department from being annexed completely, he agreed to major in the foreign language, which required him to study abroad for a year in Florence.
“I was so far from having any kind of degree; it was not going to happen. I was already in the first semester of my junior year, and I was so far from having enough credits for anything. So I said, ‘Yeah, deal,” Bott remembered with a laugh. “Then my 10-year odyssey began.”
After graduating from Rutgers, Bott followed a woman he had met in Florence to San Francisco, where he re-enrolled in acting school at the American Conservatory Theater. Again, he lasted one semester.
“I was just exploring, just soaking up experiences. I didn’t know what I was doing at that point. I was trying to figure it out,” said Bott. “I was really miserable. I just thought, ‘This isn’t for me. I don’t know what’s going on.’”
Bott backpacked around India for six months with his girlfriend before he decided to move back to the States and try acting yet again.
“I had this lifelong dream of being an actor, and then that started to really compete with this much broader world view. So every time I would come back to acting, it just seemed more and more meaningless,” he said. “I would get into it, and I would be memorizing scripts, and I’d just sit back and think, ‘What is the point of all this?’ I loved working with people. I loved uplifting people. My strength that I developed was I loved the process of working with people who weren’t trained to be actors and encouraging them to really find and develop their talent. That became so much more satisfying than anything I could do on stage.”
At nearly 30 years old and still waiting tables, Bott said, he spent many days feeling sorry for himself. Then he met his now wife, Aimee Brill, and decided to go back to graduate school at New York University for educational theater. Looking to graduate with something more than “just another useless degree,” he began attending one of his professor’s acting workshops at a medium-security prison in New York City.
Bott became very involved with several different medium- and maximum-security prisons and worked as the educational director at Rehabilitation Through the Arts, a nonprofit organization in New York dedicated to using the creative arts as a tool for social and cognitive transformation behind prison walls.
“I was learning how to use theater to develop original stuff that the men would create,” said Bott. “It was really about helping them express what they were going through and reflect on why they were there and develop their abilities and their talents and allow them to experience what it feels like to have that sense of accomplishment that is rewarding when you create something from yourself.”
Bott graduated from NYU with a Ph.D. in educational theater and a full-time job at Imagining America, a national higher education organization that aims to advance knowledge and creativity through publicly engaged scholarships that draw on humanities, arts and design. As the associate director, this was his first 9-to-5 job.
“That was the beginning of a new chapter,” he said.
Feeling perplexed about sitting behind a desk for eight hours five days a week, as well as feeling politically discouraged, Bott again began to wonder what he was supposed to do next.
He was then inspired to begin the D.R.E.A.M Freedom Revival, which is short for Dr. Rev. Ebenezer Abernathy’s Mellifluously Melodious and Medicative Freedom Revival of Central Greater New York. A political performance art project that gathers people to talk about important issues, the pieces are built on theories on the interrelationships among politics, community and performance art and on historical themes of freedom struggles and tent revivals in that part of the Empire State. The project caught on quickly, and in October 2012, the program was awarded a $10,000 grant from the N.Y. Council for Humanities.
A New Approach To Politics
It was through D.R.E.A.M that Howie Hawkins, co-founder of the Green Party of the United States, who is running for a city council seat in Syracuse, got in touch with Bott. This past July, Hawkins asked him to run for mayor. After much deliberation, Bott agreed. With his goatee and ear piercings, others pressed him to dress more professionally. However, Bott said, he is not going to change his appearance.
“I decided I’m really going to treat this campaign as an art project, and I’m going to try to get people excited about the leadership skills that I bring that are very different from someone who went to law school or someone who’s a business person that’s going to be a politician.
“When I talk about democracy, there’s part of me that’s talking about voting and things like that, but I’m really talking about being invited to share in the conversation and the decision-making process, about all those issues that impact a person’s life. The very process of making theater is a very collaborative, democratic process. My understanding of leadership that I’ve kind of gained through all of this work is that a leader is facilitating a conversation, and that’s what I feel like I’ve learned how to do. In my work, I’m bringing people together and helping them to deliberate together, whether it’s about a creative decision, or how they’re going to play a certain part, or how they’re going to come to a compromise around whatever the point is. Then in the process of all that, they’re coming to deeper and deeper realizations about themselves and each other, which then facilitates the process of solving problems. It’s a very different model of leadership than ‘I’m in charge, and I’m going to make the decisions, and you can either buy into that or not buy into that.’”
Bott’s platform is centered around five main priorities, including leadership and vision, poverty and jobs, education, justice and birth, which he said are all interrelated.
Voting will take place on Nov. 5.
“I don’t have an opinion about whether I’m going to win,” he said. “I’m definitely trying to win, but it’s a very outside-of-the-box kind of campaign that I’m running. My incumbent mayor (Stephanie Miner, Syracuse’s first female mayor and a Democrat) has $350,000, and I think I raised a few hundred today. I’m definitely fighting against a very powerful, entrenched political system that isn’t very kind to third party candidates. We don’t have many third party candidates anywhere in the country. So It’s going to be a tough road, but victory for me is can I use this opportunity to open up the conversation beyond what it is?
“Our city is very poor. We’ve lost a lot of industrial jobs over the last 30 years, and 53 percent of our children are living in poverty in Syracuse. It’s a really intense situation. I think I bring a lot more of a progressive perspective about poverty and job creation than people who are your traditional elected officials who are typically going to support tax breaks for businesses and hope that businesses will build there and it’s going to make us new retail jobs. But that’s not a solution for people who are living in a grinding kind of desperate poverty. We need to address issues in a very different way, I think, and that’s not just for Syracuse, that’s everywhere across the country. So that’s what I’m building my campaign on. I’ve spent my adult life inventing ways for people to come together to solve problems that don’t seem solvable. I’m making the argument that I think that’s the kind of leadership that we need in a world that environmentally, politically, economically and socially is really kind of ripping at the seams. Do we keep electing the same people who helped to create that problem, or do we kind of think that the safe choice might be something else?”
To read more about Bott’s campaign and to donate, visit http://www.kevinbott.org/.
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