Welcome to the fourteenth episode of Sustaining Craft the Podcast, a series that features those in a creative field. Listen below to learn more or keep scrolling to read about Legenia Bearden and her vision of affordable arts for all!

Legenia Bearden knew in the second grade that she wanted to make the arts accessible to everyone.

She’d grown up in Houston, Texas before moving to Little Rock in her mid-twenties. On a field trip as a child, she saw The Sound of Music at Jones Hall. “I was absolutely amazed by what I saw on stage,” Bearden shared. “Cast full of children, and it was just the most wonderful thing I had ever seen and all I knew was I wanted to do the same thing. And I’d always been a singer. I was always performing in my mirror at home anyway, so this was just like, ‘Yeah, this is what I want to do.’ So I remember going home and talking to my mom about the show, telling her I wanted to be an actor, I want to take acting classes, I want to be on stage like the kids in the show.”

But they couldn’t afford classes. “I remember saying, ‘Well, when I grow up, I’m gonna to make sure kids who want to act are gonna be able to act,’” Bearden said. “And that’s just something that had always stuck with me.”

Bearden didn’t take the stage until high school, first performing in the show choir and then as lead Mary Lennox in the musical version of The Secret Garden. The drama teacher invited her to audition, having already set aside the role for Bearden. “So I went and auditioned, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, this is great,’” Bearden said. “I had fun, even during the audition. So I got the part. So my very first theatrical role, I was the main character. And so, of course, I just knew I was all that. So I did it and I loved it. It was just the best feeling in the world for me.”

From there, she started traveling for competitions, winning awards across Texas. And she found that were multiple benefits to acting. “Well, for myself, it helped me socially, you know,” Bearden shared. “I was an introvert, believe it or not. I loved to perform, but when it came to actually meeting people and just being open and social, I’d always felt very awkward. But participating in the arts, you meet so many people that are just outgoing and fun. It kind of put me in an uncomfortable position and it made me be social. So it helped me in that aspect, but also it helped me academically because it was like I had my creative outlet, so I loved going to school because I knew, number one, I was going to get to go to choir, and I knew that I was going to be able to participate in the shows.”

Bearden fell in love with all aspects of theater work — performing, singing, and even writing. She wrote, produced, and directed her first play in Houston when she was 23, then brought the performance to Arkansas a few years later. “I was a writer too,” Bearden explained. “I was always writing plays, and I remember this one play in particular that I wrote called ‘The Chuch.’ It was actually titled ‘Chuch,’ C-H-U-C-H. And I remember because when I was growing up, I’d hear my grandma say ‘Chuch. Let’s get ready for chuch.’ She’d always leave out the ‘r’. And that just stuck with me and that was the title of one of my first plays, ‘The Chuch’, that I actually wrote, produced, and directed.”

With a cast of 30, the show performed in Little Rock at a local church, then in Pine Bluff at the convention center. When the show went to Harrisburg, Pa., the future name of the arts center was born. ‘The cast members, they just starting calling us, ‘Hey this is a Bearden Production,’” Bearden said. “They kind of came up with the name, the cast members. And so it’s just something we just kept, Bearden Productions. And so after the show, I said, ‘Ok, you know, I want to keep doing this.’ That’s how it started.”

Determined to fulfill the vision she’d had as a child, Bearden began researching to make her dream, the Bearden Productions Center for the Arts, a reality. In 2006, she found the resources to file for her 501(c)(3) status and was approved three months later.

But it would be another eight years to fully get her vision off the ground. “I just stopped doing stuff, once we got our 501(c)(3) status,” Bearden explained. “It just wasn’t moving fast enough for me when I tried to actually start the business, so I kind of let it just sit there and nothing happened until 2014.

She taught drama for a bit, then worked for the city until 2014. “When I started Bearden Productions, I was still working at the city, and it would just be on my heart every day as I was driving to work,” Bearden shared. “And I’m like, I’m thinking, ‘Oh, I don’t want to be going to work.’ I just knew I was not supposed to be doing it. I just knew in my heart, this is not something I’m supposed to be doing. So I remember, that one particular day, I was crying on my way to work. I went to work, I sat down, and I’m still crying. I’m working. During my lunch, I said, ‘Ok, if I do this, I’m going to need a building.’”

She found the space, renting a dance studio in the basement of a church for $300 a month. “And it was ours,” Bearden said. “Just that simple, just that quick. Like all within a week. I thought about it, I moved, and I did it.”

Bearden also looked for help, attending workshops and seminars. “Seek help,” she advises others. “Do research on your own. … I was always reading. And if it’s something that you really want to do, you’ve got to put in the time. You’ve got to put in the time, and you’ve got to put in the resources. I would just encourage you to set aside time every day to put in the time to work towards your goal. What you have, the community needs, especially if it’s a nonprofit and you know that it’s something that is in your heart to do that you were born to do. Your community needs it, so you’ve got to work towards it every single day.”

The very first class offered was improv for children, acting without a script. “So you are forced to think on the spot,” Bearden said. “Be creative. Come up with something. You have to keep the scene going. You have to keep the audience entertained. So you have to think on your feet. Our students are forced to be creative and so it kind of teaches them to think on the spot, to think quickly, to work well with their partner or their team. So they learn a lot about team building. They learn a lot about quick thinking. Again, they’re forced to be creative. So, it kind of puts you in a position where you have no choice, or you’re just going to stand there and look silly, and that’s their fear, is looking silly in front of their fellow class members.”

Now, the center offers painting, dancing, acting, and cooking across 15 classes. Seventeen teachers work with 78 children. And in the fall of 2018, Bearden Productions partnered with the school system, teaching in local arts departments.

Some might find the addition of cooking to an arts center unusual, but Bearden has found cooking to be a natural addition to their programs. “Well, for one, I love cooking, and I’ve always wanted us to be set apart from everyone else and what every other arts center is doing,” Bearden explained. “And cooking is an art, because you’re creating something, and art is all about creativity. And I almost feel like I have to prove that to people, but it really is what it is. You are creating something. Truth of the matter is when people sit down and they get ready to eat or when they’re choosing something to eat, you eat with your eyes first. It’s appealing first to the eye. Does it look good? And if you put a plate of food in front of me that is beautifully presented as opposed to something that’s kind of sloppy, more than likely, nine times out of ten, you’re going to choose that beautiful plate. The one that looks delicious. And that’s an art.”

The arts center also features theatrical plays every year, completing seven productions since 2014. Bearden would like for the center to have its own theater, a classroom kitchen, a dance studio with a floating floor, a theatrical classroom, and a gallery. “My goal is to have a large, state-of-the-art arts center for these kids,” Bearden said. “So that it’s just not, again, not just a place to go and do something, but so that their art be perfected but that it can also be presented to the community and everyone can see how great they are.”

Bearden wants to bring the community together. Her productions, with all the emotion that they relay, keep audiences enthralled. And Bearden knows why. “Because it provokes change, especially in the world that we’re living in today,” Bearden said. “I feel division–in certain aspects, it’s always been there, but it’s more prevalent today with video cameras and news. Just everything that’s going on in society.”

Bearden also knows the power of the arts to affirm. “I think we’re changing lives, and that’s what it’s all about,” Bearden said. “That’s what Bearden Productions is all about. Changing lives. Making people feel good about whatever it is that they’re doing. Of course, we’re all about the arts. But, in whatever it is that they’re doing, if we can make them better, or we can make them realize, ‘No, I don’t think I like dance, I want to be a doctor,’ then we’ve helped them. We’ve helped them realize that.”

And it’s all done at an affordable price. Classes cost $35 a month, and siblings get another $10 off. Prices are offset with grants and donations from individuals and businesses.

“Our mission is to provide arts programming at affordable rates for families,” Bearden said. “Of course, it costs to run an arts center. We have to pay instructors. And the thing about Bearden Productions is I never wanted it to be just some afterschool place where you can just bring your kids just to do something. … You’re going to get instructors that love what they do, that have been doing it for years, and they’re going to really teach your kids skill and everything that they need to go on to the next step if they want to do. With that affordability, you also get quality. And that’s what we want, quality for our kids.”

Ultimately, Bearden wants to encourage others to write that novel, read that poem out loud, or cook that meal. “Creativity is a beautiful, beautiful thing,” Bearden shared. “I once heard this preacher. He’s since passed. He said this and I thought this was so great. It’s always stuck with me. He said that the cemeteries are rich. They’re so rich, and he says they’re some of the richest places on earth. And he said, some people ask, ‘Well, why do you say that the cemeteries are the richest places on earth?’ And he said, ‘Because so many people go to the grave, their graves, full.’ And he said, ‘So when you get ready to leave this earth, go to your graves empty.’ Meaning that there are so many people that leave this earth that have a passion to write, or to paint, or to draw, or to dance. And there are so many books in those cemeteries that have never been read. There are so many paintings in those cemeteries that have never been seen. There is so much poetry that has never been heard. And he said, ‘So you’re going to your graves full of all of that goodness. So make it a point in your life right now to get all of that goodness, all of that creativity, out of you.’ Let the world see those paintings. Let the world hear those songs that have never been written yet. Because we want to hear them and those weren’t given to you just go to the grave and make the grave rich. They were meant to be shared with the world.”

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Find more information about Legenia’s work on the arts center’s website, Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. And as always, there’s lots more in the episode! Listen below.