Do Your Own 50 Year Experiment: Ideas of Buckminster Fuller with D W Jacobs

D. W. Jacobs (Playwright, Director & Actor) first heard Bucky speak in the Spring of 1968, when he was a Freshman at UC Santa Barbara. He was studying political geography, but already taking a slow turn into the study of the Dramatic Arts. In the 1980s, while running San Diego Repertory Theatre with his co-founder, he fell into reading Fuller’s Critical Path. That book gave him a whole new understanding of Bucky’s global vision, as well as some practical insights into running an arts organization.

In 1995, he directed the opening event of the Bicentennial of Bucky’s birthday on July 12. In working on that, he met Bucky’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, and her husband, Robert Snyder (a documentary filmmaker). In the process of meeting so many people from the world of Buckminster Fuller, Jacobs got the idea to write a one man play about Bucky, based initially on Bob Snyder’s book based on his video footage of Bucky, but eventually drawing bits and pieces from all of Fuller’s major works. To write the play, Jacobs had to resign from the demanding job of being a theatre’s Artistic Director.

Five years later, R. Buckminster Fuller: THE HISTORY (and Mystery) OF THE UNIVERSE, written and directed by D. W. Jacobs, had its world premiere at San Diego Rep on March 31, 2000. Over the last 20 years, the play has been performed all over the USA, but also in Montreal (in French), and in Krakow and Wrocław, Poland (performed in English with Polish subtitles.) Jacobs has also lectured on Bucky at the Wrocław University of Science and Technology.

In this session, Jacobs will share a few of the things he’s learned from 50 years of exposure to Bucky’s ideas and integrities, as they’ve fallen out of fashion, and then back into fashion, with shocking relevance to our current floods, fires and global turmoil. We will explore the theme of our lives as partially overlapping 50 year experiences.

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Welcome to the series "Comprehensivist Wednesdays". Transdisciplinarity, Renaissance humanism, homo universalis, and Polymathy are some of the ways of describing this approach which Buckminster Fuller called Comprehensivity and described as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive”.

Why Be a Comprehensivist? https://youtu.be/qjwTy6pGkNA
‪Introduction to Louis Sullivan’s Ideas: https://youtu.be/oM8vbQQ-4MU
‪Humanity's Great Traditions of Inquiry and Action with CJ‬ Fearnley https://youtu.be/8RuHE_3FMUs
‪Applying Science & Math to Humanities with Spencer Greenberg https://youtu.be/P7sJrtwazeI
‪Mapping Human Condition with Two Axes & Four Functions https://youtu.be/aM8i8pzFjo8
The Necessities and Impossibilities of being a Comprehensivist‬
‪https://youtu.be/u6372Te2YA8
Aug 19: Polymaths in 21st Century with Angela‬
‪Aug 26: Art Education: Individual & Society with Karen ‬
‪Sep 2: Neuroscience: Why are our Habits so Powerful? with Sanjay‬
‪Sep 9: Four Cardinal Greek Virtues in Visual Art & Mythology by John Roth
‪Sep 16: The Fundamental Role of Story in Our Lives
‪Sep 23: Lightening Talks (Talk for 5 minutes about what you are exploring)‬
Sep 30: The Great Conversation & Syntopicon of Mortimer Adler with Shrikant

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