Deven Bussey is the eldest of five siblings who have attended, or still attend, MWS. We are glad that our alumni stay in touch and share their news with us. Here, Deven reflects on how his Meadowbrook experience prepared him for his unique career path.
I graduated from Meadowbrook Waldorf School back in 2004, and while there are a lot of things that have led me to where I am today (which is Taipei, Taiwan!), Meadowbrook played a big role. I moved to Zhuhai, China in 2012 after graduating from Skidmore College. I lived there for two years, teaching English at Sun-Yat-Sen University, before moving to Chengdu for the better part of five years. During that time, I studied Mandarin and worked as a college counselor, before moving into video production work, which is my current focus. I moved to Taipei in February to pursue more opportunities in this area.
Over the past four or so years, I’ve produced and directed music documentaries, shot a pilot for a TV series, traveled around China shooting a tourism project, filmed concerts, music videos and much more. My next project will be a web TV series in Taiwan about a group of students learning how to produce electronic music and market themselves as up-and-coming artists.
I’d say the most exiting project was a documentary I shot with my friend called Break The Wall, about the history of underground dance music in China. For that film, I had the chance to travel to places such as Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai Yunnan among many others, and interview some of the most influential people in the electronic music scene in that part of the world. Finally, I was able to attend ADE (Amsterdam Dance Event), when the film premiered there!
Throughout this journey, I like to look back on how I came to be doing these things. They weren’t things that I planned to do but more the result of “hey, that sounds interesting and unique, why not do that?” This way of thinking is something I attribute to Meadowbrook and my Waldorf education. For example, there were many opportunities I got in China just by being willing to speak Mandarin and try something outside my comfort zone. I went to smaller cities to play guitar and sing at events where a lot of the people had never seen a foreigner in the flesh before! I gave a speech in Chinese about tourism in Sichuan for a forum attended by many of the regional governors. My proudest fun moment may have been when I made it onto the pages of Vogue Taiwan modeling a winter jacket for a marketing campaign that some of my friends were doing!
To me, these experiences, while a bit out-of-the-box, have been some of the most worthwhile as they led me to meet people and explore places that I would have never had the chance to normally. I can also see how a different version of myself would have dismissed some of these opportunities as “not worthwhile” or “too strange”, just as some might view Eurythmy (though I can't imagine my 10-year-old self ever thinking that Eurythmy was not the best use of my time…).
I was back visiting Rhode Island this past summer, and I remember talking with my younger brother, Will, who had just graduated from Meadowbrook and was looking forward to starting at The Prout School. He enjoyed his time at Meadowbrook but he was telling me how excited he was to do more “typical” things, like join sports teams etc. I understood what he meant, but I also had to smile a little, having gone to the same high school myself. I went on to tell him that, of all my educational stops (including the Catholic high school and a liberal arts college), Meadowbrook is easily the one that made the greatest impact on me, and is the experience that stands out the most, even 15 years later. There’s nothing wrong with “typical” but the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve been able to see the things I thought I may have been missing out on as a middle-school student were just that: typical.
Betty Merner and the Class of 2004 (Deven in the black hat)
Talking with my brother also got me thinking about how some of the unique things that I learned at Meadowbrook have helped me in really practical ways. I’ve become quite comfortable doing public speaking and voice-over work, and I know that the yearly plays I participated in at Meadowbrook set a foundation for that. So much of what we learned at Meadowbrook was also taught through the form of stories and I truly believe that helped me build up a strong sense of narrative structure that has helped me a lot with my recent film work. We were even decorating a set for a music video recently and I was brought back to one time when we decorated our classroom as a “crystal cave” for gnomes!
Finally, as someone who was never a math lover, I can confirm that I still do simple multiplication in my head using the rhymes that I was taught in 2nd or 3rd grade! I will never forget that “9 times 8 is seventy-twoooooo, then 80, 88, 96 and we’re through!”
Last summer, I had a chance to reconnect with my teacher Mrs. Merner and a few of the students from our graduating class. One thing that really struck me was how, for such a small class, we had all ended up following very different and interesting paths that strayed away from normal or, god forbid, boring! That’s what I’m most grateful to Meadowbrook for. For instilling this sense in me that different isn’t bad and that trying things I may not love, or that I initially would have dismissed as uninteresting, have led to some of the best opportunities and experiences of my life.
