Art Is Transformation

Friends: Here are some notes and conversation we had. Love your thoughts, additions, to extend the conversation.

Too Many Leos*

Reflections on Art Gathering From Ann and Peter

We are undertaking the sacred return of the living body into the arms of a loving mind. The sacred return of the vibrantly alive self into the arms of a loving community.

Embodied Art is a practice in the alternative to empire. Which is one function art serves in the world. It offers us an alternative to our continual "little suicides" which we have learned to override the body's deep intelligence.

Holding empire and the alternative together produces resistance to the status quo, could call it "creative tension." It's a palpable experience of the relationship between the present and the future, being and becoming.

"Don't calm down, make art." Art is constructive passion, or constructed passion. Art unleashes capacity and reveals new resources. So does a fully-deeply breathing body.

Freedom and the deeply breathing body are the contact and
emancipation of the Feminine.

Improvisation

Improvisational theater is a collective art, it's different from individual-expression mediums. This was the genius of Moreno’s psychodrama. It broke down separation between audience/observer and participant. The most intimate moments of a life become community property and in that way are released. It is prime for social revelation and transformation.

The embody-ness work (Ecstacize) that we did in Ohio is a foundational practice for an Art-full way of being in the world. It’s a Feminine form of meditation, presence-ing aliveness and inspiring movement from the body.
Embodied Improv takes it (authentic-embodied self) into the added layers of social context: relationship to the other and serving the scene, listening to the whole.

In the gathering we proceeded to build our kinesthetic model which was ripe with revelation about our unspoken cultural agreements about relationship. At minimum we agreed to add to another’s creation, not to break it down. We agreed to play by the rules laid down by John; silence, time limit, posting thoughts. Given the structure, we act as equals, no expertise authorized.

An example of unspoken collective agreement was how the group proceeded to create primarily as individual expressions. A group of relational improvisers would likely have begun with a different social “contract” - perhaps taking a breath together and making eye-contact with each other player before beginning…perhaps there would have been just one offer/movement of a piece at a time. A different rhythm/awareness/balance of relationship between self, one other, & whole.
And we did change other’s placement of objects in the model. Not in the moment, but in the process, as a result of how we chose to create.

Breath

Your body is the Smart(est) Phone and can tell when it's happening, whatever the words. Body does not lie. What AS improvisation does is consider the body as an active agent. We keep it in play, in motion and treat all its movements as important, no matter how small. We also treat the body as a source of surprise. A voice of its own. Plus in this presence, or consciousness, I reclaim my body as my own. This is what improv has in common with yoga practice. In fact, it is yoga practice.

Art as the Feminine

We midwife the transition from a sports-paradigm (one winner) to an art-paradigm (co-creators.) This is why art welcomes the Feminine. Not only co-creators, but no losers. We invoke the Feminine. Which may be the whole point. Body and mind as Sacred Lovers. Temporal and Eternal. Alive and Aligned.

Change Be a Useless Word

If self-improvement is violent why are we always talking about changing the world? Rather than talking about feeling and experiencing the world. Loving it. Empire produces the language of change agents, change the world, develop those poor countries, management development, change management. All acts of violence. Experience becomes the alternative to development.

In organic improv, it translates as: Attend to the Yes, and movement happens. This may become the distinction between change and transformation. Transformation is essentially communal and self inflicted. Change is born of isolation and is coercive.

Poetry

Brueggemann: The Poetry is a form of welcome. Poetry is an act of emancipatory imagination. Poets are able (and compelled!) to go to the depth of the crisis and to reach deep into God's own conflicted heart.

***
Internalized empire is so painful. And escaping and transforming it is holy. It's an odd culture that would have us homeless in our own bodies. What people do in moments, years, of being-displaced, and how they return,
is holy terrain.

Sacred Exhaustion (by AS)

Awake in the night
I swim upstream
In search of my holiness

I am getting nowhere
In the search for my body
With my head

The garden is here somewhere
I know it
I know it
I know it

Fear, Enter, Open, Whole

I'm afraid if I enter your house
You'll want me to leave something outside
My eyes
Or my belly
Or my voice
Something important, anyway
Not just my shoes

I'm afraid if I open
Something will get out
Flock of doves
Broken sunlight
A rabid bat
Holy laughter

I'm afraid I know
I'm not going anywhere
Until the rest of me comes along

The Mind is a Wonderful Thing to Waste

Abstractification (term from Temple Grandin, who, as someone with autism,
is literally a visual thinker) blocks us from the wisdom of direct
experience.

Over-thinking, all-head-thinking, no-body-ness locks us out of our senses,
knocks us cold. Women, artists, and sensitive men are the
canaries in the abstractification/virtual reality mine.

In a virtual-reality, displaced from our bodies, unallowed to live fully,
our nervous system connected to nothing in the room, we are down for the
count, pulse weak, breathing shallow, muscles tense from holding back,
voice silent from being unheard, our head-thoughts rampant as rats running
upward to escape the fire down below in our yearning-to-live bodies.
People are walking around exhausted from holding up their false head on a
stick to present to the world.

This is the modern version of slavery. The slavery of experience which parallels the slavery of a conceded life. The effect of restless productivity. A never enough world. To awaken from this state is revolution. The only reform that matters.

Transforming from Sports Paradigm to Art Paradigm. Where surrender is not a dirty word.

Rules of Engagement for Art/Transformative Paradigm

1. First, do no harm ( “Get your meaning off me.”)

2. Language-ing from ground up, rather than top-down. Faithful to revelation and surprise (not dogma/repetition)

3. Individual voices are affirmed and created with (not dominated/erased.)

4. Offering people a life-line, not a party-line or bottom-line.

5. 3-Fold awareness: Self, Other, Whole. Co-co-creating.

6. Creative “tension” (of the past meeting the future into new possibility) rather than competitive tension (recreating a familiar future/”winner”)

7.Unity-making through co-creation, rather than separation/Us vs. Them

8. Uses “breaking of rules” for inquiry, not penality/punishment

9. Guided by bodily experience rather than right-wrong/”should” heads

10. Heeds living signs, not dead/ening symbols

11.Awareness of evolving legacy (individual&collective)

Titles
Just as roots inform the leaves, titles feel like leaves informing the roots.
The Disappearing Body: A Sensory-Deprivation Epidemic
The Art of Emergence: Improv for Allowing a New Future
A Social Response-ability: Hearing Bodies, Healing Minds, A World for All
Take Your Body to Work Day?

Plans of What We Might Do
Ohio was a taste of the foundational body-ness, and from there comes the actual medium/art of improv itself: listening to what's alive together and following it into a shape/"meaning" - character, place, narrative. It's potent.