Agility in our perspective.
Cate and Nicole generously invited me back to their show on Kootenay Co-op Radio, Authenticity Inc, for another Interview this past June.
We talked (over Zoom) about how life has been in the midst of this scary time in the global pandemic. And how perspective and agility in our perspective can help us navigate our way through these times.
Have a listen and let me know what you think in the comments below.
Photo by Nathan Mullet
Thank you Cate and Nicole for having me on the show again.
~Markus
After seven years, it is finally here...
Markus’ book that is!
We are very excited to announce that Expressive Arts Education and Therapy: Discoveries in a Dance Theatre Lab Through Creative Process-based Research is NOW AVAILABLE for purchase through Brill Publishing. (It is also available on Amazon, The Book Depository, and through your local independent bookstores online.)
About the book:
In Expressive Arts Education and Therapy the reader follows the creation of art-making in tandem with the unfolding of sense-making. A dance theatre lab is the stage for exploration where what was discovered was phenomenologically and collaboratively reflected upon, the participatory nature of the creative work pouring into the research methodology. Creative Process-based Research efficacy is contingent upon the interaction of three poles – the creator, the product and an experience of the internal/external creative process of the creator. All three perspectives comprise the dynamics required of this research methodology in order to understand what is occurring in these three distinct and essential elements of the creative process. What results is an experience of cohesion that consciously describes this interplay.
The author outlines his influences that contributed to both the art-making and sense-making over the seven year research project. His work in experimental theatre in New York, as an educator with The European Graduate School in Switzerland and his studies with philosopher John de Ruiter in Canada are integrated into the world of research in the field of expressive arts. The visceral component of creating clarity is uncovered and articulated. This book inspires new ways of thinking about participatory, collaborative, arts-centered research where the skill of exposing the artist/researcher’s modus operandi for making art and making sense is named in a myriad of ways that call upon the intellect as well as the artist’s intuitive sense of what to focus on and its relevance to education, therapy and global health.
Chasing Inspiration
Please take some time, make yourself a cup of tea and watch this beautiful film from Lucia Cardenas.
Lucia is an AHS alumnus, and she made this beautiful film as part of her MA Thesis at the Division of Arts, Health and Society at the European Graduate School. It features AHS students and faculty speaking about inspiration and the expressive arts.
Being with the Arts is our Way of Being in the World.
Subscribe to my new Youtube Channel.
I’ve been wanting to have another medium to share my thoughts and processes around Expressive Arts for some time now and have started a new Youtube Channel for just this purpose. I hope to spark new conversations and thoughts in all who watch.
I’ll be adding new videos weekly, so please hop on over and subscribe to my Channel, like and share the videos, and let me know what you think in the comments!
The Business of Being Real
The views in Nelson are magnificent.
While teaching in Nelson, B.C. this past September, I had the opportunity to be interviewed by Nicole Le Bihan and Kate Baio from Authenticity Inc, a Radio show on Kootany Co-op Radio.
Have a listen to the interview ‘The Business of Being Real’.
Street Art in Nelson, B.C.
Part Three: COMMUNITY ART MAKING
THIS IS PART THREE OF AN INTERVIEW WITH
MARKUS SCOTT-ALEXANDER, PHD
BY PETER MAI, MD
AT THE EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
JUNE 30, 2018
~
Q: In your teaching you introduced resonance, recognition, and participation. How are they related to each other?
That comes out of my work with philosopher, John de Ruiter. If I come into a room of people and I’d like them to participate in something, again the first thing that I sense is that I am a kind human being, not just a person who has skill. I don’t care how much skill I have. If I walk into a room and I want them to participate and they don’t get good vibes, they are turned off even before we begin. So it is for me to establish resonance in the manner with which I enter a room; that I am reachable, that they see that I see and hear them. It is first to establish a kind, open resonance in the room between me and them and between themselves.
To establish resonance is a visceral phenomenon. There is such a thing as energy and if I come in angry it’s going to be very hard, but if I come in open and soft-hearted and delighted to be given this responsibility, they will sense that and there is a resonance, sometimes for people consciously and sometimes subconsciously, but people pick up and establish resonance.
Then if I want people to participate it’s important to be clear. “What would you like us to do?” Recognition: “Aha. I see. You want us to slowly start walking backwards because you want to teach us how we don’t have to be afraid of something that’s scary. Could you say that again? What do you mean not afraid of something that’s scary?” “Oh, you know, like how kids say ‘this is scary; let’s do it’. I mean like that.”
The recognition is creating clarity. I will not assume anything just because I’ve done it before or it seems obvious. Before I have them participate, it is my responsibility that I am very clear about the frame and about what I’m asking of them. We move from resonance to recognition, and it increases the chances that when we’re ready and I say: “let’s go”, they will participate.
For me that sequence is always; it is a black and white thing. You cannot skip steps. You come as a human being, establish resonance; then you come as a practiced practitioner and show that you have the skill, and from there be clear in what you are asking of them in a linear, step-by-step way. Then when you begin the process of unfolding participation, you go through that cycle again and again and again.
If I’m going to ask them to let go a little bit more, they are sensing the resonance or they trust me again. I check that I am clear about what I am asking them to do next, for the next level of participation. So I might have ten resonance/recognition/participation cycles, one for each turn of the spiral as we go more and more fully into and toward that celebratory event.
Q: Another question came to mind about self-care of the facilitator: how do you use community art as a self-care event for people who are really drawn into their professional lives to take care of others?
For me, it’s a way of life. I cannot facilitate anything if I am a jumbled mess, if I am anxious or distracted. I cannot put on my expressive arts facilitator hat and suddenly expect to be able to create a cohesion event if I’m not experiencing stillness within myself. So that pressure to take care of myself in order to be able to do sensitive work works for me. I take care of myself; I make sure I get to bed early enough if I have community art in the morning so that I’m rested and responsive. If my energy is low, they can tell in the resonance. They can tell that I’m pushing if I’m tired so I get to bed early. I take care not to have more than one glass of wine. Very simple things. Because I work so much, I have to take very good care of myself constantly. Because I love to work, it’s the just-right pressure that I have to be in good shape.
In addition to it being a way of life, I cannot be spontaneous if I don’t have a resonance with my own capacity for the stillness where my ideas come from. I need to be playful constantly, and then return to a stillness; be playful and return to a stillness again and again. I need that dexterity to come back to the source of my inspiration deep within me and then back out in a joyful, big way – and then back to that quiet place of formulation, many, many times when I’m working, whether it’s as an expressive arts therapist, educator or facilitator. So my self-care is that dexterity to go way in and way out.
Part of my self-care is not only that I know how to go into my stillness, but that I don’t lose that stillness and I don’t lose my core when I go way out into embracing 150 people, or when I’m away from home four months out of the year. My resonance with home, within, is there. It is sustaining not only my awareness of my criteria for well-being, but it supports my simply liking that I feel well when I’m under pressure, that I like the pressure to be only true to what I know.
For example, I know not to binge in something, whatever it is, even if it is having fun. I like that I know how to take care of myself so I can do as much work as I do. More than it being a discipline of self-care, it is that I am so glad and I like so much that I can be available to my inner sanctum, commensurate with how I can be available to the world, simultaneously. It’s not a discipline; it’s a deep gratitude and enjoyment of that slowly developed ability. I just really like it. It’s one thing to love the sacredness of the inner life and to love being in the world, but it’s another thing to like that you’re able to. I think that’s what sustains it moment to moment, day to day, when I’m working. I’m just liking that I know something about self-care. I know how to feed myself well. I know how to have a balanced day.
Not only do I know how, but I like that I can give what I know a life in my everyday life. I like the balance of the extraordinary and the ordinary. My ordinary is almost always un-ordinary because of the heightened awareness that I bring to ordinary things. I like my everyday things, quite frankly, just as much as the extraordinary. I like how these extraordinary things we do enrich my everyday life. So the self-care feels pretty much the same when I’m facilitating a group of 150 people or making breakfast. It’s just the joy of being able to respond with delight at our ability to give what we are a life in who we are.
Q: That resonates beautifully in myself, Markus. I can see that you have become your own father and mother to yourself, which is wonderful! Are you able to teach that?
I often say that there’s you and then, there’s your self. Your self is a construct, and if it was constructed then it can be deconstructed. Let’s see what of the self is real and will stay and what of the self will fall away because you just developed it to be pleasing or accommodating or loveable. You are like a parent that needs to hold your self kindly and intelligently, and be the mother that sometimes says, “Sweetheart, you’re so smart!” or the father that sometimes says, “That’s enough.”
You as a self are in the care of you as you. It is to help people get a felt sense of the difference between their essence, the you that doesn’t really change, and this constantly changing self that loses center, finds center, loses direction, finds direction; this incredibly malleable self that is in your care. Strengthen your resonance with the knower, with what you know, to take care of the self which has all these thoughts and feelings. Sometimes you say, “I see, sweetheart, that you have strong feelings about that, but what do you actually know?”
For example, if I work with a thirteen-year-old child who feels suicidal, and who needs to start parenting himself because his parents are quite absent or barely there, I would say to this thirteen-year-old: “So, you say you feel worthless and you want to die. Is that what you feel or is that what you know? Do you know it’s true that you’re worthless?” (Of course, the child is in crisis and I have to work very quickly; that’s different. It’s like he is in quicksand, versus the child who is not in crisis but in kind of a fog and I can work a little bit longer.) I have to discern how quickly to work, but basically, as kindly and intelligently as I can, I help him to have a physical sense or visceral awareness of the difference between what he knows and what he thinks and feels. He can say: “I know I’m okay even though I feel like killing myself, so I’m not going to listen to what I think and feel. I’m going to go back to what I know.”
It’s quite sophisticated in one way and in another way it’s quite elemental. It’s a little scary that we’ve gotten so far from the phenomenon of knowing and trusting that more than what we think and feel. So that’s connected to parenting yourself well. The final voice is the knower which is like the parent who says: “You need to shift your focus right now because you’re in a spin.”
Q: When you talked about self-care in the class, you mentioned the intimacy of the moment.
Yes. When I’m with a client or student, it’s not about my relationship with them. It includes my relationship with them, but it’s about my relationship to the moment, the fact that both of us are sharing the same moment.
How intimate can you be? The more delicate the moment, the more delicate the manner with which we hold the moment together, the more intimate it is. I have found that people become self-conscious if I’m holding them as intimately as I can; it’s too much.
It needs to be about a much more spherical phenomenon. The moment is tiny and huge at the same time; the nano-moment as well as eternal moment. In this moment that is so exquisitely tiny and so exquisitely huge, our connection is somehow moving in that. It’s coming alive within this delicate, real, new unfolding. Our ability to track that more; that awareness of this moment feels like our relationship is growing, but I’m not working on growing the relationship. I’m working on being more subtle in my ability to enjoy this moment that includes our relationship.
Sometimes I’ll just look at them, loving the moment, and self-consciously they’ll say, “What? What are you seeing?” They think I’m analyzing them, but I’m just enjoying the delicateness of the moment as I become more aware of the nuances of their stepping in or moving back from the moment. As kindly and intelligently as I can, I help them to relax into the intimacy of the moment, rather than into the intimacy with themselves with me present, or the intimacy of our relationship, and help them to keep relaxing into a more relaxed ability to just enjoy the moment which includes our connection.
Q: Let’s look at how to teach community arts. Any special skills, any special personality qualities needed to become a facilitator?
Yes. Absolutely. If you don’t have an inherent capacity for kindness, it won’t work. I can help people to do things more intelligently but I cannot teach them how to be kind. Teaching community art must be done kindly and intelligently because it is all about taking care.
Q: It can’t be an ego trip.
It can’t be a wanting or needing for people to like the way you do it, or to be seen. It is to kindly and intelligently serve the unfolding, and the teacher of the didactics of art will constantly be faced with misunderstandings about what leadership is or what learning is or what cohesion is, and must not only respond intelligently to these questions, but kindly and intelligently. Otherwise, I will try to be patient with people who are confused, and trying to be patient is not it. It comes down to responding as kindly and intelligently as you can to any confusion or misunderstanding of what the work is and what your role is.
The other thing that I think is important in teaching the didactics is that as a teacher it is very important to know the difference between setting the frame and entering into the frame you set and; how to stay in that frame and how to step out of the frame and; how to harvest what has occurred and how to reflect on it all. So there are many aspects and facets to it, and; in order to teach it you really need to know in your body through experience each aspect of that creative process.
Q: Are there any main issues or pillars of the didactics of community arts which need to be looked at or understood?
Yes. I would say an understanding of the chaos theory is important; that is, a real understanding of the self-organizing principle and the phenomenon of attractors. In order to facilitate community art, I find it to be essential to understand how in the chaos something is wanting to happen here and how to build that just-right atmosphere where people are clearly given the message and instructions on how to let go into what’s wanting to happen; and also given instruction on how to notice the attractors.
“Something seems to be happening here.” I’ll join that, rather than trying to be creative or willful. Sometimes I’ll have an idea and someone will do something and I’ll like that and go with that. They create something that becomes an attractor. Rather than saying this is too chaotic, I give myself to the self-organizing principle that I know is real in the chaos theory. Then, I can recognize that something new has emerged. If I don’t like surprises I cannot do the work, so I would say a pillar is liking surprises, not only loving them. In the moment saying: “I like this. Wow! I had not expected this. Wonderful!”
The other pillar is liking being transparent. I would say in front of the whole group: “This is a surprise, ladies and gentlemen. Look at what just happened here with Peter. Let’s...” and invite something new. I would be transparent that I was surprised. It’s not only to model it, but it’s to live the experience of surprise, and to be transparent.
Then in the harvesting, another pillar is to talk my process; that is, to be intimate as a teacher. To say: “I was so touched by that moment” and to describe what I did. In this way, as a teacher I’m not only talking about what happens on the surface but I’m also giving a little glimpse of my inner process on how I came to make that choice. That’s a pillar: that you need to be able to describe your inner creative process in the choices you make, and to inspire the participants to strengthen their connection with their own inner process. In that way they don’t just see what you’ve done and have it become about techniques for creating cohesion. Instead, they see that it is a balance of learning the skills and needing to be consistently inspired. Sometimes the inspiration comes from something within and something from without.
That’s also a pillar: to be aware that sometimes it comes from within and sometimes from without. There is a dexterity to tracking your response to what’s happening in the room, within you, and; tracking what is happening in the room itself. To respond to what’s happening on the surface and say: “ let’s shift our focus to what’s happening over here in the room”, for example, that which didn’t come from within but came from without. Having and enjoying that dexterity of awareness is also fundamental. That’s a real pillar: where you get your inspiration from.
So there is a kind of chaos and if you have a negative relationship with chaos it will be very hard to facilitate community art. But if you can say I love the self-organizing principle and something is wanting to happen here, you can be a humble servant of where the energy wants to go.
I also need a lot of skill for how to be sensitive to all the different levels and areas of movement, and how to bring my attention to what seems the best choice at that moment for this just-right next. In a sense, I am an artist. It’s the art of choosing the just-right next and I am given that responsibility of all of the options. So I would say a resonance with the phenomenon of being a servant is fundamental: to serve what you sense would be the most delightful just-right next for this community in the opening of this coming-together on this day.
I don’t believe in perfection on the level of the self, but I do have the sense that what we are is perfect and who we are is not, so the best I could hope for is excellence which is very different from perfectionism. I do think it is possible with profound integrity not to, as you said, ‘with the ego want to make something happen’, but rather to play your part as best you can, and at the end of the time be able to say there is so much excellence in our choice-making; for all of us to just go finer and higher and deeper with the more of our humanness manifesting the beauty of what we are.
Q: I like the statement, ‘to be in service of the creative process’. To help the balance between necessity and chance. That for me is the creative process. It includes both what is intended in a way, and then what is a surprise, what comes without being intended. That’s what I feel when I create a picture, a movement or a poem. There is my intention to do something, but I don’t know what I’m doing unless there is a surprise coming. The playing with the chance is so beautiful, I find. I have to take my ego out of that, otherwise it doesn’t work.
I can say that you know what you’re talking about, Peter. It makes me happy and excited that you’re interested in the work. I’ll do everything I can to support you in moving forward in being a community art facilitator.
Part Two: COMMUNITY ART MAKING
THIS IS PART TWO OF AN INTERVIEW WITH MARKUS SCOTT-ALEXANDER, PHD
BY PETER MAI, MD
AT THE EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
JUNE 30, 2018
~
Q: How do you find the balance in doing community art work? On one hand supporting the unfolding of the group members and on the other hand not being too much a leader and facilitator? Patronizing would be the other extreme.
The skill is to sense what is wanting to happen there. The improvisational artist, whether he is with others or alone, doesn’t want to impose the unfolding. My skill is to sense what is the just-right-next – for me, what’s moving toward something celebratory – and to encourage enough letting go, enough chaos, for there to be spontaneity and playfulness, as well as enough listening to instructions so there’s enough shaping and framing, so that people are not frightened or feel like they don’t have a clear enough leader for the group. To find that constantly changing balance of setting the frame and then taking my hands off, stepping back, and then saying, now it’s time to come back in to reset the frame because it’s starting to get a little wonky, a little too wild. So that constantly changing balance of opening up the space, letting go for exploring and stopping, and giving the next set of instructions which would either be more opening or starting to shape what we have, because that’s enough opening.
I’m not even thinking about trying to be creative. Sometimes people spin off and try to be creative and then lose their connection to the group. That’s when I might give more instructions and actually say don’t try to be creative; just explore what’s happening, what’s moving within you, between us and around us. I keep coming back to that energy of exploring and the quality of wonder.
Some people lose their ability to hear instructions because they get so excited, and I have a lot of compassion for them because I’ve certainly been there. As kindly and intelligently as I can, I bring back the people who get very excited. As kindly and intelligently as I can, I woo people who get a little excited by the chaos – because I’ve been there, too. As well as possible, I pay attention to the spectrum of people who are so happy to just let go and the people who are concerned that they could even physically get hurt because there’s so much wildness. I take care of that frame so that people are able to believe that I have the ability to set the frame so that they’re safe, while at the same time not having the frame be too tight for those who are so eager to let go.
Q: Do you remember a community art event where you suddenly noticed that you were moving too fast, that people were too scared or shy and that you had to change?
When assisting Paolo, yes. I tend to err on the side of conservative, but Paolo can be beautifully courageous at pushing people’s edges. He has worked with me as a kind of choreographer for his direction and he may come up with an idea that is really outrageous and I think, this is not physically possible. So as choreographer I’ll take what people say is crazy or too wild and as choreographer I’ll find a way to add the element of skill for how to begin to say, “Oh, I can do that”. I find that when people feel this is too much, rather than tone it down, to bring in the level of skill-building. “Ok, so you need to build your skill a little bit.”
Q: You, find a grounding at first and build from there.
Yes. Bring them back to the possibility that with a little bit of skill they can let go a little bit more. “If you ask me to let go into that which feels at this moment too much, I need something: either bring it down or teach me a way to match that level.” So in the pressure of working with Paolo, who I think is really quite brilliant, my ability to step up to the challenge has grown; to take that risk of a little bit more letting go and on the spot for me to come up with some skill-building to match that level of letting go.
Q: I remember very well when I came across community artwork for the first time in my life and went to EGS in 1996. I saw the chance, joined in, and thought ‘what is going on here? This is really wild, but it’s joyful and it’s fun’. Then I went back home to hospital work and I fall to the ground, and I thought, why am I here? So, they are different realities and so apart from each other. I can’t connect anymore. So, I’m asking what are the consequences of doing community art with a group of people you don’t know? How does it affect them? How do you find sustainability would be the next question of my doing into a group of the unknown and then the sustainability? Is there anything that I want to help them to continue in the future?
In the 90’s – and I do remember in 1997 – we learned that it cannot just be about the experience. We must take care that the experience not be a bubble of respite from the world or a way to get away from all the difficulties of the world and immerse yourself in something joyful. Rather, it was a teaching of how to return to the difficulty with joy or how to return to the pressure with more ability, and more and more gradually addressing the question, “How will this affect your life?” – maybe not during the community art but then later in the workshops – to end the time with “What is it that we can do that will increase the chances that this experience will not be in a bubble?” Can you name specific challenges that this will be helpful for? Can you name specific times of the day that you want to remember this kind of lightheartedness? How might it affect your relationships? Will it cause you to want to dramatically change certain things in your life? The teaching was to create the time to contextualize, before people left the event. I would say as we have moved into the 21st century, contextualizing what we do in the symposia or in community art or in any of the expressive arts work has grown.
Today we have the new program in Malta where Expressive Arts and Global Health emphasizes contextualizing and we spend at least half the time talking about how we can apply in the world what we learn there. Since the 90’s I have developed a strong structure that says you leave the ordinary life, you come to a symposium or EGS, you have an extraordinary experience, and then you go back to the ordinary in an un-ordinary way because of your heightened awareness. Paolo and I developed this structure as we moved into the 21st century to insure that people know that this is not about becoming addicted to the extraordinary, but rather about being inspired and about building skill to go back to the ordinary in an un-ordinary way because of your heightened awareness.
Q: That’s a beautiful formulation. Thank you. It touches me very much because I was of two minds. On the one hand I was shaken in a way, coming from a very structured response to the work-life as the doctor of intensive medicine and here I can let go. It was a catharsis for me and was wonderful, but then going back, my question was what do I do now? In response, I came back to EGS and it worked very well for me, actually, but I thought for other people that might be a difficult situation. The contrast is very challenging.
It is, and that’s why we’ve taken to really naming what we do as a de-centering. We’re very transparent that you will be thrown off your usual modus operandi; you are stepping out of the usual; you’ll be thrown off center into new areas of you, into new areas of interacting, and new ways of being. You will be thrown off center. You must pay attention to do the best you can when you go home in order not to go back to your accustomed self and quickly try to go back to your old center, but rather to let that decentering experience help you find a new center that is actually more suited to you, more suited to your life.
Pay attention to this ‘wobble’ so that when you re-center it’s more in a genuine core. Some people are centered but they are centered on a quality of life that is accommodating to others and others’ needs. They become somebody closely based on themselves but not themselves, so they find themselves saying, “This decentering is more ‘me’.” It is hard to completely sustain that new sense of self and the new desire to be truer to one’s self, but you can know to hold that in your awareness as you come back to your everyday life.
It’s possible to have new values, which means that your hierarchy of value will for some people be turned upside down and for others just slightly changed, but give yourself the chance in your life to effect change that might occur based on this wonderful decentering. You can decenter from your accustomed self in order to have a new way of finding, with your values and your way, how you can still be functional in the world, be useful, be available, and discover what new skills you need to learn in order to be in this new center which is a more correct center for you.
So we address that more, not only at EGS but also at the symposia. “Take care. This has been a decentering. Do the best you can not to go back to your habitual self, and yet let this disturb in a good way when you do go back.”
Q: That brings me to the next question about communication of the community artwork. Are there groups or situations where you wouldn’t do it?
Yes. In some situations it is best to work in small groups. That choice is partly intuitive in that I sense the readiness of the group. For example, I was asked to work in a school in Canada where about 90% of the students were aboriginal and about 50% of the students’ families had been murdered. There was an enormous amount of violence in families. Literally, 50% or more were murdered along with about 75% experiencing everyday abuse and violence. When they would have assemblies and gatherings in large groups, violence would break out so the school stopped having assemblies; there were no assemblies for seven years.
At last they decided to take a risk and to bring in a man whose son was murdered, along with a First Nation’s man who was the guardian of the child who had murdered that son. Those two men became friends and were touring around Canada giving talks about the importance of not moving into violence. They gave their talk in the morning and it was my job to step in afterwards to create a kind of assembly with the students, not just sitting and listening, but doing something instead so that they couldn’t just turn their backs on the talk; so that they could feel the effects of this presentation and not shut down.
So I came with seven of my senior students and we created community art. It was good that we did that because when I spoke to the man who gave the talk and showed the film he said that it was the first time ever that when he gave the talk and asked if anybody wanted to say anything or if there were any questions, no one raised their hands or said anything, They had been told so clearly that if they misbehaved there would be severe consequences. They were so tight and literally frightened to move or utter anything that no one said anything.
There was a lunch break and then I facilitated something again with my students in which I did a bit of homework. I asked about the resources there and found that there was a group of young people in a drumming circle which the rest of the school had never heard because there was never an assembly. So I said, “Let’s have all of you around the room creating a circle with quiet drumbeat.” They were thrilled. That circle started creating a safe frame in which to take risks. It ended up being so much more letting-go than any of the teachers were comfortable with. They were really scared.
I used the entire budget that they gave us for buying huge pieces of colorful fabric. It was so joyful; what I saw was release and joy, and there was not one thing that resembled violence. So it was quite successful. To describe it phenomenologically, there was a lot of energy and my task was to create a safe frame, not just for the release of that energy, but also to teach them certain skills for shaping the frame.
I applied what I know from psychology about a transitional object. By using the fabric, they were able to feel the tension and playfulness between them without ever touching each other. They would connect by using the fabric, which created the space and the connection. It took quite a long time, with me sort of massaging the idea into my psyche that I was going to do this, for me to come up with a unique idea for this group.
Q: Having had some experience with the community art and actually experiencing that it can create cohesion, I am wondering about evidence of that. Is there any research or evidence of that? When I look retrospectively at this group I have been working with several times, there has been cohesion. They have been coming together; there have been increased connections with each other.
The field of expressive arts, I feel, is still in its early stages; not its infancy, but moving out of adolescence which is the time of awe and the wonder of discovery. I think those discoveries are being grounded in the work of my colleagues and myself and many others who are starting to do serious research and grounding that research in physical writing.
I am a proponent of a growing new form of research called creative-process-based research, which is not arts-based research. I’m hoping that more of the doctoral students will employ this approach which is to track your progress, not just report about it when it’s over. To talk instead about what they go through to discover how to have an impact, and then to track where they sense that impact was felt and where it wasn’t. To work in a way that is evidence-based and also makes transparent that this is not about techniques but rather about gradually building skill for responding to situation-specific challenges. The evidence based for this group may not actually apply to that group.
I’m working with terms now in creative-process-based research where you make a distinction between discerning and distinguishing, and between what is more intuitive and what is more actual. I think we have been doing a lot of research but we haven’t been grounding it as well as we could. Certainly Melinda Meyer is one of the pioneers in our field for modeling the importance of grounded accountability and following it with implementation. She had been getting grants from the government, for example, to bring her work forward and that, I think, is encouraging people to do the kind of research work that’s necessary to get the kind of mainstream support that’s required for this work to actually blossom and come to the level of impact that it potentially can.
There needs to be more research that is grounded in the larger context, that is right at the beginning of teaching people what expressive arts is, and that does not make assumptions. It is about, again and again, laying out, “What do we do? How do we do it? How does it work?” I think these questions get addressed if people follow the model which we have laid out, which is have the experience, see if you can discern the theories that support that, and then see if you can discern the philosophy that supports those theories.
That is the way we are working and it is through the body that we connect with what we actually know. Then the writing is ultimately about how much we are able to discern and distinguish what works, within that.
Q: Working with patients, I notice I have difficulties in using the terminology of the arts. I resonate more with the terminology you just used of the creative process.
Quite frankly, that’s what resonates with me as a human being. For example, I really enjoy my time in the kitchen.
Q: It’s artwork.
It is literally being sensitive to color and texture, not just taste. I enjoy the creative process of remodeling my home, or when I get dressed in the morning. When I play the piano or make a painting, my enjoyment of that is simply a heightened intimacy. It’s not about a heightened ability or even a heightened creativity. Certain art forms teach me to be brought intimately into my physical form, my physical body, in my hearing. It makes my senses more subtle, so when I play the piano and become more sensitized it will affect how I have a conversation or how I walk down the street.
In that sense, my relationship with the arts is more aboriginal. In the 18th century, when the artist started to work in the courts and for the kings, a kind of specialness was afforded to art and to the artist. The shamanic tradition recognizes that you have a unique ability to interpret dreams or to make a beautiful bowl that is a sacred object for a ritual, but it is a respect of everybody’s unique ability, just like with basket-weaving. The person’s name would be Basket-weaver and if they later became a great runner, they would change their name to Great Runner.
So my feeling is not to give the arts too much specialness, but rather to experience them as a way to become finer in our unique way of celebrating our oneness. There is actually a humility and a quality of service, serving something as an artist, that is more shamanic – I use that word lightly – than a renaissance idea of becoming so specialized in something that it somehow puts you outside of your community such that your role then becomes to ‘raise’ the community. There is something in that that I feel is a little bit off.
I recognized early on that the expressive arts for me had to do with low skill/ high sensitivity. I resonated with the concept of bringing a little bit of skill and sensitivity to the process of creating a good life, rather than trying to passively follow things that were already set in place and once in a while go to the opera in order to have a little culture. I thought this is off. This is contrived. That’s not really what life should be about. Let’s come back to a kind of equanimity, whether in painting or cooking or dancing, and raise the quality of awareness in everything always.
{END OF PART TWO}
STAY TUNED FOR PART THREE OF THIS INTERVIEW