a nice little explanation...

Interesting post here on creativity in relation to the work of the guy who made the idea of 'flow' so famous...



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creative energy

I want to write about creative energy. Energy is a very difficult thing to write about these days. It's a word that's being used all over the place, by physicists, by environmentalists, by fitness advisers, by nutritionists, by healers, by those who are interested in spirituality.

My use of the word energy  is, at first glance, strictly physical, in the sense of energy moving through the body in biological and physiological sense. But this sense of plain, physical energy in the body turns out to be much more complicated and subtle than I used to believe. Can I run for 20 minutes? Looks like a fitness question. Do I regularly go outside and run for twenty minutes? Seems like a time management or discipline question. Do I feel like going outside and running? Oh, is this a mental health question? Or is it an 'I need a holiday' question? How come I can feel incredibly tired and then when the right person phones up and says, 'you wanna meet up?', I suddenly feel excited and exhilarated? How come I can go out feeling the same on two different days, to see two different sets of friends, and come back from one meeting utterly knackered and the other beaming with delight and sit up half the night writing poetry?

And what about driven energy, that energy of the mind and will that can push me through just about anything on this earth, if I've set my mind to it - the energy that can completely shut out my body screaming for rest and fun, and push myself onwards towards some deadline that I've convinced myself I absolutely 'have to' meet?

Recently I've begun to recognise another kind of energy, which I think has been powering all these other energies throughout my life, I just didn't understand it. It's the energy that made me always want to join in to any song I knew, whether on the radio, the tele, at a concert, on the bus; the energy that made me do annoying things with my hand to the rhythm of Indian music; the energy that made me want to leap up from my seat at a concert and seguey into that bit of open space that seemed just made for me to dance in; the energy that made me want to buy up everything in an art shop and threatened to kill me when I saw an exquisite drawing.....

As I've been reviewing my entire life, personality, habits, and foibles, these past few years, I've tried on various forms of explanation for my extremes and the intensity of my desires. Of all possible explanations, the stream that they all seem to keep flowing back to is the idea of pulsing, creative force, which my upbringing and culture have done their best to redirect and suppress. I can frame up the twisted forms this force has been forced to take, the road blocks it has tried to work around, in any number of ways, but in the end it all seems to come back to this.

There's nothing godly, mystical or spiritual about this energy. It's the force of life, the physics and biology of myself as a dynamic system, emanating from and completely enmeshed in the moving tides of a vast universe, which is itself a huge pulsating movement of physical energy. This energy is, by definition, creative. Creativity is what life is, the way that life is able to be life, in the sense that it's something constantly moving and adapting and changing; technically speaking, novelty and change evolve continually form all biological systems in the form of emergence.

As a human, it's my nature to respond to the ebbs and flows of energy that pass through me; for my muscles to start to move if a drum resonates nearby, for sound to emerge from my throat in harmony with frequencies that enter me via my eardrums, for my hand to reach out a pick up a burnt stick and scratch it onto a rock.

The suppression of the flow of these energies has nearly killed me.

How did we become so disconnected?

interview with Paul Oertel

Interview With Paul Oertel in Health & Nutrition
by Tammy Simon

This issue's Health & Nutrition is taken from an interview with Paul Oertel conducted by Tammy Simon, host of KGNU's Live From Planet Earth. Mr Oertel is a movement and voice specialist, performer, dancer and actor. He is a principal of the internationally renowned Nancy Spanier Dance Theatre.

TAMMY SIMON: You believe that the Earth is in a time of crisis. What do you see as the components of survival, in terms of self-expression and attitudes during this phase?
  
PAUL OERTEL: A critical element right now is for people to look within. To find one's own strength, one's own inner song, inner power and own resources. And to really get that power going. People who have done that are infinitely useful to everyone around them. They have the resources to take charge of the situation and to survive what seems to be unbelievably stressful and changeable energy.

They have the flexibility, the openness and the resources to walk into whatever situation no matter how polluted, confused or negative and survive it. Not by virtue of denial or separation, but by virtue of strength, compassion, understanding, openness, inclusion of the full environment. They have included all of their own emotions so they become an enormous vessel that can embrace all of reality for whatever it is. Therefore, they can become useful to anybody in need or who is hurting. They can embrace them and deal with the situation constructively.

TS: In a world of crisis, what role does art play?

PO: One of the roles, unfortunately, is that of creating distraction arid diversion and confusion. Because of that, art is developing into a very depressed state. Art in a world of confusion is becoming what art often will do, which is simply reflect the chaos. As things are getting in a sense tighter, as people are hanging on and clinging, art is getting thinned out, reduced, concerned less and less with larger issues. But in this situation we need more than ever people who are willing to create an art that embraces the more humanistic and total approach.

TS: What is your belief about the connection between self-expression and healing?

PO: For healing to happen there has to be an absence of denial. There has to be a full expression and full realization of what the person is and what they are feeling. Movement or voice brings the person into contact with that expression. These tools help them make the relationship between the expression and the facade, or the denial, apparent. They break that up so a person can come forth.

Essentially, a healed human being is one in which there are no blocks. Everything flows freely. The person can be breathing in and out, taking in and out, giving off in a way that maintains health. If one is absorbing too much or giving away too much - or what is coming in is blocking in some part of the body or being - then that part can become stagnant. It becomes unhealthy. It begins to die. The person becomes ill. Self-expression is a way of keeping everything in motion, fluid.

TS: What is the edge between being in control so you are technically excellent and disciplined, and just letting go?

PO: Traditionally, the process of skill is one of control. If you use control to get control, whatever you do will look rigid. In terms of the physical body, that process is destructive. That is why many dancers are ruined with knees breaking and cracking by the age of thirty-five. Voices are ruined through the same misuse of control. That approach to control destroys the physical form.

The other way to work with control is through the idea of letting go. Your freedom, or your control, or your discipline is the process of understanding a free flow in your body. That can be a difficult process because it requires letting go on all levels. Of understanding how to let go of the flesh in order to control it, rather than hanging on to the flesh. People are beginning to explore that more and more.

One aspect of the discipline of freedom you are talking about has to do with being able to just be okay with whatever comes.

I feel that is an absolute necessity in these times. In order to survive the whole situation where there seems to be such violent and chaotic and confusing forces at hand, one needs to be extremely flexible in order to survive. If you are rigid when a great force hits you, you'll break. If you are flexible, you can work with it and play with it. Flexibility is the key to the whole notion of survival at this point.

painting people working

It's hard to have any idea where to start reporting on my recent Discipline of Freedom workshop with Paul Oertel. I thought I might start by posting these pictures which were made while people were working. This is a unique form of painting, for me anyway, that has slowly developed over the last year or so. In the image above, Daniel Mandel was working with Paul on a song - a very melodic and beautiful song - and the work went on long enough for me to go on working the painting for some time. Before this one, he sang a different song which looked like this:

This allowed me to experiment with the feel of the voice and the melody, and the overall flow, before working on the longer piece.



The next one is of a piece of work where someone was dealing with a lot of unprocessed pain, which was an incredible and moving piece of work by Paul and the participant.

The one that follows was a dance piece by two people, moving to very earthy sounding provided by voice and viola.

And this next one was a solo sounding which went on a long journey...

Finally, this was a positively ecstatic dance piece by Paul and a participant that made me feel that I was watching Rumi dancing with his Beloved... Yes!

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off to Wales

I want to write something here before I go off to Wales for my second Discipline of Freedom workshop; my sixth of these workshops with either Kath Burlinson or Paul Oertel in two years.

I've been finding it less easy to write here recently. Perhaps this is indicative of the fact that this is a period of disconnection; a refractory period, after such an intense and focussed period leading up to the show. Breathing in, and breathing out. Feed, digest, rest, act. Act, rest, digest, feed. Act, digest, rest, feed.

In addition, some of the things that are coming up in the workshops now are too deep, too personal to write here. That's always been the case, but what comes up seems to get harder, and to be more fundamental, in terms of whatever the problems, issues, struggles, difficulties are in relation to being free to create as you want to create.

I've been pondering again on that quote of Paul's:

Never belabour your creativity.

Follow the juice.

Outsmart yourself by following the fun.

Follow the stream that is open.

Thinking about the streams that were open, I decided that:

• movement is now relatively open; it's the one area where I never had an agenda
• painting is now relatively open, at least in terms of doing it as a private activity
• sandpainting has appeared, and is asking to unite these two areas
• music and voice are still quite stuck, particularly in performance

I came to the conclusion that I wanted to work both with what's stuck and also with what's open. In terms of stuckness, I want to work with breath, voice, body, grounding, communication, staying present. In terms of what's open, I want to work with understanding and accepting that some forms come more easily now, and that there's no need to ask more of them, or try to push them over some kind of an edge, to try to make them get hard again. And then to focus on where that more easily coming work is trying to go.

The sand wants to join up with music and movement. And the painting wants to find out more about the Mattanchery thing; the Indian dancers and Indian forms that keep trying to find their way in...



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get a therapist honey

An actor/puppeteer friend of mine was talking about some ideas she had for her puppet. She said she liked the puppet because then she could concentrate on what the show was about in terms of performance, in terms of the audience. 'It's for the audience', she said, 'If it's not for the audience, get a fucking therapist'.

This little comment seems to me to hold vast worlds of art-making conundrums within it.

'So, do you sell your paintings?'

'Well, it's great if I do, but that's not actually the point'.

'Oh, so you just do it for yourself, then..'

'Well, no, I mean, I don't want to do hundreds of paintings and just shove them all into my attic...'

Perhaps it's clearer if you're a performer, but for me, making paintings, the idea of doing your work 'for' an audience is deeply problematic. It could derail what I'm trying to do completely. 'Well, that green one could have sold four times, I think I'll do some more green ones'... is more subtle than... 'I'm going to try to repeat that one that sold yesterday'... or.... 'I'm going to do a series of paintings that I hope to sell in my next exhibition'. For me, this approach would completely change the nature of the work I'm trying to do. I see it as the art version of 'people-pleasing', which, as some of us may have discovered in our personal lives, is doomed to hopelessness. If you start wanting to please people you're stuffed, as far as I can see. Off on the route of trying to second-guess an imaginary person or audience who will never, actually, be the person or audience who ever stands in front of one of your paintings anyway. So you'll never get it 'right', you won't please anyone, and, in fact, you won't even be doing 'your' art. You'll be remaining a puppet of your own emotional history/lacunae; of some murky aspect of your psyche which is trying to get some attention without you even realising it.

This doesn't mean that emotion doesn't inspire and inflame and feed the making of art. My understanding at the moment is that experience and emotion are my raw materials. But I'm beginning to see that some kind of transformation needs to happen if the experience or emotion is to become something that can communicate with other people. I don't say communicate itself to other people, which is the pipeline view of creativity; the idea that the artist can pass something from themselves to someone else in a reasonably direct manner.

I find it easier to see this in relation to performance, which in my case is currently confined to singing in the protected space of an Authentic Artist or Discipline of Freedom workshop. I've discovered that I can actually 'sing from the heart' in two distinct ways. I can mainline directly to my own experience on every level, feeling completely exposed, completely raw. All of my life's experience is somehow carried in that way of singing, all of my troubles and my vulnerabilities and all of my pain. I'm vulnerable when I sing like that, and not in a good way. I'm vulnerable firstly because I'm not completely in the song; part of me is watching myself from across the room, making judgements. I care what people think, and I care what I think. I don't want to sing badly, I want to sing my best possible singing, I want people to know that that best possible singing can come out of me, not this mediocre version which seems to be appearing in the moment... And there she is, the critic on my shoulder. My conservative ego, my traumatised child, sitting there like vultures, intent on stopping me from moving into a new story.

And then there's another way of singing from the heart. The same song, the same voice into the same air. But now the focus is not on me, on my voice, on the way that I am singing, on how I or anyone else may be judging me. Now the focus is on the song. On the words, on the feeling in the words, on the notes, on the nuances of harmony and expression. It feels different to sing from that place. There's no fear, there are no palpitations, no pumped up fantasy of how important the event of singing is. It's not a big deal. It's just a song. Like breathing, like having a glass of water. My birthright as a human.

So, I can see that the second version of this is offering a song to an audience, rather than strutting about or collapsing at the importance of it all. In the second version I'm still connected to emotion, to myself, but I'm not doing the scared child/crazy ego thing. So how does this translate into painting?

The great thing about painting is that you can do it alone, so you don't (necessarily) have to be distracted by the sense of being judged in the moment by others. You can become immersed and forget all that while you're  actually making the work. Perhaps the 'for the audience' thing comes around in painting when you exhibit or try to sell. I suppose the real issue here is whether or not your ego is sitting on the edge of the picture frame, waiting to be pumped up or to defend itself to your audience. Does it matter whether or not people say it's 'good'?

No. The work has been offered to the audience as the work, not as you. I guess this is the way in which painting can be 'for the audience'. It's subtle.

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time for a new story

I can't really get used to the fact that I am, at least most of the time now, living a new story. Sometimes I forget. A dark figure steps silently from the shadows, and I'm momentarily derailed again. Wandering in the desert, tearing at my hair, breathing hot winds.

I've been living for the last few years in this silent, interior landscape, with only the sound of my own tides for company. Trying to let my art come. Trying to get out of my own way. Preferring the idea of creativity to the idea of art, wanting music and movement and colour and texture and words to be together, to be dynamic, to be free. Holding on to the mast, determined never to let go again.

In the fantasy world of an artist that I made up at the beginning of my adult life, I was alone in a studio day after day, week after week. People were incidental, connection was irrelevant. Creativity was art, art was painting, painting was something that would possess me, soon enough. And it did not. And I waited.

...There were a few (of my friends) who seemed afraid of what was on offer, and... afraid of something it called for in their selves. As if they did not feel worthy of the invitation or felt at some essential level they were not equal to that world into which they were being invited. They had no belief in what they had encountered. What they glimpsed seemed too large for them and some part of them eventually became afraid of it. It might have been that they were afraid of an ambitious form of falling in love and the commitment to which it might lead.

...Refusing to fall in love with a vocation and thereby refusing the necessary insanities for the path ahead is hardly ever a passive process where everything goes into neutral; it is actually corrosive on the personality and character of the one who repeatedly says no to something that keeps on whispering yes.

David Whyte, 2009, The Three Marriages

What seemed dead turns out to be alive. Full of holes, blind spots, dangerous ditches, pathways and habits of destruction. But, finally, alive.

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