Season Opening Gala to honor Liz Gerring with Jacob's Pillow Dance Award on June 20
Season Opening Gala to honor Liz Gerring with Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award on June 20
Liz Gerring (top) and members of her Dance Company seen in Christopher Duggan’s Natural Light Studio at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival.
2015 JACOB’S PILLOW DANCE AWARD GOES TO
ARTIST LIZ GERRING
This year’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award, a prestigious honor carrying an unrestricted $25,000 cash prize, will be presented to contemporary choreographer Liz Gerring in recognition of her talent and…
The ring of a meditation bowl sounds, and we settle into another five-minute sit, to pause in space and place. We take a moment from the fast pace of our everyday existence as instructor and students living in the world to reflect and breathe before beginning our further explorations into creativity. On the opening day of class, we explored thoughts on creativity by asking questions such as, why promote creativity, what is the problem or why do people need help being creative, and what is involved in the ideas surrounding creativity (Robinson, 2011)? From this point of departure, our class has taken off in a number of interesting and amoebic-like directions surrounding creativity in our universe.
During the first quarter of our course, we explored the nature of self in relationship to creativity. Addressing issues pertaining to fear of failure, cultural contexts, comfort with ambiguity, blockages, and relative notions, we engaged in a number of exercises, practices, and discussions through a number of different mediums in order to examine how these ideas relate to the individual. With the course situated in a living-systems lens and supported by readings from our main text (Swimme & Berry, 1992), an awareness of the inherent nature of creative capacities within all living things aids in addressing these constructs. The students and I have been working with a tree journal: each student has found a tree on campus that they have befriended. This relationship with a tree addresses philosophical, poetic, and artistic exploration exercises of the self in relationship to another, non-human being in the world.
Photo by Michael Lees- inspired by Creative Thinking class discussions.
We have had the unique opportunity to attend shows that are part of the Peak Performances series here at Montclair State University. After performances of glacier, Brandin Steffensen and fellow dancers from the Liz Gerring Dance Company visited our course and led us in practicing a number of “visual thinking strategies” relating to perception and interpretation of creativity. A performance entitled Open City, by composer/musician Vijay Iyer and a jazz ensemble that included author Teju Cole and rap artist Himanshu Suri, explored the cognitive relationships found within intrinsic and extrinsic responses to creativity. The opportunity for our course to examine creativity in this particular context encouraged further reflection on the self and our own unique responses to what we feel defines creativity.
Moving into the third quarter of the class, the exploration of community, collaboration, planetary systems, and the universe in relationship to expanding horizons will embrace further efforts to work with broad bodies of knowledge. The introduction of deep learning, systems thinking, and constructs surrounding paradigms and processes engages the creative process by asking us to go beyond the self. Visiting artist Liz Lerman led us through two classes of movement-based exercises, which enhanced our awareness of space and challenged us to work with uncertainty. Liz Lerman’s themes and variations worked with differences by asking what we observed, noticed, discovered, learned, or found out while participating in the workshop exercises. Liz Lerman importantly pointed out that creativity emerges when two differing forces come together. This last sentiment has been resonating with the class as we continue to work with ideas pertaining to processes found within the actions of creation.
As the course progresses, questions and challenges continue to arise as we seek to figure out what creativity means or consists of, or how creativity becomes a process of doing. The use of imagination, innovation, and addressing the profane versus creative within human activity continues to drive the course’s current tenor. Examining challenges such as obstacles, difficult times, the nature of suffering, and the nature of joy in relationship to creative dynamics has us wondering whether emotions and feelings produce creativity, or does creativity produce emotions and feelings? Questions continue to emerge with answers dwelt upon as we head toward our fourth quarter of the course and the end of the semester.
After working with expressing ourselves openly and around one another, we wrote in our journals about our responses to the activities experienced in Liz Lerman’s workshop. To close, I offer my response here:
I see the students, diverse and smiling, expressive, working with feelings of awkwardness. Synchronicity, dissonance, stretching of thoughts, dynamics, laughter, and embarrassment all play a role in moments of self-expression. There were chains of ideas, questions surrounding what gesture to make next, while we worked with one another in the moment. The expansion of thoughts and overcoming of self-doubts found ground when I see some who have been the quietest artistically move about the room. Mostly, I find myself enjoying watching the people who I have now spent some time with expressing themselves outwardly and creatively using what we have learned so far.
Photo by Michael Lees- inspired by Creative Thinking class discussions.
References:
Cole, T. (2011). Open City. New York, NY: Random House.
Robinson, K. (2011). Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative. Westford, MA: Capstone.
Swimme, B., & Berry, T. (1992). The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era: A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos. New York, NY: Harper.
