July 24, 2013
I’m up at I’m up at Williams College in Massachusetts for the force-of-nature-known-as-the-Creative Capital Retreat – what can perhaps best be described as a transmogrifying mindmeld between artistic process and artistic product, an investigation of the interstices of artmaking within a capitalist society, and an invaluable opportunity to experience the tectonic plates shifting in our culture as artists of all stripes develop truly challenging directional new works.
The last stretch of time (how long, exactly?) in our country have been quite distressing, with what feels like an ominous undertow eroding enlightened movement in any direction. This time with the Creative Capital kindred is a kind of kinetic grace, an interlude-in-motion that shows another riptide happening in artmaking, intellectualism, social practice… a group of hyperstimulated humans fruitfully devoted to moving beyond old and stifling boundaries wherever they might be located. Awkward, painful, beautiful, elegant: all stripes of jittering and skeetching towards evolution.
It’s an existentially impatient gathering of souls, thank goodness.
Tree frogs, crickets and the elusive fireflies, full moons, fields of grass and the kind of spooky old buildings that only New England knows how to grow. Between it all, a kaleidoscope of artistic visions that collide, coalesce, and move through the day in ways that change my ways of seeing.
The 2013 Grantee class in Emerging Fields, Performing Arts, and Literature are all coming together to share our work, our questions, our trajectories and dead ends and avenues of possibility. At the same time, we are joined by a panoply of insightful and provocative folks from across the realms of arts and ideas. It’s a heady mix – literally. At times, the brain becomes itchy to climb out of the skull and yet like a dog who worries a bone, it chomps along through long, intensive days of processing many concepts and emotions. Compressed introspection, expansive conversation, sometimes unsettling insights, rigorous self-evaluations, and miraculous snippets of knowledge gleaned from a thousand different sparking minds and spirits.
I feel very fortunate to be given an opportunity for profound growth: as humans and as artists we tend to cultivate a small-ish habitat that makes sense to us in some way, and it can be startling to suddenly navigate such an intense consortium of deeply sensitive beings. Here at the retreat, our habitats, our small ecologies, combine into a terrarium of enormous complexity and interdependence. It’s really a rare chance to be forced to grow in the directions we need to, but often don’t know how to navigate on our own.
Here is a little glimpse at our day from the Creative Capital blog >>