Creative Reset: The Practice of Making with Audacity

Creative Reset: The Practice of Making with Audacity

by Kerri Education Frame | Work News & Updates

What: Seven sewing classes in which you will make a dress and learn to adapt that basic dress pattern to work for different bodies and styles. 

When: Tuesday evenings, 7-8 PM, October 6, 13, 20, 27, November 3, 10, and 17, 2020

Where: Right in front of your very own sewing machine in the comfort of wherever you have room to make a dress. Yes, you need to provide your own sewing machine. We will help you learn to use it. Classes are held online.

How: Register here. Classes are $10 each, and you must sign up for all seven classes in order to finish your dress.

Why: Once, I tried to make a dress. I put a square pocket on the chest, and I sewed all four sides of that pocket to the bodice. It was not great. If only I’d had Ashley Horn Nott to help me.

Ashley would have had a plan for my inexperience, my ignorance, my besotted love for the fabric and my overconfidence in “figuring out” a sewing machine. The first time Ashley took on a costume-making project for a dance company, her sewing experience was straight lines and stuffing. Pillows. She knew she could sew a pillow cover, and the rest she had the audacity to make up.

And it worked! Today, Ashley has made costumes for most of the modern dance companies in Houston, including her own productions. Absolutely hundreds (possibly thousands?) of dresses and other costumes gorgeously crafted. Why did Ashley’s gamble worked and mine didn’t? I’m guessing that Ashley had more tenacity to match her audacity than I did. She also made the compelling decision to promise other people that she would complete her project. No one cared when I folded up my half-dress with its unusable patch of a pocket and never unfolded it again. Ashley had a commitment to people she cared about, people who were counting on those costumes, and that accountability motivated her through the “now I have to seam-rip the whole damn thing” moments.

Let us be that accountability for you. Maybe you’ve been saying that you want to sew your own clothes. Maybe you found the most amazing fabric. Maybe you found that fabric years ago and you’re ready to give it form. Maybe you are a dancer and you want to be able to make costumes for yourself and others. This is a chance to create beside a self-made professional. Grab your audacity and make it into a dress. Your dress.

 

How is making a dress a creative reset? Um, can I answer that tomorrow? It’s kind of a whole thing…

 

 

 

Creative Reset: The Practice of Learning from Others

Creative Reset: The Practice of Learning from Others

by Kerri Education Frame | Work News & Updates

A History of Modern Dance with Jamie Williams

What: A series of three one-hour lecture/conversations on modern dance history with dancer and professor of dance, Jamie Williams.

When: Monday evenings, 7-8 pm, October 5, November 2, and December 7, 2020.

Where: Your screen of choice.

How: Register here. Cost is $10/class.

Why: Modern dance pioneers were masters of the Creative Reset.

The earliest modern dance artists knew that existing forms of dance – primarily ballet – were insufficient to explore and express conditions in the early 20th century. It was an era of seismic recalibration in all areas of human culture. These artists were working at the time of Freud, Einstein, and early Picasso, and their ideas were no less self-consciously revolutionary:

 

Denishawn Dancers, 1900, photo by Bain News Agency, Library of Congress

 

“I bring you the dance. I bring you the idea that is going to revolutionize our entire epoch.”

Isadora Duncan (1877-1927)

 

“We should realize in a vivid and revolutionary sense that we are not in our bodies but our bodies are in us.”

Ruth St Denis (1879-1968)

 

Merce Cunningham, “EyeSpace,” 2009, photo by Daniel Arsham

 

Contemporary and post-modern dancers also recognized the need to drop what is non-essential and do a creative reset, to accept and stretch into the new senses and modes that reveal themselves:

 

“I think of dance as a constant transformation of life itself”

On randomly chosen movements: “…I would always try it because the mind will say `you can’t do it,’ but more often than not you can, or you see another way, and that’s what’s amazing. In some cases it’s impossible, but something else happens, some other possibility appears, and your mind opens.”

Merce Cunningham (1919-2009)

 

“Making dances is an act of progress; it’s an act of growth…”

Alvin Ailey (1931-1989)

 

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre performs Revelations, Miami, 2011, photo courtesy of the Knight Foundation

 

“I realized that carrying around old information, trying to get everything in, and still be in the moment just doesn’t work.”

Meredith Monk (1942)

 

Meredith Monk gives us some direction on finding the “set” part of “reset,” a way to recognize when we have hit that sweet spot of a new “sense” – to take Olafur Eliasson figuratively – that will work for us in our changed environment:

 

“That inner voice has both gentleness and clarity. So to get to authenticity, you really keep going down to the bone, to the honesty, and the inevitability of something.”

 

Meredith Monk, “On Behalf of Nature,” Brooklyn, 2014, photo by Steven Pisano, courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music

 

Dancers have studiously refined senses, and no one literally or figuratively pivots with grace and strength like a dancer, so I can’t wait to have my mind blown by the facts, the philosophies, the responses, the lives of modern dance masters. 

 

*I tried to bold every synonym of RESET in this post. Did I get them all?*

 

Featured image: Meredith Monk, “On Behalf of Nature,” Brooklyn, 2014, photo by Steven Pisano, courtesy of Brooklyn Academy of Music

Creative Reset: The Possibilities

Creative Reset: The Possibilities

by Kerri Education Frame | Work News & Updates

In 2019, ahead of a massive exhibit of his work appearing at the Tate Modern museum in London, artist Olafur Eliasson spoke with Mark Turner, art correspondent for The Guardian, about his installations, specifically about a piece titled “Your Blind Passenger.” The work is a room filled with fog and lit by colored fluorescent lights such that all that is visible to the viewer is a shallow, blurry colorscape. Only a few people are allowed into “Your Blind Passenger” at a time because it is so disorienting, making the viewer even more likely to feel detached and alone in an indistinct but colorful unknown. Eliasson said of the experience, “Very quickly you realise, and I mean this quite literally, that you are not completely blind after all, you have a lot of other senses which start to kick in.”

With this realization comes a shift, a transfer of attention. Something is taken away or blocked – in this case most of the visual information –  and the response of the viewer is to adjust how they engage with their surroundings. According to Eliasson, “it shows that the relativity of our senses is much higher than we think, we have it in our capacity to recalibrate or at least stop being numb” (emphases mine).

 

Eliasson’s work is often about jarring, all-encompassing alterations, like “Your Blind Passenger,” and they are often about connections that are simultaneous with fracture. Some of his visually quietest pieces sound the loudest social alarms. I feel like Eliasson’s work is made for coping with COVID and our ongoing strangeness. I feel like the quote above is instructional for living in a world where the the crisis alert is stuck at 11.

First – I think the quote is telling us – we need to be aware of these numb and underused senses. Then, bringing our attention to them, we can start to turn them on or turn them up. We can do work and practice actions to heighten the senses to the point that they become capable of nuance, of making and receiving meaning. Because our attention is finite – even when turned up to 11 – by attending to new areas, we are less reliant on the ones that used to dominate our awareness. We have recalibrated.

 

The issue of recalibration has been on Lydia Hance’s mind over the spring and summer. Accustomed to helping people bring attention to their (often underused, not quite nuanced) sense of movement, Lydia knows that practicing this set of sensations – practicing dance –  reduces stress and reduces the need to rely on other sensations for managing stress. Dance practice heightens the sense of the body in space, making movement more efficient and less stressful on the body. It also gives people another way to process and express emotion, again reducing the stress load we carry in our bodies and our thoughts. Lydia knew that during the stresses of quarantine and social unrest, people had lost some of their most powerful coping devices – face-to-face interaction with people we care for and freedom of movement both within and outside of one’s community. She knew that people needed a reset.

Lydia has a mighty set of creative friends, makers of one kind or another (or a whole bunch of kinds at once) who identified areas where a little attention to an underused skill goes a long way toward recalibration. Creative Reset is designed on these practices. Taken alone, the practices allow for recalibration. Taken multiply, you’ve got yourself a transformation!

Coming Soon, Creative Reset: The Practices

Cover image: Photo “Your rainbow panorama” By Harkolufs 

Inset images: From “Room for One Color” Tate Modern 1997, Photos by Anders Sune Berg from olafureliasson.net

The Balanced Bath: A Prelude to Your Creative Reset Workshop

The Balanced Bath: A Prelude to Your Creative Reset Workshop

by Kerri Frame | Work News & Updates

The week has just started, but Wednesday is coming. Humpday, right in the middle. What a perfect time to retreat from busy-ness. What a perfect time to try a Creative Reset.

 

You’re familiar with the Creative Reset series, right? It’s Frame Dance Productions’ offering of workshops to our community – in Houston and online – at a time when we all need quick responses to the uncertain and unfamiliar. And it would be nice to make these responses with a bit of grace, with awareness, with balance.

 

You know what will help? Water. Fortunately, Frame Dance has a workshop for that this Wednesday, September 16 at 7:30 PM. Know where it’s meeting? Wherever you want it to. Creative Reset is a series of learning and tool-building recalibrations, and our workshops are all about being stretched out and then coming from multiple directions to settle into ourselves.

 

This Wednesday, you’re going to work with water, first by yourself, and then in a workshop. You’re going to give your body and mind an evening of balance and flow. 

 

Note: the balanced bath is only a suggestion! It is not a part of the workshop or a prerequisite for Brooke Summers-Perry’s watercolor class. But it’s a pretty great compliment to the class and a chance to set aside a couple of hours for yourself in the middle of the week.

 

First, you’re going to clean your tub if it needs cleaned (which it will if it is like my tub which is also a shower and is shared by the people who live with me. These are not bath people). Nice and clean. No harsh ingredients in those cleaning supplies, no irritation to your lungs or your hands. All right. Now you’re going to take off your clothes, take off your day. Ahhh. You did your work and you did it well. Time to let it go. By all means, dry brush while you fill that tub. Light candles if that relaxes you. Take a nice stretch, arms up with a big inhale, and roll down on the exhale. Get out a clean towel, fresh from the laundry or linen closet, and set it next to your tub. Check the water. Warm it up or cool it down if necessary. It’s almost time to get in.

 

What does your body need right now? 

Magnesium in Epsom salts soothes sore muscles and softens skin.

Oatmeal treats sensitive skin, and even soothes irritation as severe as sunburn and hives.

Milk, coconut milk, and coconut oil all moisturize and have anti-inflammatory properties.

And then there are the ingredients that work – in part – by smelling w o n d e r f u l:

Ginger clears congestion and aids headaches (but can be irritating to sensitive skin).

Dried, fresh, or distilled to essential oil, lavender, rose, and eucalyptus benefit the skin and the spirit.

Just a bag or two of your favorite tea will turn your tub into a tiny oasis.* 

 

Now that you have prepared the water, get in slowly. Feel the difference that the water makes on your skin, on your muscles. Breathe. Cover yourself as deeply as you can, and feel the parts of you that float. Swish your body and feel how that changes the water and your body in the water. Now be still, and think of nothing.

 

When it is time, get out of the tub. Rinse your body if it needs rinsing. Thank the water, and anything you put in it, for serving you well. Pull that plug. Get dry. Get moisturized. Put on whatever you like to wear best right now; your favorite pajamas, a pretty sundress, overalls, a big fluffy robe. You are about to take an art class with Brooke Summers-Perry, and she does not care what you wear as long as it doesn’t impede your work. 

 

You are rested and focused and ready to meet the water again, but in a new way. Color it. Play with it. You are mostly water, remember. Our need for it is literal, and perhaps this is why we relate to it so well metaphorically. Get stirred up, settle, wave, float with it, push it, be moved by it, flow. It is in you and it is a tool. Use it.

*Ingredients suggested by the website helloglow.co. Go here for yummy bath recipes.