Creative Conversation: On Deep Connection

Wed. May 5th, 7PM at New Urban Arts.

We hope you’ll join us for our upcoming workshop and Conversation on Creative Practice: On Deep Connection with theater director and educator Ellie Heyman. Ellie has directed plays in Chicago, LA, Boston, New York, and most recently, her play Diventare was honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and I am so excited to bring her to Providence. For the past many years, she has also taught and raised younger people as part of Northwestern University’s National High School Institute for Theater Arts. She comes to us from BU’s Theater Conservatory where she is achieving her MFA while educating actors in ways of embodied knowing, emotional connection, and play making from that place.

“Connection” is one of New Urban Arts five core values. In connecting with a mentor, we believe that we can become our best selves, and these connections happen in all kinds of iterations between students, mentors, staff, our friends, and larger communities. Contrary to the Romantic notion of the artist at work alone in a studio, deep connection can be an important part of a rich creative practice. Our stories are about personal and artistic transformations grown from connections amongst people and in this space. And there is a certain morality in this way of thinking; even extending out from the studio and into wider living. I think finding and fostering these authentic connections allows us to be more open, more fully in love with the world, with our work in it, and with each other.

Ellie’s practice is about helping performers connect deeply with themselves and with each other, such that their experience resounds with an audience and out into their world. She approaches her work with an ethos of embodied connection, a love for the physical, a yen for the imaginary, and a trust in the gut sense of emotion. She describes one of her plays unfolding, being always rewritten in the process, “In the beginning, it didn’t make a lot of intellectual sense at all - but it followed a kind of heart logic. So these actors, you couldn’t talk about it; there was nothing really to talk about! You had to do the scene to do it! And each time we returned from doing it, we had more information about it.” This idea of “heart logic” and doing it, really doing it, in order to discover “it” really resonates with me. I think Ellie articulates a kind of faith involved in doing work from emotional and not-knowing places in our selves, in our creative practices, in our relational practices, and perhaps in any of our learning endeavors.

I hope you will join us for an evening workshop and word-swap on Wednesday, May 5, 7PM at New Urban Arts. Since we will be working from heart logic, and gut places, Ellie will first lead a workshop around movement and connection where we will all “Do it, really do it, in order to know it.” So its not just talking, but moving too. From there, we can put our heads back together and talk about these practices. What is it like to move and work from these embodied places? How we can build safe containers for ourselves and others to play with emotions? How might these practices translate from theater to other disciplines, and to our practice as people in the world? And even better, we will spend time with the questions that you bring and that you discover. And also because we are made of our own bodies, I promise wonderful snacks. At least some home made, either crafted in a Secret Kitchen or perhaps my own unnamed one. I hope, very much, to see you, speak with you, and connect with you, on Wednesday evening.

On Organizing for Creative Practice

We hope you will join us for our upcoming Conversation on Creative Practice. Wednesday 3/24 at 7pm at New Urban Arts 743 Westminster.

Abigail Satinsky of InCUBATE (www.incubate-chicago.org) will moderate a conversation on Organizing for Creative Practice. Other discussers will include several fine folks of Building 16 (Dan Schleifer, Susan Sakash & Tatyana Yanishevsky), and I hope you will come to talk about the various projects you're organizing towards, or wistfully daydreaming about.

More and more, I'm convinced that creative practice is literally world making, and there are lots of different ways to make the world. This morning, I encountered folks making breakfast for friends, others making a window installation, another deinstalling hundreds of portraits, and someone writing a play about sticks. I'm scribbling notes about making things with teenagers and finishing another lantern. There is hope embedded in all of these acts. And I think the hope is that our inner and outer worlds shift or vibrate differently and also, probably, that someone else's world vibrates with us - even a little bit.

So that's a tiny bit on making, but what are the structures and resources that help these people, these ideas, and this work, to enter the world? How do we work with current institutions, in spaces between institutions, and also invent our own spaces as need be in back yards, attics, or alongside a riverbed? Where do we find the people, time, and funds to build the worlds that we want to see? And with all of this dreamy stuff, what are some barriers and how might we renavigate or dismantle them?

That's what we're talking about on Wednesday, and I am so pleased to have both Abigail Satinsky from InCUBATE and fine folks of Building 16 speak with us about how they've worked around and inside of these questions. InCUBATE acts as curators, researchers and co-producers of artists' projects both in Chicago and nationally. Building 16 operates a studio space, gathering place, and performance venue (by donation) for local and national artists. And your voices will be welcome additions in this and all of our Conversations on Creative Practice.

Oh! And there will be snacks. Possibly very special ones. Looking forward to seeing you and yours. Its free. Its at 7. March 24th. Wednesday. At our very favorite New Urban Arts.

Please do spread the word.