Here's a lil taste of a track from her upcoming new album:
That's Micropixie...digging this video.
I've been thinking a lot about the types of visions of success that I want to have and hold. These past months, about 4 since my first post, I can feel my conscious commitment to making community around my creative processnotproducts and realtime reallive politics sort of happen in ways. But I'm SURPRISED with how many conversations I have in creative communities about PROCESS versus PRODUCTION. What's inside of me versus what's expected. A lot of it comes down to how we understand art-- for me the art is less in the final product and more in the maneuvering relationing mobility of the process. It's about knowing and growing myself mybody mymind myspirit (and hopefully learning aboutfrom other folks).
To me, accountability in collaborative arts but also really collaboration in general means a commitment to witnessing and presence. Hearing and listening for real. Valuing each other and making process personally meaningful. Entering a process and actively working to be open to the potentials that the process could bring about. Great art doesn't come from the most demanding rehearsal schedules or striving for the highest perfection. What the fuck is perfection in anything that's realtime reallive reallife. Great art needs to be real. It needs to be rooted in what we already know is real.
We have knowledge. Art at it's height is a
validation legitimization a raucous demonstration
of coming together around what we already know is inside of us.
Art uses what we know to deepen and widen how our knowledge lets us livebreathgrowlearnlove.
"For each of us as women, there is a dark place within where hidden and growing our true spirit rises, "Beautiful and tough as chestnut/stanchions against our nightmare of weakness" and of impotence.
These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep." (Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lourde)Art is the real relationships we can leave with and sustain, the relationships we can deepen and strengthen, be it with each other, with ourselves, with our pastpresentfuture family members, with the worldsocietyworld.
Art is active, breathing. Dance, music, theater, poetry, any sort of expressive form, is not a luxury, it's a vital organ in how we exist, how we relate, how we can be positive people for each other.
"For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.[...]" (Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lourde)Art is found in discussion, in thought, in day-to-day movement and sounds, in simultaneously securing and opening our existance through the relationships we foster and value.
Art is a great youth program, motherhood, being a present sister, open listening, maneuvering the world in love.
Maybe if we think ourselves as artist-builders, we can open the way in which we live. Build where we navigate, create where we go. Love when we doubt. Actively choose to replace doubt with love.
"The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us-the poet-whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that the action in the now is also always necessary. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?" (Poetry is Not a Luxury, Audre Lourde)Audre Lourde's use of "women" is not to alienate the men-folks among us, but rather to question what type of knowledge is really valued. What ways of being are necessary for our survival and how can we stop just surviving and move on to our freedom.
Pariah Movie Trailer
My academic/life research revolves around how our emotions are sources of liberatory knowledge, and how arts provide open frameworks for expression. It's a political act, expressive freedom. Even when we don't acknowledge our creations as political, they are by virtue of shaping something around us creating a vision inside of us letting other people ourselves know about our existence.
Yeaaa here's to
writing
playing
facilitating
opening
singing
shouting
drawing
fashioning
walking
forming
allowing
dancing
moving
wearing
celebratingexpressing
our own existanceknowledgeselves.
LOVE
