Art | The Direction of Intention

Give Robert A Hand

Posted on July 21, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

499. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Robert is like a circus. When he comes to town I find myself following him around and doing the most unusual and extraordinary things. If you went to his house and asked for a cup of tea you could be certain that he grew the tea, made the cups and saucers, wove the table mats and probably built the table, too. If he didn’t design and build the chair in which you were sitting then he certainly restored it.

Robert reads the rulings written by the Supreme Court, the plays of the great poets, he knows more history, more literature, and more social science than any person I have known. He sews, he constructs, he plumbs, he paints and he does electrics. He is an actor by profession, a jack-of-all-trades by birth. His curiosity is insatiable and he’s consciously nurtured his capacity to follow his questions. To me, Robert is the master of possibility, the muse of “what if….” He turns over rocks to see what’s beneath, he acts before he knows; he designs projects based on what he might learn not upon what he already understands.

He was in town this week preparing for The British American Youth Theatre Festival, an organization he founded and has run for over 20 years. This year, they will perform with giant puppets and he needed help constructing the hands. “How about giving me a hand with puppet hands?” he said when I answered the phone. “Of course!” I said. Robert knows I jump at every chance to play in his field of projects.

“Do you know anything about making puppet hands?” he sang.

“No. Nothing.” I replied.

“Perfect! I’ll see you at 10!” he said, hanging up the phone.

Robert reminds me that this upside-down, fear-crazed, you-have-to-know-before-you-act world is unnatural. The most extraordinary thing about Robert is that he is ordinary. He simply does not invest in the idea of limitations.

Filed under: Art, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: possibility | 4 Comments »

See Like Merlin

Posted on July 17, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

495. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Every morning for the past five days, the blue-grey heron has fished in the same spot. It is as if he watches for me, too. I imagine him thinking, “That guy walks the same path every morning.” The foghorn is the sound track behind our mutual spying. The fog gives the heron the mystique of appearing from nowhere. “Magic,” I think as he emerges from Avalon. “Merlin in a heron shape.”

And, indeed, each day that the heron served as my portal guardian I have experienced enchantment. One day I called to visit Aboriginal art that brought tears to my eyes and a new vision to my heart. I learned what it truly means to dream. One day I entered the nether world of Chihuly and the museum designed to honor his imagination; it took my breath away with whimsy and color. On another day I met a hundred new people who left the comfortable patterns of their lives to wander the studios of artists. Brave hearts.

On a day I will never forget, I rolled up my pants and walked into the Sound to a sandbar 50 feet from the shore. “So, this is what Merlin sees!” My feet were cold, the fish were safe. “Yes, silly! This is what it feels like.” I heard a voice whisper on the wind and I understood what it is to see like a magician.

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Set Foot On The Stage

Posted on July 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

486. Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When John was in college he was rehearsing a play. It was late, perhaps midnight, and the director wanted to do more work. The student-actors complained. The director asked them to follow him. He led them across campus to the medical school and pointed to the med students visible through the windows, hard at work burning the midnight oil. He said, “Your work is also capable of saving lives. If you are not working this hard you have no business being on the stage.”

Once, when I was assisting a director, he told the student-actors, “Each night on the stage your work will have the capacity to impact the lives of others. That is a very serious obligation. If you take it lightly you will do harm and it is best if you never set foot on the stage.”

This is how I understand art in all its forms. It is meant to change lives. It is meant to hold the central narrative of a community (the identity); the arts are the container of both tradition and change. It is necessary and powerful because it is capable of holding paradoxes. It is potent because is serves the conservative impulse while facilitating the path into the unknown. A healthy society is built upon a living art. A healthy society negotiates its paradoxes through its arts.

Reduce the arts to entertainment, intellectual concepts or a luxury for the elite, remove it from the schools and from daily life, and there is no center. Social gravity weakens with the absence of a coherent narrative – people are like planets and without the pull of narrative gravity they spin off into space and wonder why they feel so alone. Without a common center we will continue to kill each other for bling because we have no concept of what matters and what does not.

Rather than walk away from our arts, telling our selves they are too expensive or merely electives, it might be time to attend to our business, look within (that is the point after all), and set foot on the stage with a gravity worthy of our obligation to others.

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Truly Powerful People (474)

Posted on June 26, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

474.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

When I was a kid I used to draw the same cabin nestled in the same meadow next to the same tree. I became an expert at drawing that place. It was imagined. I never saw that cabin in that meadow by that tree but I liked going there. So, I drew it again and again and again.

As I drew, I allowed my imagination to fill in details and over time my imagining became sensual and specific. It was a log cabin and the tree rings were visible at the end of each log. I counted the rings. I ran my fingers over them, weathered and cracked, they told me that the cabin was built in another time, a time before electricity and power tools. My cabin was made of some very fine old guardians! There was a particular knot in the wood next to the doorframe. I loved the way the place smelled. There was a small porch and I could stand on that porch for hours. I can still feel the texture of the wood beneath my fingers, the creak of wood beneath my feet. Often, in my mind, I ran my hand along the logs, tracing the path from corner to window, window to door.

My favorite spot (it was the point of view of the drawings) was just beyond the tree. It was the place I could sit and look across the meadow to the cabin. The tree was very old and wise and I liked sitting beneath it. I liked walking through the leaves in the fall. It must have been an oak tree though I didn’t know that when I was drawing it. I sat there for hours and imagined my life as I lived in the woods. I liked the quiet of the place. I liked the wind moving through the trees, the rustle of the grasses, the symphony of bird and insect musicians. I was a boy Thoreau.

It is a place as rich and specific as any place I’ve visited outside of my imagination (if that is possible). Earlier today I read this phrase in a story from Patricia: “art is the only thing that makes sense to me…,” and it brought me up short. As I rethink my life I am revisiting my past and that is why I visited my cabin. It’s been a long time. And as I sat on the porch, remembering, I know that for me it is also true: art is the only thing that makes sense to me; it is the only way I know to make sense of the world.

Filed under: Art, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: imagination | 1 Comment »

Truly Powerful People (470)

Posted on June 22, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

470.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It’s late. It is now past midnight. This used to be my golden hour, the time that I was most productive, most energized and felt most creative. When I was a kid I’d lie in bed and wait for everyone in my family to fall asleep. And then I would rise and draw and paint. I would create worlds in the quiet of the night. In the summer I’d open the window (my room was in the basement) and listen to the crickets and feel the cool air.

I knew even then that art meant something different to me – it was not about capturing images or lifelike portraits. I could do that. It was about something else, something that I had no words for and would never attempt to describe. My dad had an old textbook on comparative religions and I would read it when I was looking to put words on what I felt. Sometimes a passage would describe the holy and I’d think, “That’s close. Art is when people come to know themselves as something bigger. Connected.” Close.

Later, much later, I read the poems of Rumi and thought, “Rumi knows. Rumi knows what art is. And he is looking for the words, too.” My friend Sam taught me that poetry is language attempting to describe what cannot be described with language. Isn’t that remarkable; not that we use language to reach beyond language but that we want to reach, we cannot help but reach. We are compelled to reach beyond what we know. Always. We are glorious in our attempt to describe the indescribable, to full-fill (or full-feel).

This is what you discover if you know the night: every person you pass on the street is reaching. They also want to full-feel. They are just like you and like me. They are looking for the art, too, and wish they had the words to describe it. We are not so different as we pretend; we are not so separate as we believe.

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Truly Powerful People (468)

Posted on June 20, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

468.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Sometimes I have the ultimate theatre mentality. Once, in college, I was running a spotlight for a musical; the tube from the fan to the bulb housing fell apart in the middle of the show and between cues, to keep the light working, I was able to build a replacement tube with a paper cup and duct tape. Use what you have. It need not be permanent. It only has to work for a while. The show must go on but no one need know how poorly it is constructed. Sometimes that’s the magic.

This used to drive John crazy. He is a real builder, a master woodworker. John built some stage sets for me that will be here long after they drop the bomb; the only thing left on earth will be the sets that John built. I’d say, “John, it only has to look real, no one will know.” He’d say, ‘I’ll know.” Now, that is a true artist! Once I was hired to provide a set for a commercial featuring the Mutant Ninja Turtles. There was a desert scene: I hauled in sand and dumped it on the floor. I pulled some scrub from the canyon by my house and stuck it in the sand. The producer was thrilled. The real non-construction was for a scene in a cave. Since it was a film my cave only needed to hold together for a single day. Old flats, cardboard, the sand from the desert set mixed with some good goop and lots of runny paint. I stuck it all together with a staple gun and duct tape, stood it up and prayed the turtles didn’t hit the walls. I told John about my cave and he said, “I don’t know how you live with yourself.”

It’s been a long time since I’ve designed or built a set. But, my “use what you find” mentality still comes in handy. Today I needed to ship a painting and it was too large to get into my car and too awkward to carry. The shipping place was only five blocks away so I scoured the building for a hand truck. No luck. I hit pay dirt in the basement when I spied an old wheelchair parked next to the garbage. I tied the painting on to the wheelchair with an old rope and like Nurse Ratchet gone rogue I wheeled my patient through the city to the shipping place. I think I added local color to the neighborhood. Some nice Dutch folks took my picture. Some people along the way gasped and parted as if I was the Loathly Damsel. Their horror might have been commentary on my packing job. The woman at the shipping place called my packing “Frankenboxing” though she gleefully applauded my method of transportation. Both were high compliments. Being from the theatre, I knew that, in such a moment of appreciation from a stranger, it was appropriate to take a bow.

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Truly Powerful People (442)

Posted on May 25, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

442.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Over dinner one night Skip asked his friend, the concert pianist, what is the difference between a good and great pianist. Her answer was powerful. She told him the greatness was in the power of visualization. She travels to the composer’s country, she walks the paths they walked, she visits the gardens that inspired their compositions. In performance, she is not reproducing notes; she is walking in the garden. She is taking her audience on a walk through the garden.

A few months ago I had a powerful realization. I was working with teachers attempting to change their system and truly teach (as opposed to prepare for tests). They are working to transcend classrooms of control and compliance and instead create classrooms of self-regulation and self-direction. In short, they are supporting their students to be powerful. They are courageous and magnificent – yet, in the absence of an image for self-directed classrooms, they default to the old existing control image. We act out of our image. I finally saw their challenge. They need a new image. They have the yearning and they understand the process. They need to know what the garden looks like. They need to move toward a new image instead of away from an old habit.

Many years ago I worked for a theatre company. During an outreach program to the local schools I had an experience that jolted me to the core and opened my eyes to the power of the imagination. In a single day we visited two schools, one for the wealthy suburban kids and one for the poor migrant children. In each school we did a story exercise. The young children in the wealthy school imagined themselves to be princesses and princes, fighting dragons, and flying over mountains. The children in the poorer school imagined themselves as adults worried about the rent; instead of flying as birds they fled from landlords and immigration. That afternoon I sat on the curb and cried.

Note to the world: our greatness lives in our power to visualize. We go to the places we imagine. If you want to change the world, help a child fly over mountains. You’ll find that you have to remember how to fly, too. Even Einstein knew the math came second.

Filed under: Art, Education, Power, Truly Powerful People | Tagged: greatness, imagination, schools, visualization | Leave a comment »

Truly Powerful People (427)

Posted on May 10, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

427.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

“Art happens – no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about.” James McNeill Whistler
Years ago I attended a summer session of The California Arts Project (TCAP). The foundation thought beneath TCAP was that teacher’s could not teach the arts unless they recognized themselves as artists. The amazing educators driving TCAP understood that all people are artists and very few people recognize it. They existed to help teachers recognize (reclaim) their artist identity, activate it, and build community with all of the other newly re-found artists. The work was extraordinary, the revelations transcendent.

Ed was an angry young man. He looked like he’d rather punch you than talk with you. I loved him! He was a wonderful teacher because he’d been a misunderstood student. He had little tolerance for adults who abused their power over children. He was a champion for children; Ed was destined to be shamed, blunted, betrayed, and forced out of education. His administrator sent him to TCAP with the last-ditch hope that the arts would take the edge off of Ed (oh, silly administrator!).

When he came to TCAP he chose dance as his primary art form because he knew nothing about dance. Ed’s choices were usually rooted in resistance and rebellion and that extended to his personal choices. I imagine his inner monologue went something like this: “So you think you can be an artist! Well why don’t you just try dance, Mr. No-Rhythm-Multiple-Clubfoot!” Over the next two weeks at TCAP Ed went through the stages of death; denial and anger led to acceptance and then burst through to another stage: desire. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that desire burst through Ed. He decided to do a solo performance as his final demonstration. He disappeared for hours at a time to rehearse. He began to smile, his brow un-knit, his usual heavy aura sparkled; Ed had a secret and it tickled him.

Ed danced a lifetime of pain away before our eyes. To Seal’s Kiss From A Rose, he moved through darkness to liberation to celebration to elation. He bloomed. 200 teachers, shocked into silence, bore witness to the enormity of the human spirit and the power of the arts. Ed unwittingly called forth the muses and art happened. Pandora’s box was open and the art was out! Ed’s anger was transformed. He returned to his school with more than an edge: he now knew how to wield his power. There is nothing more potent than a teacher who has released their artist from the box.

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Truly Powerful People (425)

Posted on May 8, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

425.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

It’s that time of year again. The crows are barking at me. I thought I would pass the season unscathed but this morning the dive-bombing games returned. To be clear: the crows dive bomb me, I do not dive bomb the crows. I have no reason to aim my beak at their pates and swoop in unannounced.

The attacks often begin with a rowdy barrage of crow insults. At least, I thought they were insults. To the untrained ear it sounds as if they are mocking the shape of my head or saying crude things about my mother. Crows are not subtle.

Since this has been going on for years I thought it would be a good idea to know what they were actually saying! Perhaps my assumptions are wrong! Perhaps there is a reasonable explanation for their barking and diving at me. It might explain why they pick me out of the crowd. So, after some searching I found and hired a crow translator (at the moment there is no app for crow translation).

At first, I thought my translator was crazy or somehow distracted. Her translations sounded suspiciously crow-centric. After a few translations I began to get the gist of things. It turns out that crows bark Haiku! They are especially fond of Basho, the great Haiku master because he penned so many poems about crows. This is what the crow barked just before aiming its beak at me (as translated by my translator):

The crow sits
on a dead branch –
evening of autumn

“Their seasons are all confused!” I protested. “Autumn? What’s this crow talking about and why do they attack me?” The translator smiled knowingly and said:

“This is not attack.
The crow desires your response
This fine spring morning.”

Great. The crows want a poem instead of my usual flailing arms and duck-n-cover maneuvers. All this time it was art that they craved.

Attack someone else,
My head is full of divots.
Nice shot. Hole in one.

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Truly Powerful People (424)

Posted on May 7, 2012 by davidrobinsoncreative

424.
Join me in inspiring truly powerful people. Each day I will add a new thought, story or idea to support your quest and mine.

Colin was different. Dwight cast him in the play because he wanted Colin to be part of a community of support. Being different, Colin had rarely belonged. He was the outcast kid constantly trying to get into the group. Consistent shunning did nothing to dampen his desire. He wanted to belong. He kept trying. So, he auditioned for a play. Dwight cast Colin because Dwight understands the true nature of art.

One day, a few weeks into rehearsal, Dwight came into the theatre and heard the other cast members belittling Colin. Dwight was stunned. The power of his astonishment shocked the cast into silence. In a quiet voice, filled with love-rage, Dwight delivered a message worthy for the ears of all humanity. “This space is sacred. It is an art space where people come together. It is a space of generosity and courage. It is a place where people reach toward each other to have a common experience. It is a place capable of transforming hearts and lives. Colin’s need is to reach toward you. Can you imagine the courage it must take for him, day after day to show up and to reach toward you knowing that your response will be to push him away? Imagine it because this is what you are creating. And what you are creating is killing the art in you and in him. What do you possibly gain by pushing him away other than a false sense of superiority? You need to mock Colin so that you feel powerful. How does that power feel? What might you gain by opening your circle and letting him in? How powerful do you become when your power is not predicated upon the diminishment of others? Colin needs you but let me tell you something that you may not recognize: you need him far more than he will ever need you. He just might teach you how to be truly powerful and human.”

And then Dwight asked them to leave his theatre. He asked them not to come back until they were capable of respecting themselves, each other, and their play. He came into my office, sat down and wept. And then, he asked me a world-class question: “Why are people so devoted to diminishing themselves?”

Filed under: Art, Awakening, Education, Heroes, Truly Powerful People | 3 Comments »

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