clown summit

Doodle notes from an interview with Sue Morrison about Clown through Mask posted at the Clown Summit.

I’m always so amazed when someone is able to wrap words around a profound experience that seems beyond words. But then, Sue Morrison is gifted in speaking to slow learners like me.

Here’s a taste of the interview.

Slow Learner’s Bill of Rights

A work in progress
version 27.1.12

You have the right
1. To learn about yourself
2. To learn as slow and as fast as you choose (choose/need/want)
3. To rearrange your room (house, garage, life) to make room for your learning
4. To claim space, time, and money for your own learning
5. To learn from people who fascinate you
6. To learn beyond school (at school, outside of school, from school, in spite of school)
7. To ask for and to receive help
8. To learn in quiet with serious intent and without interruption
9. To learn in noise and mess with playful possibility
10. To make a mess and not have to clean up right away
11. To learn what is valuable and to value your own learning
12. To choose your own team of support: teachers, coaches, mentors, advisors
13. To work with people who find you and your visions fascinating
14. To work with people who are fascinated by your brilliant visions and will hold you accountable to live and learn into your greatness
15. To be witnessed
16. To focus
17. To make a difference
18. To make media (make movies, write books, create video games, make art…)
19. To invent new media
20. To study with those you admire
21. To experiment
22. To test limits
23. To contribute to the learning of others
24. To change the world
25. To create your own curriculum and to stick with it
26. To change your mind when it doesn’t work and start again
27. To study in community both near and distant, familiar and exotic
28. To savor the erotic nature of learning
29. To learn from mistakes (to make mistakes in the first place)
30. To join the community of practice of your choice
31. To join the professional network of your choice as a contributor
32. To make learning a priority
33. To pay your dues (do what it takes)
34. To incubate and hibernate
35. To be in action and produce measurable/ concrete results
36. To learn how to discern between the time for #34 and #35
37. To work with people who have some distance and perspective and can help you with #36
38. To dabble (experiment, explore, dream, try it on, try it out)
39. To dive in deep
40. To cross disciplines, modalities, genres, to cross-pollinate
41. To learn what no one can teach
42. To learn so that you might teach others to learn
43. To learn new ways of learning that work for you
44. To practice—to put into practice
45. To pass the torch
46. To be nourished (physically, spiritually, intellectually, socially…)
47. To nourish others
48. To honor yourself as a whole person (you are greater than your goals or anything you do)
49. To honor the yourself as a part of something larger than the parts of your communities (we are greater than the sum of our parts)
50. To set priorities
51. To take care of your needs as a learner
52. To receive feedback both critical and supportive

Henry Miller’s Eleven Commandments

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to Program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it — but go back to it next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

— Henry Miller, notebook, 1932-1933 (quoted in The Art & Craft of Novel Writing by Oakley Hall)

new year’s resolution: change socks, wash teeth, love everybody

woody guthrie, circa 1942 (Thanks Maria Popova at Brain Pickings)

 

Mine, 2012

Note of explanation. The tally marks indicate baby steps toward some goal. My motto: “little and often.”  I draw inspiration from the personal productivity advice from Michael Nobbs: “working on small creative acts on a regular basis can build over time into a substantial body of work.”

the internet, the singularity, and the dystopian present

Making Books and Learning Slowly

Before my mother married my father in 1946, she worked at Wright Field (now Wright Patterson Air Force Base). As a going away/wedding gift, Mom’s mustachioed co-workers down the hall in the art department (yes, the Air Corps had an art department) created this little home-made booklet for her in response to her comment “I’ve never been kissed by a man with a mustache.”

The book is so charming, the illustrations and intent so sweet.  And now it’s become one of my most treasured possessions. Look closely and you can see the human touches: the pencil marks, the erasures, the gestures, the staples. The illustrations clearly caricature the artists, just as they tell the story of a time and place very different from today.  The homemade book lives and breathes, long after the people who made it are long gone.

The homemade book is beautiful and charming, and touches us for years. The real charm of the homemade book, however, is what the act of bookmaking does for the bookmaker.

DIY bookmaking requires us to slow down, think, notice, compose, contextualize, design, illustrate and organize.  We have to care deeply for how the whole thing is packaged or it might easily fall apart. If there’s a fundamental difference between reading a book and skimming web pages, imagine the difference between reading and creating a book.  Students in Waldorf schools learn to make their own books, why not adult learners?

What’s your slow learning style?

I’m a sucker for learning more about how uniquely brilliant I am. I love to learn more about my unique personality quirks and strengths. I’m uniquely different. I bring unique gifts to any team lucky enough to have me as a member.

In other words, I’m unique like everyone else.

“This  learning style personality inventory indicator was  made especially for you.” PT Barnum

I may be as special as they next guy, but I’m also skeptical. Part of me resists being tested, typecast, and categorized. I’m much more complexly unique than any test can indicate, right? Isn’t all this people-type sorting just a bunch of hooey?

Still another part of me loves typecasting and categorizing as it helps me to get along with other unique people. I can blame your bone-headedness on your unique “learning style,”  or “personality type” and then give you a free pass. More importantly, I’m better able to  empathize with you if I understand that you might experience the world differently than me. And if I’m in the business of collaborating with a team, understanding how my teammates understand might help us all.

What follows is a tour of my doodle notes, featuring a few notable “learning styles” and “personality-type” people sorters, (complete with my snarky editorial comments).

Kolb’s Learning Styles

 Honey and Mumford Learning Styles

Howard Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences

V.A.R.K.

A.Q. Autism Spectrum Quotient

Myers Briggs
and the

Enneagram

and then there’s this. After all the intense doodling I did for this page, I just had to make up a people sorter of my own. So here it is:

The SBPI

or the Steve or Bill Personality In-dick-ator. (This one has less to do with how unique I am, and more to do with how I might classify the significant others in my life.)

slowly learning to cocreate with dance

Embodied Arts Series Coming to Toronto this October

Come join us for an exploration and inquiry through movement.

• Workshop, Saturday, October 8, 10 am -5 pm: “Your Life, Your Story, Your Dance” With Gennie Brukner, Henry Wai, and Vivek Patel. A Day of art making, dance making and life focusing through Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation Dance, martial arts (Ninjitsu) and visual arts. We’ll ask the big questions: Who am I being in this body, in my relationships, in the world? What’s holding me back? For what am I willing to give my life? How might I move through my life with  presence, attention, and intention? $75-100 for the day the Lower Ossington Theatre, Light vegetarian lunch included.

• Workshop, Saturday, October 15, 10 am – 4 pm: “Your Creation Story” a day of butoh, dance making, storytelling, creative writing, and visual art  At “What Next” 7-12 Fraser Ave.  $75-100 for the day. With Patricia Kambitsch and Maureen “MomoButoh” Freehill.  Light vegetarian lunch included. Members of the workshop will be invited to rehearsal and performance on October 16. (Making this a two day workshop, and quite a deal!)
• Performance, Sunday, October 16, 7 pm: “Creation Stories” an intimate performance and gallery show including members of the October 8 class at “What Next” 7-12 Fraser Ave. ($15, or free for attendees of Saturday’s workshop)

For more information contact Patricia Kambitsch at 416.799.6750 

or email  patricia @ playthink  .  com

THE PRACTICES

BUTOH was founded by dancers Hijikata Tatsumi and Kazuo Ohno in the 1960’s. This originally Japanese avant-garde performance art utilized principles from traditional Japanese theater and contemporary dance, poetic imagery, meditation and theatrical improvisation to create a unique art form that now influences artists of all genres worldwide.Momo’s work includes a collection of dance performance films created in honor of her teacher, butoh pioneer, Kazuo Ohno. The films, honoring butoh’s 50 year anniversary explores daily dance as spiritual practice, life and death issues, and playfully experimental public performance.

CONTACT IMPROVISATION dance supports us in being present, fully embodied and physically intelligent through movement exploration and deep listening in contact with another person. Contact Improvisation is a free play between two or more moving bodies. Practices includes following a physical point of contact and supporting and giving weight to a partner. Sometimes quiet and meditative, sometimes wild and athletic, it is a dance open to all bodies and enquiring minds.

AUTHENTIC MOVEMENT is a practice of embodied presence that will help you become deeply connected with yourself through the use of movement and sound in the presence of a witness. You will be invited to close your eyes and open up to your inner landscape of experience; then to move and sound spontaneously (which can include stillness and silence) out of this relatedness to yourself. Authentic movement can be great fun, deeply moving, and powerfully restorative.  It can help you to shake off the bindings of inhibitions and self-consciousness, whether inherited or self-imposed, and free you up to commune with your essential self.

THE ARTISTS

MAUREEN FREEHILL is known for innovative ways of fusing eastern and western practices of somatics and spirituality and viewing performance as a vehicle for personal, cultural and global awakening. She has been a performer and somatic/dramatic art instructor for over 25 years and holds an MFA in Directing/Asian Performance from University of Hawaii, Yoga Teacher Certification and Dance Therapy training at Naropa Institute. She lived, studied and performed for 5 years in Japan with butoh masters Kazuo and Yoshito Ohno. She has also led workshops and performed internationally including events with Katsura Kan, Akira Kasai, Koichi and Hiroko Tamano, musician Kitaro and Noh master Kanze Hideo. Currently she dwells in the Pacific Northwest where she teaches and performs regularly.

HENRY WAI started dancing at the tender age of 44 and has been exploring a world of movement possibility and fun ever since.  He has learned with a variety of Contact Improvisation teachers including Nancy Stark Smith, one of the pioneers of Contact dance.  Henry delights in introducing Contact Improvisation to newcomers and has a particular enthusiasm for teaching people with little or no dance background.

GENNIE BRUKNER  trained for three years at the Authentic Movement Institute in Berkeley, California.  She also trained with Ruth Zaporah in Action Theatre, Emilie Conrad Doud in Continuum Movement, Charlotte Selver in Sensory Awareness and Nina Martin in Ensemble Improvisation.  Her work is always informed by her meditation practice.

PATRICIA KAMBITSCH has been leading interdisciplinary arts workshops and groups for over fifteen years. A visual artist and author, she explores the interplay of painting and writing with other forms including performance art and dance. She is a member of MomoButoh Dance company.

Learning how to doodle

One of my new adventures includes (slowly) teaching myself how to be a better graphic facilitator and visual recorder.

Elsa and me working at Design with Dialogue at OCAD

I’m doing my homework: I’m scouring the internet. I’m reading and learning from the work of others. Each and every day I challenge myself to draw something new, whether it’s drawing a cartoon panel, translating notes from a Ted talk, or copying images from RSA Animate, or creating caricatures of my loved ones. I’m keeping a notebook journal of icons and visual symbols, I’m buying Sharpie Flip Chart markers in bulk, and I’m posting my work on my Playthink website.

The payoff for all this work has been big. Over the past month I’ve had the honor of working with urban agriculture activists, neighborhood activists, climate change scientists, city government planners, academics, and designers. Within one week I found myself sketching at Toronto’s Design with Dialogue session on “Enabling Arab-Jewish Dialogue”  and scribing at a healing weekend in Dayton for the Ohio Aids Coalition. Visual recording and reflection is quite powerful for people who have grown weary of Powerpoint and word-dense, talking-head meetings.

I’m learning that doodles have the power not just to record, but to transform conversation. Connections are easy to make between abstract content and concrete action. Slippery statements are captured and quiet voices are amplified. Participants with short little attention spans (who doesn’t have those?) tell me that watching the pictures helps them to focus and concentrate.

Learning how to sketch words into pictures has been a lifelong process. Doodling was a means of survival for me in school. When I scribbled in my notebooks, lectures seemed to sink in better than if I tried to take notes. As an adult, doodling helped me to survive countless meetings that might have otherwise crushed my spirit to pieces.

As a reading specialist in public high school, I found that nearly all of my struggling students were visual or kinesthetic learners. I shared my doodles and  Tony Buzan’s mindmapping techniques with students who couldn’t otherwise sit still.  And now, it seems, visual methods enhance learning for nearly everyone. I’m receiving some of my most enthusiastic feedback from even the most  geeky, linear, sequential, verbal types.

Visual engagement is powerful. I hope to learn much more. The next step in my Slow Learning process is to connect with other graphic and visual practitioners. This is the scary part for me. I’ll need to swallow my pride a bit and show them what I’ve done. I’ll need to swallow my pride even more and ask them what I need to do.

Gearing up for the intense

This summer I’ll be heading off to Cleveland, Ohio for another round of intense, slow learning at the Sacred Arts Intensive at my dear friend Roger’s Sacred Arts Holistic Center. Imagine spending an entire week on nothing but working on a single project with the support and feedback of other intense artists.

Hey, and here’s the great news: there’s still a couple of spots left.

From the blog: The Sacred Arts Intensive is a laboratory for artists of all disciplines, including the healing arts, where you will be offered a perfect blend of structured group activity and solitary time to work on individual projects.

Participants are invited to come with a work in progress and an intention to move this project forward more powerfully than you’d be able to do alone.
Arrive on Friday, August 12 and settle in. We begin with breakfast on Saturday morning and conclude with lunch on Sunday, August 21.$650 if registered by 7/1/11. $700 thereafter. Reserve your spot with a $50 deposit.
Dormitory lodging available for free.    Hotel rooms available.

To register contact Roger at rogersams@mac.com — 216.476.0583 or me at patricia@kambitsch.com — 416.799.6750, in Toronto or 937.919.6389 in the US.

You will be inspired by the diversity of gifts in the community, time spent in nature, and structured experiments designed to challenge, provoke, nurture and awaken the muse that resides within all of us. This is a space where you’ll be taken to your bleeding edge to rediscover your essential nature as an artist.

For more information check out the blog at www.artsintensive.wordpress.com.