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Arts Awareness Monthly E-Newsletter | August 2013

Hello <<First Name>>,

Welcome to the August 2013 edition of Arts Awareness E-Newsletter delivered to your desktop each month. If you know someone who may be interested in receiving this newsletter, please let them know how to sign up through www.artsawareness.com.


Creating Art Together

 
There are thousands of artists, day after day, who are getting out of bed running full speed ahead, knowing in their hearts that they can prevail over circumstances that come their way. They commit and they accept responsibility for what they accomplish. Artists who work together with others to create their art have unique opportunities to interact in groups with common interests and goals.
  • The artistic work they are engaged with is truly alive in the interaction with others.
  • These artists work with the knowledge that what they create will impact each other.
  • They work together without shying away from what is hard or uncomfortable.
  • They work toward their goals with a single minded purpose.
  • They understand individual as well as group responsibility in creating their art.  
I’m reminded of a concert performance I observed several years ago. It was an orchestra performance of a popular work, well known to the audience. While the orchestra musicians were young, the performance was beautiful—that is until about two-thirds of the way through the piece. Suddenly it was apparent that there was something going on that was very wrong, causing a complete collapse of the music. It was absolute cacophony, and although they appeared to end together, no one was sure how they got there at the same time. 
 
What happened? After the concert, the musicians and the conductor were stunned. As they reflected on the experience, the sequence of events started to become clear.
 
They discovered that in rehearsal, rather than counting the many measures of rests, the winds had relied on a particular pattern in the percussion section, making their entrance flawlessly every time. And the conductor always reinforced the entrance with a cue. Spending the effort to count the measures seemed unnecessary.
 
The music was written to build from that wind entrance through the last third of the piece with a huge climatic moment—the full orchestra settling on a final impactful chord. However in the stressful environment of the concert, the percussion section members were nervous and missed their entrance several measures before the winds. The winds knew something was wrong—it didn’t sound like what they knew, and they were getting frantic looks from the conductor who was trying to help them make their entrance. Unfortunately various wind players became frightened and began to play their parts at different times. There was no way for the conductor to let them know who was right and get them all together again at the right place in the music. His motions became larger and larger, his eyes were wide, and he even lost his place because nothing that he heard was representative of what was written in the music.
 
Finally, after what seemed like several very long minutes, he whispered “last chord,” and gestured for them to watch. He gave a huge downbeat and they all sustained whatever note they were on at the time. Many couldn’t think clearly enough to skip from where they were to the end. All of the musicians were wide-eyed playing nonsense, and desperate to get out of this embarrassing situation, so the large gesture to sustain was very welcome.  
In their reflection, they considered a number of questions. Was there someone to blame? Was this “the fault” of the percussion section? Was it the teacher’s responsibility to somehow magically know that the winds had never counted their rests, but rather waited for the percussion to enter? Was it the fault of the wind section? Was it the fault of the conductor who lost his place in the performance amid the chaos?
 
The chaos became a valuable lesson for everyone.
 
They learned that—
  • No one else can personally prepare and perform for you.
  • You cannot blame others for the choices you make.
  • You alone determine your feelings about events, no matter how negative they seem.
  • You learn by taking risks, becoming vulnerable to change and growth in your life.
  • In a group, regardless of how you individually prepare, things can still fall apart.
Teaching the arts, especially when it involves public performance or display, always has unknowns.  It’s impossible to know every detail of what is in the minds of students, how they accomplish what they are doing. In fact, that’s true for all of us, no matter whether we’re community and business leaders, parents, or educators.
 
We can learn commitment from creating art. Commitment is promise—it is responsibility, authenticity, and accountability. Commitment requires action. Through the arts, we also learn that in communities, we all must learn to live and work together with one another— a shared artistic process of taking action, measuring results, and adapting to group circumstances. While you might be responsible for your own success, when you’re in a group, you can’t do it all by yourself.  


Interesting—Check it out:

Mark Cooper, along with Lisa Sjostrom, presents the power of artistic collaboration in his book, Making Art Together: How Collaborative Art-Making Can Transform Kids, Classrooms, and Communities.
 
Creating Together, an article written by Cathy Malchiodi and published in Psychology Today on March 9, 2010, discusses the distinctive kind of creative energy generated when people work together to create art. She describes the group creative experience as having the potential to change our perceptions of who we are.
 
In his book, Learning as a Way of Being: Strategies for Survival in a World of Permanent White Water, Peter Vaill introduces an innovative philosophy about living and working in a productive way in today’s turbulent environments. The strong self-direction, willingness to take risks, and integration of the learning that life teaches outside the classroom is applicable to all areas of life.
 
Ignite the Genius Within: Discover Your Full Potential by authors Christine Ranck and Christopher Lee Nutter offers a profound tool for anyone feeling stuck in life or in art. With this revolutionary book, the authors attack the common issue in life that it appears we don't get what we want, and what we don't want we get plenty of. We think we know what kind of partner, job, friends, home and life we want, but rarely does anything happen the way we expect it to. This book prepares you to consider growing beyond where you ever thought possible.
 
Nothing will work unless you do.
−  Maya Angelou −
Contact Dr. Patricia Hoy for media appearances, to book her to speak at your event, or to engage her workshop or consulting services—

Customized Consulting; In-Service Workshops; On-Site Training Institutes; Seminars; Conference Sessions; Seminars; Round Tables; and Guest Speaking that provides motivation for launching the beginning a project, keynote theme inspiration, or setting the foundation for a goal to be achieved.

About the Arts Awareness Newsletter:

This newsletter is meant to spark ideas and develop a deeper understanding of artistic processes and their use in everyday life and work. Content, which comes from personal experiences and a variety of sources, is based on the Arts Awareness concepts developed by Patricia Hoy. Questions? Comments? Contact Patricia at patricia@artsawareness.com or 901-229-1955, Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA.

Copyright © 2013 Arts Awareness, All rights reserved.
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