#createtherevolution

[julieannotis]

Hip Enuf

[julieannotis]

Secret Genie

[julieannotis]

Dry Out

[julieannotis]

Hopscotch

[julieannotis]

DIY

[julieannotis]

Radical

[julieannotis]

Varnish

[julieannotis]

Everything You Need

[julieannotis]

Open

[julieannotis]

The artist is the… last champion of the individual mind and sensibility against an intrusive society and an officious state.

John F. Kennedy

[julieannotis]

Most Poetry Fails Me.

Most poetry fails me.

Same with most music, most paintings, most movies, and certainly most theatre. I’m a born critic, and as a performing poet who sees upwards of 100 shows per year, I walk away from most artistic endeavors grateful to receive more art but caught in the (often thick) margins of what didn’t work. I see where the truth remained eclipsed, where intimacy was missing, and where contrivance and forced maneuvers won out over simplicity and presence. Don’t get me wrong – I never fault an artist for trying. I appreciate composers, writers, and art makers of all genres who create in the face of a culture that largely doesn’t value creativity as an essential part of the human experience. (Much like sleep, we know it’s psychologically essential, we don’t know exactly why, and that mystery leads to devaluation.) The very act of taking pen to page or voice to air deserves encouragement.

Back when I worked in the management side of theatre, a guy came up to me after a performance of Jerry Springer: The Opera (to this day, the most entertaining show I’ve ever been a part of) and said, “y’know, I’m not into theatre, but I liked that. It was like non-theatre.” I can think of no higher praise than this kind of recognition; that a performance has pushed beyond norms of storytelling to find unexpected resonance. It’s the same surprise and delight I experience when hearing a poem that’s pushed beyond being a poem to become an incantation, a revelation, a witnessing, a truth telling, a miracle of translation from divine experience into words thru semiotics so ripe they almost fall off the vine. These slim slices of poetry (or “non-poetry,” as my friendly patron might have called them) press against the form to take it further in its evolution or to strip it back further than I thought I could let go.

The dusty manacles of what we think poetry and theatre are still weigh on us (and our box office ledgers). But though the outdated or overwrought may give our art a bad name, they also provide the springboard for our minds to be blown by the true, clear voice of those gifted few who pierce thru and captivate us. Every miracle owes a debt to the sea of the mundane, all the worthy artistic efforts that caused only minor ripples or invoked eye rolls and watch checking. Indeed, if it weren’t for all the failures and mediocrity filling the atmosphere, those shining stars wouldn’t have a backdrop against which to blaze. Nowhere is this truer than with poetry, and understanding the necessity of half-baked, milquetoast work is comforting and encouraging to me as a poet. Of course I want everything I write to be a stroke of astounding genius. So inevitably, when it’s not, I can value the work it does in contrapose.

The liberation of enjoying missteps and almosts and not-at-alls is at the heart of why poetry welcomes all players. I love poetry as a form because creating it allows for uncertainty and inquiry, because it lets the space of what’s not said communicate volumes, and because, at it’s best, it receives instead of instructs the reader. Most of all, I love poetry because anyone, anyone, anyone can play with words until they find the arrangement that is the unique scaffolding and portrait of their experience in that one moment in time.

Looking back, I see that the patron who told me he loved Jerry Springer had only taken the first step: He had seen and noted the exceptional nature of a play that pushed on his assumptions about the art form. But the next seed to be sown was his desire to push on those assumptions himself. When people see my work, I’m complimented that they don’t know how to describe it; that “poetry” either carries too much or too little definition to describe what I’m performing. But what I want now is to hear that I’ve planted the desire to create. Spreading the love of a poem is a gift, but loaves and fishes, friends, loaves and fishes: Spreading the love of creating poetry is a transformation. I want them to hear my call to join our army. Remember you were born to create. Relearn how to play with words as if it were your right and pleasure to bend, twist, and employ them. Press into this form with us and explode it, expressing yourself with your own brand of disfiguring linear language, helping us all to evolve and expand its reach. I love poetry because of what you, non-poet, are going to show me it can do.

[julieannotis]

A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

Walt Whitman

[julieannotis]

God is a four letter word

One of the most common lamentations I hear from my coaching clients is that in order to sell their art, they have to self-censor their spiritual experiences in creating it. They talk all around it in order not to offend anyone. But can't even atheists and agnostics have a soul-stirring experience when engaged with amazing art? Aren't we ready to have a conversation about spiritual wealth, spiritual growth, and spiritual peace that has nothing to do with dogma, nothing to do with one's religious choices, and everything to do with the psychology and benefits of spiritual experience?

[julieannotis]

Arts Renaissance in Boston

Hey artists, arts administrators, and arts appreciators - during the 2013 mayoral election, Marty Walsh made the arts a major piece of his campaign platform. He pledged to lead an “Arts Renaissance” in Boston. One of his major commitments was to create a thoughtful cultural plan for the city’s arts community over the next decade, and now it's time for the work to begin: Boston Creates Town Hall, June 2 at 6 PM at the English High School in Jamaica Plain. RSVP required, tickets free but limited. Let's sell out the house and start creating the arts renaissance in Boston. TIX: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/boston-creates-town-hall-tickets-16596057254

[julieannotis]

Selective Harmonizing

"...harmony cannot be imposed on those who are not ready to receive it." - Lewis Hyde @jodisolomonspkr

[julieannotis]

Let’s Combine the NEA + Department of Defense

1. We’ve already started, really. We entertain the troops abroad, we use mask work to heal veterans, and even use musical theater to save soldiers’ lives. Boston Mayor Marty Walsh is incorporating artists into the housing, transportation, and education departments. He sees how essential artistic viewpoints are in coming up with holistic creative solutions to long-entrenched problems. It’s only a matter of time before artists are working on public safety.

2. How to prepare for peace is first by having the creativity to imagine a world that could be peaceful. If you can’t envision it, it will never happen. We’re on our way there: This is the least violent time in human history. But we’re really not prepared for it. In the same way that we’ve learned that dis-ease and upset happens against the backdrop of ease and joy (happiness is not an anomaly), peace is the backdrop against which conflict is happening. But maintaining peace is like weeding – conflict can crop up anywhere, anytime, and in weird, unexpected forms. It requires imaginative vigilance to be kept at bay. Creative artillery is what keeps the weeds from taking over a peaceful garden, and intercultural creative exchange is the best soil to grow peace.

3. The more pliable and improvisational you are, the better you work with and around enemies, sometimes letting them fall on their own swords. We all know the feeling of rigidity of fighting the same old battle with a co-worker or family member. In the human office space of this planet, learning how to win wars is ultimately going to look more like creatively diffusing tension earlier and earlier in the process of conflict escalation. Anyone who’s taken Meisner technique or a improvisational jazz class can tell you how much easier it is to read people and work with and around them once you’ve had good training.

4. Just think how disarming it would be to be invaded by an army of horn players. We see activists using glitter bombs and dancing flash mobs. The natural end game is that peace and equality will eventually be won by the largest, most colorful, whirling dervish of performers invading the last bastion of curmudgeons and fear mongers.

5. We can transition from war dynasties to artistic dynasties. We’re used to this. We’re comfortable with dynasties in both the political realm with our Kennedys, Roosevelts, Bushes, (and Clintons?) and artistic lineages of the Redgraves,  Barrymores, Couperins,  Bachs, (and De Laurentiis?) So maybe the first peaceful artistic defense dynasty is on the horizon. Sure, I’d vote for Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman. But go ahead and nominate any artist you want. Maybe even you.