Nurturing Creativity
Hope Littwin
Nurturing Creativity
Cultivating Communities that Acknowledge Beauty as a Fundamental Human Need
I. BEAUTY IS A FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN NEED
Theaster Gates, Chi-town hero, potter, conceptual artist and community builder extraordinaire has been known to stare down cameras and state assuredly, convincingly, “Beauty is a fundamental human need.”
A project of his that meant a lot to my own development was his Basel bank statements project, in which he partnered with a drowning Swiss bank to create a finite amount of art piece/bank notes that were sold for $5,000 a piece. Long story short, they sold every last one, saved the bank and raised one million dollars (which leveraged $6.5 million, ultimately) to renovate a building in the hood on the south side of Chicago and turned it into the Stony Island Arts Bank, a community Black Art archive, where members of the surrounding community can experience beautiful, intimate ‘for us by us’ art space for free.
People often ask Gates on which level is his art? Is his art on the physical object level? The conceptual level? The meta community building level? To which he responds, “Every level!” This opens up new possibilities and questions in my mind about the ecology of creative spaces.
This ecology is not unlike environmental activism/conservation. A wonderful Ted Talk by Marine Ecologist Enric Sala entitled, “Glimpses of a Pristine Ocean” contains an applicable metaphor here. In his presentation, Sala contrasts what we imagine a healthy marine ecosystem to look like (picture giant schools of colorful fish swirling around each other consuming/cluttering vast spaces) verses what it actually looks like (a significant number of large mammals, mostly sharks and whales and significantly fewer amounts of small aquatic life). Sala says that the fish have a shorter life span, quicker turn over, while sharks live longer, and we should see more of them. He suggests we think of it like gears in a watch; smaller gears spin faster and take up less space while larger gears turn more slowly and take up more space. Sala points out that our sense of foundation or pyramid structure is flipped. We should be seeing more large animals and fewer small animals. Similarly, In our current model we have a few worshiped artists at the top; but a healthy ecosystem, I believe, is flipped, we are all artists. With the advent of AI, we have a unique opportunity to flip this dynamic and prioritize the many over the few... Seth Godin recently said when discussing the explosion of AI music creation,
“Creating music (or writing) is an inherently human activity, and it doesn’t go away. What does go away, though, is the commercial dynamic of thousands of someones in Nashville or Hollywood hitting it big big big with nothing but a typewriter or a guitar…The end of pop and the rise of the long tail and AI brings us back a century. Just like it used to be–small circles of people, not mass markets. But this time with endless choice and a business model that is hard to visualize.”
We have the opportunity to focus on the inherently human contexts of music making.
II. BEWARE THE SEDUCTION OF THE ARCHIVE
“Beware the seduction of the archive,” Ekow Eshun prayerfully warned us after watching a group collage video installation during our class “Radical Composition” with Professor Tina Campt. This mantra has echoed in me with each new piece of work I have made or taken in since. I've toyed with what that warning could inhabit with various translations in my mind palace … “You are gathering beautiful data from the mines, but what are you saying with it?”; or “The assortment of goodies you have excavated is lovely but that isn't art, what is your thesis?”; or “Respond to a philosophy not to a technique”; or something deeper that I haven't been able to verbalize… and to be honest, I don’t believe words or images are the tools to describe the experiences that I (and many) am craving from art. The experiential animal part of me that wants those sensory experiences that bypass my frontal cortex and charge my cells with remembering, that ignite webs of connection like an underground mycelium network lighting up a few thousand of square miles... Those “you had to be in the room” kind of experiences. The sensual world! Out with the old sensorial hierarchy: Mind over body. Knowing over not knowing…
Up until now, I touted the image of a kaleidoscope to explain what I experience composing to be like, only because my eyes can't roll any further back in my head at the stubborn image deep in our western psyche of the lone creative genius who sits and stares and yearns until eureka strikes or fairies whisper in his ear or God’s thunderous voice moves his pen. Not to mention that the conveniently forgotten mother and sister of said mythological lone geniuses who cooked the meals, cleaned the home, cared for the pets that nurtured these pretend solitude symphonies… deserve a footnote. Beyond that, distributed cognition, the idea that our ideas and creations are interconnected, is a natural phenomenon that is due to take center stage.
Our greatest humanist inventions have been birthed from painstakingly nurtured communities where artists, philosophers and scientists have gathered in space (much harder to afford/come by today), and time (I don't know anyone who has it anymore?) and carte blanche (we may be on the verge of claiming this again soon, fingers crossed). Daring and devotional folk who nurtured creativity in their communities gave us the Florentine Camerata (opera), gave us The BauHaus (your chair, probably), gave us Black Mountain College (The 1950s New York School), gave us the philosophy, practice and function of art that we have been working with to this day.
To be clear, I do not fear the archive, I revere it! How splendid to have a vast network of historical human knowledge at our fingertips. This beautiful archival treasure trove with which to…. xerox copy a picture of our current reality infinitely into the future? But is this the function of art? It might make a great Black Mirror episode but when it comes to creativity, I hold fast to the Socratic method and have found dialogue and real time connectivity to be where the sparks truly burst into flames. Archives do not themselves cultivate community.
III. ARTISTIC LINGUISTICS
The artist is a translator. Beyond 1:1 direct translation, she is something of a wisdom keeper who is capable of making creative connections of disparate parts and weaving them into context. It has been well articulated by many philosophers, historians and psychologists that we are in the era of the “meaning crisis”. Notably, John Vervaeke, PhD lecturer at the University of Toronto, released a 50-episode lecture series on the meaning crisis that went viral after his interview on the Lex Friedman podcast. Clearly there's a craving for an updated synthesis and no one has more capability than artists to deliver on this.
I was recently introduced to a book by visiting folk musician and Princeton Arts Fellow, Kamara Thomas called “The Goddess and the Alphabet.” In it the pre-alphabet language of symbol is excavated and reexamined to be more potent in encouraging our minds to hold pluralism (symbols often contain one meaning and its opposite). This language of symbols holds a character and its surrounding environment, whereas alphabetic language necessarily reduces meaning per word to work one after the other in a straight line, introducing linear thinking and conclusive action. This presents language as an early technology, one that reduced pluralistic symbols to words with singular meaning and literacy to a compact user-friendly interface which could rapid-release literacy to the masses, something that was up until that point was a full-time job called “scribe” that required lifelong dedication and study.
In my recent collaborations with various ensembles here at Princeton (including Charlotte Mundy, Yarn Wire, Michael Love, Van Anh Vo and Alarm Will Sound), I have engaged in the role of composer in a broader sense for the term, including, and moving beyond traditional scores. Like Shlain’s reimagining of the alphabet, this is something that I feel opens up the participation of a larger community of creative partners as well as new creative realms with those versed in traditional western score notation. In doing so, I have taken on the position of musical choreographer of sorts.
In my excavation for a philosophy and practice with which to build a new language of musical leadership, I have looked to the likes of director Anne Bogart (Siti company) and choreographer Merce Cunningham (Cunningham Dance co.) for inspiration. In both cases, their companies produced bodies of work using guided methods and principles and necessarily developed a school to train those techniques. This inspired me to envision a company/community and school of training of my own. Like Bogart and Cunningham, I want to host my own creativity and others’.
Such a thing requires a rare commodity: time. Something that I am very much appreciating about the scientific community here at Princeton is the acceptance that alignment of philosophy with practice can sometimes take 20+ years. I have seen these communities delve deep in collaboration while including experimentation and failure in the process. In the arts, however, we have been led progressively into immediate production.
In fact, I came to grad school because I was desperately trying to figure out a way to create and innovate with artists in a way that did not drive them to madness, that supported their needs, that healed everyone involved. As Bogart states, “I wanted to create a room where everyone is invited to participate, and everyone feels responsible.” Sometimes the steps are not clear moving forward, but they make sense retroactively, and that takes time.
IV. SANCTUARY STUDIOS
“In our culture, which is rapidly spreading around the world, collective action is suspect. We have been discouraged to think about innovation can be a collaborative act. There has to be a star. Group effort is a sign of weakness. We revere the cowboy riding out alone across the prairie. We are brought up to make money and spend it on ourselves. People are considered successful if they get rich and appear on television. Commercial success is applauded. I want something else. I looked for a connection to an earlier American culture in order to find an alternate route into the future. “ - Anne Bogart, A Director Prepares p. 29
Artists are paid for their vision. Visionaries are born out of nurturing communities. However, it is somehow still not self-evident that we are all creative. I hope to be a force of care in that intention, larger than myself, to create a school/production company that hosts a method, a practice, a philosophy, with various tiered entry points with which people can engage in practices of creativity in community. This depends on interdisciplinary work that could include music, theater, dance, visual art.
What does it mean to nurture creativity here and now? Art in the US is in a particular crisis. We have rap king/cosmetic company funded super bowl artists and we have dusty underground, experimental, hanging by a thread artists and nearly no in-between.
I want to have a larger impact than temporal experience, one that can have an impact in the community. I find music itself transformative, so I started an online community music center named “Sanctuary Studios.” Within it I embrace social-emotional pedagogy as a core value that provides a model for the “soft skills” necessary to build a sustainable relationship with music.
Thus far during my time at Princeton I have explored this through:
“Self-Authoring Through Songwriting,” a songwriting workshop I created and hosted at Winter Session this year.
“Chamber Meditations” A monthly improvised music meditation series that I lead in the University Chapel.
“3 Songs Podcast,” A podcast that is 12 episodes in, in which I engage in dialogue with visiting artists and scholars exploring songs as an entry way into the larger experience of creativity.
I will be building this company as I finish my PhD with the hopes that it can be a platform for my professional life and a way to support my work as a musician, as well as nurture international collaborations.
V. THE PRINCIPALS AND MOTIVATIONS OF THE MODEL
“I have never tried to build a career; I have only tried to build a community.”
-Pauline Olivers, Founder of the Deep Listening Institute
“You just try to make a community where everybody has a role to play.”
-Jennifer Walshe, Composer
In a recent interview I facilitated with Bolivian artist and powerhouse community builder, Ibelisse Ferraguti, she beautifully stated of artistic communities that, “We must reclaim organization and schedule from productivity for capitalism…”
One thing I have learned is that people support what they create. Nurturing a space in which people are encouraged to create has been a blueprint for me for a long time. Music is a fundamental human experience, it is a core, source vibration that reaches the deepest parts of us. Getting artists out of their silos… Creating a community, the likes of Black Mountain College that isn’t place based, but space based.
I am creating a language to communicate art and ideas that works with distributed cognition. I am artist as beekeeper - somebody’s got to hold the creative vision in their head as people deposit into it. I want to create a balance between the theoretical and the practical, to imagine new spaces for social innovation, and to inspire the future of creative ecology and education. We are due for a new breakthrough in music and the creative world and AI isn't it…
A rehearsal shot by Omi Abiodun of Devising a Musical Theater piece with Dancer/Director Wasif Sami, Neuroscientist and filmmaker Sade Abiodun, Photographer/Poet Ami Aliu and myself this year at Princeton.