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What Can We Bring Back?

Writer's picture: Cliff DansaCliff Dansa

This approach to artistic practice that I have been describing evolved quite naturally once I allowed myself to drop the idea that artistic practice is about being “good.” Choosing this approach required me to drop the culturally accepted division between performer and audience. But how do we then respond when our inner sensibilities are telling us that we should make an offering, that it’s time to perform? It’s good to push back on impulses like this a few times to find out what’s behind them. Is this just another instance of the culturally dominant paradigm trying to assert itself? But if it keeps coming back, if it feels genuine, there is only one way we can respond; we bow and accept the invitation.


When we take on the practice of dropping the dream of being a performer, dropping the goal of being good, and immersing ourselves in the lived experience of the music, the dance, it changes us. We consciously allow it to change us. This opens us up and leads us to a more intimate relationship with our lives, a rich experience indeed, but contained within us, within the walls of our studio, perhaps shared with a few friends and fellow travelers.


You who sit on the top of the hundred-foot pole, although you’ve entered the way, it is not yet genuine. Take a step from the top of the pole and worlds of the ten directions are your total body.”

Changsha (788-868)


So how do we step from the top of the hundred-foot pole?


The real test of our shamanic tendencies is not in our ability to enter the Mythic, but in how we return to our humanity and what we do with our powers.

Antero Alli (1991, p. 136)


So how do we return to our humanity? How do we step out into the human catastrophe, the rat race that we have necessarily withdrawn from in order to immerse ourselves in this practice that the mainstream labels as crazy? With an open mind, we have consciously and consistently stepped outside of the boundaries of our cultural conditioning in order to explore what’s there. We have learned a lot and we have something to offer.


Weird People have always been the ones who move humanity forward. We are the ones willing to go to the verge of the horizon, where the known world disappears into mystery and uncertainty, to lean out over the raw edge of our own fear, and then to take another step.

Jacob Nordby (2016, p. 77)


After years of approaching artistic practice and allowing ourselves to be guided, asking for nothing, how do we make an offering to the world when we are essentially empty-handed? The answer is essentially the same as how we practice, we step into the situation and allow ourselves to be guided. After years of immersing ourselves in the question of who and what we are, knowing that no conceptual answer will suffice, knowing that the only way of answering that question is with who and what we become, the only thing we have to offer is ourselves. Like the tulip that is called by the springtime to push itself through the earth and blossom, we are called to show up and be seen as who and what we are. This is really just a deepening of what we have been doing all along. We discover who we are by stepping into who we are and seeing what we become.


As we allow ourselves to step into the role of performer, the conflict between the role of the performer and the role of the mystic doesn’t go away. If anything, it intensifies. How can we offer our artistic selves to the world without falling into the trap of allowing the value of who we are and what we do to be defined in terms of “success” as defined by the mainstream culture? How can we step into the role of performer without allowing ourselves to be defined by the economic system? Can we allow ourselves to believe we have something to offer and to offer it freely, letting go of all of our attachments to how the world responds to our offering?


Baseball pitchers have a saying that fits here,


I just try to make a good pitch and put it in a good location. What happens after the ball leaves my hand is beyond my control.

Unknown source


Can we redefine “success” in ways that make sense on a human level? Are these ways of defining success necessarily different from the ways that success is defined in the culture at large? Regardless of how we define “success,” can we open ourselves up to success without needing that success, without allowing our desire for success to slip into our subconscious and hijack our practice? Can we open ourselves up to success without allowing success to cut us off from Suzuki roshi’s “no gaining idea,” which is so essential to our practice? Can we open ourselves up to success without allowing success to cut us off from the essential relationship with our lives that we have cultivated through our practice?


These are difficult questions and they become even more difficult when money is involved. My teacher, Paul Oertel used to say that it is fine to take money for your art as long as you don’t care about the money, as long as you don’t allow money or the thoughts of money to influence your artistic process. My heart totally agrees with this, but as artists, as mystics, as shamans who practice in the context of a society that defines itself in terms of money, this is hard to do. We need to eat, we need to pay the rent, we need to make a living and when we take on a “day job” in order to do this, it unavoidably conflicts with our artistic practice, even if only in terms of how we are able to split up the twenty-four hours in a day. If we are to remain true to our practice, we can’t let ourselves care about the money, but we also can’t pretend that we don’t care. There is a conflict here and a paradox. The only way to approach it is as a koan.


Even successful professional artists face this dilemma. Professional artists have to spend a lot of their time doing things that, while related to their art, are focused on the creation and marketing of a product. This includes doing promotional work, traveling to and from gigs, packing and unpacking equipment, etc. Even activities such as rehearsing with a band to prepare for a show or a tour, rehearsing a dance piece or a play, or doing paintings for a show, while legitimate artistic activities, all have a goal, a desire for success. There is nothing wrong with this and there is nothing wrong with these activities, but they are not, by definition, mystic artistic practices. They are focused on the performance and presentation side of artistic practice rather than the exploration side.


It’s easy for a professional to get caught up in art as career and lose the essence of what attracted them to the artistic practice in the first place. The professional artists that I have known who were most successful at navigating this—based on, an admittedly small sample size—are aware of this issue and consciously set aside artistic time that is strictly for the artistic experience, that has little or nothing to do with the product-focused work that they spend much of their time on.


Again and again, we return to the well, Seeking only to know the water As a potter knows clay, as a drummer knows time.

Cliff Dansa


However, if we resist the temptation to lose ourselves in the money, if we resist the temptation to lose our essential relationship to the practice in a quest for success, then the energy and intensity of a performance, of preparing for a performance, of whatever we are taking on, can push us deeper into the practice. Interesting questions arise. If we are offering ourselves to the world, what are we offering? If our only answer to our explorations of who we are is who we have become through the process, can we embody that fully and openly? Can we allow that to be seen? Exploring these questions can call the bluff of our timidity and push us deeper into the practice. We do, however, have to pay attention and be mindful of our motivations, which may be complex, confusing, or even conflicting. We have to be aware of what our motivations are and how they are affecting our process, and we need to make conscious decisions about which motivations are being allowed to drive the process.


I learned a lot about this in Paul Oertel’s class. Paul had an MFA in theater from NYU and had studied with some of the big names in modern theater and dance. He exposed me to an artistic sub-culture that takes art very seriously, that sees it as an essential part of the collective evolution of human consciousness. Over the years, I have had the pleasure of getting to know a number of other artists with this perspective. These artists are passionate about art and they take it seriously. They create art for performance, but their focus is on touching people, moving people, opening people up, healing people, exploring the questions of what it means to be human. They fall at different places on the money and success continuum. They want their performances and productions to be successful, but successful for the right reasons and in the right ways. To adapt a quote from new age entrepreneur Paul Hawken, “Profit is a necessary expense of doing business. It is not the reason for doing business." (1987)


There is another connection between mystic artistic practice and performance that was a central focus of Paul Oertel’s class. As Paul worked with the students in his class and helped them immerse themselves in the experience of what they were doing in the moment, the more the students were able to immerse themselves in their experience, the more powerful their performances became. A poem that a few minutes before had been a bunch of words suddenly became vivid images, songs suddenly reached deep into the listener’s heart, puppets became living breathing beings. The ability to let go of our desire to be good, to let go of all of the cultural expectations about art as product, the ability to touch that essential relationship with artistic experience that is at the center of our mystic practice, the ability to do that honestly and to allow others to witness us doing it is a powerful offering to the world.


We are offering ourselves to the world, the fruits of our journey. This is different from offering our talent and this difference affects what we do. This is growth mindset vs. fixed mindset. If we are offering our talent, we are holding ourselves up as special people with a gift from God that we are sharing with our audience; we get to be on the stage because we are special. This mindset puts a barrier between the performer and the audience that is felt from both sides. As mystics, we are not special people.


Zen mind is ordinary mind and a person who advances in the way is an ordinary person.

(Footnote 1)


We are ordinary flesh and blood human beings who are sharing and modeling experiences from our journey, experiences that are accessible to everyone. We are offering our faith and our trust in the divine, our willingness to question, and our willingness to explore. We are offering a glimpse of life that extends outside the conceptual boundaries of our culture. We are offering ourselves, whatever that means.


This is not an easy practice. We don’t actually want to let go of “success” and we don’t want to let go of wanting to be “good.” Rather, we need to redefine them so they make sense in the context of our approach to artistic practice. As human beings, we want to offer something of value, something nourishing to our fellow human beings. The motivation for this is essentially the same as our motivation when we lovingly cook a meal for our spouse or our family. It is an active way of loving, and taking into consideration how they will feel when they receive it is part of the process of loving.


At the same time, from roots that reach deep within our experiences as artistic mystics, we have a sense of what we are trying to do. We know that even when we let go of all thoughts of “success” or “being good” as they are usually defined by our culture, there is still something left, something essential and deep. We have been working for years to touch this essence honestly and genuinely. We want to share this with our audience, and we know all too well that this is not an easy task.


Many books and articles about developing creativity tell us that we need to “silence our inner critic.” What they should say is that we need to silence our outer critics, the voices and ideas that we have taken on from the culture around us about how and what we should and should not be as artists and as people. But inside all of those voices, after we’ve learned how to shut them up, we encounter our inner critic, the muse, the one who has been leading us and guiding us all along, and she has high expectations. Her expectations are of an entirely different nature than those of the mainstream. We know all too well that we can never quite live up to those expectations, but we know that she knows that too. We also know that giving ourselves up completely to the task of meeting those expectations, sacred as they are, with one-hundred-percent combustion, is to put one foot in front of the other and to move a little farther along this path that we have chosen and allowed to become our lives.


And as we offer that which is most essential to our heart of hearts, as we open ourselves up and allow ourselves to be seen by our fellow humans as honestly as we allow ourselves to be seen by the divine, we have no way of knowing how that will be received. Will we be labelled as crazy? Do we care? These are not trivial questions. Do we focus completely on staying true to our muse, true to ourselves, and let go of all concerns of how the audience will receive it? Many artists throughout history have made this choice. Or do we think in terms of skillful means, of wrapping the essence of what we want to share inside forms and artistic modalities that are accessible to an audience? And can we do this without compromising who we are and what we do? The only answer that makes any sense at all here is, “No one said this would be easy.”


Theater director Peter Brook writes about the need to move beyond “audience wooing” and continues,


This can never really change so long as culture or any art is simply an appendage on living, separable from it and, once separated, obviously unnecessary. Such art then is only fought for by the artist to whom, temperamentally, it is necessary, for it is his life. In the theatre we always return to the same point: it is not enough for writers and actors to experience this compulsive necessity, audiences must share it, too. So in this sense it is not just a question of wooing an audience. It is an even harder matter of creating works that evoke in audiences an undeniable hunger and thirst. (1968)


This is the challenge of taking on the role of a mystic performer. It is somewhat different than, but a natural extension of, the practice of the artistic mystic. Doing it honestly requires us to let go of “success” as our goal and to let go of notions of “audience wooing.” We may have to make compromises, but even within those compromises we can keep our awareness and stay connected to the essential relationship with life that we have developed through our practice. In this way, we step down from the hundred-foot pole and offer ourselves to the world.


References:

Alli, A. (1991) Angel Tech

Brook, P. (1968) The Empty Space

Footnote 1: I vividly remember Danan Henry Roshi, my first Zen teacher, saying this in his talks, but I don’t have a reference for it.

Hawken, P. (1987), Growing a Business.

Nordby, J. (2016) Blessed Are the Weird

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2 Comments


Libby
Libby
Jan 05, 2022

Thank you for this reminder of what we are offering, and why.

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mer
Aug 25, 2021

Reminds me of a You Tube analysis and auto tuning of Led Zeppelin. You can lose the heart and soul of music, the essential human Ness, by making it all "

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