As my time as Werklund Centre’s TD Incubator Fellow draws to a close for the season, I am sitting in a soup of feelings. Exhaustion. Pride. Relief. Excitement for what comes next. And finally, gratitude. So much gratitude for what I witnessed and learned over this past year holding space and breathing creative process into form for the more than forty performing artists who took part in the TD AMPLIFY series.
Our team: director Steven Conde, who truly was our fearless and gentle leader through the entire collaborative process.I learned how to listen and lead. To our stage manager, Emily Parkhouse, thank you for keeping us all on task. I learned the power of the room agreement from Emily. To our Werklund team, Sanja Lukac, my peer and Mama bear to the TD Incubator visual artists, I learned loving and compassionate flexibility. To producer Josh Dalledonne, I thank you for your vision and dedication. I know he will bring his passion to the Banff Centre for the Performing Arts. To Alex Bonyon, Kiani Evans and Dena Vahle, thank you for getting the word out and keeping a light but firm direction on how we communicated with the outside world. To all the incredible technical staff at the Engineered Air Theatre who worked tirelessly with us to bring everyone’s vision to fruition upon the stage, thank you. To our BonnyBoom Arts Centre family, Doug McKeag and Marcie Januska of the Old Trout Puppet Workshop, thank you both for accommodating and hosting the entirety of the rehearsal process tucked away in the industrial wilds of Ogden.
And ultimately, to the artists, a thank you feels small, but I feel something large well up from my gut and form a lump in my throat as I consider the deep creative and personal relationships that have developed over the past year. I was entrusted to hold the fragile collaborative system made up of unique creative processes, artistic disciplines, lived experience and education. I was gifted the experience of witnessing, time and time again, a creative vulnerability that I believe seeded artistic greatness in each and every artist involved. Though I was meant to mentor these artists, I feel like it was I who was mentored.
To MurMur Theatre, Sierra Oszust and SHY FRiEND, (un)decided, Matt Mooney, Gisele Ardosa, Jed Arbour, Darya Ivanova, Aditya Chaudhuri, Timothonius Alai, Miarlequin, and Ashley Velvet: thank you.
And yet, we are not done. In fact, as I intoned countless times throughout the year, “this is just the beginning,” and it is. As we observe many societal systems rocked and crumbling, we must fortify ourselves against the onslaught of AI. I believe, as I always have, it is artists who are tasked with the most important assignment. To be fully and completely ourselves and speak the truth regardless of consequence. What is an artist’s service to humanity but to speak the truth, to mine the depths of their being and reflect back to the world the authentic expression of humanity in artistic form?
In the 1970 documentary To Be Free: The Nina Simone Story, Simone outlines what she believes is the artist’s duty.
"…as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I'm concerned, it's their choice, but I CHOOSE to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don't think you can help but be involved…So I don't think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and NOT reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist."
Now, mind, this quote is from more than fifty years ago, and yet it is as timely now as it was when the words left her mouth.
But how? What is the process by which an artist does such a thing?
I believe it is within the very process of creation itself that we find and reflect the truth. That messy, unknowable space between nothing and something that I spoke of in Chapter One of this blog series. I also spoke of the threat to this process currently underway in Chapter Three as AI strips, mines, steals and sells back to artists that which we have created.
And so, what to do, what to do…I believe with all my being that we artists must get very real, brave and specific about how we do what we do. Because it is in the definition, refinement and reclamation of the power of the process that we bridge between what is now reality and what is possible.
Each artist involved in the TD Incubator program has developed their own unique take on “the how.” And yet over the years, as I speak to, collaborate with and write about artists and how and why they create, I am struck by how similar we are regardless of discipline. There is such joy in understanding how we do what we do, so for my final blog post, I wish to take you on a creative joyride.
This is how I, Kenna Burima, TD Incubator Fellow, humbly…do…
I follow songs rather than write them. I don’t really know what a song is until it makes itself known to me little by little. I discover that the truth and the search for it is a diligence or a devotion that leads to an act of feeling past the dust and grime of conditioning and socialization.
And so, I sit at the piano. I close my eyes, breathe so quietly, gently and slowly that the movement in my body is barely perceptible. I liquify my being. I notice how much tension it takes to think. With thought comes tension. I lean into the space between the thoughts. I notice how thinking is held in the muscles of my face. I relax the world around my eyes and mouth. I release my full body into the bottoms of my feet and drain everything unwanted into the floor.
I defend my time at the piano against myself, my schedule and all else that draws my energy from it. I devote myself to my creative process by choosing it every single day I draw breath.
Embodiment leads to what I believe is the way creativity communicates itself. Call it intuition, desire, a wanting. This particular subtle feeling of “the pull” expresses itself when I give myself a moment to decide something, not to analyze the options and logically decipher what is the best choice, but to follow a leaning towards something. Practicing the pull means catching yourself in a moment of simple and easy decision-making. Nothing life-determining, but simple decisions; what clothes to wear, what food to eat, which direction to take on a walk. This beautiful exercise I discovered in W.A. Mathieu’s beautiful book, Bridges of Waves.
I’m paraphrasing, but the exercise is simple and profound in practicing the Pull. Pause, close your eyes, take a few deep breaths, and “think” of a sound in your head. When you feel ready, open your mouth and release a sound. It may or may not be the same sound you “thought” in your head. I find that sometimes sound doesn’t even come out. I just release a breath and accept it. This process charges or enlivens the connection between something (a sound) being inside of me (as a concept) and the thing (a sound) being outside of myself. That connection is creativity, and we can experience it as a space in the middle of “before” and “after”. This is possibly why it continues to be tricky for me to truly define what creativity is. I continue to resort to it being an energy.
I write, record, perform, play and teach music and songwriting. Through stage performances, public sing-alongs, choir direction, band leadership and my private teaching and coaching practice, I continually learn and nurture a deep understanding of what a song can be, and how it can be brought into being.
I consider my creative process as a two-step process. The first step is experienced as “inspiration”; an alignment of all my senses to receive any and all input as material to support creation. I “feel” something inside of me needing to get out in some way.
Secondly, comes the craft; through engagement of my experience and training, I form, craft, and edit that “something” being.
My creative process “looks” like I sit at the piano and wait. Pencil and blank paper to start. My tool of the pencil is important so I can easily manipulate and change (aka craft) what is coming out. It could be notes, chords, lyrics, or form.
At any point, I’ll record into an app on my phone that has easily become as essential to my process as the piano. I keep a first draft until it's almost illegible with edits and erasure rips and smudges that I will acquiesce and plug the lyrics and chords into a Word doc. There, I will take the time to edit, revise and most likely add another verse of lyrics, but it is far from a final draft. Oh no, there is much more crafting and agonizing work to come. I record and listen on long walks.
So vast are the needs of the many voices housed within my body. No wonder I struggle to move words from the cavern in my head to the tips of my fingers. Which word do I choose? Which image so vivid and stark within my mind, do I draw forth into being with words on a page and then attach to sounds, notes, chords, and instrumentation? Many times, that’s how it starts. The words, if I let them, come first, and I do not question them. I can rework them later. This is where the importance of acceptance appears. The initial phase of creation, I find, can easily be stoppered if we begin to edit and fine-tune too early. Instead, I continue pulling and attach those words to notes. They become lyrics and melody, but they do soonly through the offering of support through harmony. Most of the time, this is how it goes. Words plus chords equal a melody sung.
This step always required me to step away from the thing I was doing, give space, go away and then return; sometimes later, in a different part of the day, but more often than not, sleeping on it and looking at it again the next morning. This was the phase of decision-making. Did I want to continue engaging with whatever it was that had come out?
A creative block is everything and anything hindering the trickle and flow of creativity. Large boulders like doubt, little rocks of distractions, barbed-wire snatches on behalf of judgment, sweater snags on nails of expectations. If I can start despite these hindrances, and continue through devotion, something will come far enough that I can return to it. If I can pull it away from the muck of primordial beginnings, then the desire to return to the thing again and again is set. I never know what a thing is going to be, so I’ve gotten good at pulling it out regardless of what it sounds and looks like. I simmer in judgment in many moments throughout my process, but at conception is not one of them anymore. I have crashed and burned that first gate as the mightiest of gatekeepers.
The beginnings of songs rarely present themselves by crashing through the gate, but rather as a slow trickle past. The important part is making sure the gate is open. And how do we make sure the gate is open? With a dedicated artistic practice that supports the pulling past the gate.
I believe that through having a strong understanding of how we do something, the end result is a fulsome world larger than the sum of moments of creation. To all the artists of TD Incubator, please do not stop, not ever, doing what you do. The world needs your art. The world needs you.
Love,
Kenna