Be All You

0 CommentsFriday • May 11, 2012 • by Imei

Be All You: How to Be An Authentic Artist

One of my favorite things to hear from friends and fans of my work is the phrase, “You can totally pull that off because that is so you!”  It is a spontaneous affirmation from those who have observed your path and find that even a new work in progress has a strong trace or element that is strongly tied to your character, a past piece of work, a progression or outflow of your energy and interest, and your obvious skill set and experience. As I have mentioned on my blog in a previous post, I’m a fan of Julia Cameron’s description of finding one’s “vein of gold“; that is, not just a project, product, or performance that results in a high monetary gain, but one that uses the artist’s craft and technique in such a way that converts towards brilliance. My argument is much more simple. Do you want to put out credible, honorable, creative, provocative work? Rather than just imitating (and I have little against good imitation), my simple mantra has been this: BE ALL YOU.

1. BE

Lati.n veil dance by Imei. Photo credit: Chris Yetter. Used by permission

The “be” of “be all you” is really about presence. Just show up and shut up. Bring your attention to your work. Don’t come to it distracted and encumbered with other sh!t. Leave that at the door of your studio or place of creativity. Stop yaking about your kids or your kitties. Put on the headphones and block the world out if you’re working by yourself. Turn off the damn cellphone, and shut down computer notifications. It’s time to just “be.”

My piano teacher Mrs. Hahn would often have me listen to a piece of classical music after we had studied it together for some time. We would take the sheet music in hand, and sit with it, hearing the music without striking a key. Today, I often come to choreography this way, having listened to the music for weeks — and sometimes months! – before I attempt to place the movement upon the work. I take a moment to breathe, to attune to where I’m “at”, and then to remove anything that might pull me away from sitting with the work and just being with it. It’s not some mumbo jumbo magic juju. It’s presence.

I would find out many years later that the principles built into my study with Mrs. Hahn share similarities with Mindfulness Mediation. From John Kabut-Zinn:

“Mindfulness means paying attention

in a particular way;

On purpose,

in the present moment, and
nonjudgmentally.”

Without being completely reductionist, it appears to me that much of Mindfulness is about intentional attending and focusing, with no agenda to jump ahead and criticize. Just be in the moment.

2. ALL

Bringing all of yourself to the creative process is actually tougher than it sounds. I assume everyone is busy. Life is full of the mundane, the tyranny of the urgent, deadlines and day jobs, and health challenges. Bringing all of yourself requires you to plan ahead, to take care of your responsibilities, and to set aside your best hours — not your worst! — for your creative projects unless you don’t care about quality.

While I’m not saying you can’t write a decent piece if you’re tired, or you have children, or you have day job, I’ve seen good writers put out articles rife with grammatical errors and missing words. I’ve observed dancers with hunched shoulders and  “heavy” legs (low-level leg extension) who didn’t make time to eat properly and rest between performances. Many of us have attended rock concerts where the lead singer still looks like he or she is recovering from a night of bus travel and heavy drinking. How can you bring your all if you didn’t plan ahead for your all to be available to you?

An example of planning for my “all” to be available to me was to surrender my Sundays and a part of Monday morning to balance my busy schedule. I found that if I stopped accepting performance gigs on Sundays and did not spend time writing for hours on Sunday night, I had energy and “pop” for Tuesday through Saturday, which are the busiest days of the week for both my professional work as a psychotherapist and my artistic endeavors as a writer, dance artist, choreographer/instructor, and budding amateur photographer. I needed “downtime” more than ever, and while sleep is some of that downtime needed to recharge my batteries, having waking time that isn’t drowning in sound, motion, and phone calls is important to my creative process. I reinstated the 10 pm cut-off hour as the final hour of the evening that I cannot respond to emails and phone calls, no matter what the time zone of the sender, until the following morning at 8:00 AM.

Those of you who work a corporate job will roll your eyes at me. It’s just not doable, you’ll say. Those of you with small children will smirk at my naivette. OK. Fine. But you get my point. If you can’t bring your all to your work by creating the space for your all to show up, then you should not be surprised if your work does not produce the results you were hoping for, whether that be innovation, improvement, joy, fans, making a difference in this world,  or money. Even if you are an accomplished artist with past success upon which you glide upon with golden apples coming out of your a$$, I can tell when you are slipping. If your all isn’t into your work, it shows.

3. YOU

With all the Social Media platforms changing their TOUA’s to include language that may make it easier for them to share your work without crediting you or owing you royalties, I stand on the boundary between hypersensitivity to the issues of privacy and stealing, and the marketing aspect where you as an Artist has to give away a lot of your work — books, photos, music, workshops — in order to get something back in return. But besides the monetary act of stealing someone’s work, such as “fauxtographer” Megan Kunert‘s actions against wedding photographer Amber Hughes [HT to Jackie Baisa Donnelly for bringing this story to my attention], my point is that your art should be a representation of you: your work, your life, your beliefs, your intentions, your hopes for the world, your vision of beauty or violence or ugliness or joy. It should have “you” written all over it.

When I first started collecting pictures from my point and shoot cameras, I wondered what I should be shooting. Some people are great at shooting nature, and they travel to the ends of the earth for it. Others are good at shooting food and architecture. For me, it made sense I would start with two subjects I know something about: performance art and my cats. By practicing on two things I love, I could use them to gain experience on lighting, setting up the shot, posing, and patience! But a third subject that  naturally arises in my shooting is emotion, and while I would never think to start painting faces, I have found it irresistible to shoot faces and bodies with a camera to express the vulnerability found in the changing landscape of the human body. I’m so excited to share with you very soon my professional project uniting photography and psychotherapy. You’re going to love it!

My point is this: it may not matter the medium you chose as much as the intention to bring the “you-ness” of you to the creative moment. And so while the first novella I attempted to write was all in the first person “I”, my current writing project will have as many third person stories because this is where I am at; that is, you will need to commit to being you — and no one else — even if you are writing about someone else. You can still apply craft and technique to get authentic renderings, but guess what? Even those renderings will have the trace of you that is as unique as your scent and your fingerprint.

In a couple of weeks, I will have performed my unique choreographies to two pieces of Latin-inspired music for a bellydance show. While I did not create the props nor the styles of prop use that will be featured in those works, I have applied the above principles of being, bringing my all, and sticking to who I am. The end result are two pieces that reflect not only where I’ve been as a dance artist, but the unique flavor to which I bring to the moment to express the stories found within both the music and the Artist.

This is my art. And that’s the kind of art we can own and be proud of.