Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

How does myth/story return us to creative sources of energy beneath polarized global discourses? How can we use our bodies/intuitions/interactions to access creative solutions/approaches? How do we use indigenous/time-honored humanistic practices to meet “below the head” in our scientific techno unsustainable current ecology/mindset? In this workshop, we will put our money where our mouth is by practicing performance-based creative explorations together as a collective. Using a blend of lecture, inquiry, story, and participatory small-group problem-solving, we will work directly with the older wisdoms built into the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice–a classic story about learning how to surrender ego to larger wilder forces in our creative reservoirs–to seek for ourselves creative dialog with our guiding questions. Drawing on my expertise as a theater director, deviser, writer, and educator, I will create a workable framework and guide participants through their own experiences and use those experiences to illuminate our own group-generated insights and discoveries about how “oddkin” (creative unlikely gatherings of humans) can collaboratively and creatively identify “renewed” (old but rediscovered in our own historical context) ways of real transglobal learning from each other. Drawing diversely on the fields of performance, creative arts, pedagogy, mythology, meditation, and Jungian insights, I will link our work specifically to many of my recent research and practice sources: Donna J. Haraway, Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Phelim McDermott, Micheal Keegan-Dolan, Mary Zimmerman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tina Foster, Joseph Campbell, and Phillip Glass. By completion, participants should feel what working with relational intuitions can be.