Between Sun & Moon Course March 2023

ANIMIST ARTS APPROACH TO NONDUAL PLAY

Registration at the link (CLICK THE PICTURE)

In this foundations course we are engaging with the roots of theater, ritual, artistic expression and creativity as ancestral technologies that belong to all people, and around which diverse social-spiritual processes can operate according to specific needs and contexts. We are guided by the nondual aspects of listening, creating, and learning for the benefit of the whole. This means we take steps to host Nature or Reality in its totality, as a wisdom and presence that exists beyond human concepts of separation and good/bad or right/wrong in our creative processes.

“Nondual” is a term emerging out of ancient wisdom traditions that seek to alleviate suffering by recognizing the inevitable cohesion of all reality. The experience of individuation or separation is a temporary state predicated on the presence of an unfathomable source, where all concepts and forms dissolve. In order for this reality and all its various expressions to exist, there are many phenomena that have to create friction, tension and difference, therefore creating a “dual” world; the force of gravity and the force of buoyancy, light and dark, density and subtlety, the elements of earth, water, fire, air, and space, the sun and moon, and on and on. In more recent human history (the last 10,000 years or so, greatly quickening about 2,000 years ago) there has been an explosion of attempts to dominate different aspects of our shared world that frighten or disturb us, creating vast suffering and exploitation in an attempt for some groups to protect themselves from discomfort at the expense of others. The narratives that bolster these behaviors are always fixated on difference and ideas of supremacy, forgetting the original nondual nature of everything.

There are many philosophies and ongoing conversations about how to live in a nondual way that reduces harm and suffering. For us “nondual play” is a way of inhabiting True Presence, which allows us to be available for the most beneficial course of action and communication in a given situation. The term encompasses flexibility, responsiveness, trauma informed creative expression, responsible improvisation, rhythm, listening, and devising or designing. Animist Arts devising is improv plus embodied research (ritual), learning through play, learning through making games/devising play/finding games, finding choice and optionality inside of discomfort, making up and breaking rules, and co-creating temporary dreams. The activities and structure of this course is inspired by many disciplines and lineages, including but not limited to: Viewpoints, Focusing, Contemplative Theater, Theater of the Oppressed, Meisner Technique, Authentic Movement, Bouffon, Devised Physical Theater, Trika Saivism, Ecopsychology, Deep Listening.

Each live session will be a combination of teachings, demos, experiential labs, and feedback. There will be opportunities for both solo and group practice.

All levels of experience are welcome, and the principles learned in this container can be applied to how you hold space as a facilitator, healer, or artist, individual research projects, devising works of art, shifts in organizational structures, bringing balance into relationships and communities, and creating deeper awareness and adaptation across networks, human and nonhuman.

Full details and Registration at animistarts.art/bsm