CULTIVATE

Creative Practice in the Belly of Impermanence

~ Realizing, Manifesting and Releasing our Living Artistry ~

An 8-week online workshop series
 Led by Lauren Beale & Brooke McNamara
& Special Guests, Zap McConnell and Bayo Akomolafe

 

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WINTER SERIES
Sundays, January 10 - February 28

9-11 am MDT, 5-7 pm CET

$275 Suggested Investment. Please pay what you can.

In this potent chapter of global unpredictability, we are called to gather with brave and tender humans willing to dive into the belly of our ever-changing circumstances. Welcome to CULTIVATE Creative Practice: an embodied, interdisciplinary exploration and training in which we harness, catalyze, and source the creative aliveness of our churning world. 

 

We begin with the truth that every human being is innately and uniquely creative. 

 

CULTIVATE is a practice of attuning to, cohering with, and yoking the generative principle that inherently pulses through each of us in every moment. We practice not only to refine skillful awareness of this creative vitality, but to grow a multidimensional capacity to realize and mobilize the imaginative power and potential at the center of our deepest humanity. As old structures within and around us collide, collapse and transform…

 

CULTIVATE ignites our skillful capacities to sense, sniff, woo, court,
magnetize, and catalyze living ideas and inspiration,
 

 

AND 

 

to prime, tenderize, forge, steady and awaken ourselves as vessels
for these living ideas to come into form!

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ABOUT YOUR GUIDES:

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Lauren Beale (MFA, she/her) and Brooke McNamara (MFA, she/her) are performing artists and embodiment activists living in Boulder, Colorado in the USA. Lauren and Brooke met while both earning an MFA in Dance from CU-Boulder after performance careers in New York and San Francisco. In 2010, they created the collaborative identity and organization, Eunice Embodiment, which offers cutting edge dance-theater performances, embodiment education, and CULTIVATE creative practice workshops and retreats.

Brooke and Lauren herald from the experimental and experiential art lineage of Michelle Ellsworth Artland and Gesel Mason Performance Projects, somatic practice lineage of Yoga, and Zen Buddhist meditation and facilitation lineages of their teacher, Diane Musho Hamilton, Roshi. Their performance work and creative practice labs have been presented in residencies, festivals and conferences in Colorado, New York, Montana, Mexico and Hungary. Lauren and Brooke's creative work centers around the magical power at the intersection of imagination, collaboration, emergence, and awareness.

 

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WHAT YOU'LL RECEIVE

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  • Weekly live 2-hour workshops facilitated collaboratively by Brooke, Lauren & Guests

  • Access to workshop recordings within 48 hours

  • An online community space with teachers and participants on Mighty Networks

  • Connection to a global community of creative thinkers, feelers and shakers

  • A dynamic range of interdisciplinary experiences to explore creative practice

  • Creative exercises & inquiries to grow your artistic skill set

  • Myriad opportunities to reflect, share and relate with others

  • Practice prompts and investigative nudges to move beyond habit & into new territory

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As CULTIVATE facilitators, we are devoted to guiding the manifestation of creative aliveness from a place of wholehearted intention, embodied knowing, micro and macro interconnectedness, honoring of each participant’s uniqueness, and genuine community. Our interwoven practices inside of our series include: 

  • intimate and playful conversation
  • improvisational movement 
  • exploratory free writing 
  • meditation and visualization
  • deep rest and daydreaming 
  • imaginative prompts 
  • visual art

 By engaging these multiple dimensions of self, other, and world, participants gain access to a dynamic field of powerful perspectives and playful possibilities with which to engage and respond to any given moment. Each of our unique, inborn artistry then comes to life with purpose - revealing, affirming and catalyzing truth, beauty and goodness intertwined with each other, our ancestors and all life to come.

 

In CULTIVATE Creative Practice (for people of all backgrounds, identities, and levels of experience) we aim to create a brave space in which we can: 

 

  • Descend, to include deeper layers of body, psyche, soul, and imagination 
  • Tenderize, through conscious contact with emergence and impermanence
  • Become fertile ecosystems to magnetize inspiration and ideas
  • Recognize that wounds and challenges are entwined with deepest gifts
  • Transform internal leadership from conditioned tyranny to wakeful sovereignty
  • Track creative aliveness and engage  it as a compass for purposeful choice making
  • Forge a reliable practice in a community of care and dignity

 

 

Our practice together in community is deeply rigorous and wildly fun. 

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If you’re interested and able to show up live, we request that you attend all workshops as fully as possible in real time. If you’re not able to attend live, you may register and receive recordings. We use the Zoom platform with a lot of interaction, engaging directly onscreen, in breakout groups, exploring the space around us through creative prompts, and engaging guided rest or meditation nearby the screen. We request that you be able to have your screen on and ready to actively participate as much as possible.

 

GUEST TEACHERS

Zap McConnell

Zap McConnell (MFA, she/her) is a director/ producer/ performer of multimedia site specific performance experiences. Through the years, her focus on sustainability has manifested in dream-scapes of image, movement, and music, informing not only the content of the performances but the processes by which that work was created. Since 1995 Zap has been a directing member of Zen Monkey Project; founded @hand productions; co-created Chicken Bank Collective (an international interdisciplinary arts collective); and much more. https://www.zapmcconnell.com 

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Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D., he/him) is a teacher, speaker, lecturer, public intellectual and author of 'These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to my Daughter on Humanity's Search for Home'. He is currently a proud diaper-changer, life-partner to Ije, father of Alethea Aanya and Kyah Abayomi. Bayo leads The Emergence Network as its Chief Curator and considers himself the chief steward of the concept of postactivism. Learn more at: http://bayoakomolafe.net

We also believe that creative practice is not only about what emerges into form. CULTIVATE Creative Practice consciously works with processes of creation, preservation, refinement, AND dissolution and destruction. Cycles and patterns of expanding and contracting, inhaling and exhaling, creating and destroying, birthing and dying appear to be features of reality itself on every scale, and express through all of our human stories and experiences. We believe it takes sustained and wholehearted practice as artists, as well as the support of a caring community, to allow ourselves to consciously participate with the full range and intelligence of these cycles. The fruits of this wholehearted practice can come in the form of deeply satisfying artmaking and/or the profound feeling of being truly, artfully alive.  

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And yet - how can we have the courage to go into the Belly of Impermanence and fully experience these cycles without knowing something boundless, resilient and unconditioned in our being?

 

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CULTIVATE IS FOR YOU IF YOU ARE...

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  • Drawn to explore humanity through the lens of creativity and creative practice

  • Curious about expanding your capacity and skillfulness inside of the unknown

  • Desiring to grow yourself and your living artistry in a global community

  • Interested in rooting more deeply into a creative way of being

  • Craving the courage and tools to manifest your creative aliveness with purpose

This practice may sound exhilarating, or it may sound like a tall order. In our experience, as artists and facilitators, there is an indispensable key to accessing an open space of mind in which creation, preservation, and destruction can all occur. The degree to which we can access an open, unbiased awareness in any given moment is directly related to how fully and courageously we can encounter the waves of feeling and joys and challenges of the material we are working with creatively. 

 

Therefore, throughout CULTIVATE trainings, we braid in awareness practices such as meditation and yoga nidra, to train ourselves to access a bigger perspective in which our creative process can flow more fully and freely. As we come to know and trust something boundless, resilient, and unconditioned in our being, we can more gracefully shed outdated or toxic ways of being in the world or engaging our creative practice. We can release habits and patterns that have bound us to narrow expressions of ourselves and our relationships. We can transcend limited perspectives or world views of who we are as artists and how living artistry can serve the world around us. We can grow beyond a self-serving, isolated sense of self - and yet include our uniqueness and wisdom born of our wounds. We can adventure into the broader dimensions of what’s possible in creative practice together in harmony with life and death. 

 

In CULTIVATE, we measure the growth of our creative practice by how much we are able to track and channel our own creative aliveness in any given moment of artmaking or living.

We hope you’ll join us and a kind, powerful, international community forming around this practice: artists of all mediums, curious thinkers and feelers, and so many yearning to join together more fully with each of our creative capacities!

 

What people are saying about CULTIVATE:

 

“...surprising, enlivening and intimate…”

“The community of people coming together served me deeply and cracked my heart open.”

“You are both brilliant, human women and I am so moved and inspired by you. This time has brought more sacredness, attention, gentleness and the feeling of being lit from the inside. I have treasured being seen and bearing witness as others share who they are.”

“You are deeply inspirational and I have fallen in love with your partnership too; it is magic to experience your togetherness and how you each enliven and beautify the other.”