Without Words

Other art forms for inspiration, distraction, procrastination. Or pause

Photo by Eric Awuy on Unsplash

This is Vancouver Jazz Fest time—ten delicious days that I have missed for the past two summers.

Saturday night we saw a duo called Anteloper, with a multi-media performance at one of my favourite venues, Iron Works, an old industrial building at the north end of Main Street, right by the port with its noisy working cranes and cargo containers, piled like giant lego blocks. The performances are late, and I have to admit to having grown rusty with being up late. But the tiredness adds a particular layer to the absorption of the experience—it’s good.

I’m wishing I’d taken a photo of Anteloper: they had a kaleidoscope background infused with shapes of animals, a drummer and trumpet-player—often the trumpet in silhouette to the screen. Jaimie Branch, horn-player, can hold such a clear note for so long, a sensation of drilling clarity. She holds longer than I can breathe… so there’s a sense of just having to let go of my own breathing. Letting go is one of the keys of listening to this music.

And the good piece here is that I wasn’t thinking about pulling out my phone for a visual. Sorry—not even to share with you! I was just listening. Music for me is both healing from all-sorts, and enlivening for that moment and the future.

Listening to live music—jazz in particular with its improvisation and cooperation—has often moved my mind to come up with story-germs, and to birth ideas as I write through the “problem solving” of longer pieces coming together.

Much as I love lyrics, it usually is music without words that works for the purpose of breaking any sort of block.

A long time ago, I discovered that any art form that is word-free is provocative for my own work. It’s as if in the abyss of no language, my own starts to fill. I’ve been in the middle of a blocked time and gone to dance performances, visual art exhibits/galleries, music without lyrics. It’s always—can’t think of an exception—pushed words to emerge and move.

And more

Getting out into nature, to all nature’s shapes, colours, silences, sounds, has often done the same.

I’ve experienced the roaming mind of dealing with shapes and colours while putting together puzzles, and that too can be an oddly creative space.

I recall a friend, exploring the creating of pottery, say that working with clay caused her to re-examine her ideas of “expectations.” Wow… no corollary there to writing…!

Gardening, digging, planting, hours of careful watering, a most meditative state… can also serve what we do.

Doing vs/or/and observing

In bringing up puzzles and more, I switched from “observing/hearing” to “taking part/doing/being.”

The difference in this doing is that your mind is caught up in that. In observing, your mind can be working through your writing. Or is it any different? The sub-conscious, off in its corner, can be doing its own thing, always.

The secondary art form might become a process-piece or some world-knowledge for you. Or it might become a distraction.

How much time do you have for writing? We can find so many wonder-filled ways to procrastinate, and each can look so good. You can determine if you have the time, or need to make the time, to incorporate and take part in another art form in your immediate world.

Sometimes the call goes too deep to ignore, even if you don’t understand all the reasons. And it might be time to listen to the call.

Flamenco

Flamenco dancing and me… case in point. In my late 40s I tried dance classes starting with a form of ballroom that a friend offered in her living room for women who wanted to dance but didn’t have partners who wanted to. It was truly fun. And made me aware of how my brain could not grasp more than three consecutive steps for longer that 2.5 minutes. After a year, I tried jazz/contemporary. I’m not even going to speak to that experience. Suffice to say I was in a class with four or five young women who had all danced since early childhood, and I am grateful no one filmed any of it. No record = it never happened.

Then someone invited me to a demonstration class of flamenco at a local school. And I was terrified and smitten. The history of the dance did the smitten part. What is it to hide in caves from religious persecution? And dance? Loudly! I won’t wax on here—you can look it up if you want.

But within months I was doing four hours per week of classes, and I stayed with that until I moved out of the area and was unable to find a similar class.

The connection with writing

In flamenco every movement from fingers to heels has a corresponding beat. Nothing is arbitrary. The music is not in simple time; it took me two years just to hear the rhythms, so different for my ear.

“Stay on the horse!” would call out the teacher, Bev, when we lost that rhythm. When Bev asked me if I’m hesitant in life—because I was too often a split second behind the beat—I realized that, yes, I am, and also that writing is the art form that is the antithesis to dance. In writing, we can mull. We can change our minds. We work unseen, unheard, until the moment we choose to be otherwise.

Dance forced me to move and to be, with no thought about anything else, and to push ahead. There is no such thing as “dancer’s block”—“block” is not allowed to exist. Imagine if this was true of writing?

I began to feel this in my work. When writing, when pushing myself to explore, to get words down, to feel the story, I could hear Bev’s voice: “Stay on the horse.” Those words helped to stay with the work. Writing—words themselves as well as the work, the sitting, the staying—has its own rhythms.

This made me question the internal rhythms of my characters, too, and made me consider: what is the heartbeat in my writing? What is the heartbeat in this particular story I’m working on? How can I sustain it?

And the trust of dance—that the body knows the next step—made me wonder, too. The realization that the more one thinks about it, the more likely it is to all comes to pieces. Is there a way to let me mind go, in the same way I have to let me body remember steps and move? There’s a wondrous putting together of the mind and body in dance. In the cerebral stuff of writing, it’s useful to remember the possibility of letting go.

Dance has also taught me focus. The type of focus required develops the capacity to block out distraction. And while I might be utterly unable to think about writing in the moment of dance, it later gives me that tool: to focus on my work when I need to, to get my head and being into that place, that no-distraction place.

Bev says our stories are written on our bodies. It’s a statement that I’ve pondered as a writer. These bits of gleaned dancer-wisdom add to my work. I suspect all art forms have such bits to illuminate and edify.

What art forms and activities have expanded and deepened your writing practice?

Please share!