Institute for the Living arts

With great agency in shaping our art forms comes an even greater responsibility to know and internalize our history -- Not just who came before us, but what they did and why! Who inspired them? Who did they discuss their work with at the coffee house? Who did they create with? Who did they argue with? What did they believe and how did that inform their work? These are the types of questions we encourage our students and artistic partners to ask in their studies, not just as academic exercises, but as a way of staying in dialogue with our past.

Creativity and Art are inextricably linked, but the idea of Creativity is very difficult to define and even harder to teach. Instead, we like to talk about Perspective. We each have a unique perspective on the world and on our art form, be that our view of history, recordings we listened to growing up, colleagues we've worked with, ideas we subscribe to, &c. We believe that when we draw interesting connections between these things and synthesize them into a work or performance, we share a part of our perspective with our audience, and that exploring this process is core to expressing the creative energies.

No Artist exists in a vaccum. We're part of a community of artists, current-day and past, that we call a genre or style. We share among eachother a language of our art, a shared grammar and narrative. When we work together, share a meal together, or have a coffee together at the coffee house like the great artists of the past, we push our art form collectively toward new horizons. Learning from, challenging, and encouraging eachother as a community of artists is what creates an art form, genre, or style. Above all else, this is indespensable.