The Ritual Festival: And how it related to spirituality and the object
Photos by Me
I am a part of the festival community not only because they're my community and these spaces feel like home, but also because I want to learn, grow and evolve as an emotional and spiritual human being. It's one of the reasons we call this a transformational festival scene.
Transformations in the festival scene works in a very interesting way. Earlier this season I wrote about the spiritual implications of dance (here), and that one is a big one for me. But one of the other big ones is the implications of manifesting the impossible, and the role of play in self transformation.
I took a Developmental Transformation Drama Therapy class one year, with a premise that I find very akin to what happens in the festival culture. The whole idea of this type of therapy is that you get together, either with a therapist or a group, and all you do is play. The only rule is that you can never say no to someone else's idea, you just have to run with it. The philosophy of this type of therapy is two things. First off, the only things constant in the world is change. If we can learn the skills to continually deal with change in a therapeutic setting, then we can apply those skills to make us more comfortable in our lives.
Secondly, as you play, you cannot help but have some of your deep-set emotional issues come to the surface. As soon as those issues are on the surface, everyone begins to play with them in the most ridiculous ways. Normally when we have issues, we tend to get stuck in patterns about how we think about them. But when we begin to play around with all of the infinite possibilities that exist in the world, no matter how ridiculous, we can get past those normal patterns to possibly find more options for change.
Every festival does this for me, but every once in a while there is a festival space that goes so far to the core of my being, that it transcends everything I held to be true, and everything changes for me. This year The Ritual did that for me.
Photos by Kathleen T Smith
Who knows what are the factors that make a space truly enlightening, if it's the people who put it together, the people who attend, the people who decorate, the people who play, the vibe, the surroundings, the people you hang out with, how much you dance, how much you push yourself or deny yourself sleep. I have never been able to determine when, where and how my inner self will get ripped apart and rebuilt, but every once in awhile all of the factors align to allow myself to be open and solid enough to have all of my foundations shaken and changed.
Change and growth is the essence to us progressing in life. I love this quote by C.S. Lewis- "It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad." Learning to change and be comfortable with it is so important. And for me, festival spaces are ripe ground from me to deal with some of the changes that need to be made in my life.
Photo by George Arvanitis
Although I don't necessarily want to write about all the personal changes I went through at this festival, one question always follows me away from these experiences, and that is- "How to I anchor these experiences and solidify these changes when I leave the forest?" And that brings me full circle back to my art practice and the question of the art object.
When transformation occurs in these spaces, it tends to come in an entirely dreamlike, surreal form. These festival spaces are completely phantasmagorical, they exist outside of time and space, and are completely unlike almost anything that you find in what we call "the default world". And when you are in these spaces, you are pushing yourself and your body to the extreme, and opening yourself up to the type of peak experiences that don't tend to occur day to day. Because of these things, when you experience transformation, it can often seem completely unreal once you have left the site. But something happened for me this festival that really cemented together art and spiritual experience.
Photo by Julz
Photo by Me
For one of the days during this festival, a group of about eight of us decided to climb to the top of the waterfall and spend the day together. I didn't know any of these people overly well, but, as often happens in intense spaces, throughout the day everyone really opened up. The day seemed to become about all of us dealing with our own deep-set emotional issues in whatever form that took. It was an incredible experience. Of course difficult, but amazing just to see everyone be at where they were at, and work through their stuff.
During the course of this day I noticed that something began to happen. Certain objects would become significant to an individual or to the group as the day went on. A mushroom found during a bathroom trip, a rock that looked like it had a face in it, etc. These objects would be brought back to the group and shared, and soon we began to have piles of important objects, that eventually started to become altars and be more decorative.
Through out the day these objects were turned to whenever there seemed to be a significant experience. The altar morphed and grew, and as the day went on I started to realize that these basic objects were helping us anchor an etherial experience that was going on in our heads into a physical reality. We were making the most basic form of human art, with the purpose of translating lived experience into the tactile. We not only were using art to help us realize that what we were going through was real, but also to communicate significance to others who couldn't see what was going on inside our heads. By the end of the day we had a beautiful structure, which we left intact on the beach, to communicate to strangers that something important had happened there.
Photos by Julz
Often as an artist I question why it is that I and others, feel the need to make art objects. In my line of work art often becomes about commodity, or the saleability of a product. We use all these academic, heady words to define the genres of art we participate in, how we culturally define symbols, the reasons why a work is made, how we define it in terms of art history. But going through this experience really solidified the notion for me, that the reason the art object exists for me is for two reasons- One, so that I can communicate to others what is going on inside my head. And two, having a physical object as the product or remnant of an experience allows me to anchor that ethereal transformation into something physical, which allows me to bring what I learn forward into my life.
Photo by Me
So coming away from this experience with a few lessons.
-Change is good, learn to play with it.
-If transformation is etherial, anchor it in the physical.
I don't often draw, but I did because of this. Here's one of my physical objects that I made to anchor the whole experience more deeply in my head, and to communicate to others what I felt and saw-
And all in all, the thing I always come back to- I am so blessed. I love my life.
Photo by Kathleen T Smith