COA THE COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE Volume 10 Number 2. . Fall 2014 CREATIVITY: THE ARTS 152472_cover.indd 1 10/29/14 12:55 PM COA The College of the Atlantic Magazine Creativity: The Arts Letter from the President 3 News from Campus 4 Donor Profile Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15 9 CREATIVITY: THE ARTS Introduction Catherine Clinger 10 Leaping into the Feature Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes 12 Trouble Dolls Jennifer Prediger '00 17 Creativity in Motion Tawanda Chabikwa '07 18 Evolution, Creativity, and Art A Dialogue 22 Seeking Form Miles Chapin '10 24 Creativity The Paths 28 Creative Activism The Restaurant 30 The Future We Bought 32 Reclaiming Land, Connecting Communities 33 You: Unplugged 34 Poetry Gregory Bernard '16 and Molly Caldwell '14 35 "Leta" Grace Goschen '17 36 Alumni & Community Notes 40 On the Doorstep of Europe Heath Cabot 47 Elmer Beal Retires 48 2014 Commencement Address Excerpt Mary Harney '96 49 "I want to dance until I disappear, because at some point everything is shed, you're finally as you truly are meant to be - creativity, vitality, life." Tawanda Chabikwa '07 (photo by Craig Bortmas) 152472_text.indd 1 11/3/14 11:44 PM COA The stories in this issue reflect The College of the Atlantic Magazine quests. They are personal Volume 10 Number 2 Fall 2014 accounts of alumni, faculty, and students striving to reach out, Editorial Editor Donna Gold to connect, to change. Through Editorial Guidance Heather Albert-Knopp '99 them we see how we all seek Lynn Boulger Catherine Clinger to understand ourselves, our Dru Colbert mortality, and our relation to our Darron Collins '92 Jennifer Hughes chosen worlds - from humanity's Katharine Macko ancient heritage to the emotional Bob Mentzinger Suzanne Morse and physical currents of daily Steve Ressel life. Miles Chapin '10 carves a Eliza Ruel '13 Lauren Rupp '05 four-ton granite block in hopes Photo by Bill Carpenter. Josh Winer '91 of connecting two nations - Editorial Consultant Bill Carpenter Alumni Consultants Jill Barlow-Kelley and a smaller block to speak of Dianne Clendaniel love. Alexis Gancayco '17 draws a heart eighty-four times in a piece stretching Design twenty-eight feet as a response to the death of a friend. Tawanda Chabikwa '07 Art Director Rebecca Hope Woods dances, chants, paints, and writes to instill some of the tremors of the primordial balance between humanity and nature into our twenty-first century world. COA Administration President Darron Collins '92 With her distinctive humor, faculty member Nancy Andrews explores human Academic Dean Kenneth Hill consciousness. Others expand art into public activism to connect a community, Associate Academic Deans Catherine Clinger Stephen Ressel confront bureaucracy, or simply remind people of the joyful satisfactions of Sean Todd sustenance. Karen Waldron Administrative Dean Andrew Griffiths Dean of Admission Heather Albert-Knopp '99 Such efforts galvanize our full selves. As Ashley Bryan, artist, sculptor, children's Dean of Institutional Lynn Boulger Advancement book writer, and COA friend says, "The desire to create is what identifies us as Dean of Student Life Sarah Luke being human." (An exhibit reflecting Ashley's life, produced with the help of a COA Board of Trustees host of COA people, is in the Blum Gallery through February - so visit!) Becky Ann Baker Linda McGillicuddy Dylan Baker Jay McNally '84 Timothy R. Bass Stephen G. Milliken As I write this, the full October moon is rising. I wake to the aroma of wood Ronald E. Beard Philip S.J. Moriarty smoke in the glow of golden birch trees, and fall asleep to the glimmer of Leslie C. Brewer Phyllis Anina Moriarty Alyne Cistone Lili Pew moonlight on Penobscot Bay. In the news, emerging from miseries of war, Nikhit D'Sa '06 Hamilton Robinson, Jr. disease, and politics, is the revelation that cave paintings on the island of Beth Gardiner Nadia Rosenthal Amy Yeager Geier Marthann Lauver Samek Sulawesi, Indonesia were created some 40,000 years ago. These paintings are Elizabeth D. Hodder Henry L.P. Schmelzer as old, or older, than those on European cave walls. With this evidence that Philip B. Kunhardt III '77 Stephen Sullens Anthony Mazlish William N. Thorndike, Jr. early creativity spanned the globe, scientists are saying that humans were likely Suzanne Folds McCullagh Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15 making art even before the rafts of Homo sapiens left Africa - possibly even Sarah A. McDaniel '93 before we became human. Art, these scientists suggest, accompanied a huge Life Trustees Trustee Emeriti growth spurt in human intelligence - something faculty members Helen Hess William G. Foulke, Jr. David Hackett Fischer Samuel M. Hamill, Jr. George B.E. Hambleton and Bill Carpenter speculate about here. John N. Kelly Sherry F. Huber Susan Storey Lyman Helen Porter William V.P. Newlin Cathy L. Ramsdell '78 When I look at the blue-gray nightscape cast by the radiant moon, I have to John Reeves John Wilmerding wonder, did this surge in creativity evolve so as to comprehend the beauty of our Henry D. Sharpe, Jr. world? The faculty, students, trustees, staff, and alumni of College of the Atlantic envision a world where people value creativity, intellectual achievement, and diversity of nature and human cultures. With respect and Damn Damn Id gld compassion, individuals construct meaningful lives for themselves, gain appreciation of the relationships Donna Gold, COA editor among all forms of life, and safeguard the heritage of future generations. COA is published biannually for the College of the Cover: Tawanda Chabikwa '07, photographed by Craig Bortmas (see page 18). Atlantic community. Please send ideas, letters, and submissions (short stories, poetry, and revisits to Back Cover: Beech Hill Farm by Ezra Hallett '17. As part of Dru Colbert's Activating human ecology essays) to: Spaces: Installation Artwork class, Ezra turned one of the outbuildings of Beech Hill COA Magazine, College of the Atlantic Farm into a camera obscura. The building became a large-scale pinhole camera. 105 Eden Street, Bar Harbor, ME 04609 Should you have entered it during the installation, you would have seen this image dgold@coa.edu projected on 10 by 6 feet of sheets hanging on the back wall. The back cover is a WWW.COA.EDU digital photograph of the actual projection. MIX PRINTED WITH CERTIFIED COA indicates non-degree alumni by a parenthesis around their year. Paper from responsible sources FSC WIND www.fsc.org FSC C021556 POWER® 152472_text.indd 2 11/3/14 11:44 PM From the President When I consider COA, I think of creativity, for it is one of the most important characteristics we like to cultivate among students, faculty, and staff at College of the Atlantic. My use of the verb cultivate here is strategic because from my experience you neither teach nor learn creativity, but are rather exposed to conditions that encourage it. Though creativity shows no bias when it comes Darron, his daughter Molly, and Ashley Bryan at the opening of A Visit With to disciplines of thought, influencing outcomes Ashley Bryan (see page 7). in fields as diverse as political science, two- dimensional design, and micro-biology, COA's strategic lack of departments and focus on interdisciplinary approaches more forcefully inspires creative thought. Asking students to apply classroom learning to projects and problems is also something of a catalyst to the creative process, though one can certainly exhibit creative thinking in purely theoretical realms as well. And being at the controls of your own curriculum - that is, designing your own course of study around what you're interested in, what you're perplexed by, or what you're trying to solve - almost requires our students to think creatively about their own education. You're not likely to come away from reading this issue with a blueprint for how to live a more creative life. That's not our intention. But the pages that follow dispel the myth of creativity as something only for the slightly touched, savant painter, or the scientist suddenly possessed by some mysterious, revelatory "a-ha" moment. When I consider creativity and the creative life, I think of my favorite artist John Coltrane whose wild, sometimes superficially incoherent improvisation is neither random nor mysterious. Coltrane's inspiration emerges from one of the hardest work ethics in jazz, from repetition, from attention to detail, and from supreme concentration and presence. I like to think our work and our scholarship here on the COA campus, in the Mount Desert Island community, and across the world echoes Coltrane's focus on presence and practice and, in so doing, cultivates the creative spirit amongst us all. Darron Collins '92, PhD P.S. I want you to know that College of the Atlantic's annual report, previously mailed, will now be offered online each January at coa.edu/developmentliterature. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 3 152472_text.indd 3 11/4/14 11:01 AM NEWS FROM CAMPUS BLUM GALLERY PRESENTS A PRINT SHOP IS BORN BEECH HILL FARM BOUNTY JENNIFER JUDD- MCGEE ('92) JUNE JULY AUGUST Degrees are handed to 76 students from Summer events range from a conversation Princeton Review rates COA as #3 among 15 nations and 20 states, including Sean with Jenny Bicks, Sex and the City and Men top liberal arts schools for "professors get Murphy, the first male staffer to receive in Trees writer, and faculty member Jodi high marks," #9 for best food, and in the a BA, following in the footsteps of former Baker, to genome research with trustee top 20 for faculty access, quality of life, and staffers Pamela Parvin '93 and Patricia Nadia Rosenthal discussing her work in financial aid. Ciraulo '94. Commencement speaker Mary regenerative medicine with Steven Katona, Washington Monthly calls COA one of the top Harney '96 (see inside back cover) brings former COA president. 100 "affordable elite" schools. tears to many eyes. The Peggy Rockefeller Farms obtains a The Hatchery, COA's venture incubator, The New York Times publishes an op-ed commercial agriculture permit allowing it to is asked to be a founding member of by Doreen Stabinsky, faculty member fulfill more college and community needs, the University Network of Incubators in global environmental politics, calling raising 30 sheep, 50 egg-laying hens, 200 and Accelerators, administered for a global carbon emissions cap, plus meat chickens, and tending more than 50 by the Rice Alliance for Technology and substantial investment to make it happen. apple trees, ½ acre of organic vegetables, Entrepreneurship at Rice University and 30 acres of hayland. in Texas. EARTH IN BRACKETS RICH BORDEN: A EARTH IN BRACKETS AT NYC'S FACE OF HUMAN THE GREAT WEST MONSTER CLIMATE MARCH ECOLOGY COURSE NEAR CALAVERAS SEPTEMBER OCTOBER NOVEMBER The year opens with 107 new students - 80 As they travel the national parks for the Jay Friedlander, faculty member in socially first-years, 23 transfers, and 4 graduates. Great West 3-credit "monster course," 8 responsible business, gives a TEDx talk on They hail from 14 nations and 30 states, students and faculty members Ken Cline his concept of the abundance cycle. joining 264 returning students. and John Anderson, affirm that water Singer-songwriter Dar Williams performs COA stands in the top 100 of US News defines the region. at Gates Community Center ahead of an & World Reports' annual rankings, the Michelle Pazmiño '17 heads to South appearance with Ani DiFranco in New York top 15 for best value, and the top 10 for Korea as an invited participant of the UN City. international students on campus. Conference on Biological Diversity. The Earth in Brackets team is invited to Some 20% of COA students, numerous At the Society for Human Ecology UNFCCC planning meetings in Venezuela alumni, and faculty and staff attend the conference faculty member Rich Borden is as civil society members. Klever People's Climate March in New York City honored as a "Face of a Human Ecologist" Descarpontriez '16, Adrian Fernandez '15, Sept. 21. Alumni Matt Maiorana '11 with a plaque in the George B. Dorr Hiyasmin Saturay '15, and Julian Velez and Juan Carlos Soriano '11 are on the Museum of Natural History. '15 go, along with faculty member Doreen organizing team. Stabinsky. 4 FIND MORE STORIES AND PHOTOS AT NEWS.COA.EDU 152472_text.indd 4 11/3/14 11:44 PM The COA contingent arrives in Samsø. Back row: Energy academy staff members Michael Larsen, Michael Kristensen, Jesper Roug Kristensen, and Anne Boisen Albertsen. Third row: Zabet NeuCollins '16, Lauren Pepperman '16, Kate Unkel '14, Luke Greco '16, Wade Lyman '15, and Andrya Russell, MPhil '16. Second row: Nick Urban '15, Saren Peetz '15, Nathaniel Diskint, MPhil '16, Zakary Kendall '17, Navi Whitten '17, Surya Karki '16, and Sam Allen '17. Front row: Jay Friedlander, faculty, Rebecca Coombs '15, Anna Demeo, faculty, Malene Lundén and Mads Lundén Hermansen, energy academy staffers, and Paige Nygaard '17. Photo by Søren Hermansen, Samsø Energy Academy director. The Fund for Maine Islands Takes COA Offshore The COA community has just gotten a whole lot larger. locally appropriate renewable energy strategies for Maine From a small college on a Maine island - albeit a bridged islands. one - it now embraces many of Maine's unbridged, year- round islands. A grant of two million dollars from the The fund was announced in August at a launch celebration Partridge Foundation has created a partnership between held at the home of former COA board chair Sam Hamill in COA and the Island Institute, known as the Fund for Maine Maine's Seal Cove, and attended by renowned journalist Islands. The fund will enhance collaborations between the Bill Moyers. This fund will empower COA and the Island two institutions on issues relating to energy, education, Institute, "to search for solutions to sustain the ecosystems agriculture, and climate change on the islands. of these coastal islands," and to share the innovations with the world. Said Moyers, "From this seed in this place can The inaugural project began in September, when fifteen come a new paradigm for the future." COA students, two alumni, faculty members Jay Friedlander (sustainable business) and Anna Demeo (director of energy Moyers concluded his remarks with a tribute to Partridge education and management), along with individuals from Foundation donor Polly Guth (see Spring 2011). "Once upon Long Island, Monhegan, Peaks Island, Swan's Island, and a time I might have thought a small island off the coast Vinalhaven, and two Island Institute staff members, flew of Maine hardly the place where a partnership could be across the ocean to the Danish island of Samsø. Through forged that might show the world this better way - one of a community-driven, grass-roots effort, Samsø - half the obligation, reciprocity, and cooperation. I would have been size and one-third the population of Mount Desert Island wrong. The future begins here and now, this evening, in this - has become carbon negative, producing more energy, small but significant place, this Isles de Polly, with each and renewably, than it can use. all of us." In an intensive study that deepens COA's hands-on COA President Darron Collins '92 sees this connection as approach to education, the students are taking a modeling an essential educational approach, combining coordinated schedule of three classes (a COA "monster the research efforts of the college with real-life applications class"), combining the engineering and financing of that can solve, he said, "fundamental challenges that face renewable energy and conservation strategies with the aim islands and remote communities elsewhere." Collaboration of applying these approaches to MDI and Maine's island is essential, added Rob Snyder, Island Institute president, communities. After the fall term, spent partially at the "We could never do alone what we are now able to dream Samsø Energy Academy, the team will continue to develop up and implement together." COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 5 152472_text.indd 5 11/3/14 11:44 PM "This internship has been great! I'm getting an authentic glimpse into the medical field," says Emily Peterson '15 (right), as she begins her day interning at Mount Desert Island Hospital by consulting with physician's assistant Kate Worcester. Photo courtesy of MDI Hospital. Students in the Wards: Interning at Mount Desert Island Hospital BAR HARBOR, ME - It's one thing to practitioners daily, and each week met Current intern Emily Peterson '15 be interested in health and medicine; with Betsy Corrigan, nurse educator, agrees. "I'm excited to apply what it's quite another to experience life along with the program's director, I've learned in John's human anatomy within a hospital, day after day. An Edward B. Gilmore, MD, MACP, the class to the hospital setting," she says. arrangement with Mount Desert hospital's chief of medicine. "The "I'm getting an authentic glimpse Island Hospital now offers COA program was very positively received into the medical field. I've been students an internship within the by colleagues," he says. "Each day most surprised by how emotionally intensity of hospital life - from toe Linnea would read about situations intense it can be. It's one thing to read amputations to childbirths. she encountered, and return with about a health issue; it's another to questions the next day. All the experience it with a patient." "The veil between in-class theory and preceptors enjoyed having her around medical practice has been lifted for - she even inspired them. One of the Her internship completed, Linnea me," says Linnea Harrold '15, who refocused her senior project. Having refreshing things about bright and spent the summer as the program's experienced MDI's hospital - and perceptive students is that they ask inaugural student. "I had the chance patients coming in for everything questions that make you think." to see firsthand what clinicians do, from bug bites to forty-foot falls off how they interact with patients, Cadillac Mountain - she will look at the ways they work as a team. I "We are so excited, grateful, and ethical issues in international aid, and learned so much from just watching appreciative of the opportunity that how physicians cope with the often how everyone works together, and the hospital is giving our students," extreme lack of resources. from talking to patients and their adds biology faculty member John families. It is such a rare and fantastic Anderson who oversees students And the most rewarding aspect of the opportunity." interested in medical careers and internship? "The birth of a new person worked with the hospital to arrange into this world," Linnea says. "The For ten weeks, Linnea shadowed the program. "This is infinitely tension, anxiety, pain, and emotion hospital physicians and nurse more powerful than classroom are so overwhelming that the relief of practitioners, spending two weeks experience; it will prove invaluable in the infant's first sounds brought tears with each of five specialties. She launching a new generation of health to my eyes. It is the most magical thing discussed her observations with professionals." I have ever witnessed." 6 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 6 11/3/14 11:44 PM COA Artists Help Make Ashley Bryan Exhibit Happen A Visit With Ashley Bryan at COA through February ISLESFORD, ME - When Ashley Bryan tells a story, his fingers snap, his feet tap, and his voice quickens and slows, covering several octaves. He pulls the meaning out of each word, the sound the out of each syllable; to him words, like i people, like all of life, are momentous. This artist, storyteller, children's book writer and illustrator, puppetmaker, and humanitarian lives just off the shores of Mount Desert Island in the village of Islesford on Little Cranberry Island. Visits to his home, which is filled with artistic miracles - sea- glass stained glass windows, found- object puppets, large-scale flower paintings, and a global toy collection - have inspired legions of COA students. Ashley, now ninety-one, received an honorary MPhil as COA's commencement speaker in 1996. This summer, thanks in large part to the help of the COA community, the exhibit "A Visit With Ashley Bryan" was launched on the island by the fledgling Ashley Bryan Center. Working with Betts Swanton '88, arts faculty member Dru Colbert designed the exhibit. Aiding them were Eli Mellen '11, MPhil '14 and Danielle Meier '08. Photography lecturer Josh Winer '91 coordinated the process as project manager. "My involvement has been a labor "I want people to have an experience of of love," says Dru. "It is a small delight that will tap something so at the reciprocity for Ashley's generosity roots of enjoyment that it will lift their to COA over the years. Many, many spirit," says 91-year-old ar tist Ashley faculty members have taken students Bryan of the exhibit of his life and out to Islesford to have them feel the work designed by faculty member Dru palpable energy and spirit that Ashley Colbert (with Ashley, above), along with has toward creative work and life. His Bett Swanton '88 and many more COA philosophy is so close to our human helping hands. Photo by Josh Winer 91. ecological framework: making art from what's around us, and using art to help us see the world more fully." drafted from his studies at Cooper Union into the segregated United States Army. Even on D-Day, Bryan concealed a sketchbook in his gas mask to draw his fellow The exhibit features the astonishing soldiers, seeking, he says, "to preserve my humanity." range of Ashley's work and his life in art. Born in the Bronx to parents The exhibit is in the Ethel H. Blum Gallery through February. Hours are Monday from Antigua, his childhood was filled through Saturday, 11 am to 4 pm. Please call 207-288-5015 to be sure of hours with music and color until he was during COA's winter break. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 7 152472_text.indd 7 11/3/14 11:44 PM Card Brook Hannaford Solls Drainage Class Excessively Drained Somewhat Excessively Crained well Drained Moderately Well Drained Somewhat Posty Drained Peorly diained any Poorly Drained When city officials realized that Ellsworth's stormwater runoff system needed help, COA's Land Use Planning class created detailed maps, such as this one of the area's soil drainage capacity (above left), often using LiDAR, a remote sensing technology measuring distance by analyzing the reflected light of a laser beam to determine the shape of the surface topography (above right). Pipes & Pollution: Students Help Ellsworth Upgrade Drainage By Elena Piekut '09, Ellsworth Assistant City Planner ELLSWORTH, ME - Lately in Maine, associated with climate change. Along walked the brook's banks; and when it rains, it pours. In Ellsworth, the Maine coast, extreme rain events proposed green infrastructure where the Union River Watershed's are now more frequent, more intense, solutions. In June, the class presented 500 square miles of drainage meet and have shifted in seasonality, with their findings to members of the the ocean in a heavily trafficked more storms occurring earlier in the planning board, city staff, and local urban area, rain flows from roads and year when soils are already saturated engineers. parking lots through storm drains from snowmelt. Flooding is a real, directly into Card Brook, the Union costly consequence of local climate The audience was impressed. The River, and Blue Hill Bay. change. students offered a cohesive analysis, educating and energizing our Ellsworth's larger parking lots and COA's Land Use Planning class, stakeholders. They helped us move stores, many of which were developed taught by Isabel Mancinelli, faculty forward by providing new data and in the 1960s and 1970s, sit within member in planning and landscape figuring out what we still need to the Card Brook Watershed, one that architecture, and Gordon Longsworth learn. We're ahead of the curve for a students - under the guidance '91, GIS Laboratory director, small municipality right now - COA's of Ken Cline, faculty member in specializes in taking on real, local work helped us win a state grant to environmental policy and law — have problems. Last spring it focused on collect more data on our stormwater been working to improve for more Ellsworth's stormwater drainage in infrastructure. than a decade. Recently, the stakes the urban core area of the Card Brook have been raised. Card Brook fails to Watershed. As assistant to Ellsworth's Ellsworth's next step is to seek meet water quality standards under city planner, a position I've had since funding to implement solutions, the Clean Water Act. The likely cause: 2012, I helped guide the class - while hoping to build resiliency against stormwater runoff from impervious building my own GIS skills. a changing climate and maintain areas. a healthy stream in the center of Students looked at the location of the city's commercial area. As the With Card Brook on the Environmental drains, pipes, and culverts; utilized students wrote in their presentation, Protection Agency's list, Ellsworth can sophisticated LiDAR topographic data "Card Brook provides a rich ecosystem no longer ignore water quality issues. to create maps modeling water flow; where frogs and beavers make their The problem is even more pressing updated impervious surface data; home, flowers bloom, and sounds with increases in water quantity considered emergency management; from the city's traffic disappear." 8 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 8 11/3/14 11:44 PM Donor Profile Walking the Walk: Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15 By Donna Gold Trustee Cody van Heerden is on her just inspired me. I was able to see the Growing up, catching frogs and turtles third master's degree. At twenty-two world through a different lens and I after school was my favorite thing she began an MA in geology at Brown thought, why not take the next step? to do." Cody almost applied to COA University; she then took an MS in I knew it would be very challenging, during the school's formative years, oceanography at the Darling Center of but it's good to challenge yourself. but her father thought she needed the University of Maine. Now that her And I really wanted to experience COA more structure. Besides, it was at children have finished college, she's in that way, to have the pleasure and Colby College that she met husband investigating how institutions change, privilege of focusing really deeply on Christiaan van Heerden. That was focusing on Maine's lobster industry. something." before he left Colby to become a boat Come June 6, 2015, Cody will become builder and naval architect, which the first COA trustee to earn an MPhil The experience, says Cody, has been led them to Mount Desert Island, and in human ecology while serving on the transformative. The questions of ultimately linked them both to COA. board. sustainability and resiliency in Davis' For after Cody spent a few years at Ecological Economics class changed the Department of Environmental "If I was going to talk the talk, I just felt how she looks at what's happening Protection, Christiaan took a job with I should walk the walk," she said over to the earth. She's also studied water The Hinckley Company and the couple, a glass of lemonade at the coffee shop issues with law and policy faculty with their first baby, moved into a just outside of the three-story Artemis member Ken Cline, and the philosophy home his family had on the island. Gallery in Northeast Harbor, which of nature and mind with philosophy Cody co-runs with Deirdre Swords faculty member John Visvader. "The Schooling their two daughters (wife of Michael Boland '94). Her face, best teachers I've ever had have been immersed Cody in Blue Hill's Waldorf- rimmed by shoulder-length straight from COA," she adds, without a flicker inspired Bay School, where she taught brown hair, mingles the intensity of hesitation. math for a number of years, rewriting of the eager scholar with motherly the curriculum and gaining solid concern. Raised outside of New York City, Cody insights into how people learn. In spent summers on an island in central 2005 she joined the COA board, seeing "I was a trustee, I love academics," Maine's Belgrade Lakes. "We bathed in COA qualities similar to the Bay she says. "I took an economics course in the lake using biodegradable School: "Community. Regard. Respect. with [COA faculty member] Davis soap, we had kerosene lamps, no Those change everything," she says. Taylor and I thought he was one of electricity; we came and went by "It's what I look for in my life." The the best teachers I ever had, and that boat. I liked being outside in nature. connection deepened when Christiaan enrolled at COA, finishing his BA in 2009. Cody's ties to the college now extend to Artemis Gallery, which tends to hire from the COA community and has featured work by COA students and alumni during each of its three years. This fall, the gallery became the site for the Activating Spaces: Installation Artwork course taught by arts faculty member Dru Colbert. And what does Cody receive from these connections? "The satisfaction of knowing that COA does what it does, of being a part of that. Unless the world becomes a little bit more like COA, we're in big trouble." Trustee Cody van Heerden, MPhil '15 hikes the Italian coast with her daughters Eliza and Alexi. Photo by Eliza van Heerden. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 9 152472_text.indd 9 11/3/14 11:44 PM One Meditation on Creativity (Among Infinite Others) By Catherine Clinger, faculty member in art and art history Creativity happens, it does not wait for something to happen. Remaining in a state of anticipation or expectation may prevent us from harnessing our self to a deeper world where potency is paired with disintegration, images form and dissolve. Creativity calls for perseverance, humility, and a devotion to dreaming here in the phenomenal world where the sacred is concealed in plain sight and we miss its signs if we don't pay attention. It is the act of coalescing focus even as the subject of one's attention shifts and changes shape; becomes a line, a circle, a number, a tunnel, or disappears altogether. Creativity is the coming and going, immersion and resistance within a field of thought in which the imagination dwells. Creativity is not Art, although Art may be a consequence of creative deliberation. Creativity can be both tender and mighty in its nature; an aggregate of processes and patterns, formative before form. Creativity is movement during stillness, toil during respite. It doesn't always get it right; however, one could argue that it should do no harm. It is not a stopping point or an end, rather it is a ceaselessly evolving tale that describes and constructs experience all at once. The act of creation restores myth to its old dignity and, in so doing, paradoxically builds new mythologies that disrupt timeworn solemnities. To be is to bring oneself into existence; to imagine is the activation of being-ness beyond a calculated existence; to create is to convert imagination into being. Creativity is the act of traveling beyond the present by moving below the surface of both time and space to find more stuff to build worlds with. I suppose I would argue that one might consider carefully what one chooses to build a world with, whether it be a world of ideas or things, animate or inanimate; and this mindfulness may be one of the principles of Creativity - the ability to develop concentration without stagnation and to privilege reverie without elevating one's self above another entity. In our day, the word is bantered about, sometimes with great care, sometimes with great incredulity, often enough with a modicum of lazy application. How do we speak of Creativity here at COA? The text and images that follow will tell us. I believe we do so with a fierceness that belies our gentle nature as an institution. The Heart is the Hardest to Break, The Heart is the Hardest to Heal by Victoria Alexis Gancayco '17, sharpie on paper and stitching; detail; composed of individual pieces 4"x3½" stitched to extend to 336"x4" (see also pages 28-29). 10 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 10 11/3/14 11:44 PM ml U.C. 3 find thenr ! lanes 11 11/3/14 11:44 SAZINE Leaping into the Feature: Nancy Andrews' Strange Eyes By Michael Diaz-Griffith '09 Every artist begins somewhere. kid next to me in class could draw And, as in her Ima Plume trilogy When Nancy Andrews, faculty Superman perfectly, and that's (Monkeys and Lumps, The Dreamless member in performance art and what I thought you had to do," she Sleep, and The Haunted Camera, video production, was nine, she drew says, laughing. "But I suspected that created between 2003 and 2005), a a pastel "of a very lonely tree" that that wasn't true." The daughter of film noir homage centered on an artist made it all the way to the Montgomery a successful engineer and a former who attempts to illustrate the unseen, County Fair. Today her work has been secretary, Nancy knew what the inside imagination becomes something to collected by the Museum of Modern of a museum looked like. "One of the investigate. Did her open approach Art, but her most ambitious work is markers of middle class aspiration to mystery, her attraction to bathos still ahead. With three decades of was giving your children cultural and black humor coalesce at art diverse artistic production behind her, experiences: piano lessons, visits to school? "Actually, I think my fifth grade this drawing, painting, puppet- and cultural spaces," she says. If the slip of teacher is responsible," says Nancy. video-making Guggenheim Fellow has a girl had her bullies, she also had the Mr. Grossman introduced his class to embarked on her first feature-length work of her particular favorite, Paul film, The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes. Klee, to admire - and a burgeoning Shakespeare, The Three Stooges, old Behind it will be the queer, complex imaginative life of her own. radio shows, pulp fiction, and opera. creativity that expressed itself in a He even projected the silent horror neighborhood art class in suburban Today, much of Nancy's work draws on classic The Phantom of the Opera onto Washington, DC circa 1970. vaudeville and early film influences. the classroom movie screen from a In her world, song-and-dance might 16mm film projector. "I loved all of it," Not that everyone endorsed Nancy's punctuate a scrupulously silent she says. "I had a lot of those 'That's vision quite as heartily as those fair animated sequence. Crisp fields of what I'm talking about. That's it,' officials. That lonely tree? "Well, the black and white give way to shadows. moments." 12 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 12 11/3/14 11:44 PM made a jumpsuit with clear pockets through death, purgatory, and for pictures related to plastic surgery," returning to life." Over the course showing that, for Nancy, art has of the film, birdgirl is literally and always been interdisciplinary. figuratively reanimated: returned from near-death and rendered visually Nancy never did go to film school; intelligible by Nancy's brush - and she's always been a human ecologist, her performance. On one level, says assembling her films from multiple Nancy, the film took shape like most sources. A decade after graduating of her art: "I have what I call a 'stupid from MICA, she began an MFA idea' and just start working with it. It's program at the The School of the Art a collage process." Institute of Chicago, not in film but in performance art. The Art Institute is She continues: "This one idea always known for fostering interdisciplinarity, dovetails with multiple other things a key factor in Nancy's decision to I'm thinking about. Often these things attend. Why the shift to performance don't fit together in obvious ways, so I art? "The Baltimore scene," she says, sort of force-fit them and ask myself, with a wry smile. Intense friendships, 'Why am I thinking about things that communal living, supportive wash up on beaches - things that community, cheap rent: after MICA can't be identified or assigned a she remained in Baltimore, a perfect provenance; and at the same time, city for experimental artists at the Jane Goodall and her research on time. "It was a real art community. chimpanzees; and Donna Haraway's People collaborated and helped cyborg theory? Why am I thinking each other out. There was nothing about these things together?' I don't to compete for: if people wanted to really know, of course, but I use these 'make it,' they moved to New York. questions to begin exploring leads." We made art because we loved to do it." In this context, almost by chance, The process is fundamentally Nancy formed a three-person band experimental, involving more mystery, that morphed into a four-person contingency, and uncertainty than performance group. you'd expect. "It's like going down a dark hallway and just trying a key Soon they were playing gigs in DC in every door until you find one that and New York and were written up fits. But it's not a singularity: the key Rebel, rebel in the Washington Post. Encouraged, is going to open more than one door. For college, Nancy headed to the "we wrote more and more songs, and It's a blind faith thing. I also use the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a friend made us crazy costumes," metaphor of taking a journey without a photography major, "we learned says Nancy. As a performance art a map. And so it's very much about about composition, light, contrast troupe they aired on college radio and finding my way as I go along." - the basic building blocks of appeared in the pages of Interview cinematography." She'd been playing magazine. They were almost booked Even on the brink of death. The around with Super 8 cameras for years for a slot on David Letterman's Late "stupid idea" for On a Phantom Limb and, in addition to film production and Show - "we were too weird, so can be traced back to the Intensive film history, took MICA's first course they cancelled" - and never quite Care Unit of Brigham and Women's on video technique. She describes "made it," but it had a major impact Hospital, where for two weeks in 2005 borrowing avant-garde films from on Nancy's art. Those eight years Nancy fought for her life, remaining the Enoch Pratt Library back when a of performance added another hospitalized for another two weeks. reel in your hand might be the only dimension to her work in video and She had undergone multiple life- way to see a particular, potentially film. threatening surgeries; now, wracked life-changing film. With punk rock in by delirium and convinced that her the air, it was also a good time for Something "stupid" - and profound doctors and the hospital staff were rebellious do-it-yourself art-making. In her 2009 short, On a Phantom trying to kill her, she struggled to Studying abroad in England, Nancy Limb, Nancy collages medical footage, survive. Diagnosed at the age of photographed the butcher hanging drawn animation, and live action to twenty with Marfan's Syndrome, slabs of beef - and made earrings tell the story of birdgirl, "a human- a genetic disorder affecting the out of the prints. Recounting this to made hybrid, a surgical creation connective tissues, Nancy was not the LA Record recently, she said, "I also - part woman, part bird - passing new to hospital stays. In her senior COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 13 152472_text.indd 13 11/3/14 11:44 PM year of college she underwent open- different - from trying to understand been fantasizing about making a heart surgery to replace a heart who I am as a person with a genetic feature-length film for two years. valve and part of her aorta affected mutation that is life-threatening and With a month to spare before the by an aneurysm. But this time was life-changing to determining how to COA winter term, and support from different. The surgeries were riskier, be defined as a person, and by whom a friend who teaches screenwriting, and her delusions threatened to pull to be defined." On the book's final Nancy began to write. her under. "I was on a raft, in a space- pages, Loupette escapes from the pod, in a fly-by-night health clinic, sanatorium where she is unfairly held, It was a new experience. "If you're in a conference room, in a library, in flies to the moon, admires a Ziggy making a feature, you want it to have the arctic, in the desert, and even in Stardust-like magazine, Mutant Style - some of the tropes of the popular a hospital, each with its own terrible and scrubs away the monstrous black form: recognizable characters, narrative," she writes in her blog shadow projected not by herself but characters who have relationships, devoted to the art and science of ICU by an uncomprehending society. conflicting interests. These things are delirium (nancyandrews.net). not my bread and butter," she says Post-ICU, Nancy's work externalizes with a laugh. "So bringing them to Radically healing art the bad and internalizes the good: life had to become a focus from the Nancy credits her partner Dru Colbert, a radical aesthetic project with very beginning." Along the way she COA faculty member in art and design, therapeutic psychological effects for discovered that "a huge amount of with helping to save her life. In a TEDx herself and her audience. She says the creativity of making a film comes talk on ICU delirium, Nancy recounts that since Loupette began with images, in the writing." After completing the that Dru "offered me a pencil and not words, and since text can reduce screenplay, Nancy sent it around paper to make drawings. She asked the primacy of visual narratives, she to producers - and was told not to me to draw the dog that I would like kept writing to a minimum, allowing expect funding for her first feature. to get once we got home. My first readers to "internalize the experience "Just make it and see what happens." drawings were considerably worse while actively having to work out what than a two-year-old's, just a series is happening." Something similar is She successfully turned to of jagged lines. But after a few days I at play in her Ima Plume triology, in Kickstarter.com, adding $10,000 from could draw something that resembled which Ima says, "There were things her own pocket. Indie-film websites an animal, with legs and ears." Nancy I could draw pictures of, and there quickly spread buzz about the film, continued drawing, creating "a heroic were things that couldn't be drawn. featuring Michole Briana White as birdgirl avatar that represented More and more I was attracted to the Dr. Myes, researcher in the science myself." It could fly between heaven second category. There were things I of perception, and Jennifer Prediger and earth "to negotiate the space wanted to describe, but I didn't know '00 (see page 17) as Dr. Linda Wiley, in between, that space that I had how. There were things that I wanted her best friend and love interest. inhabited within my delirium." to show but there was no way to show "After a near-death experience, Dr. them." Myes attempts to graft animal senses The drawing helped Nancy piece back to the brain to revolutionize human her fragmented sense of self. "By Drawing, for Nancy, is an attempt to consciousness. She must face the externalizing my memories I began describe the indescribable, to show consequences when she uses her own to understand how my version of the unshowable. body and mind as a research tool and what happened related to what really transforms herself into a creature happened." Filmmaking without a map with super-senses," Nancy writes in an Her creative process continues to email. On a Phantom Limb, and the projects evolve. Inspiration for her 2010 short, that followed, are a result of - and a Behind the Eyes are the Ears, came in This project has been her most further step in - this healing, though the form of a song cycle, not images. challenging - and rewarding - yet. like many who have experienced ICU Drawings were developed later; "It was my first time on a feature delirium, Nancy suffers from post- then the processes intertwined, "so set, and I was the director. So I had traumatic stress disorder. Her comic that I might go from doing research a lot of learning to do." But while the book, Loupette and the Moon, tells the to writing a song, to drawing an film may be large, the budget isn't - story of another of Nancy's "avatars," animation sequence, to finding some requiring constant invention. "We're a girl with the genetic mutation film footage, to shooting some live always asking ourselves, 'How do we hypertrichosis, commonly known as action. I didn't do anything in a neat make a film that looks interesting "werewolf syndrome," in which the order." That film, about Dr. Sheri and beautiful with no money?' - but face and body are covered by a thick Myes and her revolutionary attempts Dru as production designer and the pelt of fur. While Loupette's genetic to expand human perceptions and whole team have done just that. It's mutation is different from Nancy's, consciousness, generated the idea challenging, but it makes you more she says, "the struggles are not so for The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes. She'd creative." 14 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 14 11/3/14 11:44 PM Animation stills from The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes, featuring Michole Briana White; animated by faculty member Nancy Andrews and SL Benz (Lauren Benzaquen '14). OFTL ATL ATIG SE 4.5 Scores of people got involved, from Rohan Chitrakar '04 as director of photography, to COA students, to town officials, to locals offering locations for free. "There are creative aspects to everything," Nancy says. "Take a scene: you may have it story-boarded out, but when you're working, the actors, the weather, the cars going by - whatever you have to deal with that day, you have to come up with creative solutions." She learned that "the buck has to stop with the director, one has to make decisions constantly - do we have enough takes? If we spend more time on this scene, what will we not have time for? Is a lighting set-up 'good enough' so that shooting can begin, even if it's not perfect?" As with teaching, the quality of the outcome depends on leveraging collaboration. And enjoying it. "Having all of these skilled people around makes me like a superhero," she says. They give me new powers, powers that I don't possess." When she says that she wants to let "everyone do their job" on set, it's clear that this is Nancy's creative ethic - and it benefits everyone. Her work in the editing suite is no different. "The editor and I will be working on transitions and one of us will have an idea, so I'll start drawing an animated transition, and we'll end up inserting little bits of animation into the film, right in the middle of the editing process. It's never stopped being inventive." This meant leaving behind the screenplay. "Something works on paper, but then some people watch it and say, 'I don't really believe this relationship.' So you go back to the cutting room and say, 'How can I put this together to make these relationships more believable?' At that point it really doesn't matter what's down on paper. What's happening on the screen has to be doing the job. It's about what I have, not what I wrote." Referring to her usual, collage-like creative process, she says, "I collect stuff and then I start looking at how it all works together. At some point during editing, that's what this process became, too." Hearing her, you get the sense that she's more comfortable without the map. And that her film, due out in 2015, will take us on a trip we couldn't make without her. Visit thestrangeeyesofdrmyes.com for a link to the trailer and more on The Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes. Top: Nancy Andrews directs a shot in COA's zoology lab with camera operator Eve Cohen in the foreground. Center: Nancy directs a pool scene at Atlantic Oceanside Hotel with Jane Piselli '12 acting as lifeguard. Bottom: Nancy and Michael Diaz-Griffith '09 now lives in New York Michole Briana White. Photos courtesy of Nancy Andrews. where he continues his graduate studies. 16 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 16 11/3/14 11:44 PM Trouble Dolls: A first feature by Jennifer Prediger '00 By Michael Diaz-Griffith '09 Jennifer Prediger '00 always knew she psychology helped her land a impractical is a thread running wanted to make movies - though she fellowship with the United States through my life and my movie," and didn't want film school. "I knew I'd Department of Agriculture, for which also Jennifer's time at COA. "This rather study philosophy and literature Jennifer produced and directed videos is a terrible thing to say, but the and apply those things to the craft of on Monsanto and bioengineered characters in Trouble Dolls are like filmmaking," she says, noting that she products in Africa. She became a a teasing stereotype of typical COA graduated from COA before filmmaker filmmaker in the process, but "learned students. Instead of cleaning their Nancy Andrews joined the faculty. a lot about things I didn't like." house, they smudge it with sage. Now, Now that she has written, directed, I love sage, but sometimes you just and starred in her first feature film, So she gave up her cushy government have to clean up." Trouble Dolls, which premiered at job for an unpaid internship at The the Los Angeles Film Festival in June, Onion, and then produced videos In the film, Jennifer and real-life Jennifer can say that COA "certainly and wrote content for Nerve, Babble, friend Jess Weixler (also co-writer gave me some interesting things to the Washington Post's former green and director) find that "their lack of chew on as a filmmaker - including website Sprig, and created the website practicality ultimately becomes a learning from Nancy, albeit as an series for Grist.org's eco-advice detriment to living in New York." Says alumna. column "Ask Umbra." When funding Jennifer, "Our two characters are living for that was cut, she decided to the life of the mind, pursuing their "I love that I got to spend three "foolishly pursue filmmaking at any ideals as artists and activists. These years on an island surrounded by cost." She had already begun acting in aspirations run through their lives, intellectuals and looking at the ocean micro-budget movies including Uncle even when jobs don't." Facing eviction, from a chair in the library," she adds. Kent, A Teacher, and Nancy Andrews' they flee New York for the promise of "I loved the introspective winters, Strange Eyes of Dr. Myes (see previous LA sunshine, where their friendship is the sacred feeling of the place, and article); now she would make them, tested by a chance at fame, a fortune the abundance of vegetarian food. too. teller, and an amorous wealthy aunt. Classes I took with Bill Carpenter, John Visvader, John Anderson, Rich Borden, The path is not easy. "Filmmaking is a Art imitates life. As we conclude our and others have resonated all these shooting-the-moon approach to life, interview, Jennifer, who's in LA for years." and I'm still hoping that I'll reach close a screening, tells me that she's just to the moon. But making a movie is a rescued an insect from a swimming Jennifer's "strange and circuitous" Sisyphean task. You finish and then pool. "I hope it's still alive," she says path to filmmaking took her far you realize, 'Oh god, I have to write with real concern, before heading out from those library chairs, first to another? Push another boulder up yet into the Hollywood night. Los Angeles, where she sought another mountain?" she says. Hollywood but found advertising Above: Movie still and publicity photo from Trouble Dolls of Jennifer Prediger '00 (left) ("soul-crushing"), then Washington, It requires hard work and a strong and Jess Weixler (right). Photos courtesy of DC, where an MA in organizational head. "The practical versus the Jennifer Prediger. COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 17 152472_text.indd 17 11/3/14 11:44 PM Creativity in Motion: Tawanda Chabikwa '07 By Donna Gold, photographs by Craig Bortmas In a cluttered studio in Columbus, near him. Returning to his feet, he and on his head - spinning the world, Ohio, Tawanda Chabikwa '07 dances climbs onto a wobbling pile of books definitions, himself, upside-down. along a path of white paper. At the and balances, unsteadily, then knocks wall, cornered, he stops, but only the pile down and he's on the floor The fifteen-minute performance of momentarily. Soon he's upside-down, pushing the books with his head. Digression in the Fourth Movement his weight on his head. The quiet Later, Tawanda returns to the white ends with Tawanda taking a brush Shona chant that has been playing paper, crossing it on his knees and and a pail of black paint, materializing is silenced and the dancer becomes elbows like a penitent, then rising his ephemeral gestures on the now- another sort of creature, arms and to dance jubilant before collapsing rumpled white paper, which he then legs moving along the wall, a noose- to the ground, almost writhing now. rolls into and rises, dancing, the like black rope dangling ominously Several times he is back at the wall paper echoing the rolled-up skirts of African women. Shortly before the performance closes, the paper tears away and becomes a body Tawanda holds to him, then abandons, ending the dance with gestures intended to cleanse and move on. With its piles of books, gestural painting, and references to Africa and acrobatics, with its unusual segues, turning movement on its head, this dance could be an autobiography. Tawanda first choreographed and performed it in 2012 in his homeland of Zimbabwe, when he briefly served as artistic director of Tumbuka, the premier Zimbabwean contemporary dance company. A consummate artist, Tawanda is devoted to exploring the currents that flow beneath our lives, the ones that bind us as humans. Stories and myths - whether from science, contemporary theory, or ancient mystics - nourish him, as does the gesture, the movement that illuminates being. Tawanda dances, yes. He also writes, makes music, and paints. For his senior project at COA, he wrote the novel Baobabs in Heaven, which he later published (see Spring 2011), and choreographed and performed an evening of dance. He is now in a PhD program in dance studies at Ohio State University. But he continues to practice his arts - as well as "hiking and photographing, making videos, reading quantum physics, religious texts, The Economist, and the New Yorker, and spending time on Facebook and YouTube." These media feed him. Digression emerged from some writing 18 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 18 11/3/14 11:44 PM Tawanda had done. "This happens quite a lot - one medium sparks another, and they bounce back and forth until I find the greatest form for it." In this case, the dance completed Tawanda's prose. For those of us who struggle with one expressive form, Tawanda's reach seems astounding. When I mention this over lunch in Bar Harbor during a summer visit to Maine, he laughs. "What is the paradox?" he asks. "Time?" I venture. "My mother asks the same question," he returns, and laughs again. Tawanda laughs a lot - possibly a means of deflecting the intensity of his thoughts. But when he dances, this slight, muscular man with dreadlocks falling in curls down his back is both breathtaking and serious: agile, delicate, precise. "If I could, I'd do it all, all the time," Tawanda continues. "Painting with my toes, writing with my hands, wriggling with my heart." As he speaks, he places his hands in a circle in front of his chest and rocks them, as if rocking his heart, his being. The longing Tawanda's own story begins in Harare, Zimbabwe's capital, the second of four children. He describes his education as "little boys in grey and khaki uniforms, shorts, shirts and ties, hats, blazers, and socks pulled up to your neck." His earliest dance training was in ballroom style; his first accolades were primary school prizes for the Lindy hop and cha-cha. Summers imbued another legacy: learning the stories and dances of his Shona heritage around the communal fires of his ancestral village. These movements have since been joined by a multitude of others - from modern dance and rugby to capoeira and salsa. But his days in urban Harare and his ancestral enclave remain central. Though he left Zimbabwe at fifteen, heading to the Li Po Chun United World College in Hong Kong, and from there to COA, this heritage continues to inform his work. Tawanda never expected to be immersed in the arts. At Li Po Chun he focused on science until one day he found himself walking by the art studio, looking longingly inside. Chrys Hill, the art teacher, called him in. "Paints are expensive," Tawanda objected. "It's in the budget," Chrys assured him, inviting him to use the studio at will. Soon after, "when life things were gathering in my mind," as he says, and he was wandering around campus hours after midnight, Tawanda found the lights on in the empty arts studio and lost himself inside. That was it. Chrys and his wife Anne became mentors and the couple, along with the art he was making and the dance he began to explore, helped him to understand the questions of a young Zimbabwean in a new world. "I haven't turned back since," says Tawanda. What began in Hong Kong blossomed at COA where Tawanda studied with arts faculty members Dru Colbert COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 19 152472_text.indd 19 11/3/14 11:44 PM Photographer Craig Bortmas met Tawanda Chabikwa '07 at a performance in 2013. He says, "The stage was rich with visuals, Tawanda executed unnerving acts of athleticism (such as climbing a ladder upside down), and he succeeded in creating an amazing mess of the performance space. Quite memorable, to say the least." For more of Craig's photos visit www.bortmasphoto.com. 152472_text.indd 20 11/3/14 11:44 PM and Nancy Andrews, with literature verbose reading - inspires me, descendants, at times appearing as and film lecturer Colin Capers '95, cultivates my mind, and cultivates my watchful, gentle lions. To Tawanda, MPhil '09, with creative writing faculty practice," he says. this reflects the eternal cycle of life, member Bill Carpenter, and dance a river of self that connects in all with visiting teachers. Through math In studying while doing, theorizing directions: to one's ancestors, to the and physics faculty member Dave while making, does he fear that the as-yet-unborn, and outward, to one's Feldman's Chaos and Fractals class he analysis of creativity will disrupt the family and community. "The tree found a mathematical basis to his own source of his art? Tawanda smiles, would not grow if it did not long for observations that in seashells and dispelling the question. "I won't the sun - and the water," he says. African compounds alike, the whole steal from the magic of creativity Longing, reaching, in all directions. echoes the part. Tawanda laughs by speaking its name - why not again, "It might as well have been an sing the ninety-nine names of Allah? For many years, though he was on art class. Dave doesn't know it - don't Why be shy about it - it's only my scholarship, Tawanda managed to tell him that!" longing to be a part of this creative support the education of as many as flow." Definitions, he says, whether fifteen AIDS orphans in his ancestral Body knowledge of creativity or the thing one creates, village who otherwise couldn't go to For Tawanda, the many manifestations "are places we gather, not places that school. The funds came from ticket of creativity have but one origin: the should put us apart." and painting sales, and the help of body. Whatever its form, he sees all friends. Using art for fundraising is creativity as movement. The body Life as ritual tricky, but Tawanda recognizes few is where mind, spirit, instinct, and This is not a dispassionate quest. boundaries. "Perhaps because of a heart reside. "Everything is body, it's Tawanda seeks to understand how short attention span, I tend to think common sense to me," he says. "The dance is transformative, regardless in multiple ways about a single thing writing is alive in body, that's how of the culture. He frequently works and to want to know it. We could go it comes out, through the written collaboratively, looking at both life philosophical, spiritual or new age gesture." and dance as ritual. "I've read that with it, or just pure quantum physics: rather than performing rituals, most we are made of the same thing as In seeking to understand the source traditional African communities stars, every single bit of us." Again, of humans' urge toward art, part simply ritualize their life," he says. Tawanda gestures, one hand circling of Tawanda's PhD work is practice- There's a mission driving this life-as- in front of him, and then both come based research, investigating his ritual. Some negative attitudes are together almost tenderly, shaping a own creative process through an being imbued as truth within our sphere. "That makes me smile," he autoethnography that's centered in bodies, he adds, causing a separation says. how cultural ideas are learned and between people and within people. carried within the body. "It's the His ultimate search is to "harness the As Tawanda works toward publishing actual movement itself that creates healing powers of dance to cultivate his theories of creativity, he continues knowledge," he says. Dance, he writes, more sustainable ways of being." to pen a second novel, and to paint, produces an internal intelligence that make music, collaborate, and dance. lives "at the intersection of multiple In Tawanda's dance Inheritance - "I choose dance because nothing fields of knowledge - culture studies, Dunhu reMhondoro, which he created escapes the body - what is more technology, cognitive neuroscience, as part of his dance MFA from Dallas' human ecological than dance?" he aesthetics, semiotics, politics, Southern Methodist University, says, and then, "I want to dance until philosophy." one performer lifts high above the I disappear, because it isn't dance. others, circling the air suspended on At some point everything is shed More specifically, Tawanda is looking a rope. Elsewhere on the stage, five and you can truly be with people, at the global presence of Africanness other dancers, all dressed in white, you feel like you've joined what Rumi as a way of understanding the place of seem to be reaching, searching, calls the 'migration of intelligences' cultural experience within our bodies. while the sounds first of birds, then because you've cut the crap, and the To that end, this multi-talented artist of beasts emerge over calm, quiet tax payments, and the wars, and the has segued into theory, reading music. Among the Shona people, says jealousies, and fears. You're finally everything from ancient African texts Tawanda, dunhu reMhondoro can be as you truly are meant to be, you just to psychoanalyst and revolutionary translated as the valley of the spirits. grow - creativity, vitality, life." philosopher Frantz Fanon, dance It's a phrase used to describe life's historian Brenda Dixon Gottschild, journey, which can be perceived as To see Tawanda's dances and other African scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, a passage through the wilderness. work, visit ndiniwako.org. and a range of third-world feminist This journey may be dangerous, but theorists. "I am in school because there is protection. The spirits - reading - yes, deep, nerdy, intense, one's ancestors - walk beside their COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 21 152472_text.indd 21 11/3/14 11:45 PM Photo by Donna Gold. Evolution, Creativity, and Art: A dialogue Bill Carpenter, poet, novelist, and faculty member in literature and creative writing, and Helen Hess, faculty member in invertebrate zoology and biomechanics, discuss evolution as process and metaphor. This dialogue reflects an ongoing conversation on questions of human evolution among faculty members and others, held over dinners during the last few years. Donna Gold: So, the question is why? Why did creativity, or of a continuum. At the other end is completely hardwired better, art, evolve? Why is it a universal? and instinctual behavior. So something that's neurologically very tiny and simple and yet fairly behaviorally complex, like Bill Carpenter: I think the reason why art is a universal is the honeybee, makes these hives and does these dances that we needed it. As we emerged as humans we lost our and has complex parental behavior - - but it's all hardwired, instincts for behavior that would tell us what to do in any while more and more of our behavior is learned through given situation. An oriole can make an amazing pendant culture. nest; a hummingbird cannot. Yet a human being can choose to make any kind of nest and also a modern glass house BC: Yes, we're hardwired for both the freedom and the or a wooden house or an earth mounded one. We have necessity to create. God was the greatest of our creations, that choice because we no longer have the compulsion of but we didn't stop there, our anxiety caused us to keep instinct. That also gave us a space of freedom, which was creating stories and images so we would understand who unknown and scary and required our creativity to fill. we were. Those with that understanding were more fit to carry on. Helen Hess: I agree with you that the lack of hardwiring and the narrowness of an animal's repertoire is the other side of HH: I think I've got a contrasting perspective. I would say the coin of our flexibility. Flexibility and plasticity is one end that art and creativity arose as a capacity in response 22 COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 152472_text.indd 22 11/3/14 11:45 PM to other things that were directly HH: I think the capacity for binding the instruments of mutation and selected for. We're very, very good within a group is very much hardwired death, nature produced this amazing at problem solving and that requires and universal. world before we even got here. some creativity. So being creative problem-solvers, we developed this BC: So what are those mechanisms? HH: I would say we are different capacity to be creative in all kinds I'm trying to define creativity a little because we can use our imaginations of ways. Problem solving required more tightly, and I would say in art and invent something that's never creativity; the creativity permitted art. it's specifically the ability to bind a been and we can do that intentionally. group together, I'm considering art Nature can't do anything intentionally. BC: And some of the problems were to be public performance, not just Natural selection is a remodeler, those of identity and existence, to individual experience. not an architect, and humans are answer those our problem-solving architects. creativity took an artistic form - HH: That's a surprising characteristic coming from a poet! BC: But TS Eliot said that when you HH: Yes. We were getting more make a poem, you're not building cognitively complex, more aware of from scratch, you're making a small ourselves and our universe and why mutative change to the body of poetry am I here and what happens after I Creativity was which exists - going back to the dawn die - well, guess what, in our ability to make art we have this capacity to absolutely needed. of the written word - and you can only add a little bit. So, like evolution, address those scary questions. And Otherwise how do each poem is a slight revision of a creativity was absolutely needed - and art fulfills even more than we get out of bed in global and ongoing body of work. that in terms of self-expression and the morning? HH: I can see that revision process understanding our relationship being very much analogous to natural to each other and to our world. Helen Hess selection because natural selection Otherwise how do we get out of bed is really good at sorting among all in the morning? Here's a story that I the options and choosing the best of heard fairly recently. There have been what's available. For the poem, the BC: Well we all want an audience! I all these efforts to teach great apes poet makes what's available, and does tell students that poetry thought in how to communicate. Well, one gorilla, the sorting and the judging of which your head is not yet poetry. When in communicating with his human is best among the alternative versions. poetry becomes understandable handlers, came to recognize that he by the group, then it becomes very was going to die and when he died group binding. And we push and BC: Right, but the main thing is you it was all over. He was an incredibly revise until it happens - because the have to be quite tough about killing off depressed gorilla. He couldn't get out need is not just an individual one, it's the prior forms and moving it forward. of bed. shared. I imagine that cave paintings weren't just for an individual's own HH: Ninety-nine percent of the species BC: Because we had given him our contemplation but for the community. that have ever evolved have gone anxieties without giving him the And some art has almost worldwide extinct. creative means to resolve them. We acceptance, giving hope that it might should have given him a paintbrush or transcend competing subgroups and BC: But for the artist, a lot of this a piano. help unify us as a species. takes place unconsciously. By the time you see what you think is a first HH: Right, so if art makes you feel HH: So I would say, the capacity to draft - and this is what the mystery better, you just do it and it's going to be creative is a human universal. The is to me - what process has it already persist. But you want it to be more capacity to participate in a group been through? So human creativity fundamentally selected for? and feel group cohesion is a human and natural creativity follow the same universal. But how that creativity pattern, with a lot of waste and death BC: What might be selected is and binding manifests is going to be involved! the power of art to bring group dependent upon your culture and cohesion. The huge cultural bond of situation. HH: So evolution is both a metaphor a rock concert for instance. Artistic and an analogy of the creative achievement when it becomes public BC: Oh, I think that's right. And I think process, and the driving force and the has the quality of erasing individual all creativity is probably modeled process that made our capacity as differences and binding the social after evolution. It is only made a species to be creative as possible. group. incrementally, by small changes. With Interesting! COLLEGE OF THE ATLANTIC MAGAZINE 23 152472_text.indd 23 11/3/14 11:45 PM