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Art and Freedom

Sarah Kay Peters, Author

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Trickster: Living in the joint.

Trickster allows the artist/activist or artivist to exist. It lives in the joint. Humor and play or the trickster give longevity to the activist work, while the ethics and awareness of the world and the many problems there in and the complexity of the internal world fuel the art.

I have vacillated back and forth from one of the spectrum to the other about whether I am an artist or an activist, falling at different points on the spectrum at different times.

In Aesthetics of the Oppressed, Boal says, “I have sincere respect for those artists who dedicate their lives exclusively to their art - it is their right or their condition - but I prefer those who dedicate their art to life” (107). I say, why choose? Why not do both? I believe it is possible to dedicate your life to your art and to dedicate that art to life. I don’t think it will always look like TO, but that doesn’t mean in won’t lead to liberation. What are the many ways art and freedom connected? Boal says the one thing they can’t imprison is your imagination and as you lose your freedom of space, you doesn’t lose your freedom of mind and imagination. They don’t lobotomize you in prison. Your mind can work. And yet, working with Changing Ways for the past 8 months, I have learned about a lot of ways people cope with long term incarceration and what psychological effects it can have on individuals. I also know that for several of them, who first started Changing Ways as a favor to Sister Mary, they kept on because of the experience they had in their body, mind, heart, spirit through the process of making theatre. It was the experience of art that shifted something in them and set something free.

Does this have to be TO? No. Can it be TO? Yes. I know for myself that my freedom and my ability to keep going out and fighting for what I believe in and just getting through some really difficult years is directly related to me creating art. My resilience is immeasurably higher when I am engaged in creative projects outside those related to oppression. This semester, the thing that saves me amidst all of the stress of the course load and issues and very challenging struggles that have come up at Changing Ways and really difficult weeks in my personal life, was making art, not for the community, but for me. To deal with myself, my stress, my own ways that I was being shut down. I have learned, and right now I am standing strongly in this place, that I will have to do art just for myself, just for the act of creating for me to continue to do art for liberation. That doesn’t mean I’m not dedicating my art to life. On the contrary, my devotion to my art keeps me in a place to do that long term. It is about ethics, whether you are dedicating your life to art or art to life.
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