Just Dance

-ILI Director Lucinda J. Garthwaite

I’ve been thinking about how often I’m ... thinking. When I consider my place in movements for social change I generally conjure logical sentences strung together to try to make sense. I’m seeking answers: why-this-not-that? If-this-then-what?

I believe in the essential work of thinking, of considering complexity and finding threads to comprehend. This week, though, I was drawn to something else, stunned by the ambition and beauty of a new project by ILI advisor Daniel Alexander Jones, and by the emotional impact of my friend Reuben Jackson’s poetry. I was encouraged by pending productions of plays by friend and former colleague Deborah Brevoort, and moved by the courage and lyricism of a memoir by Megan Baxter, who'd studied in a fine arts BA program where I was director. (See the June 25, 2021 issue of Intersections: The ILI Newsletter for links to all these artists.)

I realized I’d been forgetting something; as precious as they are, thinking in sentences is far from enough.

Sentences are not enough to reflect and relate to the ineffable complexity of people, cultures, histories, and the planet. They’re not enough to encourage a beautiful world. I’d been forgetting the power of making, of paintings and gardens and graffiti; bouquets, baskets and gorgeous meals; poems, melodies, shapes and movements.

Realizing what I’d forgotten, I asked my friend and ILI advisor Danielle Boutet, who is a visual artist, musician, philosopher and teacher, to think with me about what I might write this week. I began by asking what her thoughts were on art as a way of making change.

She stopped me right there: The idea that a person can make social change, she reminded me, is ridiculous, because social change exists with or without our efforts. Change just is. It can no more be made than the sun on my face as I sit here and write.

We kept talking, reminding ourselves also that change is infinite, that any attempt to put a period on change will not succeed. I can decide to apply myself to effort of bending the famous moral arc toward justice, but it’s not like bending a bar toward the ground. The bar will meet the ground, and the job will be done. That’s not so with the arc of social change, because the future is a shape-shifter. All I can do is stay curious, determined and humble, applying my intention to affecting the direction of change.

But what of action without an intention for change? What of art with no thought of a moral arc at all? Danielle considered the question, “If work is moving and full of light or even darkness;” she said, “if it’s full of humanity,” then that is more than enough. No intention is required, we decided, for art to contribute to the collective work of infinite change.

Danielle reminded me of what the visionary artist Laurie Anderson has often called, “the beautiful and strange,” and of something Anderson once said about art, “I’d choose the thing that’s beautiful, more than the one that’s true.”

I came to that conversation thinking about art as activism. I left considering the beautiful and strange for their own sake, as reflections and generators of a beautiful and strange world. It’s a whole other way of relating to change, as infinite and inevitable. Our participation is essential, and our intentions matter, but they’re not always necessary and sometimes they get in the way.

There’s one more story to bring this home. When my stepchildren were young, they enrolled in a hip-hop dance class. After the first class, their mom asked my stepdaughter if the instructor had added context to the class. Had they learned about the history of hip hop? Its importance in African American culture? My stepdaughter, who was 8 or 9 at the time, sighed. “Mama,” she said, “we just want to dance.”

Just dancing is too often unappreciated, and I intend to just dance a lot more often. It’s not only others’ creations that I’ve been forgetting. I’ve been forgetting my own. I’ve a greenhouse to build out of old windows, and poems to write. There’s a summer adventure to make for three teenage boys who mean the world to me.

So this Blog is going on hiatus for the month of July. The work of the ILI will keep humming, and our collective intention is clear. As for my individual creations, though, this month my only intention is for what I make to be full of Light, and that will be enough.