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ART IS NOT A LUXURY
From the communes of the sixties to the experimental communities of today,
many skilled and talented people have been involved: builders, bodyworkers,
system-designers, gardeners, healers, organizers, grafters, musicians,
midwives, bakers, herbalists, shoemakers, mothers, weavers and so on.
The high rate of failure in these communities, of burnout and reassimilation
into the mainstream, is not caused by lack of skill or capability. Simply
put, these communities fail over and over again because people cannot
get along with eachother. It is the lack of healthy social infrastructure
which has caused and continues to cause most of the difficulty. And it
is precisely within this arena of social health that the arts most benefit
a community, and the individuals that comprise that community. Community
arts practices are quite indispensable if we want to fulfill the main
permaculture tenet “CARE FOR PEOPLE.”
In tribal societies all over the globe, what we might refer to as the
“participatory arts” serve the function of keeping the social
wheels greased. These societies use dance, song, music, and theater to
bond the group together, to resolve conflicts, to dissipate tensions and
blockages both within the body and between people. The
participatory arts accomplish this social function quite efficiently.
Improvising with sound and movement serves as a method for people to explore
a sense of union with larger cycles and patterns that are simply too vast
to understand rationally. This valuable type of experience, where we physically
harmonize with natural law, cannot be achieved through science or technique
alone.
If we observe indigenous tribes—both human and non-human—we
notice that tribe members gather together regularly and cyclically. Perhaps
they gather around the campfire each evening, singing songs at sunrise
or at the full moon, celebrating, perhaps, the first day of the summer.
We also notice that everybody in the tribe participates. There are no
rows of chairs where people sit down, watch, applaud the “performers”
and then leave.
Today, mainstream art may qualify as entertainment, and perhaps voyeurism,
but it certainly does not constitute participatory art, and thus
the essential benefits of this type of art are not accrued to the community.
The lack of modern participatory art gatherings is noticeable, and this
lack is closely related to the sense of alienation, of separation from
nature and from each other that plagues modern people, and our attempts
at creating New Communities.
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