Creativity -- Fieldwork workshop to begin next week


Creativity and the Fieldwork process. New Fieldwork workshop to begin Sunday, Feb. 29, 20004. Are you an artist living in the greater Rochester, NY, area? Check this out!

I am so excited. I received an e-mail from Liz Hallmark (of Hallmark Danceworks) today notifying me that a new Fieldwork workshop will begin next Sunday. I was in one of these last fall and it was just about the most wonderful creativity workshop I have ever been involved with. From her e-mail:

"You make good work by (among other things) making lots of work that isn't very good, and gradually weeding out the parts that aren't good... It's called feedback, and it's the most direct route to learning about your own vision. It's called doing your work. After all, someone has to do your work, and you're the closest person around." From Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils and Rewards of Artmaking

Join us for the next Fieldwork Session. Bring the stuff that's still wet.

WHAT IS IT?  Fieldwork is a rigorous weekly workshop designed to help artists gather information about their work. Each week artists can show developing work and receive feedback from their peers in a supportive environment.  Fieldwork sessions culminate in informal studio showings of developed works open to the public. Fieldwork sessions are designed for artists creating original work in any discipline including Dance, Theater, Writing, Visual, Plastic, Hybrids.

To sign up for Fieldwork, please register by sending your contact information and a $20 deposit to Hallmark Danceworks, PO Box 18795, Rochester, NY  14618.  Payment in full is due by the first meeting of the workshop.  For more info, call 244-0962.

March/April (6 weeks)
Sundays, February 29 - April 4, 4:00-6:00
Where: 34 Elton Street, 2nd Floor
Cost: $50
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The feedback process in Fieldwork -- plus the fact that it involves artists from a wide variety of disciplines -- is what makes it unique. No one is allowed to tell you what to do to "fix" your work. Instead, people talk about what they see in your work, how it makes them feel, what kinds of responses they have to what they see/hear. The CRITIC has no place in Fieldwork. And it's really great to get feedback from artists who are not involved in your particular discipline. Because they are artists themselves, they take seriously the task of responding to your work; but because they don't know your technical processes, their responses are more like what you might inspire in your readers/viewers/audiences. That's very different from what you get in workshops with people who know the specific technical processes involved in your discipline, as they tend to be more critical and all too often rely upon the "rules" they learned from this teacher or that.

Rules, as any artist knows, are made to be broken. Always with a purpose, yes. And better that you do it consciously rather than because you just "don't know" what the rules are. But art is about helping people to see and understand their world differently, in a new way.

So I am thrilled with this opportunity. Hope to be writing more on this every Sunday throughout the workshop, or at least by Monday morning.

And perhaps one or more of you artists/creative folk out there living in the greater Rochester area would like to participate!

Posted: Sun - February 29, 2004 at 09:24 AM          

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