Life's Surprises and Inherent Humor

Sometimes I'll create, imagining a thing will be kitschy. It surprises me by becoming elegant.

Other times, I'll set out to create an elegant thing and laugh as it becomes kitschy.

Color Psych! Lura Astor
Put the Fizz In  Lura Astor, assemblage detail

Dancing and The Unlived Life and Creativity

bubble kids photo prise 28 avril 2012 Saint-Merri, Paris by bpixel

The following writing is from the book Sylvia Ashton-Warner Teacher 

These are her notes on teaching in New Zealand, the class known as the "infant room". The children are Maori and English.

Published by Simon and Schuster NY 1963, she is known for her work on organic teaching.

The photos are not from the book.
 
Dancing
 
 …. Plato said it was the one complete expression involving the faculties on all levels, spiritual, intellectual and physical. That’s what I think too. Not that I deliberately teach it for that reason. It just happened one bright spring morning when I was playing some Schubert to please no one but myself that a child stood up from his work and began composing a dance, then another, then another, and there it all was. And here it all still is.

Although most of the interpretations come from them, I indulge myself by providing them with a further selection of movements to use as they choose, to supplement their own movements. But I haven’t noticed much of it being used voluntarily in their interpretation of new music. The old story of imposition again.

I never use other than classical music. Not only for my own sake but because it was a classic that brought them to their feet in the first place. So far I have used Schubert, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Brahms and Grieg. But I’m only feeling my way, since my only source of dancing knowledge is from my own dreaming.

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My aim is that a child may be able to create dancing as freely as he draws or writes autobiography or plays. But I haven’t got there yet. (By the time I wrote the book Spinster I had got there. (Lura note: Spinster was made into a film Two Loves starring Shirley MacLaine) Although we place dancing in the output period, we also use it to break any strain of work during the day.

The Unlived Life
It’s all so merciful on a teacher, this appearance of the subjects of an infant room in the creative vent. For one thing, the drive is no longer the teacher’s but the children’s own. And for another, the teacher is at last with the stream and not against it: the stream of children’s inexorable creativeness. As Dr. Jung says, psychic life is a world power that exceeds by many times all the powers of the earth; as Dr. Burrow says, the secret of our collective ills is to be traced to the suppression of creative ability; and as Erich Fromm says, destructiveness is the outcome of the unlived life.

Martha Cooper

there'll be dancing in the streets ... music, sweet music

 

 

 

As a dancer and teacher, I love how Sylvia Ashton-Warner could play classical music but received dancing lessons in her dreams!

Curiosity

Curiosity allows for conversation.

click here for quote

Sky Ablaze with Stars

During genealogy study I read: 
1833 year of the falling stars 

I look it up ...13 Nov 1833:

“From two o'clock until broad daylight, the sky being perfectly serene and cloudless, an incessant play of dazzlingly brilliant luminosities was kept up in the whole heavens."



It was so bright that a newspaper could be read on the street. 

One writer says, "For nearly four hours the sky was literally ablaze."


Mystical Wisp mixed-media by Lura Astor

purple spiders

In a swimming pool an 11 year old girl asked, "What are all those purple lines on your legs?"

Well, I thought, a map of my years on earth. Considering ...

 ... the number of leaps and landings, jumps and choreographed tumbles during 30+ years of dance/performances.

But it was hopping within one square foot of stage, over and over, while the other leg, a la seconde en l'air at waist height, then burst! a round of twirling jetes circling the stage in half backbends ...

... yes, it was that first jete out of the centripetal motion and I could feel my capillaries as the foot landed on earth and spiders of electricity crawled up my leg.

Kinda like that, these maps of our lives, etched on skin and membrane.

Kinda like that, kid.

art: The Gift lastor

It's About Time