Other worlds [are] invented in play, invoked in ritual, or fabricated in the arts
Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus

Life Force Arts Center is a space for spiritually-based visual, literary and performing art. By spiritual, we don't mean being of a certain religion. Rather, spiritual means working with the flow of energy and the energy field that surrounds every person, place and thing.

Many artists ground their practice in the concept of healing through transforming energy. This concept of energy healing is shared by many indigenous cultures, as well as the Asian world. For example, the acupuncture and herbs of Chinese medicine and Indian Ayurvedic medicine are based in balancing energy. The shaman's role is to heal through shifting energy, and shamans often have used the arts to accomplish this goal.

In healing from an energetic standpoint, we focus transforming the energy to a positive, healthy state. As Peter Abbs (1991) says:

Art should not refer to a series of discrete artifacts or what some critics call "art objects" but to a highly complex web of energy linking the artist to the audience, and both artist and audience to all inherited culture. (Abbs, 1991, pp.247- 248)

Architect Louis Sullivan said "Form follows function." According to Sullivan, everything in existence has an inner essence that strives to become manifest in a form peculiar to that essence. If we think of this inner essence as energy, "Form follows function" is a wonderful statement of what the spiritual artist strives for.

This is not new. From the Hawaiian hula to the Kung healing dance of Africa to Indian dancing of the Shiva mythology, dance is used as a means of channeling spiritual energy. Song and chant are used from Australia to North America to invoke the gods and spiritual power, as are visual art forms such as costumes, masks and sand painting (Dissanayake, 1992).

Throughout history, writers on aesthetics have talked about art as being inspired from a spiritual or energetic source. In his work Ion, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (trans. 1925) differentiates between the training and skills needed for the technical aspects of one's art, such as learning techniques of singing or dancing, and the inspiration for the art, which Aristotle says comes from possession by the spirits. The artist receives the inspiration from the spirits and then passes it on to the audience. Aristotle gives the analogy of a magnet (spirit) magnetizing one piece of iron (an artist), which in turn attracts many other pieces of iron (the audience.)

Anthropologist Victor Turner said that both art and ritual are liminal. Liminality is a state of changing structures and identities, of ambiguity, even paradox, outside or meditating between customary categories (Ashley, 1990). Just as a tribe might employ a ritual as a liminal process to create the shift from boyhood to manhood, so art is often a liminal experience, helping the audience and artist make energetic shifts to new perceptions and even identities.

Lev Vygotsky (1971/1984) was a 20th century Russian psychologist who spoke of art as energy work. For Vygotsky, art creates catharsis, or transformation, through awakening contrasting affects (emotions) in the observer. He relates emotions to rhythms.

We can say that the basic aesthetic response consists of affect caused by art, affect experienced by us as if it were real, but which finds its release in the activity of imagination provoked by a work of art [art delays] the motor expression of emotions and, by making opposite impulses collide, initiates an explosive discharge of nervous energy (Vygotsky, 1971/1984, pp. 518).

In Vygotsky's description, we see the artist as creating a transformational container through the art work. This form becomes so powerful that it can transform the emotions (affect) of the audience.

A Common Bond: The Imaginal World

Ellen Dissanayake's book Homo Aestheticus (1992) points out that though people are called Homo Sapiens ("thinking man") art is as omnipresent a behavior for humans as thinking. Virtually every human being in every human culture for all of human history has participated in the arts.

Dissanayake says that art must have evolutionary survival value for the human species, because no behavior is universal in a species if it does not have survival value for that species. Dissanyake then asks what is the difference between three common types of human behavior: play, ritual and art. She gives a most profound answer: "other worlds [are] invented in play, invoked in ritual, or fabricated in the arts" (Dissanayake, 1992, p. 51).

Play, ritual and art all deal with the imaginal realm. But the purpose of play is to invent a non-ordinary realm; the purpose of ritual is to invoke its spiritual or energetic power; and the purpose of art is to fabricate the imaginal realm into physical form. The artist takes materials in the physical world -- paint, movement, sounds, words -- and causes them to manifest the energy the artist perceives.

Art, Teaching and Healing

The artist who works in a spiritual way is often also a teacher and healer. In our current culture, however, the individual often does his/her art in one venue, teaching in another location and healing in yet another context. Life Force Arts Center is a place where an artist who is also a teacher and/or healer can fully carry out her profession in the same Center.