The Three Weeks I Spent in Heaven - Part One
by Mayumi Lashbrook
I am a huge advocate for travel as a major catalyst for growth. Being away from the routine of everyday life provides a platform for change that I feel is necessary to experience especially at key points in your life. For me, January was a month of that kind of soul searching change in a beautiful city far from home.
Along with 19 other artists from around the world, I attended L'AiR Arts residency in Paris, France. The program titled 'Revisiting the Roaring Twenties: Art, Culture and the École de Paris Les Années Folles' was focused on Paris in the 1920s and recreated the intercultural exchange of that period that was the catalyst for so many artistic movements we know today. The idea was ambitious: bring 20 international artists together to match with 20 Paris based facilitators for a 3-week program meant to spark dialogue, intercultural exchange and commemoration of a particularly potent period in art history. The schedule was generous with activities to do every single day in varying different artistic disciplines: dance, visual art, literature and theatre.
In so many ways, it was hard for me to grasp exactly what I was getting myself into until I was physically there and experiencing it. Even so, the memory of it feels surreal and I use photos and journal entries as a means to confirm the realness of what I did, felt, saw, heard and danced. Some of the things we did included:
Gallery/Museum visits, both well known large institutions and small unknown galleries
Visiting arts schools and artist ateliers
Dance workshops and classes in contemporary and jazz
Open mic nights
Attending a dance work in Faits d'Hiver Danse Festival
Writing workshops on dreams and violence
Received the 48 hour Paris museum pass where we could select which places to visit
Open studio space to practise, choreograph and condition as we needed to
A tour of the National Centre de la Danse
Salon style hangouts with the group where we exchanged ideas, snippets of work, and generally talked about the arts
Although the program didn't have any specific outlined goals like creation or study, I determined structures for myself to adhere to. I journaled every day to recap and document the events. I created a piece ready for presentation at the closing gala. And I wrote every chance I could, including after workshops that I felt particularly drawn to, evening hangouts with the group, and while sitting in the park enjoying one of many croissants. I desired ways to both document the changes I was seeing in myself and a way to dig deeper into my consciousness, knowing the results would be different than usual. And those dives into myself yielded shifts in my understanding of who I am as an artist and how I fit into the artistic ecology of the world.
On one of the last nights, the group pointed out what they felt was the greatest shift for me from the program. Their suggestion was that I came into my confidence, developed a deeper understanding of my artistic voice, and an overall sense of certainty. I feel much more in touch with my intuition and from it, springs exactly what they all saw in me: confidence, certainty and a voice to my artistry louder than ever before. I am incredibly grateful for what each of them taught me and saw in me, which I can now see in myself.
I have come to learn that I am always in process. Ever-changing, ever-evolving and continually growing. L'AiR showed me how to be in love with that evolution, giving up striving for an end goal or finished product.
I am never finished growing.
I am never finished creating.
I am always in process.
