| Yoga
and Creativity By
Heidi Kotnasky |
|
One way to passionately engage with the creative life force is to rediscover the joy of movement. "As a culture, we've lost our relationship to our physicality," laments Nina Wise, a San Rafael, Calif., performance artist who creates experimental theatre pieces, using her body and voice in unique improvisational works. "The mushrooming interest in yoga is a symptom of an attempt to reclaim the human body," she says. Her fervently felt new book, A Big New Free Happy Unusual Life: Self-Expression and Spiritual Practice for Those Who Have Time for Neither (Broadway Books), offers playful exercises for spontaneous self-expression. Yoga quiets the mind, silences self-judgment, and reconnects us with fluid, natural movement. It can also waken our creative nature. "If you physically feel the creative force within yourself, as you may in yoga, that's what the Buddha calls "feeling the body in the body," notes Wise. When that happens, she says, your practice and creativity can be mutually enhancing. However, she cautions that in our eagerness to achieve prescribed form and perfection in a practice - whether itís yoga, music, painting or dance - we tend to overlook creativity. "In yoga itís not about the pose, itís about the release, the openness, the spaciousness that occurs in the body after the pose. Itís about a state of mind thatís achieved through the body," she says. "From this quiet state we can profoundly perceive life, and then it is rich." Yoga also develops inner focus, which allows us to concentrate on details that enrich us. "Meditation nurtures the soul with good food - the food of silence and aloneness," writes Fox. Nina Wise illustrates this point with her solo dance improvisations, which are informed by personal life events from within 24 hours of a performance. "To prepare for creative self-expression, I stay in gentle asanas for a very long time, breathing and letting go, until my mind is quiet and I start to understand what I need to perform about," she says. "Normally, we move so quickly through life that nothing seems significant. To make art, you have to slow down enough to see that even the tiniest thing is important. One night, I gave a performance about such an experience. At 2 a.m., I lay in bed reading a story about a woman dying of cancer. A fly buzzed around my room, and I thought I should be compassionate, get up, open a window and release the fly. But I was tired, so I stayed in bed drinking spice tea, when I noticed that a clove was floating in my cup. I took another sip, but it wasn't a clove - it was the fly that had drowned. I spit it out, then had to chant Om mani padme om over and over because I hadn't bothered to let the fly out. A drowning bug is insignificant only because we overlook it. Instead, I saw with artist's eyes and a performance was born." |
|
home
| about nina | performance
schedule | workshops | videos |
