An Excerpt from Wild Women, Wild Voices
by Judy Reeves
Art as Transformation
I was in kindergarten, and our class and all the other elementary school students were sitting cross-legged on the polished hardwood floor of the cafeteria/auditorium for the performance of Aladdin and His Magic Lantern by a visiting high school troupe. Never before, in all the books that had been read to me, in all the stories I’d been told, in all the dramas played out on records or on the radio, never before had I experienced such magic. Before me, and me alone, because now all the other students had faded away, appeared mysterious tents draped with brilliant fabrics and furnished with satin pillows as large as my father’s easy chair. The play began, and actors adorned in colorful costumes and tasseled shoes with turned-up toes performed their roles. And there was the gleaming magic lantern itself — pure gold, I was certain. Then suddenly a loud drum sounded, and out of a cloud of smoke appeared the genie! ready to grant any wish Aladdin might desire. My wish: that this could go on forever.
This was the first but not the only time I was transformed by a theatrical performance. Nor is theater the only art that has this powerful effect on me. Music, dance, art installations, paintings, films, books, and poetry: I witness art and through my witnessing I am a participant in the making of art — a busker performing in the park where I stop and watch and put my dollar in her basket, a poet reading her work who hears my holy silence at the end of her poem, the man on the banks of the Mississippi River who invited me to look at the moon through his telescope.
“Creativity is interactive and art is alchemical,” said Jean Shinoda Bolen in her essay. “Its power is in its capacity to affect and transform the artist and the audience.”
Listen to how these Wild Women relate their experiences being transformed by art:
“We were in the Louvre in Paris,” said Angie. “As we came down a low staircase from one of the open galleries, there in front of me on a five-foot concrete pedestal, so that she stood above the crowds, was Winged Victory of Samothrace. She soared above the crowd breathing liberty to me….I stood before her in tears, the crowd surging, and me lost in her presence.”
“I was crazy-lucky to hear Claudio Abbado conduct Anton Bruckner’s Symphony no. 9 at the Lucerne Summer Music Festival,” wrote Gina. “At one point the symphony struck such deep chords of resonance in my being that I was crying and shaking. The sound waves in the concert hall seemed to dissolve the boundaries of my skin and bones, erasing any delineation between me and the music, allowing me to merge with its expression of sheer beauty and joy.”
Notes for Nurturing Wild Voice
• It’s okay to not know where you’re going.
• It’s okay to not know how to get there, even when you think you know where you’re going.
• Don’t be afraid to make mistakes.
Such experiences have a mystical effect; we’re changed in a deep, soulful way that inwardly has no language and outwardly often expresses itself in tears.
But it isn’t only in grand, sacred places that this magic happens. “Art transformed me in a pigpen,” said Anitra. “I was on my knees in the mud and pig shit when I noticed that my body had left and I was purely an eye looking through my camera lens.”
And sometimes witnessing another’s artful expression inspires us to create our own. “That mosaic table I saw twenty years ago in a gallery transformed my life,” said Jill. “I dreamed about it all night, bought it in the morning, and have been creating my own mosaics ever since.”
Sylvia related, “On a certain day in 1991, I had an encounter with a monarch butterfly and my first poem appeared to me. That was the beginning of, so far, twenty-two years of writing poetry…and eventually being able to call myself ‘a poet.’ ”