Reviving Spirits is here! It is our newest project exploring the intersections of belief, sexuality, and gender all in an effort to revive the collective spirits of the LGBTQIA communities. It is a big project. One that can only be told through multiple narratives and perspectives.

That’s why we here at OutLook have a cross-cultural, intergenerational project team at its helm: we want to model the pluralism we wish to see within the broader ensemble and in the broader community.

Working cross-culturally and intergenerationally comes with its own unique set of opportunities/challenges. One of the most crucial opportunities/challenges is demonstrating how consensus and dissent together deepen cultural understanding, refine artistic expression, and build bridges between the generations. It is no small task.

To start deepening our cultural understanding, refine our artistic expression, and build bridges between/among our project team, we are working with Columbia dance history, choreography, and cultural studies professor Peter Carpenter. In fact, Peter will be joining us in the Bay Area in April to facilitate our first Reviving Spirits Ensemble retreat (Thanks Pete!).

Peter posed three questions to each of the project team members — Anthony Julius Williams, Marissa Rea, and Jason Wyman (moi):

• How does the theme of “Reviving Spirits” inspire and challenge you?
  
• Do you have desires for this project with regard to any of the following: personal development, community engagement, service, or interpersonal connection?
• Is there anything “in your way” as you begin this project?

All three of us answered his questions, and all were incredibly different, nuanced, and artful.

As a lead up to our Ensemble Application DUE DATE (WED, FEB 29, 2012), we will be publishing each project team members responses. We hope it sheds light on our own internal consensus and dissent. We hope it inspires YOU TO APPLY. We hope it SPARKS A CONVERSATION.

And now, Marissa Rea’s responses to the questions!

***

How does the theme of “Reviving Spirits” inspire and challenge you?

Seeing my parents reject their religious upbringings and the process of embracing my queerness impacted my view of religion and spirituality.  I just thought it wasn’t for me.  The past few years in San Francisco, interacting with the most lovely spiritual and open-minded individuals as well as being involved in Outlook’s recent work on “the GOD project” has helped me realize that I have always been a spiritual person.  I care deeply about values that go beyond our physical and material world such as beauty, creativity, and love.  I also see being spiritual as having humility; as seeing the importance and divinity in everyone including myself, therefore not seeing anyone as beneath me or above me.  Humility is about clarity and acceptance.

The theme “Reviving Spirits” challenges me because I have never allowed myself until this past year to look at the intersections of belief, gender, and sexuality; so this is new terrain for me.  However, I do welcome this challenge.  I’m excited and inspired to partake in “Reviving Spirits” because I see this process as aiding in my own spiritual growth and self-discovery.

I’m the youngest member of the “Reviving Spirits” team and I see the only downfall as my lack of experience.  My desire for personal growth includes learning more about fundraising, being a strong facilitator, and all the organizational aspects to having a successful project as well as welcoming any spiritual growth in relation to my queer identity.

I am constantly looking for a sense of community and I have always found that within the safety of Outlook’s walls.  I’m always excited to work on a new Outlook project because that means forming a community/family from a vast array of communities and sharing our experiences.  I hope our “Call for Artists” attracts people to join our ensemble with diverse backgrounds and creativities from LGBTQIA communities all over the Bay.  I’m also excited about engaging community interest with whatever the “Reviving Spirits” ensemble produces.

The only thing I see as being “in my way” as I begin this project is being a senior at SFSU and having a large load of classes this semester.  My goal is to budget my time wisely as I finish up college while being a dedicated and reliable member of the “Reviving Spirits” ensemble.

Reviving Spirits is here! It is our newest project exploring the intersections of belief, sexuality, and gender all in an effort to revive the collective spirits of the LGBTQIA communities. It is a big project. One that can only be told through multiple narratives and perspectives.

That’s why we here at OutLook have a cross-cultural, intergenerational project team at its helm: we want to model the pluralism we wish to see within the broader ensemble and in the broader community.

Working cross-culturally and intergenerationally comes with its own unique set of opportunities/challenges. One of the most crucial opportunities/challenges is demonstrating how consensus and dissent together deepen cultural understanding, refine artistic expression, and build bridges between the generations. It is no small task.

To start deepening our cultural understanding, refine our artistic expression, and build bridges between/among our project team, we are working with Columbia dance history, choreography, and cultural studies professor Peter Carpenter. In fact, Peter will be joining us in the Bay Area in April to facilitate our first Reviving Spirits Ensemble retreat (Thanks Pete!).

Peter posed three questions to each of the project team members — Anthony Julius Williams, Marissa Rea, and Jason Wyman (moi):

• How does the theme of “Reviving Spirits” inspire and challenge you?
  
• Do you have desires for this project with regard to any of the following: personal development, community engagement, service, or interpersonal connection?
• Is there anything “in your way” as you begin this project?

All three of us answered his questions, and all were incredibly different, nuanced, and artful.

As a lead up to our Ensemble Application DUE DATE (WED, FEB 29, 2012), we will be publishing each project team members responses. We hope it sheds light on our own internal consensus and dissent. We hope it inspires YOU TO APPLY. We hope it SPARKS A CONVERSATION.

And now, Anthony Julius Williams responses to the questions above.

***

How does the theme of “Reviving Spirits” inspire and challenge you?  

I can’t answer this question without indulging a critique of postmodern critical theory. The main problem I see in queer culture is an uncritical knee-jerk embrace of postmodernist thought and behaviors that results in all manner of hypocrisy; for me, this compounds the alienation from mainstream society that results from homophobia with another layer of alienation from the queer community that results from pathological behaviors that claim anti-homophobic rationales as their justification.

Try as I might, I can’t forget one incident that happened to me several years ago: I was curating a night of performative collaborations between gay male writers and non-literary artists, and commissioned a local well-known queer writer to participate as our honored guest. Our honored guest showed up without a collaborator and performed a multimedia piece that ended with him pissing on a Bible, tearing out pages and papier-mâché-ing them to his body while singing a witty diatribe against Christianity. Half the audience loved his work; the other half was appalled, and one woman was so upset she literally had to be physically restrained from attacking him. Though we had discussed his commission twice before the show, the guest artist had not warned me ahead of time about what he was going to do, leaving me with no time for a post-show discussion to depressurize the audience; when I asked him why he hadn’t told me, he said, “Because I knew you wouldn’t let me do it if I did.” Then he fled the room, adding, “Maybe you should be careful of who you associate with.”

While I admired the guest artist’s bravado, my immediate first thought after seeing the piece was “If this is where queer culture is going, I want nothing to do with it.” To me, the piece strayed from a critique of Christianity right into the territory of hate speech – the artistic equivalent of painting a swastika in a synagogue. I generally have no problem with sacrilegious art, but such art is most effective when leavened by ambiguity or humor, and it’s even better when it makes the case for its own brand of spirituality; in contrast, our guest’s piece was scorched-earth aesthetic terrorism, typically postmodernist in its fragmented, unhealthy, isolated, nihilistic view of the universe, and reeking of the very same smug self-righteousness that it hypocritically condemns in the homophobic pastors it rails against. I prefer art works that catalyze conversations, present multiple possibilities, and build bridges; pissing on a Bible is about ending a conversation, imposing falsely polarized black-and-white choices on the audience, and (piss-)marking one’s territory in a turf-war. That’s what the artist meant by his warning me “Maybe you should be careful of who you associate with.”

It’s an attitude that is prevalent in certain quarters of the queer arts community who consider themselves “radical;” I am more inclined to believe that they are “ultraleftist” – that is, people who are more concerned about their cutting-edge images than in actually doing the distinctly unglamorous work of bringing about real social change. Real social change is grounded in various dialogues – political, aesthetic, etc.—and in the context of battling homophobia in Christianity, that means remembering that the Bible is primarily a collection of tales about an oppressed minority fighting for liberation, forming alliances with LGBT-affirmative churches and LGBT members of all faiths, and, whether we like it or not, acknowledging that living outside of Christianity is largely perceived as a sign of white privilege in communities of color whose cultures largely revolve around church organizations and functions (as is true of large segments of both the African-American and Latino communities). Postmodernism is largely founded on the claim that we can simply cut off the past with no consequences; in contrast, I say there’s a reason that the saying “those who don’t know history are condemned to repeat it” is a huge cliché. If you are really interested in changing something — people or culture or history or whatever – you’d better get in dialogue with it; otherwise, it’s more likely to be changing you. The closest synonym to “transformation” that I can think of is “awareness.” It’s so strange that I have to be the one to articulate why the LGBT community should be in dialogue with Christian churches, as I practice a pagan religion – Santeria – and have no particular investment in Christian survival. But I do have an investment in “awareness” as it is the most important tool in combating racism and homophobia, and I happen to be a black gay man.

So the theme “Reviving Spirits” inspires me as not only a way of learning about the LGBT communities’ amazing array of experiences in regards to believing and non-believing, but also about building a conversation around strategies for living life in ways that are whole, healthy, connected and meaningful — or, in a word, “spiritual,” that is, affirming (not denigrating) of our spirit. The challenge is to move beyond narrow ideologies and the resulting pathological behaviors that can ultimately only serve to depress us.  Personally, that means moving beyond the baggage I carry from past cultural organizing experiences and stepping into new belief systems and aesthetic experiences that allow me to step into my power and affirm my spirit!

This project intrigues me both because of the topic – examining intersections of faith, sexuality and gender – and the way it is organized – as a sort of “train the trainers” exercise in social entrepreneurship. Both aspects will allow me to expand my conception (the why) and execution (the how) of community organizing through cultural work. To try to touch upon all four aspects of the question – personal development, community engagement, service, and interpersonal connection: I want to demonstrate to myself and others that I can be of real service by becoming more precise and powerful in my ability to communicate and practice the relevance and benefits of transpersonal modes of consciousness to larger, more diverse sections of the LGBT community in hopes of creating more soulful personal connections – as friends, coworkers, artists who are aligned with something larger than themselves – that strengthen and enliven those communities. In short, I want to create “communion.” I want to figure out how communion can result in spiritual, physical, cultural and financial rewards.

Is there anything “in your way” as you begin this project?  

Yes, quite frankly, there are. I am rather jaded about the personalities, ideologies and practices I see in the queer performance art community. I am also coming to the end of my graduate studies and I am nervous about my job search and (un)employment prospects. I will also have to balance my other commitments (including that to my own artistic work) with this project. The challenges can be summed up this way: leadership, finances, balance. This project takes on additional fascination because it is a big mirror for finding my way through these challenges.