Rescuing the creative instinct

One of the things we lose when we are exhausted or suffering from burnout, is our capacity to be creative, and our faith in our existential creativity.

In Biodanza creativity is one of the essential lines through which we express our human potential. Through upbringing and education, the impossible demands of late-stage capitalism, and many other factors, our creativity becomes stunted. We see this in the automation of our bodily movement. Some even come to think that robots can replace lovers.

Biodanza is a practice for the liberation of movement, from our most concrete, biological movements to embodied existential movement. We take the capacity for creative movement as innate, constrained by factors of inheritance and context. In the Biodanza session, we establish conditions that support the natural unfolding of our creative capacity and propose dances that stimulate expression along the line of creativity.

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Here are some indicators of our work:

1.?????? We recognise a primordial creative life intelligence (the vital unconscious, an extension beyond the collective unconscious and the personal unconscious, shared with all living beings) and dance to stimulate primary biological capacities (autopoiesis/sympoiesis) to unfold into more complexity, eventually a cultural poetics of dance, song, and poetry, and all the other ways we make our ourselves.

2.?????? ?A core objective of Biodanza is the rescue of the instincts (in this case, the creative instinct: we only need to look at nesting and mating rituals among birds and mammals to recognise the primacy of our urge to make beautifully). The expression of the creative instinct is shaped through mimesis (or memory) and transformed through the imagination.

3.?????? At the level of music/movement, there is a refinement of instinctual expression from rhythm to melody to harmony. This is like a flowering. Rhythm creates temporality and shape, melody connection and beauty, and harmony inclusion and the possibility of creative transcendence.

4.?????? We often think of creativity as expressive, yet it also requires a contrary interior movement. We need to withdraw into solitude (and even seclusion) and become established in our originality and the depths from which we perceive, before we can again move to engage with the world and connect with each other in manifest creativity.

5.?????? Creativity entails a movement towards and beyond the edges (a peripheral/centrifugal movement), while also establishing and drawing on the source that we may sometimes call tradition (a central/centripetal movement). Always new and old simultaneously, it approaches the infinite.

6.?????? At the heart of creative unfolding is the capacity for flow: the seamless and ongoing transformation of this into not-this, yet-this-again (the same different, said Heraclitus). Fluidity is both opening and yielding to the vast, and concentration into the crisp singularity of a lightning strike.

7.?????? We rediscover our creativity in the simplest movements of our everyday lives: walking, being playful, breathing, moving with flow, encountering each other though creative participation in the mysteries of I-You and I-You-All.

We emphasise: we can talk about this, but until we move nothing happens. It will be useful for us to articulate the causes of our exhaustion and loss of creative spark, but to rescue our creativity, we need to create. It is as simple as rediscovering walking.