{"id":85,"date":"2011-06-27T09:54:00","date_gmt":"2011-06-27T16:54:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=85"},"modified":"2011-06-27T09:54:00","modified_gmt":"2011-06-27T16:54:00","slug":"communion-captivation-and-flow-%e2%80%93-with-a-little-rapture-thrown-in-for-spice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2011\/06\/communion-captivation-and-flow-%e2%80%93-with-a-little-rapture-thrown-in-for-spice.html","title":{"rendered":"Communion, Captivation and Flow \u2013 With a Little Rapture Thrown In For Spice"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Prarie<\/a>

Prarie Dog Rapture<\/p><\/div>\n

Last fall, I was walking with a friend on the expansive brilliantly white patio outside the Kennedy Center<\/a> in Washington, DC.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was a hot day, and when my friend needed to take a call, I snuck out of the sun to stand under the large flat roof of the building in the shade, next to the cool marble walls.\u00a0 The building is huge, a true monolith<\/a>, and as I was looking up at the architecture, one of the many quotes they have engraved on the Kennedy Center\u2019s walls caught my eye:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis country cannot afford to be materially rich but spiritually poor.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This quote, spoken by John F. Kennedy during his State of the Union address in 1963<\/a>, stuck in my head (and has been percolating in there for all of these months) in large part because I was struck by the fact that this particular sentence, at least verbally,\u00a0has nothing to do with the arts.\u00a0 It mentions art not at all.\u00a0 Instead, it has to do with the spirit, the health of which is, generally speaking, thought to be in the hands of the church.<\/p>\n

Of course, we compare ourselves to church all the time (there was a whole conference<\/a> on it)\u2014and every once in a while, there\u2019s a real backlash against<\/em> comparing ourselves to church\u2014as indeed Ben Cameron did during his speech at Americans for the Arts, where he brought up that theatres, like churches, are trying to mediate a relationship in an age of disintermediation.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been on the fence on the church metaphor, though I have previously written about an experience of mine at church as a way into talking about the power of the arts, but with all the writing I did last week<\/a> about the fall of the middle man, I\u2019ve been thinking about it more.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Recently, I was invited to sit down and speak with the leaders of 25 or so of the country\u2019s best professional choruses.\u00a0 It was an intimate round table at the Chorus America<\/a> conference, and we were meant to be discussing the two topics that take up most of my time now: impact<\/a> and excellence.\u00a0 After doing a PowerPoint-free variation on my intrinsic impact presentation, my co-presenter and I opened it up engaged in what I felt was an extremely electrifying conversation with these leaders about the power and purpose of their art.\u00a0 The confrontational leaders said things like, \u201cWe don\u2019t need to measure excellence or impact\u2014we are who we are, and run the organizations that we run, because we are the best of the best, and so are already excellent.\u201d\u00a0 The skeptics, by and large, were silent for much of it.\u00a0 And in the middle, about ten of the people in the room got into a detailed conversation about the peculiar power of live chorus music to engage in diverse audiences a strong and nonspecific \u201clift,\u201d something that one of the people in the room described this way:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy goal is to make the guy in the trucker hat in the back of the room come down at the end of the show and tell me, with surprise, \u2018I\u2026liked<\/em> it.\u00a0 I really liked it.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know why\u2026but I liked it.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another leader put it this way:<\/p>\n

\u201cI think when we\u2019re doing what we do well, we stop existing for the people listening.\u00a0 They\u2019re not seeing an individual singer; they\u2019re not even seeing the whole group of singers.\u00a0 We all just blur and disappear, and the song emerges out of us like a bright light, and it washes over the audience and they get lost in it.\u00a0 There are no singers, when we\u2019re doing well, there\u2019s just the audience and the art.\u00a0 And when it\u2019s over, they may not know why, but they\u2019ll leave and say, \u2018Hmm, I really enjoyed that.\u00a0 That was really good.\u2019\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There are no people, when we\u2019re doing well, there\u2019s just the audience and the art.<\/em><\/p>\n

At their best, the facilitators of both religion and art just get out of the way.\u00a0 When that can happen, whether it\u2019s on an organizational level or at the individual level, then a lot of barriers fall and the \u201cspiritual\u201d that Kennedy was talking about comes into play.\u00a0 In church, of course, this is called \u201ccommunion,\u201d which Merriam-Webster<\/a> defines as \u201can act or instance of sharing,\u201d and which\u00a0Oxford English Dictionary<\/a>\u00a0more flowerily defines as \u201ccommon participation in a mental or emotional experience.\u201d\u00a0 In this way, at least, the arts and the church are both aiming for the same thing.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s actually a lot of science behind this feeling of communion.\u00a0 The brain waves of the faithful give them away<\/a> (though \u201cfaithful to what<\/em>\u201d is an interesting question\u2014researchers in England recently discovered that Apple fanatics\u2019 brains manifest similar activity<\/a> when presented with images of Apple products\u2014so maybe the Church of Steve Jobs<\/a> isn\u2019t such a bad moniker after all, hallowed be iName.).\u00a0 A couple weeks ago, I wrote a blog post<\/a> about brainwaves and how they sync during one-on-one conversation.\u00a0 If you think about it, that is a small-scale example of this same phenomenon, because when you get down to it, communion is really just paying close attention, all at once, together\u2014syncing into a conversation on a more massive scale (insert image of the faithful all waiting, faces turned to the sun, for the Rapture.\u00a0 You know what I mean.).<\/p>\n

Another way to talk about this communion is through two terms that I\u2019ve thrown around on this blog before, that I think deserve a little more discussion: captivation and flow.\u00a0 \u201cCaptivation<\/a>,\u201d which in this sense was coined by Alan Brown in his early writing around measuring intrinsic impact, is the extent to which the audience member was absorbed in the performance\u2014as in, \u201cDid you lose track of time and forget about everything else during the performance?\u201d\u00a0 It is what Brown refers to as a \u201clynchpin impact\u201d of the artistic experience; the amount that a person was captivated by the performance direct affects the other impacts of that performance, including how much they engage on an emotional, intellectual, social and aesthetic level.\u00a0 Incidentally, WolfBrown\u2019s work has shown that people who are more captivated are more likely to say they want to come back\u2014so marketers take note, this impact stuff isn\u2019t just for the artists anymore.<\/p>\n

Intuitively, this makes sense\u2014both that you would get more out of an experience and that you would be more likely to return if you were strongly engaged in the experience in the first place.\u00a0 Where \u201cflow<\/a>\u201d comes in is in extrapolating out from a presented experience to just about anything.\u00a0 Whereas captivation is really about an external force (the art) affecting attention and focus of an individual (the audience) in a positive way, flow can happen with any activity, anywhere, whether in a group or alone.\u00a0 The term, coined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (yikes), basically describes when a person is as fully immersed in any activity as they can be.\u00a0 Cskimzentmihalyi proposes that when this happens, whether it\u2019s doing a puzzle, tying a shoe, doing your taxes, painting a portrait, eating a meal or going to an arts event, one gets a \u201cfeeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity.\u201d\u00a0 In other words, in that moment of flow, one is completely fulfilled.\u00a0 Per Wikipedia, \u201cthe hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture, while performing a task.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which loops me back to Kennedy\u2019s quote.<\/p>\n

The country cannot afford to be materially rich but spiritually poor.<\/em><\/p>\n

The spiritual is the place where we live.\u00a0 It is the thing that makes life worth living, and as artists we have a tremendous opportunity to create something that taps into that spirituality, expresses in beauty and art something that stretches beyond the individual\u2019s capacity, becomes a glow of pure light and sound that overpowers a room and makes them forget who they are, where they are, what divides them, what beliefs they came in with, what problems they left to be with us.\u00a0 We can do all of this, create a space as humming and religious as the most ecstatic church, provide a different language for understanding the universe.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All we have to do is get out of the way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last fall, I was walking with a friend on the expansive brilliantly white patio outside the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC.\u00a0 It was a hot day, and when my friend needed to take a call, I snuck out of the sun to stand under the large flat roof of the building in the shade, next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":86,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5,8,7,4,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-85","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-advocacy","8":"category-audience-development","9":"category-language","10":"category-main","11":"category-research","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=85"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/86"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=85"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=85"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=85"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}