blog dharma/arte

A r t a s s p i r i t u a l p r a c t i c e

Meredith Monk

Foto: Erin Koch

Photo: Erin Koch

In 2010, Dharma/Arte will publish the Brazilian edition of True perception: the path of dharma art, by Chögyam Trungpa, with an introduction to the Brazilian edition by Meredith Monk. Below, an excerpt from the introduction. To know more about the Brazilian edition and how to collaborate, please email redes@dharma.art.br.

I first met Chögyam Trungpa in New York in 1974, during one of the early talks he did there. I have to say the meeting was kind of funny because we just shook hands – there was nothing in my mind, a blank. Later on I spent quite a bit of time at Gampo Abbey in Nova Scotia. When I told Ane Migme, one of the nuns, that during this meeting there was nothing in my mind, she said “Oh that was a very good meeting: he was showing you the gap, that was very auspicious”.

His assistants had given a long introduction telling him about my work: that it was music as meditation, Buddhist theatre etc. but in the exact moment that we looked at each other, all my “achievements” seemed unimportant. My thinking just came to a standstill; I knew there was nothing that I could say exactly. Again, this was very instinctive, because I hadn’t really studied at that time, I hadn’t formally practiced at all, but I had the sensation that my conceptual chatter was inconsequential, and I literally was speechless.

So that was my first meeting with him. Later, I taught at Naropa Institute during the summers of 1975, 1976 and 1978. We did meet each other but I never really spent a lot of time with him. I went to all his talks during the week or two that I was there. At that time I felt part of the artistic community but I was skeptical about organized religion. I kept hovering around at the edges. But what was so amazing about Trungpa Rinpoche was that he found a wide variety of modalities to reach the Western mind and one of them was definitely art. Another one he created was the Kasung, for people who were more interested in a type of military discipline to focus energy and yet become soft within a bracing, precise form. He tried many different ways of conveying Dharma.

During that time in my life, the only way to reach me was through art. I had spent my whole life absorbed in making art, as my practice, as my life. So right away at Naropa, I was very much in tune with the way the arts were integrated with Buddhist studies and inspired by the aspirations of the community. When I performed for the first time there in 1975, I was aware that how the audience was perceiving allowed for a lot of space; what I was performing could be what it was, there was no pressure to be entertaining or to do anything other than what I did. There was no rush.

In addition to Trungpa’s eloquence, the way he dealt with people’s questions and how he worked with the situation was inspiring. I remember Gregory Corso, who was a poet in the Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, spontaneously shouting out his comments or questions. Trungpa always worked with Gregory’s explosions of energy as a really great playful dialogue. I admired the way that Trungpa always worked with anything that anybody came up with. Gregory yelled a question out and Trungpa just yelled something back. It was like a tennis match. I also remember one question I identified very strongly with, living in New York: A man said, I live in NY and it’s really noisy, how do I do my practice of meditation? And Trungpa answered: “Just think of the taxis as monkeys”. He also said “The landscape of New York is the faces of people”. When I really look at people’s faces, these faces are our mountains, our trees and our sky here in New York.

Trungpa created a strong sense of artistic community at Naropa in the mid-seventies. It was not that everybody’s work was the same, which would not have been a good thing. There was not a particular sensibility; one way that art was supposed to be. There was just a commitment to the process itself and the courage to not assume anything. That was an exhilarating time at Naropa. Everyone sensed that this was the beginning of a rich flowering of energy. The aspiration was to let go of expectations, to be authentic and honest with experience. People were trying to deal consciously with their bewilderment and confusion. There was a shared sense of excitement and a spirit of adventure. Naropa was also a wonderful place to create work. I was there for 2 weeks in the summer of 1976. After teaching for 3 hours in the morning, I would go to a beautiful space that had been a chapel and work on new material. The result of that process became “Plateau #1” which I premiered at the end of my stay.

Being at Naropa certainly made me think carefully about how I worked with other people. After that, in the mid-eighties, I started Shambhala training and that really changed me as a human being. I realized more and more that there was no separation between the principles of art making and practice. I always had some kind of an instinctive trust in my vision as an artist but in Trungpa’s teachings I found a place where I could nurture it as a person.

The Shambhala teachings made me slow down more in my daily life. In my working process I was always able to start from emptiness but in terms of sitting on the subway, walking down the street, experiencing the basic aspects of daily life, I began seeing differently; appreciating the most ordinary kinds of events. When I first began working with these teachings and practice I became aware that overlaying what Trungpa calls our “basic goodness” is the sense of terror that he speaks about and so much of what we do is a reaction to that. Our aggression has to do with our fear. It was a revelation to discover that in myself.

As an artist, you’re dealing with this fear every time you begin a new piece because you’re allowing yourself to tolerate hanging out in the unknown. Basically, it’s like a blank canvas, you’re starting from nothing, from not knowing anything. Every time you make a piece, fear is always there and you’re always working with it, playing with it, allowing the interest and curiosity of what you’re making to become more compelling than the anxiety. Then you’ve actually walked through the fear and there’s a sense of discovery.

Right around the time I started doing Shambhala practice in the mid-eighties I made a piece, one of the more direct ways of working with that notion, called “Scared Song”, basically a song about fear. It was an unusual song for me because there were shards of text within it and I was working with a very specific human emotional state.

This practice helps us to trust the unknown or the uncertainty of our passions and our sensations. I think that’s what we do as artists intuitively. For people who are not artists, it really helps in terms of understanding what the artistic process is and how that corresponds to the process of living fully. Actually, one could say that every person is an artist in how he or she lives his/her life.

Foto: Erin Koch

Photo: Erin Koch

In True perception, Trungpa wrote: “The basic problem in artistic endeavor is the tendency to split the artist from the audience and then try to send a message from one to the other. When this happens, art becomes exhibitionism”. That is a very complex statement with many layers. You do see art in which there is above all a display of ego. The Western tradition up to a certain point emphasized the individual artist being isolated from society and a separation of art and life. Often artists who created brilliant works had painful lives so there became a basic misunderstanding: that really good art came from neurosis. This notion flourished in the 19^th century and continued into the 20^th. Van Gogh and Pollack are two examples that come to mind, each with very difficult personal lives and yet their work reflects and embodies luminous principles of the universe. Trungpa came from Tibetan culture where the emphasis was on objective techniques passed from generation to generation and art as spiritual practice. I would imagine that his first exposure to the Western approach of “individual expressivity” was curious.

Personally, what I hope to be doing is to offer an experience that doesn’t manipulate in any way. Each person will of course see, perceive and hear something different so it’s potentially an open situation for everyone. Obviously, the material is filtered through my own sensibility which becomes more and more refined as the years go on. I always try to start a piece at zero with no assumptions or expectations. Of course, the older I get, the heavier the backpack of my own history weighs. But I attempt in every way to put myself into a situation of risk to keep the process fresh. And in the work itself, I try to offer an expansive, multi-layered experience which leaves room for each person to relate to in his or her own way. Maybe after being immersed in that experience someone would perceive aspects of everyday life in new or startling ways.

The people I work with are so evolved as vocal artists, that some of these very basic principles are already there. When we perform we are very sensitive to each other and to the space. It really is ensemble in profound sense. In this work one can’t necessarily receive the ego gratification that some modes of performance offer, say like a Broadway show where you are taught to “sell” your material. You and the material are separate. If you are very skillful and full of personality, you do get instant love back. In my work, there is no division between the material and the performer; we are the music, the movement or whatever we do.

The beauty of a live performing situation is the possibility of complete disaster at every moment. When you’re making a film or a recording, at a certain point you can cut out everything you don’t like. It becomes a fixed form. But in live performance everything is real, present tense, you’re seeing people on a kind of tightrope, you’re experiencing that. Vulnerability is such a beautiful aspect of a live performance. The performers exist and everyone in the audience exists ; we’re all in the same space at the same time. We’re sharing that time and space together. The experience ultimately becomes like a figure 8, an infinity sign, that just goes back and forth, back and forth, comes around, and comes back around again.

[...]

Trungpa pointed out that there is something to always keep in mind when you’re creating : “Is the work you’re making of benefit?” The Dharma Art teachings are very uplifting; they point out an awareness of the process itself and the relation between art making and practice. Artists develop a personal sense of discipline in the process of creating work so in a sense the Dharma Art teachings verbalize and delineate something which is discovered instinctively. But the teachings are valuable for everyone to become aware of the elements that exist in every moment of perception. I always think of myself, particularly in my singing, as being a conduit of these fundamental energies. As an artist, they were a rich reminder of why I became an artist in the first place.

Foto: Erin Koch