Performing Community + Seeming Ridiculous = Revolutionary Love

07 Mar Performing Community + Seeming Ridiculous = Revolutionary Love

My last post referenced the Consciencia Congress I was about to fly to Puebla Mexico for and this  post gives a flavor of it.

• Seven speakers all in one (very long) day—addressing the topic of love, mostly from the perspective of the individual and how love is good for you. Indeed, it usually is, but that wasn’t the topic of my presentation nor that of my colleague Cathy Salit of Performance of a Lifetime. We addressed the practice of revolutionary love.

Me and Cathy Salit at the congress site

Here’s the opening of my presentation:

The theme of this gathering was originally “Love as a Catalyst for Global Change.” I agree. At the same time, though, I invite us to reconsider the unidirectional relationship that this phrase implies. Might it also be that global change is a catalyst for love? Today I want to share with you how I have come to see that active involvement in creating change is a catalyst for love. I am not negating the role of love in catalyzing change. Rather, I see the two activities—love and change—as two sides of a dialectical coin.

In doing so, I am relating to love as something other than an emotion—again, not to negate the emotion of love, but to reconsider how love is created and to broaden our understanding of it from the sentimental to the activistic, from the ordinarily wonderful to the revolutionary.

• One day of sightseeing in Puebla and nearby Cholula with congress organizers and other speakers—lots of conversation, great food, a reconstructed pyramid, beautiful buildings and buildings, and the amazing Amparo Museum of pre-colonial Mexican art (dating back to 2500BC).

Congress speakers with indigenous performers