One: I was so stuck in the angry teenager phase of my art practice and for such a long time that I quite forgot how to value any approach that didn't feel to me "active" enough. But that was so long as I refused to believe that "active" could take any form other than ripping people's throats out or stomping stilettos through their tongues or throwing every provocative thing imaginable up onto the stage; because I feared I never could be "active" enough, I trembled at the thought of tenderness as a plan of action--it would have meant that I was doing enough at the start, back where I first began. If I remember correctly, the only reason I threw myself onto a stage at age eight was because I needed to share my joy with the people in the room. My joy was too big for me to carry alone. By the time it became my career, I had been fed for years with the thinking that a faggot's joy was shameful, culpable, condemnable. My rage became my power and the only way I could know it. Then here, one of the first things I learned was that this experience was not unique: any marginalized individual becomes an activist as soon as they get joyful / because marginalized joy is as radical as it is revolutionary, as much an act of rebellion as it is an act of reclamation, and it has healing power.
Two: That being said, a second takeaway from these seven weeks and probably the one that should take precedence on this list is that in order to be successful artivists, we must learn how to simplify in the act of getting more specific about our vision. Too quickly I want to address every problem, every crisis, every injustice in ever a more novel way, and this only ends in chaos and disappointment. Every step of the process we must return to the drawing-board, investigate our own motives, be honest with ourselves about whether or not this step really fits in line with our vision. And in order to do that at all, the vision itself must be clear, sober and concise without being reductive. So much for simplifying my explanation!
Three: Listen to the voices of those people you are engaging by your story. Uphold their honor; let them write their own narrative, give them credit, value their opinions, thoughts and feelings above your own.
Four: To that end, always know your place. Know your power and how it plays in the room. Know your privilege and how to use it as advocacy + / subversion + / mobilization + / resistance. Never stop investigating your privileges; remain open and seeking to find new ones that you hadn't known or thought about before--they are opportunities for expansion and they ought to be invited into your praxis.
Five: P R A X I S .
Six: Anger coming from the moral high ground is a provocation that allows for invitation; anger out of hysterical animosity is a tantrum to which even the most compassionate mothers can give nothing but the silent treatment.
Seven: It is okay to fail. It is required that we make mistakes. Humility is a prerequisite for the work. Friction is a fact of the work. Our courage is in extending beyond our limits of experience. Our shared experience is in our blind spots. Is there a universal axiom? The questions we ask ought to ask as much of us as they do the subjects of our inquiry. Even when you think you've run out of questions, there is a question in that. Real learning is never knowing.
Eight: Beware of mistaking your group for society in need of an anti-hierarchy ideology lest you want your circle to keep talking in circles and never make it into the streets or society.
Nine: The symbols and signifiers of this world contain within them some of the most compelling meanings. But it is a fact evidenced by history that these meanings are not forever, that these meanings have a way of shifting with the conversation or sometimes urging and activating the conversation to begin with. It is that much more compelling, then, when these symbols are reclaimed, repurposed, recontextualized, by we the new-meaning-makers who say Function Is The New Form.
Ten: Theater politics without aesthetics is as good as a lecture for a dozing audience. Theater aesthetics without politics might stimulate but it sure as hell won't galvanize.
Eleven: Just because you fractured your skull does not mean you cannot think critically, creatively or constructively.
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