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LOVE AND THE CREATIVE ADVENTURE This seminar/ workshop will explore the relationship between love and creative functioning using five videos created by John G. Young, M.D. The videos were created and produced by the presenter, John G. Young, M. D., a board-certified psychiatrist, multimedia artist, writer, musician, and consultant on creativity, innovation and change. This class will be integrated with the video presentation and involve discussion and experiences related to the needs of the participants. Dr. Young is writing a book called Love and The Creative Adventure, an expansion of his honor’s thesis, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Love. The videos, The Creative Adventure, [120 min.] won The International Cindy Award, The Communicator Award and The Telly Award; Word Salad, [75 min.] won The Accolade Award; and Poems at an Exhibition, [50 min.] was positively reviewed in Voices, the art and science of psychotherapy, by Stephen Howard, M.D.. Gift Rapt, is a work in process about a one man conceptual art show at the University of Colorado’s Macky Gallery. Day One In these rapidly changing times, creative and innovative approaches are mandatory. Psychological wellness in individuals and organizations occurs when you stop applying yesterday’s solutions to today’s problems. You obsolete your organization before others do it for you. You change before you have to. The first day of the seminar/workshop, Your Creative Adventure, shows you how to live your life as a creative adventure and how to develop maximum effectiveness using creative and innovative approaches. In the video Dr. Young tells the story of “creativity” creatively, using a multimedia approach of artworks, graphics, animation, music and poetry. He shows you why you must have a sense of adventure and a love of what you are doing to bring into being that something new and valuable we call “creative.” Part One: Love and Conception answers the questions, “What is creativity?” “Why is creativity important?” and “How can you become more creative?” It takes the attitude that everyone has creative abilities, but we can all improve our creative approaches. You will find how to update your problem solving techniques to enhance productivity, decrease stress and avoid future shock. Highlights of The Creative Adventure Part One: Love and Conception
The Creative Adventure, Part Two: Birth and Re-Birth begins at the incubation stage of the creative process where Part One left off. Techniques learned in Part One: Love and Conception can lead to new levels of integration, but sometimes you find yourself unable to see the forest for the trees. Then it is important to back off or take a different approach. The second part of the program extends the investigation into creative approaches, but shifts the focus to the being side of creativity. We move from the creative process to the creative person and explore attitudes necessary to creative living, learning and loving. Highlights of The Creative Adventure Part Two: Birth and Re-Birth
Day Two The second day of the workshop, Your Creative Expression, will explore the use of creative expression using three videos, Poems at an Exhibition; Word Salad: Creativity and Madness with Foxes, Deer, Ducks, and Chickens; and Gift Rapt. This part of the seminar explores mature love and its vicissitudes. We will look at art, poetry and music in therapy; the four kinds of love as it relates to Martin Buber’s I and Thou and, coping with disability artistically, using personal experience in creative expression, the role of courage in creating, and finding diamonds at home. Poems at an Exhibition [50 min.] “I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else,” Picasso. What started as a documentary of a one-man art show becomes a video poem on disability. In this work Dr. Young blends his art, poetry, animation, and music into a creative autobiographic documentary of his family’s attempts to cope with disability. His wife has multiple sclerosis, his daughter is hearing impaired, even the dog is mostly blind. This multi-media presentation shows how they overcome the challenges of loss, pain, rejection, and despair with laughter, courage and love. With interviews, by and of each family member, emotions emerge as spontaneously as the improvisational background music. In the end, this video points beyond one man’s family to the needs of all families who struggle with disability. Word Salad[75 min.] Word Salads come in many forms: In psychiatry it refers to a thought disorder found in various forms of psychosis; in the creative field a break from purely logical thinking to arrive at new meanings; in poetry it suggests playing with language such as the famous Jabberwocky poem of Lewis Carroll. Some word salads are complete non-sense and in others you have to dig for the meaning. In this video, it is a mix of all these senses. This semi-divine comedy takes an out-of-the-box “mockumentary”approach to the creator-producer’s state of mind and tells his tale through his alter-ego, Rembrandt and some of his friends. It presents a new look at creativity and a new look at madness. It begins like an educational piece on creativity but soon evolves into a mad morality/mortality play. In it he mocks contemporary art, immigration policy, museum installations, architects, rap, himself–even God. This video, Word Salad, begins with a series of sketches, using widely differing multi-media approaches from word-play games, graphic manipulations, documentary, fantasy installations, music/poetry videos, to posters and rap. It makes suggestions about the creative process and creative expression that carry through the video and looks at their relationship to madness. Like the elements of a salad, the sketches are individually prepared before they get mixed together. Issues of bowing to the past vs. starting fresh, boundaries and intimacy, choosing and being chosen, standing out and fitting in, shallowness and depth, and duck, duck, goose get all mixed up. Psychiatrically poems move from ignoring issues [Sublime Suite andStrangers to Themselves] to the struggle to face one’s demons [Plaza de Toros], to manic excesses [Hamilton and Chicken Salad.] The video poem gradually moves into madness. It progresses from the psychological madness of schizoid distance and manic excesses to the physiological madness of multiple sclerosis, its multiple ramifications, and anger about its indignities to existential madness of being tossed into existence with the prescriptions for living “left in a bottle too wet to read,” only to then in the end having to face loss. In the concluding neo-dada play Dr. Young tossed the entire work into an incredible chicken salad. It extends the focus from sense and non-sense to meaning and meaninglessness in the style of the “Theatre of the Absurd.” The dialogue is full of chicken clichés, wordplay, looseness of association and other nonsense. Humor replaces the sad edginess and over-the-top emotionality of some contemporary art films. Gift Rapt [50 Min.] The last video is Gift Rapt is an elaboration of a one-man conceptual art-show about appreciating “now” plus other shorts. The gallery show happened at the onset of the Great Recession and at the time of personal loss; it is about appreciating the “here and now” despite the here and now, learning to “dance in the rain.” |