About Liberation Arts
The Vision is Creativity in Community
Liberation Arts (LA) exist to create powerfull expressive arts experiences. LA is about education that comes from warrior art cultures. In sessions,we can use art to disassociate from material reality "just enough" so as to create a virtual space in which to act with "virtually" 100% freedom. Artist know and live this process and so did our ancestors. Liberation arts is the fight in arts, it's for the artist in everyone and for art made by everyone.
LA's ideas on how to act with 0% oppression come from August Bolow.
There is massive potential energy in the cultures of North and South American oppressed peoples that can be accessed for the good of humanity. The vision and mission of LA centers around providing that energy to all. To us, all of us, me, you, us, them, anyone, everyone. Anyone short of elightened can benifit.
As a picture is worth a thousand words, to know what LA is about you have experience it.
I am Macaco Nova Yolk. I curate Liberationarts.com and create it's content. I own and managed the brand. It was due to my exposure to the Afro-Brazilian Art of Capoeira that I am the person I am today and that is the foundation of my experiential knowledge of what Liberation Arts are. I doubeled back to being raised in Jamaica Queens NYC understand the experiences of LA I had growing up in Hip-hop culture.
For more: visit the faq's of participation page and the abstract I wrote in 2008 blog
Without community, there is no liberation; what does that mean?
Most of us experience a personal and visceral sense of being free when we participate in community gatherings that create joy, connection, that educates, inspires and that releases stress.
But when we consider the freedom of all individual members of a group at the same time, freedom has a counterintuitive demand to surrender of some individuality.
The Black national anthem calls to lift every voice and sing. Every is quantified as 100%. We have trended away from this powerful number. Can we move beyond elections that end 50/50-ish? In nature there are other points of equilibrium such as 80/20. In certain scenarios the gains of 100% participation is exponentially greater than even 99.
Call and response instructs that when there is a call, everyone responds. This is a community reflex we can practice in expressive art. And it can become a community’s culture.
When manifesting all always siding with the whole, something new appears. The whole now has an energy of its own.
To a gathering that knows it can rely on that energy a new set of actions is accessible. In this set lies a subset that has the attribute of Freedom. Only present in and as a group experience this new phenomena provides freedom for each individual.
What about the individuality surrendered? Typically on the new plateau there are greater amount of space for individuality, the rigidness of being part of a platform birth a launchpad with space for all to leap abound.
The rest of the quote by Audre Lorde offers that the relationships must be in balance.
“Without community, there is no liberation...but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” ― Audre Lorde