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220 | Ruminations and Curiosities: A Series of Anecdotes and the Questions That Follow As I write this, I am teaching a creative process class at the Bates Dance Festival . I hardly ever use the word “creative.” Over the years I have found that it has too many bad connotations. It makes many people feel less than themselves , and for reasons that are difficult for a teacher to overcome. But perhaps I’ve thrown the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. By avoiding the word “creative,” I may have stopped seeing the power of the word “creation.” This is odd, as making things is the most important single thread in my life. But then I am always happier talking about “making” as opposed to “creating.” When I began to work in religious settings, I noticed that creation was a big part of how people pictured God. For some who struggled with God concepts, creation offered a positive way to think about godliness. Reluctantly, I recognized that ideas about making things were a useful part of the conversation about creation in faith communities. I also saw that this put me back in a crazy loop around understanding the power of creativity as a force in an artistic life. Growing up, I hadn’t really liked the creation story as told in Bible Stories for Young People. During the thousands of hours of dance training-in those days, first ballet and later the classical moderns-I didn’t much think about the relationship between the way people consoled themselves with meaning and the sweat of becoming a dancer. Even though I wandered between the intensity of a Reform Jewish education and the orthodoxies of the art world, it would be many years before my own work in religious settings would spur me to ponder how the act of making dances might also shed light on the act of making a world. Most recently, as I have pursued encounters with scientists, I have begun to catch the links with yet other spheres of action: passionate physicists smashing particles in order to complete their own truth about how the universe begins, artists obsessively creating over and over, and every tribe in every era making for itself a story of creation. In this crack of light opening into my world, I see counterpoints and mirror images between art, science, and religion. The thousands of rituals, prayers, speculations, missions, practices , philosophies, theories, and all the joys and trappings of varied disciplines Ruminations and Curiosities | 221 have a lot to say to each other as each field strives to comprehend the nature of beginnings. Going back and forth between worlds has become a passionate way of working, for me and the artists of the Dance Exchange. We have evolved many processes to move a conversation between various disciplines, lines of work, and ways of being, and I chart these under various rubrics in my mind. One of them is what I call “overlapping inquiry.” It might be best understood as a vast Venn diagram that layers the content of questions, the method of questioning, and the means by which answers lead to further questions. All these are compared, contrasted, and used as a way of making connections and meaning. In that spirit of overlapping inquiry, I offer the following ruminations from my perspective as a choreographer and teacher, starting with this idea of creation. Why is creation so powerful? Why do we risk so much to try making something again? Why does it matter so much to artists, scientists, and people of faith how it all started? There is such a desire among so many to bridge differences of faith, geography , race, and gender. The Dance Exchange often gets asked to make that happen . Over time we have found some methods that serve most circumstances. One of them begins with the idea that we get to know people in their own way first. We meet them on their own ground, in their own settings. We listen to their stories, their perspectives. We may ask each of them similar questions, but we are eager and curious to hear their particular answers. It was like that in Tucson. In the spring of 2000, as we were working on a multiyear project we called Hallelujah, I found myself in the Arizona desert with a film crew and my colleague Peter DiMuro, who was at the time head of the project. Leading up to this moment, we had met many, many different...

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