Holiday Message December 2024
Season’s Greetings Our AMAW World Family!
Next year will be my 28th year (!) of having started AMAW. I can’t believe how quickly the time has passed.
When I reflect on life on Terra firma and how wild it is to be alive today, I never lose sight of what it also means to be an Artist — a custodian of stories. A steward of the planet and its citizens. A receptacle of feeling and self-expression. For as we forge meaning through our work, we are also connecting to the life-giving source of our work: nature, the planet, the stars, the flow, the cosmic dance that has sustained and perpetuated life for billions of years.
I have been asked many times over the course of 28 years how I would define my “methodology”. I have been steadfast in refusing to do so — as defining and labeling things also reduces them. Puts them in boxes. Categorizes them in easily digestible formats for a cohort that wants easy (and quick) answers to things that are much more nuanced, intricate and ephemeral. (Not to mention, part of the Collective Unconscious and therefore not really quantifiable.)
But years ago, I read a quote by sociologist Brené Brown — whose early work influenced mine — and she said that the definition of bravery (which simultaneously means vulnerability) is to, “Live in risk, uncertainty and emotional exposure without knowing the outcome.”
Eureka!
When I recently re-read that definition I thought, “Oh my goodness… That’s what we’ve been teaching for almost 30 years.” It encapsulates the vulnerable (and yet empowering) condition of placing yourself in conflict-driven situations of storytelling that will naturally ply your emotional exposure and force you to live-moment-to-moment without playing the outcome. Of course as actors, we know the outcome of a scene that we are working on because we have read it. But the moment-to-moment experience of it requires that you almost (figuratively) lobotomize your knowing and live riskily in the uncertainty of what the moment brings up.
That’s scary and exhilarating; brave and exposing, risky and uncertain.
Vulnerable.
And that is analogous to life. Especially as 2024 comes to an end.
But we forget. We go about our days habituated by our daily routines, knowledge, commitments, and familiar behaviors. If you’re like me, you also struggle with the ruinous tendencies of social media and the distortion and negative impulses it generates.
We lull ourselves into our somnambulistic ways of living — often erasing the excitement of uncertainty and the real moment-to-moment experience of being alive.
Our Big Tech-driven world and corporatization of … well… everything is complicit in that sleepwalking. As we traverse our careers, personal lives, our creative development and spiritual journeys, we get seduced by the ease in which we succumb to the algorithms, the silo’s, the hyped popularity and the sameness of it all. The homogeneity of mass-production and data-driven entertainment.
Kyle Chayka, in his book Filterworld talks about how algorithms flatten culture and drive culture toward sameness. It shapes our aesthetics and how everything is driven toward a similar homogeneity: “Recommendation generators like Netflix’s top picks, TikTok’s ‘for you’ page, and Spotify’s autoplay suggestions are the least ambiguous, least disruptive, and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture [that] are promoted.”
But we are Artists! We aren’t consumers! We aren’t products of suggestibility. We aren’t the unthinking robots of mass hypnosis, are we?
My good friend Christina and I were talking about the rise in Fascism that is occurring almost everywhere in today’s societies. She screamed, “If you’re going to be a Fascist, be a Fascist for Truth!”
Indeed.
That’s what being an Artist means. Perhaps now more than ever (although that statement always feels important and I’m sure Artists were saying that in the 10th Century)!
But you get the inspiration.
It is in these disturbing and dare I say, dystopian times, that we stand for truth. An Artist, in their work, is moving toward the apotheosis of their self-expression. You practice your work not to become a good technician. You practice to become a great Artist. And in doing so you, you stand for something. You have something to say. You are not the regurgitation of everything you have consumed before or what you are bombarded with. You are creating your own interpretation of what it means to me to be alive in 2025.
As much as the commodification of almost everything has become commonplace in our culture — contradictorily, we are living in a time where, more and more, myriad ways to create and share your work are being generated.
So you don’t have to wait anymore! And as the urgency of things seems to intensify — we don’t have that kind of time anyway.
I was at the West Hollywood pool recently and one of my fellow swimmers asked me what I did. When I told her, she remarked, “Oh… so you’re a content creator!”
I know she meant well and was excited for me, but was unaware that she too has drunk too much mass-produced corporate buzz-word bullshit Kool-Aid: content.
I dramatically sunk to the bottom of the pool and thought to myself… “Content” is for the inside of a cushion! “Content” is what’s packed in your suitcase! The “Contents” are the ingredients in a box!
I am an Artist! You are an Artist! So is she, for that matter. The way you live your entire life is artistic.
Content isn’t what we are making.
We are making Art. Music. A poem. A dance or a play. We aren’t making “content” to fill up other people’s time or space or distract them with their “second screens” so that they can ignore the “content” to watch some other “content” to replace the stupefying “content” that has become the backdrop of all our lives.
We are making people think. We are connecting the thread of our humanity with the filaments of others. We are empathetic and show a world in need of much healing how the power of art and empathy can do that. We don’t hide behind technical gadgets and phone screens. We feel. We share our feelings with others. We are interpreters of the celestial to overcome the burdens and pains of our mortal-ness. We use the tradition of storytelling to bring light to darkness. We give
others hope. We teach. We have a moral and ethical obligation to tell stories that can change humanity. And in the pursuit of telling them, we ourselves are changed.
That’s You. That’s Me. That’s what being an Artist means. Hold onto this. It will keep you going in 2025.
Happy Holidays, All!
Here’s to a blessed New Year.
Love, Tony
