DIY: 2005 – Ready Steady Luau! South East

Led by Stacy Makishi

Aloha! E Komo Mai and welcome to Ready Steady Luau! an intensive three day workshop for ‘creatively constipated’ artists to push through their blocks and reinvigorate their practices

Led by Stacy Makishi

Thursday 28, Friday 29 and Saturday 30 July 2005 (6 – 10 pm daily)
Whitstable Umbrella Community Support Centre, Kent

The Project

Ready Steady Luau! is a colossal creative-cornucopia enticing the appetites of starving artists who suffer creative constipation. In Hawaiian, the word Luau means feast while the word Lua means toilet. Whichever way you say it, Luau or Lua, this workshop will make you go, go, go!

As artists, our creative blocks often occur as a result of someone in authority telling us that our art is somehow wrong. Their words and opinions are woven into the mythology of our lives as artists. We begin to believe that good work is somehow synonymous with making perfect work. To require perfection invites constipation. It blocks the flow and eventually denies the work of its ordinary, universal (and sometimes shitty) humanity.

Ready Steady Luau is:

Low Fat – For many artists, time can be fattening. If we are given too much time to chew the fat with a great idea, we will usually find a way to talk ourselves out of it.  This workshop reduces the fatty doubts of indecision, hesitation and procrastination as it galvanizes participants to:

• Write faster than edit
• Do faster than think
• Create faster than critique
• Complex Carbs – The complexity of our actions or inactions are largely based upon the mythologies we’ve created about ourselves. The second part of the workshop will be dedicated to revealing the negative beliefs that have long been the source of our blocks.  When new beliefs replace the old ones, our actions and our work can flow with new life.

High in Fiber – Ready Steady Luau is Ex-lax to a blocked creative. Specialized exercises based on impulse-body-work will release the flow and free up any old toxic beliefs that keep artists stuck!

Participants / Numbers / Selection Process

Ready Steady Luau! is an intensive three day, four hour workshop – open to both emerging and emergent artists at any stage of their development.  It welcomes any artists who are currently feeling blocked or unable to move forward along their own creative paths.  It will be a workshop where people must be willing to be open and honest.

The Luau will be opened to a maximum of eight participants.  If you want to apply send a short statement about how and why you think the Luau will benefit your practice and a couple of paragraphs about you and your practice to [email protected].  Those people who have not taken a creative workshop in a long time will be prioritized.  Artists resident in the South East will be prioritised.  Your application must reach Stacy by 6pm on Monday 13 June 2005 and Stacy will let you know if she can offer you a place by Monday 20 June.

Participants must also be willing to prepare a dish for the Luau Party on the last night.

The Organiser
Stacy Makishi is a Hawaii-born performance artist, filmmaker and Co-Artistic Director of runt.  She has been successfully running workshops and creative salons for over 10 years.  She has taught workshops and lecture demonstrations at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley and Davis, William and Mary in Virginia, Wellesley College, University of Massachusetts, The Hong Kong Art Centre, University of Ohio, Rose Bruford, The English National Opera, Queen Mary and Westfield College amongst others. Her most recent works include When I Feel For You I Fell Like The Bomb, commissioned by The Walker Center in Minneapolis.

Any questions?

If you have specific questions about Ready Steady Luau! you can email Stacy [email protected].