It’s barely better than blecchy outdoors right now, so it’s easy for the space inside your head to fill up with a funky fog. While you’re waiting for the sky to clear, we have a few ideas about how to get your mind’s creative pistons firing again.
Brain feeling like it’s weighed down by winter webs? Here are a few bright ideas for slogging through the mental mud season.
ART OF THE MATTER
Flummoxed by experimental film? Put off by Pollock?
You’re not alone.
Even Adam Lerner, Ph.D., a Denver Art Museum master teacher and executive director of The Lab at Belmar, says he has head-scratching moments in front of contemporary works all the time.
But not “getting” a piece of sculpture or an installation, or feeling like you want to flee an exhibition doesn’t mean you’re a dope. It just means you need to tone up your powers of observation.
“We all have this immediate response: ‘I am not responding to this work, I must go for help! Is there a label that explains the work, or a docent or curator who can tell the story?’ Even if the answer is ‘No,’ you can get so much out of the work from your own response.”
In the interest of getting patrons shaped up before the metro tsunami of modern and contemporary art hits – think the new Museum of Contemporary Art and the Clyfford Still Museum a few years down the road, and the new wing of the Denver Art Museum and a three-screen experimental film coming to The Lab this fall – Lerner and his crew have developed a four-week Art Fitness Program.
It’s a thoughtful, if tongue-in- cheek, boot camp designed to help people better appreciate how and why they respond to art.
“What we focus on is trying to get people out of their head and out of the idea that there is a trick to know, or a book they should have read or a class they should have taken, and help them develop an understanding of how they see what’s in front of them, and connect with their response to it.”
Participants get an art-fitness club card and will be supported with Gatorade and Power Bars for sustenance. “We don’t take ourselves very seriously,” he says.
Art Fitness Training
The Lab at Belmar, Lakewood
6:30 p.m.
Track A: April 5 and 19, May 3 and 17
Track B: April 6 and 20, May 4 and 18
$36 adults; $24 students
Advance registration required, 303-742-1520
YOGA AND GUFFAWS
Ellen Brown smiles a lot and has always laughed easily.
But it was a gut-busting round of giggles at the end of a Pilates class last summer that got her thinking that laughter might be really good medicine, even for people who are well.
“I had this incredible release after that belly laugh on the floor,” Brown says. “I started thinking about what it would be like to just have a time of laughter.”
Following a path cut by medical healers Patch Adams and Norman Cousins, Brown started to explore the connection between good health and a hearty ha-ha-ha. Along the way, she found Dr. Madan Kataria and his Laughter Yoga program, which combines gentle yogic breathing with tension-releasing laughter exercises.
Participants start with clapping and chanting of HO-HO-HA-HA-HA. That exercise is followed by a period of admittedly oxymoronic laughter meditation, during which people force laughs until the real thing starts to flow. In the long run, Kataria’s literature says, regular laughing boosts the immune system, combats the negative effects of stress and can take the edge off of depression and anxiety.
Skeptical? That’s no surprise. “We’re not automatically positive; that takes a little switching of gears,” Brown says.
The workout reportedly works for anyone. “It is a real subtle, gentle, simple, powerful activity,” Brown says.
Laughing Clinic
Schlessman Family YMCA
2625 S. Colorado Blvd., Denver
11 a.m. to 2 p.m.
April 8, $30
Sign up by calling B.J. Bachmann, 720-524-2776
MARCH RIGHT UP
Willie Hoevers is looking for a few hundred good musicians – not necessarily pros, but people who love a parade, are willing to learn nine rousing marches, and will show up to play at parades and patriotic events when called.
“I don’t even expect people to memorize the music,” says Hoevers, a 54-year-old Summit County truck driver and former Air Force honor corps bugler.
Hoevers got the idea for a giant, military-style marching band in 2003, when he attended the dedication of a monument to the 10th Mountain Division in Breckenridge. He was stunned that there wasn’t a marching band present.
He reckons it’s his patriotic duty to make sure that a boom box isn’t the only music playing at similar events.
If his lofty idea flies, he’ll have corps of musicians who practice in small groups all over the state and come together for parades.
The band’s administrative structure has been set. Hoevers is recruiting musicians age 18 and older who have some high school, college or military marching experience. Participants will only have to march in straight lines; Hoevers has no football-game half-time show aspirations. “If it comes off the way I want it to, it will be fun,” says Hoevers, who will be the band’s drum major. “The more, the merrier.”
10th Mountain Division All State Marching Band
10thallstateband.tripod.com/index.html
THIS SUITS YOU TO A TEA
For most of us, the consumption of caffeine is more about a rush than a moment of contemplation. The Boulder Dushanbe Tea House proposes spending a bit more time thinking about what we’re drinking during a Chinese Gung Fu Cha Tasting.
“Gung fu means ‘to do with great care,’ and cha means ‘tea,’ so this is basically a way of drinking tea with great care,” says owner Lenny Martinelli.
With the help of trained servers, patrons will learn how to awaken oolong teas from China and Taiwan and what to watch for as the leaves unfurl. They will also share small cups of tea with their tablemates and observe the subtle changes as the tea steeps.
This is meant to be interactive, very unlike the traditional Japanese tea ceremony, during which everything is done with purpose. “Gung fu cha is a way to drink your tea and experience it, interact with it, look at the leaves, play with the leaves and smell it.
“It’s kind of fun to just experience the tea and relax,” Martinelli says.
Chinese Gung Fu Oolong Tasting
Tuesdays and Thurdays, 3 to 5 p.m.
$18, includes dim sum (reserve 24 hours in advance)
Boulder Dushanbe Tea House
1770 13th St., Boulder
303-442-4993
