A material and an immaterial tool I find useful

Written By Lia Haraki

A material and an immaterial tool I find useful for life and creation

 which I strongly recommend.

The recorder on my phone which Ι use to store information throughout the day.

Very often, ideas, thoughts and emotions may appear at random times throughout the day, like in the car as I’m driving, or when walking somewhere or at any time or place. I then catch myself in need of not wanting to lose that momentum, and I use my recorder to ‘catch’ it. So I document that emotional moment or random thought by recording my voice in speaking about it. The recorder can act as a personal diary, as storage of a tune that gets stuck in my head that I might want to work on later, or as a notebook of recording lists of things or tasks I need to do throughout the day. I find it super useful for life and the creative process.

 

The second tool I use is humor.

I call this a tool because I consciously use it to avoid a projection of drama on several challenges or situations that are happening during the day.  It’s like an internal dialogue, where instead of giving energy to thoughts of anxiety, fear, or guilt, I have a sense of not taking myself or the situation too seriously and even taking the piss out of it.

So when I catch myself being triggered or upset in any way, I do this process where I observe the trigger, embrace it like a little child that needs attention through breathing,  and then I begin teasing it. For example, yesterday I got the electricity bill, which was huge, and I could feel a sense of panic taking over my body. I sat down and breathed with that emotion/state, accepted it, got used to it after a while, and then I kind of made a funny song out of it like:

Money you’ re a bad ass

But im badder

Life bring it on

Cause im smarter

etc……..

The moment passed….and I dealt with the problem, from a lighter place.

Hug huge

Lia

Lia Haraki

Lia Haraki is an interdisciplinary performer, maker and practitioner working across performance, devised theatre, choreography, song, spoken word and what she calls repetitive poetry. As a creator, she is occupied with issues related to identity, community and value and she beleives in the power of art as a medium that can trigger shifts in perception towards a fairer world.

Lia usually works with the moving and sounding qualities of the human body, in order to speak about its sociopolitical position, by challenging notions of normality associated to it. Beginning from self-sarcasm and working with satire, she enjoys finding performative ways to crack socially constructed narratives and reveal the illusion we have of them as ‘real’. In her pieces vulnerability and empathy are celebrated as human super powers and act as threads that connect the performer with the audience.

Her work in general takes the shape of staged works, site-specific pieces, one on one experiences, sound installations, standup shows, music bands and performances in shops.

At the same time she is proud to have developed several practices through the collaborative artistic research of the past twenty years in the forms of workshops, coaching and artists’ mentoring. In general she considers inspiring others and triggering creativity awakenings especially in younger artists is her most sacred of services !

https://www.liaharaki.com/
Previous

Art for

Next

Ignorance hides a lot of violence