What does a truly emergent sense of making look like?
   
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Six weeks after ten’s first in-person festival in Red Hook, Brooklyn, we are still dancing with questions and curiosities lingering in our field of practice. We’ve been working on a dynamic Liquid Cartographies harvest with photos and reflections from our time together in New York. The festival offered an emergent portal that mirrored some surprises and failures that echo throughout the ten ecosystem. In response to an unexpected crisis, the community resilience and fortitude that arose through proposition-making and creativity during the festival is also reflected in our translocal community and co-practice spaces. Over and over again, we have been called to release expectation, to be present to the spontaneity and magic that comes from  being with community rather than  doing for community. We’ve learned that intimate and creative connections between the people, the land, and the waterways become possible only when we’re willing to let go of our pre-determined plans and agendas.   

We’ve been reminded that THIS is why ten exists. We ask: how do we adapt in the wake of unanticipated calamities with agility and care? How do we respond to crises using different kinds of attention and sense perceptions? How can we – the humans involved – simply support the momentum or agency of what wants to emerge, rather than be its central protagonists? How do we stay open to surprise amidst uncertainty?     

With constellations of deep intimacy also comes failure. At times, a lack of clarity around skills, capacity, resources, and process has led to miscommunication and confusion in our relationships. As we reflect on our partnerships this year, ten is longing to listen to and connect with wisdom at the edges, beyond the confines of white modernity. We wish to create spaces where people of ethnically diverse backgrounds feel called to gather. And we want to build further capacity for navigating conflict with care. This is not only a matter of inclusion, it’s also a matter of radical hospitality rooted in cultures outside of the West. Along the same lines, we have been grappling with how to continue nurturing a sense of community across time and space.

With these reflections, we find ten existing in a liminal space, in the murkiness between growth and decay, beyond the binaries of birth and death. We feel called to be in ritual practice with the spirit of ten, to sense deeply into what will be by looking back on what has emerged. While we don’t know what shape ten will morph into next, we do know it cannot happen without the support of our community. Our bi-annual fundraising campaign is an invitation to entrust ten with your support in these uncertain times, as we continue to dream and live into postactivist experiments. Make a donation to Dancing in the Ashes here.  

With gratitude,
Aerin, Austen and Pooja 
ten Core team