Inside the Art

I came across something recently called Liberty horse training and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s a magical way of working that on the face of it makes no sense. There’s no contact between the horse and the trainer. No reins, no halter, no whip. The horse can leave at any time. Nothing happens without the horse choosing it. Until it trusts you and your nervous system, nothing else can happen. Much like class.

You can’t fool a horse that your nervous system is ready. And you can’t fool an audience that you’re in connection with the art when you’re obsessing about yourself, trying really hard, judging how you’re doing. When that’s where you are, you’re in front of the art, not inside it.

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A few weeks ago something happened in class that I’ve been thinking about ever since. An artist was working on a scene. Their partner, who doesn’t know them well, said a single line - you’re not from here - to the alien character they were playing. The whole room held their breath. Everyone who has been at MAP for years knows this person’s story. Everyone knew exactly how loaded that line was for them. Everyone worried, except me. Because I watched that artist pause, feel the hurt, feel the tears, and offer it to the story. And what came after was as electric as anything I’ve seen in that room. Their partner had no idea what they’d set off. The audience knew everything. And the art was gorgeous because that artist chose to let it land instead of protect themselves from it.

In the talk back they said two things. That hearing that hurt. And that was really healing.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing.

What I see in training that I find most damaging is the idea that artists need to manufacture that kind of emergency. That you need to drag something unresolved and raw into the room and shove your finger into it to feel alive, and that the electricity people feel watching that is art. It isn’t. It’s someone fighting for their life on a nervous system level and it’s intoxicating to watch but it costs you everything and gives you nothing back. You can’t keep doing it. And at some point your instrument stops responding the way it did the first time you held a gun to its head.

What that artist did was different. They were safe enough with their fear to let it touch them. The fear wasn’t resolved. It may never be fully resolved. But they had faced it enough to work with it, and when it arrived uninvited in the middle of a scene they didn’t run from it or perform it. They let it move through them and offered it to the story.

That’s what we’re building at MAP. Not armor. Not a more powerful version of yourself. Resiliency, facility, agility, and trust with your own instrument so that you can be your most free, most available, most true. So that you become the artist the audience is drawn to without knowing exactly why. We do that by learning to see ourselves. Not fix ourselves. See ourselves.

Let yourself be moved. Let yourself be touched. Let yourself be hurt. Let yourself be seen.

Let your art look like you.