Janice Garrett, an award-winning choreographer and dance educator, is founder and Co-Artistic Director of Garrett + Moulton Productions whose programs promote the capacity of the creative arts to transform individual and collective experience. Her work seeks to confirm the unity of the human family and celebrate our shared humanity.

Informing this presentation is my understanding that as human beings, we are all creators and carry within us an unbounded capacity to create, to give birth to ideas and impulses that flow from our spirits through our imaginations. The life force that flows through us is, by its nature, boundlessly creative and we are each given the extraordinary gift of being able to bring this creative flow into manifestation in an infinite variety of forms. At this particular time in our evolution, we’re being invited to access our deepest reservoirs of creativity to address the existential crises of our time through the unitive consciousness that Jude so eloquently articulated in her presentation. 

The work that I’ll be sharing is work that I’ve done in collaboration with my creative and life partner, Charles Moulton, in which we seek to explore and express the oneness and the interconnectedness of the human family.

One of the primary modalities that we’ve worked with is a theatrical form which we call a movement choir. The movement choir is a group of dancers who, much like the traditional Greek chorus, form a unified collective body that comments upon and amplifies the action in the choreographic work. It reflects a sense of shared human experience that embodies both the earthly and the ethereal, and it can convey a wide spectrum of experience ranging from a very grounded physical sense of community to the invisible forces that penetrate and move our lives. 

[Two videos were shared.] The first is from an evening-length piece set to Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. We chose this music because of its overwhelmingly beautiful articulation of sorrow and grief and also the message of transformation that informs and infuses it. The music and the choreography convey the understanding that from the depths of grief and inner darkness, there can be a resurrection of the light.
 
The next excerpt is one created by my collaborative partner, Charlie Moulton, that weaves together aspects of our movement choir work with his signature Ball Passing piece. Ball Passing is an iconic postmodern dance work in which the simple act of passing a Nerf ball becomes a model for cooperation and a metaphor for the interdependence and interconnectedness of the human family. For both the participants and the audience, it’s intended to uplift, unite, and inspire through the joy of collective endeavor.

In conclusion, I believe we’re poised at a place in history in which we’re being asked to direct our creative impulses toward a higher order. As transmitters of light, we have an infinite capacity to open doorways to new paradigms and to engage in shared endeavors that embody the beauty, the complexity, the interdependence, and the interconnectedness of our existence. These can be small, daily acts of creation, a thought, a word, a gesture that we extend to ourselves and to the world that play a real role in restoring our spirits and enable us not just to survive, but to truly flourish.   §

Click here for video footage and transcript
World Goodwill Newsletter 2022 #3 – In Search of a New Culture