Program Information

Program Faculty

Creative Process

To successfully navigate through complexity, we need to draw on both our analytical capacities and our intuition. Creative process sessions based on artistic disciplines — movement, theatre, jazz, calligraphy — awaken and clarify sensory, intuitive awareness. These exercises also help us embody and integrate our understanding, so that our competence is more deeply embedded in who we are. We are then more adaptive in the midst of the pressures and changing conditions around us, and more flexible in the way we apply our tools and frameworks.

This summer the ALIA Creative Process team is offering the Social Presencing Theater, a new social art form being developed by the Presencing Institute. It combines action research, theater, music, art, contemplative practices, generative dialogue, and open space.

Social Presencing Theater captures stories of transformational experiences and mirrors those back to the community to create collective healing or inspiration. It is based on a premise of interdependency or whole systems – that what happens in one part of the global social field affects us all. Otto Sharmer says in Theory U, "what happens in one part of the collective social body (in one part of the world) must have the possibility to trigger healing in another part of the world," because "these communities are already connected through the global social field." Social Presencing Theater can help us become more aware of the deep connections.

The Social Presencing Theater team, Barbara Bash, Jerry Granelli and Arawana Hayashi, will be gathering stories of change work in which the ALIA community members are engaged – what is working well and what is not. From that material we will create a trigger event that can seed a conversation about what we are learning about systems transformation in our lives and work. We can look at how our collective experiences might show us where and how to move forward into the future. If you would like to tell your story, please let us know.

We would also invite a few of you interested in arts-based social change work to be part of the process of making and performing in the Social Presencing Theater on Thursday afternoon. Meeting times will be tucked in between module sessions and other whole-assembly activities. Please contact Arawana Hayashi if you would like to join in creating a Social Presencing Theater at ALIA this summer.

Barbara Bash has worked for many years as a calligrapher and teacher of book arts and nature journaling, and teaches Big Brush calligraphy workshops throughout the U.S. She was co-director of the book arts program at Naropa University and has collaborated over the years with musicians, storytellers, and dancers, exploring calligraphic performance art. Her study of Dharma Art with Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche and Chinese pictograms with Ed Young contributed to her understanding of Eastern principles as applied to Western forms. She has written and illustrated many award-winning books on natural history for children and adults, including her most recent work, True Nature: An Illustrated Journal of Four Seasons in Solitude. Barbara teaches Creative Process workshops at the ALIA Institute and has been a core faculty member since 2002. See also www.barbarabash.com

Halifax-based percussionist-composer Jerry Granelli grew up in San Francisco where he studied with Joe Morello and drummed for pianists Denny Zeitlin and Vince Guaraldi (he's on A Charlie Brown Christmas – on Fantasy Records and the Charlie Brown TV soundtracks). He pioneered world jazz fusion and electro-acoustic percussion during the 60's hippie era, established the music department at the Naropa Institute in Boulder in '76, and has had a continuous teaching career since then in Boulder, Seattle, Halifax and Berlin. In the early '80s he performed and recorded in a trio with Ralph Towner and Gary Peacock for ECM. He has recorded as a leader for Evidence, Intuition, ITM, Koch, Love Slave and other labels, and performed and recorded with longtime musical associates Mose Allison, Jay Clayton, Jane Ira Bloom, Glen Moore, Anthony Cox, Dave Friedman, and Jamie Saft, as well as projects with Bill Frisell, Robben Ford, Julian Priester, Charlie Haden, Kenny Garrett, and Buck 64.

Arawana Hayashi is a dancer and choreographer, with roots in Asian and Western arts. Arawana has been on the faculty of the Shambhala Summer Institute for Authentic Leadership since its inception. She also teaches extensively within the international network of Shambhala meditation centres and is leading the development of Embodied Presence Practice and Social Presencing Theater in collaboration with C. Otto Scharmer (MIT) at the Presencing Institute.

“The ALIA Institute combines in-depth cultivation of personal leadership with the organizational issues that are critical in today's global environments. Few other leadership programs create such a dynamic, living laboratory of personal and collective learning.”

—Peter Senge, author, The Fifth Discipline.
2001-2004, 2006, 2007 faculty

Sustain and integrate the learning, deepen the impact. Pathways for Authentic Leadership is a nine-month course that begins with the Summer Institute and continues in your home organization.