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.

2010 Workshops

Calligraphy Mind

with Barbara Bash

What is the experience of making our mark in the world? How do we show up? How do we follow through? How do we view what we've done? Working with large brushes and buckets of ink, we will bring forth our direct inquisitive calligraphic minds. The oriental principles of heaven, earth, and human provide a deep structure and guidance. Through the steadiness of straight lines and the risks of spontaneous marks, we appreciate the moment – and our lives – in fresh ways.

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

Leadership as a Performing Art: Short Practices for Bringing Mind and Body to the Present Moment

with Steve Clorfeine

Where does the training and wisdom of a performer meet the training and wisdom of a leader? What does it mean to be on the spot, focused, attentive and at the same time relaxed, open to an event and its surroundings? A series of direct and simple movement-theater exercises will reveal the tranformative power of play.

Steve Clorfeine is part of the Cultural Envoy Program of the U.S. State Department and recently spent two months creating a perfomance with theater students in Kolkata's Rabindra Bharati University. Upcoming is the same residency in Nepal. Steve has been writing, performing and directing theater pieces since 1975. For many years he performed in the companies of Barbara Dilley, Meredith Monk, Ping Chong and at Naropa University where he has been on the adjunct faculty since its inception. His own performances and workshops have toured the U.S., Europe, and Asia. Steve has long standing collaborations with Lanny Harrison, with jazz singer Jay Clayton, tap diva Brenda Bufalino, musician/composer Steve Gorn, and with the arts team at the ALIA Institute. He leads theater, poetry and storytelling residencies in public schools in Europe and the U.S. as well as workshops for theater teachers in Germany, computer engineers in Zurich, and actors, teachers, and business leaders in India and Nepal. Steve is guest faculty at Akademie Remshied in Germany. He is the author of In the Valley of the Gods – Journals of an American Buddhist in Nepal, several poetry collections, most recently, Field Road Sky, and a sourcebook on creative process.

The Natural Action of Creativity

with Jerry Granelli

Authentic creativity is the natural action of community and of leadership. Great bands, great leaders, and great organizations establish patterns of excellence through innovation and creativity. In this workshop we will explore how improvisation reverberates through a community, and how new patterns are established. We will work with spontaneous composition, the pulse of the blues, and the relationships that arise during creative group activity.

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.

Who Leads?
Explore The Characters Who Dwell Within

with Lanny Harrison

Let's play with going beyond the limited view of who we think we are, and discover some of the myriad characters who dwell within. True play combines structure and freedom — refreshing, outrageous, sublime — often revealing our deepest selves. Through exercises that emphasize imagination, improvisation and transformation, participants will experience the connections between live theater performance, contemplative practice and leadership roles.

Lanny Harrison began her career in the New York Pantomime Theater in 1966. She has played character roles in Off-Broadway musicals and films and, for the past 26 years has written and performed one-woman shows, touring America and Europe. Currently she has been presenting a new solo, ISBA. She is also a member of Cocktail Cabaret which premiered at La MaMa in NYC this past January. Ms. Harrison has collaborated with the late musician Collin Walcott, with Steve Clorfeine, Lily Pink and with Meredith Monk. She has been a member of The House, Monk's company, since 1969. For the past 10 years, she has been part of the Creative Process team at Alia Institute. Ms. Harrison teaches theater to children in upstate NY, in the Gallatin Division of NYU and at The New York Shambhala Center.

The Art of Making a True Move

with Arawana Hayashi

Authenticity begins with an integrated relationship between body, mind, and environment. Discover your natural creativity through a gentle process of paying attention to the body, in stillness and in ordinary movement. In this workshop we will learn how to access fresh responses to the challenges of leading in the midst of the speed and fragmentation of contemporary life.

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