Art, Ritual, and Trance Inquiry: Arational Learning in an Irrational World

216 Pages·2020·6.701 MB·English

by  Barbara A. Bickel

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MOVEMENT ACROSS EDUCATION,
THE ARTS AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Art, Ritual,
and Trance Inquiry
Arational Learning in
an Irrational World
Barbara A. Bickel
Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education,
the Arts and the Social Sciences
Series Editors
Alexandra Lasczik
School of Education
Southern Cross University
Bilinga, QLD, Australia
Rita L. Irwin
Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, BC, Canada
This series is a new and innovative proposition in the nascent and growing
space of movement studies. Emerging and established scholars who are
beginning to work within the contemporary practices and methods of
movement, seek resources such as this series seeks to provide. Education is
very much tied up within an awareness of space and place, for example, a
school can begin to take on an identity of its own, with as much learning
taking place within its corridors and playgrounds as occurs in the class-
rooms. As learners interact with these environments through movement it
is essential for researchers to understand how these experiences can be
understood, allowing for a very interdisciplinary approach. This series spe-
cifically explores a range of movement approaches, including but not lim-
ited to walking research, a relatively new and exciting field, along with
several other paradigmic lenses. The series will be commissioning in the
Palgrave Pivot format.
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15783
Barbara A. Bickel
Art, Ritual, and
Trance Inquiry
Arational Learning in an Irrational World
Barbara A. Bickel
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL, USA
Palgrave Studies in Movement across Education, the Arts and the Social Sciences
ISBN 978-3-030-45744-0 ISBN 978-3-030-45745-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45745-7
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
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I dedicate this book to Helen Bickel, the wom(b)an artist who is my
mother, and to the wom(b)an artist in everyone.
Praise for Art, Ritual, and Trance Inquiry
“Sacred song describes the sound and feel of this book. How indeed do we
develop a transformative understanding needed for our world? Art as a relational
encounter with spirit coming into form....is dropping popcorn from the darkness we
have grown around our hearts. We can follow the trusting such acts hold for
us. Mahalo Barbara for your own mutual emergence with Art, Ritual, and Trance
Inquiry.”
—Manulani Aluli Meyer, Associate Professor of Education, University of Hawaii,
West Oʻahu, USA
“Bickel’s daring ritual and trance inquiry leading to educational writing with
inspiring examples drawn from artworking—like those of Maya Deren, Hélène
Cixous, Gloria Anzaldúa, Marina Abramović—contributes to appreciating the
radical significance of the woman artist for becoming aware of healing capacities
offered through copoiesis between the humans, the treasures of nature, body, and
earth and for spiritual knowledge. Thinking of art practices that reach the matrixial
borderspaces and interval-times and engage compassionate wit(h)nessing and com-
municaring, the author offers her own practice-based trance guidelines for entry
into a twilight zone of creativity.”
—Bracha L. Ettinger, Artist, Philosopher, and Psychoanalyst,
Paris & Tel Aviv
“Bickel’s text soars to the sacred, to the cosmos, and back, unfolding the blooms
of Earth to emerge and inmerge in essential breath. Situating herself in-between,
tangled, she plucks the dripping ripeness out of life blood on her journey. Founded
in arational governance, artist / researcher / teacher / writer are one, anticipating
and honouring the threshold of new beginnings. Read to open yourself in new
spaces!”
—Pauline Sameshima, Canada Research Chair in Arts Integrated Studies,
Lakehead University, Canada
“Drawing its strength and evolutionary value from among Indigenous traditions
and pantheistic modes of thought, Bickel’s study calls for the rematriation of
human consciousness and realignment with the creative life force. This book pro-
vides an experiential process yet directs a critical eye upon the practices of educa-
tion, the nature of creativity, and the arational as a valid epistemological realm. It
supplies flexible analytical frameworks for thinking about art, survival and one’s
own relationship to both.”
—Yvonne Owens, Professor of Art History and Critical Studies,
The Victoria College of Art, Canada
“With poetic prose and artful engagement, this book goes directly to the heart
and soul of how trance-based art, and art-based trance, can return us to the
kind of earth consciousness that has guided traditional Indigenous cultures for
most of human history. Recognizing the current consequences of the loss of
aesthetic self- expression and truth-seeking, it shows how we can re-create
our world.”
—Four Arrows, Doctoral Faculty, School of Leadership Studies,
Fielding Graduate University, USA
“The recent feminist post-secular return to religion and the sacred has taken many
forms. Integrating ritual, art, and spirit, this book invites and guides readers to
encounter the sacred anew, experientially and through matrixial lenses. Bickel’s
perspectives offer a cogent counter to the perverse forms of entrancement cur-
rently pervading the symbolic violence of patriarchal culture, while simultane-
ously offering new important routes to cultural containment, integrity and
resistance.”
—Mary Condren, The Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, Trinity College
Dublin, Ireland, and Director of Woman Spirit Ireland
“In a world where we may question what it means to be human or more than
human, Bickel’s inquiry illuminates these dark corridors of discovery and
renewal, immersing the reader in the interconnected fields of spirituality, ritual,
and trance, linked to aesthetics and ethics in art. Bickel illustrates how we may
transport elements of the numinous to inspire and uplift on an individual and
collective level—allowing compassion to impregnate artistic practice.”
—Yantra de Vilder, Artistic Director, 5 Lands Walk Cultural and Spiritual
Festival, Australia
“Bickel fearlessly shares methods for creating art with radical awareness achieved
in trance and ritual. Embracing artmaking as embodied sacred inquiry she expli-
cates courageous practices of deep art that can liberate. Theoretically accessible
and filled with strategies for expanding our own creative practices, her vision
offers the possibility for authentic deep healing to counter individual and collec-
tive cultural traumas we live with.”
—Helen Klebesadel, Emeritus Director of the Women’s and Gender Studies
Consortium, University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA
“Barbara Bickel has written an extraordinary book that will serve artists, art educa-
tors, and all those who understand the importance of internal inquiry! Much like
the mother spruce tree, this work by Bickel encourages stillness, reflection, con-
nected knowing, and putting roots deep down into ourselves, into our silences as
a way of connected knowing. Let us receive what emerges!”
—Holly Cormier, Clinical Psychologist and SIU Clinical Center Director,
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA
“As bushfires rage in our state, Bickel’s call to breathe healing rituals into our con-
nections with Earth, community and the world seem especially pertinent. Bickel
finds, guides, and engages with liminal spaces of the real world by opening up
awake-dreaming, trance and practice-rituals that establish ways of wit(h)ness-
ing and communicaring with our non/human world. The positioning of connec-
tive aesthetics and matrixial theory as ways to explore ritual-as-art validates the role
of the intuitive, spiritual, and relational.”
—Geraldine Burke, Lecturer, Monash University, Australia
F
oreword
Here is a book which goes beyond ordinary understandings of time and
space, offering us wisdom marinated in a lifelong artistic practice, con-
necting the earth and ethereal realms. I receive this book as a blessing and
reading is an entrance to a womb and borderland, which traverses into the
interior life. One cannot be static in the listening to this book; it is a bright
invitation to the relationship between the visible and invisible threads knit-
ted through both the sensuous and sacred.
The ancient and contemporary practices of ritual and trance inquiry
and the place of dreams and the unconscious are given as a portal to other
worlds. These are worlds which can save and heal us where one’s existence
cries out for a path more than what is just seen. Truly through an arational
view, steeped in the tradition and conversations of many scholars, perfor-
mance artists, seekers and mystics there is a matrixial, earth-based femi-
nism that is relational and indicative of spirit womanfesting into form.
I am emboldened and inspired to attend to what I deeply long for
through this work. Bickel’s work is steeped in mystery, and in the reading
we are invited into a space which holds us, waits for us to come and be
changed in the hearing. Here ritual and art become partners and in a
humble and fertile way we are asked to listen to our own hearts and bodies
through the meeting of art and everyday life and the more-than-human
world. This is the place where dreams are food, and ruminations are the
paints for the canvas, and the liminalities of our own lives the movements
for creation.
This book is truly a piece of art and beautifully written, excavated from
the immersion of scholars who bring life, art, poetics, spirit and the sensual
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