Creative Destruction

by Susan Weinberg

We gathered tonight in a special Artists’ Lab done in conjunction with eighth-graders from Talmud Torah and led by facilitators from the In(heir)itance Project. The in(heir)itance Project last joined us in 2015 and performed a play that many in our lab attended. Their approach is to engage the community in dialogue and then use that dialogue in the creation of theater. Their theme on this visit is water. A return visit will be made in February in hopes that the seeds that were sowed through this visit might take root.

Teacher Kara Rosenwald and the eighth-grade students came together with a number of lab members in this exploration. Chantal and Ari from the In(heir)itance Project led us through an exercise of creating a word cloud around water. As they went around the room, each person offered up a word that they associated with water. 

Body, Source, Quench, Fluid, Lake, Silk, Trees, A Right, Rising, Flow, Hydration, Health, Clear, Ocean, Drink, Cloud, Wet, Dogs, Rain, Ice, H2O, Turtles, Survival, Ripple, Tea, Waves, Gills, Flood, Memory, Access, Precipitation, Evaporation, Runoff, Filtration, Wash, Fracking, Thirsty, River, Land, Light, Rift, Fish, Shark, Salt, Swamp, Pollution, Waste (water), Glacier, Iceberg, Mayim, Plastic, Reflection, Mermaids, Play, Sea, Well. . .

We began to find the common themes within the words. There were elements of water – fluid, wet, reflective. The forms or characteristics that it might take- ice, steam, rain and then there were the ways we interact with it. Many of the words represented consumers of water, including us as our body is 70% water. Another large consumer, trees.  A thirsty cottonwood tree can consume 200 gallons of water each day.

 “Where does water come from? “ they asked and drew our attention to the first story of creation in Genesis. There the first mention of water is in the second line of the Torah. Remember Ruach? the spirit or breath of God that hovered over the water. While we often think of God anthropomorphically, here the water is given a face as well.  Is it God’s face, reflected within the water?

1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. 2 Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God hovered over the face of the waters. 

So, was water primordial?  It seemed to always be there. Nowhere does it speak of its creation. We discussed its presence as elemental, a core element in all things and for God on the second day, a creative element. Just add water. Or perhaps just divide water into firmaments and ocean. Water is both a creative element and a destructive element. Often those two acts are related. Water carved out the Grand Canyon, destroying in order to create that negative space that evokes such wonder. 

Now that our wheels were well lubricated, we broke into groups to choose a descriptor and develop it into an artistic creation. The theme of our group was the cycle of both creation and destruction, often flip sides of each other. The eighth graders led the way without hesitation, drawing a wave and then another wave in reverse echoing the form. We used blue to represent creativity and grey tones to represent destruction. While our image came together in the last five minutes it was a satisfying creation that captured the contrary, yet complementary nature of our subject.