Democracy and Creative Practice (EP.82)
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Updated
February 25, 2025
In this episode of Work Shouldn’t Suck, host Tim Cynova connects with the ever-awesome Shannon Litzenberger to explore the intersections of democracy, creative practice, and collective thriving. Together, they dive into how artistic methodologies can expand leadership frameworks and help shape more caring, equitable communities.
In this episode:
✅ How creative practice informs leadership and systems change
✅ The importance of mutual care and collective thriving
✅ Sensory attunement, attentional awareness, and improvisational leadership
✅ Disrupting default systems and embracing world-making as a practice
Fresh from the national tour of her production World After Dark and moments away from presenting at a social theory, politics, and the arts conference in Spain, Shannon shares insights on how creative practice can serve as a catalyst for personal and societal transformation. They discuss the power of mutual care, the significance of sensory attunement, and the need to reimagine default patterns in both the workplace and society.
This episode also touches on the enduring influence of Shannon’s friendship and collaboration with the late Diane Ragsdale, their shared exploration of aesthetics and embodiment, and their co-authored chapter in Democracy as Creative Practice. Plus, hear how Shannon is bringing her artistic ethos into unexpected spaces—like reimagining an academic panel as an improvisational score.
Tune in for a conversation packed with practical wisdom, unexpected insights, and a reminder that thriving workplaces and thriving communities are built on mutual care, relational leadership, and a willingness to embrace the unfamiliar.
Quotables
“This is where I find a lot of fertile ground for transformation, and why I feel it's so important for creative practice methodologies to gain purchase in this conversation around change, because they're practice-based, and practice is how we change habits. We can have lots of fruitful conversations that evoke ways of knowing that we understand, but to actually become something different than what we've already been conditioned to be requires practice, not just a kind of conceptual knowing.” – Shannon Litzenberger
“ Practice is the pathway to change. If you want to be able to expand your repertoire of being and doing, you have to practice things that are unfamiliar.” – Shannon Litzenberger
“Identity is a very powerful organizing construct in society. The pandemic especially I think really highlighted identity significantly as an organizing structure, as a way of revealing structural harms and inequities. It also started to deepen the way that we are relating in these identity-based affinity groups, and in a sense, this is a challenge when it comes to developing practices that are supportive of a pluralistic democracy. Because, in a pluralistic democracy, we need to develop an ability to be together in ways that are not so strictly codified that we are all twisting ourselves in a knot to try to belong, that actually we need to be able to embrace differences within a dynamic whole in order to work well and co-create well together.” – Shannon Litzenberger
Highlights:
Values in Creative Practice (02:14)
Exploring “World After Dark” (04:08)
Leadership and Collective Action (09:32)
Navigating Post-Pandemic Challenges (11:10)
Creative Practice in Organizations (17:43)
Improvisational Leadership (27:09)
Collaboration with Diane Ragsdale (35:33)
Improvisational Score as Panel Discussion (42:29)
Final Thoughts and Reflections (45:52)
Related Resources:
Bios
Shannon Litzenberger (she/her, Tkaronto) is an award-winning choreographer, director, researcher and embodiment facilitator. She creates sensory-rich multi-disciplinary performance experiences that animate our relationship to land, community and the forgotten wisdom of the body. Her imaginative collaborations connect art forms and communities, centering participatory experiences in artistic processes. Throughout her 25+ year career, her work has been presented across Canada and the U.S., in collaboration with many of Canada’s leading artists across disciplines. The creative principles and embodied practices she works with regularly in the studio are also central to her work in relational leadership, organizational development, and systems change. Her approach to personal and collective transformation focuses on recovering our capacity to sense and make shared meaning of our complex, rapidly changing world. The collective experiences she designs focus on strengthening our ability to respond generatively to what a moment is asking of us, in service of mutual thriving. They invite a conscious recovery of embodied capacities like sensory attunement, expanded attentional awareness, reciprocity, imagination, collaborative play and worldmaking. She works frequently across corporate, academic and non-profit spaces in support of creating a healthier, more interconnected, caring and resilient society. She is currently a Public Imagination Network Fellow and Artist Researcher in Residence at Creative Community Commons, within University of Toronto’s School of Cities. www.shannonlitzenberger.com
Tim Cynova, SPHR (he/him) is the Principal of WSS HR LABS, an HR and org design consultancy helping to reimagine workplaces where everyone can thrive. He is a certified Senior Professional in Human Resources (SPHR) and a trained mediator, and has served on the faculty of Minneapolis College of Art & Design, the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity (Banff, Canada) and The New School (New York City) teaching courses in People-Centric Organizational Design, and Strategic HR. In 2021, he concluded a 12-year tenure leading Fractured Atlas, a $30M, entirely virtual non-profit technology company and the largest association of independent artists in the U.S., where he served in both the Chief Operating Officer and Co-CEO roles (part of a four-person, shared, non-hierarchical leadership team), and was deeply involved in its work to become an anti-racist, anti-oppressive organization since they made that commitment in 2013. Earlier in his career, Tim was the Executive Director of The Parsons Dance Company and of High 5 Tickets to the Arts in New York City, had a memorable stint with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, was a one-time classical trombonist, musicologist, and for five years in his youth he delivered newspapers for the Evansville, Indiana Courier-Press. Learn more on LinkedIn.
Transcript
Tim Cynova:
Hi, I'm Tim Cynova and welcome to Work Shouldn't Suck, a podcast for thriving workplace practitioners. On today's episode, I'm joined by the ever awesome Shannon Litzenberger to explore democracy and creative practice or the importance of mutual care, collective thriving, and the potential of creative practice on societal transformation. We discuss how connections between artistic practice and methodologies can inform and expand what is often considered the bounds of leadership and team development and create more caring and equitable communities. I was excited to catch up with Shannon fresh off of the national tour of her production World After Dark and moments away from her hopping a flight to Spain for a panel at a social theory politics and the arts conference where she happened to be presenting her panel discussion in the form of an improvisational score. So much fun stuff to explore. So without further ado, Shannon, welcome to the podcast.
Shannon Litzenberger:
Hello. So nice to be here.
Tim Cynova:
Why don't we get started with how do you typically introduce yourself in the work you do these days?
Shannon Litzenberger:
I, first and foremost, identify as an artist. I'm a dance artist and choreographer director, and I also think a lot about my role in society as an artist, and so that has kind of opened up my practice and career into other spaces including leadership development and systems change work. I am based in Toronto, Canada or Tkaronto, which is a Mohawk name for Toronto and it means where the trees stand in the water. So I mentioned this in part because I also, through my practice, have a significant connection to land. I grew up in Canada's rural prairies in Saskatchewan, and so this beginning of my life really informed how I relate to the natural world and it's quite inherent in my artistic practice.
Tim Cynova:
We talk a lot about value centered work on the podcast. You've mentioned some things that I think are probably values in the work that you do in your own work. How do you define the values that you center in your work and unpack them in the context of what they mean in the workplace?
Shannon Litzenberger:
Something that I've been thinking a lot about lately in terms of values is a value of mutual care. This is something that comes up for me a lot in my work in a studio and also in context of leadership development. Mutual care for me is also connected to the idea of mutual thriving. It's something that I really center in my work is that how are the ways that we relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us really supporting this idea of collective thriving? So not just a kind of thriving or care for the thing that we're doing, like the mission that we're on or the thing that we're working on together, but how are those decisions and actions having impacts that extend out beyond ourselves in the larger set of interrelationships that we're a part of? This for me is something that I also look for in the relationships that I enter into in work and in life. Is there a sense of mutual care so that there can be the potential of mutual thriving?
Tim Cynova:
Following along on your Instagram feed, it seems like you are in the midst of several significant projects this year or have been in the midst of several significant projects this year, recently landed back home after a tour with World After Dark, there's a wild soma. I'm just curious what's in this mix that you've had this year? And I know because you're also headed off to be on a panel about another project you're working on. So what's it look like to be Shannon Litzenberger and the things you're juggling?
Shannon Litzenberger:
There's really never a dull moment. It is sort of the nature of my work that I am engaged in a lot of different spaces, but yes, I have just returned from a national tour of my production called World After Dark. This work premiered in 2019 at Harbourfront Centre Theater in Toronto. Of course then there was the pandemic that happened and now it has just returned from a national tour where we traveled to Guelph, Ontario and then to Yellowknife Northwest Territory, so the far north, and then to the West Coast to Coquitlam and Salt Spring Island. I'm kind of starting by talking about this because this is the creative artistic manifestation of a lot of the values that are inherent in the other kinds of work that I'm doing. World After Dark is a show about night. Some of it is about the actual night, our changing relationship to night and how the advent of city light has really disconnected us from our experience of darkness, but it's also for me, night is a metaphor for our lost connection to be embodied and to the feminine polarity of our nature.
I took ways of knowing that our not rationalist or that can't be reduced to data and algorithms, ways of meeting the self and the world that are part of our felt experience of being alive. And it was so interesting on this tour, especially in the Northwest Territories, we were there, we at a time of year, like it's November, so we're a month away from the solstice and the days are short, the days are short, so the sun was rising after 09:00 A.M., setting before 16:00 P.M. and I could feel in that community a kind of preparation for the hibernation of this time of year and it made me reflect on what the significance is of that way of being, of this kind of contemplative time, this time of moving out of a state of and what that feels like in our being to recover that sense of maybe slowness of stillness.
It's interesting as an artist, I forget who said it, but there's a notion that artists keep making the same work over and over their entire lives, and I feel like this work for me. I had my first rehearsal for this show in creation really 10 years ago. We started developing it in 2014. And so came to life before the pandemic and now is had a life after the pandemic. It's so interesting to me when I look back at it, how many layers of ideas are embedded in there, many of which were intentional and explicit, but some of which were my own unconscious manifesting in this show. The show takes us through the experience of a male protagonist who, in a sense, represents us as society and he is someone who's sort of this corporate boss that is instituting his policies and procedures and wreaking havoc on the workers around him.
The whole work is how he goes through this intense process of transformation where he moves through phases of the night and encounters his antagonist, a woman who portrays a kind of personification of night. And at each turn he keeps meeting this new way of being or this order of things that are so unfamiliar to him until eventually he sort of remembers something that he had forgotten and what he remembers is something from the beginning of his life, something from his childhood, this sense of curiosity and wonder and discovery and love even. And so as I keep rewatching this work over the last several weeks, seeing the cast perform it over and over, it's been also rekindling in me the power of creative practice and what it does in the world, why it is that we need art as a way of knowing the world and the way that art can offer us things for our consideration that don't need to turn through our rationalist minds, but can be felt and can evoke a kind of recognition of something that is very difficult to explain.
Tim Cynova:
When we first met, we were on the cultural leadership program at the Banff Center, and then we kind of moved on to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in the creative leadership program. You also participated in the Ethical Reopening Summit in between there that Lauren Ruffin and I produced, so it's been a ten-year arc. I'm curious, as you think about your ideas that you brought into those spaces, how are you thinking and approaching it differently or what's still the same in how you would approach your work?
Shannon Litzenberger:
In these spaces of leadership, I think one thing that hasn't changed is my orientation toward leadership as a collective act and leadership as relational and leadership as a pathway to shifting our current paradigm that is very long-tail work. So in that bigger vision hasn't shifted for me in this timeframe, but all of these spaces and as time passes, these ideas and practices meet a different moment. When we spoke at the Ethical Reopening Summit, this was a kind of in the midst of the pandemic moment. It was a moment of clearer recognition of the systems that we are conditioned to buy and living inside and working within and a kind of hopefulness around what needs to change, what is possible in terms of a different kind of future. If we're recognizing some of the ways that our world is not in alignment with our sense of wellness or aliveness or just like thriving, I'll use that word again, if it's not in alignment with that, then what needs to change in order to orient it in that direction?
Now fast-forward a few years and we are in a kind of post-pandemic lockdown moment and deeply feeling the impact of that time of closure. I think we're in this tension where we're quite burnt out actually, and also maybe from that state of burnout, finding it difficult to over and over enter into a state of learning and growth and novelty. That's kind of the tension that I'm feeling now is that there is this absolute imperative for change and growth and co-creation of new worlds from this moment and also this paralyzing condition of exhaustion and burnout and when we're in that state, we just return to the familiar habits. It takes a lot of energy to grow and change. So I think that's something that's really top of mind for me right now. Thinking in particular in the culture sector, I'm really seeing that there's this push and pull a recoiling in a way to the familiar and simultaneously, a kind of push or movement toward change by those that are still really working for that paradigm shift and so what to do about that now, how do we orient our efforts?
I think it's important to acknowledge that this state of change is constant regardless of what we do. It won't be our actions that determine change, that actually the planetary forces will decide for us. Like the earth will decide how much change is going to happen and how fast and how soon, and we will always be in relationship to that because we are a part of that. This condition of burnout is something I've been thinking about a lot in relationship to leadership development because of course, I want so much to bring to life these practices that come from creative work and believe so much that they can support and expansion into new possibilities, that they can support a movement away from old habits and toward creating new habits and support co-creation across among differences. I think that is all possible, but that isn't easy from a state of exhaustion and burnout. And so I think one of the things that's really top of mind is how do we embrace care back to that value of care?
How can we better care for ourselves and how can we better recover our sense of wellbeing so that we can continue doing from this paradigm shifting change making work. When it comes to care, I think this idea of self-care comes up a lot. And self-care is, I think, connected to this idea that we go to work and we work really hard and we get burned out and then we leave work and we go home and we take care of ourselves and then we go back to work and we burn out and then we go home and we take care of ourselves.
And so I think this is really just a triaging strategy for trying to maintain the status quo. It's really through some of the research that I've been working on with some of my collaborators, like you mentioned Wild Soma and also a collaborator that I work with through an entity called PlaySpace as well, that we've been exploring what it means to create collective care, so how does care manifest in the collective space, which really is about creating cultures that don't lead to harm and burnout in the first place. So how do we do that?
That's been part of my research and exploration as of late, is really looking at, how do we actually work and create together while also feeling cared for so that we don't have to go home and take a bubble bath to recover from our time at work.
Tim Cynova:
So important and so challenging. We're going from one really challenging thing in the world, one after that next, after the next, I've sketched out a piece that I'm calling hedonic adaptation and the snapback.
Shannon Litzenberger:
Oh yes, the snapback. I want you to tell me more about that because I like this term. It resonates with me.
Tim Cynova:
I first heard about it through systems change work from another one of our Banff Center cultural leadership program colleagues, Katrina Donald, how systems will snap back. We saw this coming out of the pandemic where organizations had figured out a different way of working. You figured out that not everyone needed to be in the same room as each other to get work done, and then as other pressures came in, we have real estate that's not being occupied or we can't get really creative work done or whatever it might be, the systems were snapping back to everyone in the office five days a week and we're still seeing this. Even though we have proven that there are better ways of doing things, the systems and structures are meant to support the systems and structures. And so they're snapping back to what was before the pandemic.
I think about this now as in the US we're recording this in December of 2024, about a month and change before the next administration comes into office and what systems and structures were in place when this administration was in office four years ago, what's similar, what's different? What's going to snap back? What needs to keep changing? And at the same time, people who are involved in this work are just exhausted. You're exhausted as human beings. Your organizations are exhausted, and yet your idea of collective care, how do we center that in our work and acknowledge that, quote unquote, "work work" isn't in isolation of life? It is a part of that.
I think this is one of the things being introduced to your work in those early days where I'm like, "Oh my gosh, Shannon approaches this in a very different way than I approach my work," and its what I find so fascinated by getting to connect with you and hear about how you approach your work and to see how do you describe the work that you do and oh, that's similar to the way I might describe it, but it's done in a completely different way. I find that so fascinating the times we get to chat and the times I get to actually see you do your thing is really inspiring and energizing.
Shannon Litzenberger:
I do think that some of the ways that I approach my work is unfamiliar to folks in organizational worlds. It's more familiar to those who are in creative worlds. I find this also a fascinating truth that the organizations that exist to facilitate creative work find creative practice unfamiliar. And it also kind of reveals this other truth where creative practice is a practice of creating art, but organization and their structures are very much a product of the corporate world, of the industrial era model of organizing. And why is that? Why does it have to be that way? Does it have to be that way? I don't think so, but this is where I find a lot of fertile ground for transformation and why I feel like it's so important for creative practice methodologies to gain purchase in this conversation around change because they're practice-based and practice is how we change habits.
We can have lots of fruitful conversations that evoke ways of knowing that we understand, but to actually become something different than what we've already been conditioned to be requires practice, not just a kind of conceptual knowing. It's still a bit baffling to me that we have not fully embraced this in our field. It's like the knowledge this way of knowing and doing derives from the practices that are contained within our field and yet we look to the same kind of theoretical strategic frameworks, ideas-based ways to change.
I think if there's anything that I've learned from sharing these practices over more than a decade is that practice is the pathway to change. If you want to be able to expand your repertoire of being and doing, you have to practice things that are unfamiliar. A lot of the work I do is simply providing a kind of space to practice that where the stakes are very low, practicing and being able to experience that unfamiliar thing within you and to feel those reactions of discomfort when it just doesn't matter, when there's no material consequence, to allow that to build new possibilities within us to allow for expansion to occur.
I think in the process of sharing these practices over many years, I've also really kind of in a reverse way formed some theories around it, theories that grow out of the impact of the practice. Some of those things for me are about how rationalist our world is and how we need to recover sensory ways of knowing. It's about how individualist our world is and it's about recovering our sense of relationality and interrelationship. It's about how we have divided the mind and body, how we treat the body as a thing and not as us. That we are bodies and we think with and through our bodies, we shape our realities. How we come to understand our reality is through our sensory motor engagement with the world, and then the story of that actually comes after.
It's also, I think, trying to move away from the conditioning of command and control type leadership models and to move toward sensing and responding. Sensing and responding, you have a very foundational principle in creative practice and embodied creative practice. That's not novel to a movement artist. But maybe it's novel to a leadership team in an organization because sensing and responding acknowledges the unpredictability and complexity of the environment, whereas command and control type leadership really requires a predictable environment because there's no way to always apply the same rules and have the same outcome unless you have a stable container and we are in a very unstable container right now.
Tim Cynova:
I'm reminded of the times when you can trust your gut, different scenarios when you can trust your gut. One of them is like if you have significant prior practice with that thing, and another one is if you're getting immediate feedback from what you're doing, and I forget what the third one is, but it's been top of mind recently, especially in the pandemic because no one's lived through a pandemic. No one has prior practice running an organization through a pandemic. All these different things, and now when can you trust your gut? When can you just use the thing from the book? When do you have to say, "All right, well, no one knows the right answer here, so how do we sense what's going on and then figure out what to do about it?" You've worked with a lot of different groups. When you work with different groups, how does what you do resonate differently?
Shannon Litzenberger:
I have made some really interesting discoveries about this work and working with different kinds of groups. And yes, absolutely this work resonates differently with different ensembles of people, but I would say that most of why that is the case is because of the context in which they're experiencing the offer. As an example, I had an experience with a group of business students who were invited to play different games and were introduced into ways of sensing and tuning different ways of paying attention. Even though I would prompt the group around discovery and sensing as a kind of priority as opposed to trying to source solutions or win whatever the game is, that it's actually all just about noticing what happens as things unfold. It was such a strongly conditioned habit for a group of business students in the environment of a business school to be a certain way, and so introducing things that involved expressive play, for example.
I mean these are human beings who are in their early twenties. They're not that far away from their childhoods. I know that they remember what it feels like to play, but in the environment of the business school and with all of the codes of belonging inherent in that space, it was a challenge to invite another way of being. I think something that I have really learned is that the context matters and how rigidly we understand our identity, also makes a difference.
Identity is a very powerful organizing construct in society, and the pandemic especially I think really highlighted identity significantly as an organizing structure, as a way of reviewing structural harms and inequities. But it also started to deepen the way that we are relating in these identity-based affinity groups, and in a sense, this is a challenge when it comes to developing practices that are supportive of a pluralistic democracy because in a pluralistic democracy, we need to develop an ability to be together in ways that are not so strictly codified that we are all twisting ourselves in a knot to try to belong, that actually we need to be able to embrace differences within a dynamic whole in order to work well and co-create well together.
But so often in the example of the business school environment, if there's a very strict code of belonging and a way of being in that space, well then that becomes very apparent when you introduce practices that are about expanding into new possibilities and inviting the possibility of differences and plurality to co-exist in a generative way.
Tim Cynova:
As you counsel organizations and leadership teams to show up differently, what are some of the things that are typically helpful to them?
Shannon Litzenberger:
Something I like to distinguish when talking about this more improvisational or sense and respond type of leadership is that it requires the development of a set of capacities that I am distinguishing from maybe what you might call skills. When we go and do our MBA or management degrees, we have a list of skills that we learn, that to me is different than the kind of capacities that are required to be in a generative relationship with an ensemble in a state of complex volatility, which is really what we're in now. I have, through my collaborations with many different embodiment practitioners and also through my own research and practice over the years, developed a kind of framework that for me is kind of living set of practice-based ideas that contain what I feel is sort of the essence of what those capacities are that we need to develop in order to be in a kind of generative, co-creative relationship with others.
One of those things is what I call sensory attunement. How are we activating the sensing body as a source of knowing? Maybe an example that I can give is that we talk about how do you read a room? How do you read a room? What sensory capacities are you using? Without having any story about what's going on, how are you taking the temperature of things? How are you noticing the energy of the space? And that is a whole set of sensory systems that we can actually activate and bring to life and practice using. That's usually a very strong baseline, is how do we activate the senses as a source of knowledge. The next thing that I work with is what I call attentional awareness. Because we're so into our devices these days, we tend to have an overdeveloped ability to focus directly where we close our field of view and we very task-focused.
We're looking singularly at one thing, but we also have a kind of form of attention that's more ambient where we're engaging the fulsomeness of our peripheral vision, neurologically this peripheral focus is connected to our system of social connection. No surprise. It tends to be a bit underutilized, and so practicing holding our attention in that peripheral, I call it sometimes seeing everything at once, the seeing everything at once space as we navigate the world is just a different way of taking in information and then being in a practice where we can shift between multiple modes of attention, which also supports us to be well. Often our exhaustion comes from really overusing one form of attention for a really long time, but if we're able to shift between different modes of attention, I mean that's sometimes why the conventional advice is get up and go for a walk, because when we go for a walk, we will often open our attention into the peripheral space.
Being connected to nature is another time when we quite naturally open our gaze widely, it's very healthy for us to do this. Practicing ways of paying attention and noticing. I mean, if it's true that our sensory motor engagement with our world shapes our reality, then what we pay attention to has a huge effect on what we notice, what we see and what we understand as relevant information. And we often have a lot of default habits in how we pay attention because those habits actually help us navigate through the world more quickly. Activating an expansive, attentional awareness necessitates really slowing down so that we don't stay in those defaults of only seeing what we think is absolutely relevant to whatever we need to be doing at a certain moment. So those two are quite foundational, sensory attunement and attentional awareness. And then the other practices that I often associate, like these capacities that I associate with this more improvisatorial way of leading together is relationality. So how we are relating then to others.
For me this is about to what extent are we exercising our agency and to what extent is our own will and desires being expressed and met in a relationship, in a collaboration, and to what extent are our actions and decisions in service to the group itself or to the creation, the collective creation? For me, there's an important balance between those things that we need to practice because when we're so in service to everything and everyone around us and we are not expressing any of our own desires or are not exercising our own agency, then this can be actually very bad for us, and you can ask any serial caregiver what this feels like. The opposite of that is when we express so much energy and we impose our desires and will on the group so much that we then start to take away the agency of others or potentially disrupt the aim of the group as a whole.
This is also sometimes what we see in this classic heroic leadership model where it's like the vision and intention of a single individual that dictates the actions and decisions of the group as a whole. Trying to strike a balance between these things is, I think, one of the capacities that really supports generative relational collaborative leadership.
And the last one is what I call world making. World making is this potential of co-creation that is capable of transcending familiar paradigms. So really this is a more exploratory process like the improvisational action itself. What happens when we put all those other capacities in action and we try to create something together? What is possible and how do we notice when we are sliding into defaults? And how do we notice when new possibilities are coming into being or permissed through more expansive actions? So that's kind of the framework that I have been working with. I mean, it's all a work in progress. Everything is a grand experiment, but these are some of the capacities that I see as different than skills building that are so essential to generative ensemble-based improvisation.
Tim Cynova:
I love that. And thinking about how you would map those defaults to team members on a team. And what might be their default and what might be how they operate on the team to think about awareness or my default might be very narrow, but my role on this team is to make sure I'm leveling up. And actually naming that so that we're showing up I think is so intriguing and probably helpful and eye-opening in a way where it's like, oh, right there, we are all showing up in a way here, and how are we showing up together as a team and what might be the fault of the team? I once was on the leadership team where we all did the Myers-Briggs and then we rolled them all into the Myers-Briggs of the team, and the Myers-Briggs of the team was Myers-Briggs of the CEO.
Whether or not you believe the Myers-Briggs is an accurate tool or not, for a different day, but it was really interesting. We all show up in this way, that might be the default, but that might not be how we need to be operating. Talking about different ways of approaching our work, you and our dear friend Diane Ragsdale would actually take participants of the programs that we were in literally into the woods and then talk about the work or into a gallery or into a museum.
When I heard about that, I'm like, "I would not do that. That's not how I would approach it." But once again, one of those really interesting ways of shifting the frames in which we're operating. I know because we have known each other a long time, and I know Diane, that you two had a practice yourselves, a regular practice called Brain Dates and an opportunity to be together to think about things, toss around ideas, and also led, to among other things, you two writing a chapter of a book in democracy as creative practice. Can you just sort of sketch what that is? What was that relationship and then how did it lead to you all writing a chapter in a book together?
Shannon Litzenberger:
I feel like in order to explain that, I have to tell you the story about how Diane and I met because we did meet at the Banff Center and she was teaching a course called The Aesthetic Advantage. And it was a leadership course using the principles of creative practice to train leaders. I think this was at the time just one of the iterations of her work that has come to life in other spaces as well. But I was at the Banff Center because I was invited to audit some of their leadership courses, and so I was there as a participant, actually.
So experiencing many of these practices like going to an art gallery and spending 20 minutes looking at a single image, a single work of art, and noticing how your gaze starts to transform your experience of noticing and seeing. One night we had an epic conversation over several glasses of wine and just the [inaudible 00:37:20] notes a version of it is that we kind of realized that our practices and our interests were two sides of the same coin, that what Diane was exploring through her work in beauty and aesthetics, I was exploring through embodiment and movement.
And so in true Diane style, she immediately within the course invited me the next day to host a session on embodiment. And so I did. I shared some of the exercises that I do, and it really provoked our long friendship and collaboration from that point. And I think we did just really recognize in each other this mutual exploration that we were on. And so we did. We collaborated a lot through the creative leadership or the cultural leadership program at Banff Center, and then we did form these weekly brain dates. Those sort of arose in the pandemic when we all needed to create a little more structure in our world that felt very unstructured at that time. So our brain dates, we met once a week for pretty much four years.
It really was incredible how we sustained this collaboration in both of us. As the lockdowns ended, we started to get busier and busier, but we just really committed to this relationship with each other because I think what we were really trying to do is to express the interrelationship between these aesthetic practices and how they hold the potential to create an inclusive democracy.
Our best attempt at writing about this was published in Democracy as creative practice not long before she passed away, and I'm so grateful that we actually did manage to write the one chapter. We were already starting to plot our book together. This question that we were trying to tackle is what are these capacities, what are the missing capacities from programs like an MBA that we just so desperately need in order to co-create a different kind of world, and what can the knowledge and wisdom of art lend us in that pursuit?
And so my collaboration with Diane through the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and their creative leadership master's program also was really foregrounding those things, beauty, discernment, improvisation, imagination, sensory attunement, attentional awareness, like all of these very human qualities that support healthy interrelationships with self-others in the world around us that are aligned with collective thriving. This was really our shared exploration. And yeah, I'm trying my best to carry on as much of that work without having her formidable partnership, but she is in my ear all the time, let me tell you.
Tim Cynova:
That's really wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. As you two rolled around these ideas, what couldn't you get into the chapter? What didn't land in a way or what still circling? I don't know what to make of that.
Shannon Litzenberger:
There's quite a bit, actually, that didn't make it into the chapter. I mean, she and I wrote a longer version of this chapter that remains unpublished. So I'm working on a way of trying to help this writing find its way into the world. But the chapter was in service of introducing a section of the book. So what we did is a kind of foundational introduction of relationality and pluralism and aesthetics and aesthetic practice as having a relationship with democracy.
But I think in the longer version of this writing that we were doing, we were also trying to map out what are these aesthetic strategies, marrying the work that she had been doing around beauty and the work that I had been doing around embodiments and trying to find a way to list what these things might be. And I feel like that part of our work was always a bit in progress. It was hard to really draw a hard conclusion around what would be the eight capacities that you would really develop in order to be able to animate art as a way of knowing and aesthetics in your leadership? And I think this will be a question for me as I continue my research for a long time. I have a strong sense of what many of those capacities are, but I think there's always new things that kind of pop up that make me think more about it.
Tim Cynova:
That would be usually the point in my conversations with Diane where I'd be like, "Well, just drop it in ChatGPT and ask her what it says are the eight things you should do?" And then she'd be like, "Well, have you read this book?" I'm like, "Oh my God, Diane, every time we meet, I've got five more books on my list to read from you." It's true. You're just about ready to head to Europe to attend a conference where you'll be discussing the book and the chapter and you've decided to approach it in, dare I say, a slightly different way than one might think a panel discussion would typically be delivered. What's in the mix on this one?
Shannon Litzenberger:
I'm heading to Osuna, Spain to attend a social theory politics in the arts conference, thanks to Andrea Zitcer and Tom Borrup, who are the editors of Democracy as Creative Practice. They made a proposal to the conference to host a panel with some of the chapter authors from this book. And so in a conversation with the panelists, we were talking about what does it mean to share these ideas at an academic conference? And of course, right away, my artist self was ready to create a disruption to the usual system. And I think I was in great company because I proposed the idea of instead of having a typical configuration of a panel, that we host the session as an improvisational score. And if anyone out there listening doesn't know what an improvisational score is, it's basically just a set of instructions, prompts of how we might move from thing to thing in a particular duration of time.
And so, I'm so thrilled that my colleagues on this, quote unquote "panel" have agreed to co-create a kind of improvisational score that will be our session. And so we're still in the process of designing that, but I feel like this kind of generative transgression, if I can call it that, hopefully ways of disrupting that our in service to positive change is really part of my ethic as an artist. And I'm really excited about what will happen, what kind of questions will come up, what kind of discussion will arise. But I felt it would've been maybe a missed opportunity to have a panel discussion on democracy as creative practice without actually having any creative practice present.
And so we're really going to go for it and just see what happens. I'm thrilled to have been invited to this event, and I feel like this would've been the kind of conference that Diane would've attended to represent these ideas. And so I feel like I'm going carrying the spirit of our collaboration with me and hopefully doing it justice at this event.
Tim Cynova:
Well, she would've loved that structure. Having worked with her on a number of things where she's like, "How about this?" I'm like, "Oh my God, Diane, that's too much. It makes me too nervous. To try it with real live people? Oh my gosh. Why don't we just all sit behind a table and talk about things?" Yeah, I'm so excited for that. So excited to hear how that goes and what prompts do you use to guide the improvisation.
Shannon Litzenberger:
Those are still to be determined, but I think no matter what, there's going to be some things that include a mix of inquiry, a mix of movement or action-based interventions, a mix of contemplation and conversation.
Tim Cynova:
No surprise, our time has flown by as the plane lands on our time today. Where do you want to land it?
Shannon Litzenberger:
I think maybe a thought I'd like to leave in this conversation is that what's really alive in me about my own creative practice right now is how it can be in service to this moment. Creative process is often understood as a way of making art that becomes an experience or an artifact that lives in a system of cultural production inside a cultural industry. And I think this is maybe one of the biggest challenges that we have as artists and as people who work in service of culture, is that we might be losing sight of the fact that art is also a practice, it's also a process.
It's a way of knowing that can really support transformation if we unleash it from its task of being only in service of creating experiences and artifacts. This is what I feel like I've really dedicated my life and career to, is yes, making art as experience, but also engaging the practices and processes of art as a way of knowing the world and as a way of building community, as a way of developing better leadership that leads to a more just and equitable world. And as a form of world-making that's capable of creating better democracies.
Tim Cynova:
Shannon, so much gratitude for you, for your approach to the work, for sharing your approach to the work, for your ideas that are different than my own. And thanks so much for being on the podcast.
Shannon Litzenberger:
Thank you, Tim. It was such a pleasure.
Tim Cynova:
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