For the past year, I've been part of a (very) loose constellation of artists responding to a prompt sent out by the playwright Erik Ehn.
Though I don't know Erik personally, I've long followed his work, which is often epic in scope, experimental in structure, and always in some way concerned with spirit. (His play cycle Soulographie: Our Genocides is a set of 17 plays exploring America’s relationship to genocide, and takes 9 days to present from start to finish.) Ehn is also well-known for the silent writing retreats he has been facilitating for over a decade, where he draws on his experience as a theologian and a student of contemplative practices to guide writers through a week or more of monastically-inspired creative discipline.
The prompt Erik offered last spring, which he called “100 Thousand Praises,” was vague but intriguing: he said he was seeking one thousand artists to commit to making 100 gestures each on the theme of praise. We could work in any medium, praise anything we liked, and make something as big or small as we wished. The goal was to have 100,000 gestures of praise by today — February 29, 2024 — leap day.
All year I have been trying to smooth out the crinkled and confusing edges of this prompt — why leap day? why 100,000? and how does the practice of praise not become nauseatingly Pollyanna-ish, absolutely full of toxic positivity?
Erik sent out monthly emails, which were poetic and inspiring and often abstruse. There was one, early on, that began, “It may be that as artists we are an exaltation of larks.” He exhorted us to remember we were part of a formation, an accumulation, even as we labored individually. Every few months, when I would remember that I still had to find 100 things to praise, I would pull up Erik’s emails and reread them, particularly this one, searching for a sense of this larger body or energy to write in relation to. So there was the question of praise, yes, but increasingly also the question of synchronicity, felt or not felt, real or imagined…
This week, we received a pdf nearly 1,000 pages long containing all the praise gestures that have come in so far. Erik will be gathering artists at La MaMa tomorrow in New York to read at least an excerpt of each contribution aloud. They expect to go all day. I won’t be at La MaMa, but I thought I would use this month’s newsletter to share my piece with you. (What I submitted turned out to be quite small, though it might be the seed of something larger.) Here is a link to read it, since its formatting isn’t easily copy-paste-able: The Work of the Flock
If Leap Day is an extra day, a sort of spilling-over of the calendar, I like the idea of using it for something that doesn’t make sense inside the strictures of normal time. Like reading a thousand pages of responses to a prompt you have been sitting on alone for the past year. 365 days of questions and then, whoosh, a thousand answers. And then maybe if each person reading this email praises 100 things… just kidding. After this, cynicism only.