TEDx El Paso

November 27, 2015

When thinking of a time and place to allow oneself to be vulnerable, people, especially those in professional positions, often find that they’d only let their emotional guard down around close friends, family and significant others. For some, vulnerability is best left for a psychologist or an empty room.

But for Austin Savage, the founder and director of local performance company Border Theatre, vulnerability is the key to unlocking not only one’s creativity, but community progress as well.

Cynicism is prevalent now, it’s prevalent in art.
It’s prevalent in human interaction.”

“The opportunity to discover more about yourself can only come about by reaching out to others, because if you’re not reaching out to others, then you’re only containing yourself, and by containing yourself, you create an armor,” Savage said. “You create a protective shield where you’re more worried about your perception and your supposed identity as opposed to the powerful thing that’s inside of you.”

When a friend of Savage suggested he talk for this year’s TEDxElPaso conference, he decided to highlight vulnerability as a powerful way to address an ongoing issue many creative thinkers face.

A significant turning point in Savage’s approach to performance occurred when a cast member tragically died while in preparation for his first major show as a director.

During his talk, he didn’t specify the name of the play or the woman who was killed. Instead, with a gentle tone, he described her as a mother of two and as someone whose presence and later absence significantly impacted the cast and crew. Some decided not to proceed with the production, and those who did searched for ways to heal from the loss.

“We found the best way of doing that was opening up to each other. We had to do that before we could move on,” Savage said. “And I realized something. We had connected in a profound way and now we had something worth truly sharing with a larger community.”

But while opening up to one another proved valuable for the cast and crew, Savage still acknowledged that sharing one’s raw emotions is a challenge in society. He searched for answers as to why so many of us find it difficult to be authentic and candid.

Perhaps movies and TV shows play a major influence in our desire to suppress our emotions, Savage suggested. We try to play it cool and create social masks. In the non-fictional world we call reality, real emotions and intentions are often buried underneath a projected image of oneself in order to fit in.

“Vulnerability is considered weakness in a lot of circles, and to a certain extent, in my family,” Savage said. “But when you look back over it, there are tremendous examples of people being vulnerable and being whole. Ulysses wept and so did Achilles. According to the Bible, Jesus himself wept too.”

As Savage made eye contact with the audience in the El Paso Community Foundation room, he appeared to wear no social mask. Exhibiting pensiveness and excitement through every facial expression and hand movement, the emotions he revealed as he stood on the platform in front of an audience of over 100 seemed like the same emotions he’d reveal to a close friend in privacy.

He then challenged the audience to join him in vulnerable honesty.

“If you can say one simple truth, then you have been brave for that day. And all you have to do is find some person and tell them, ‘you are a human being,’” Savage said. “If you’re brave enough to commit that act, then you can take it one step further and tell another person, ‘You can hurt me.’ We know both of those things to be true. And we have to embrace it in order to move forward.”

Later, Savage said that this year’s TEDxElPaso reflected El Paso’s societal advancement. “I think it proves that our community is growing in terms of being able to provide the quality of thinkers and speakers that we have and it’s proving that our community has a voice that communicates with the global community at large,” he said.

The topic of vulnerability seemed relevant to Savage, not only in terms of exploring human behavior, but to TED Talks as well.

“The motto of TED is ‘Ideas worth sharing,’” Savage said. “You can’t share something if you’re not willing to be vulnerable.”

Culture, FeaturedBhutan, TED Talks, TEDx El Paso, Xochitl Rodriguez

Found in Translation

Victoria G. Molinar

September 22, 2015

For each issue of Art Avenue, we’ll highlight a speaker from the 2015 TEDxElPaso conference, which was held at the El Paso Community Foundation Room in May. An independently organized event, TEDxElPaso continues the national non-profit TED’s mission to share “ideas worth spreading.”

“Made of memory” Performance by Xochitl Rodriguez Photos by Federico Villalba — “Made of memory” Performance by
Xochitl Rodriguez
Photo by Federico Villalba

The first minute of transdisciplinary artist Xochitl Rodriguez’ time on stage during her speech “Speak Without Speaking” at the 2015 TEDxElPaso conference consisted of no words, yet a message of tranquil exploration was implied through her clothes and body movement.

Making her way towards the platform at the El Paso Community Foundation Room, Rodriguez embodied a boat as she swayed the large sail she wore from side to side. Standing in front of a video projection of the desert, she lingered on stage before speaking, her voice as calm as the sound of the gentle wind that played in the background.

“I turned myself into a boat after spending 14 months in the Kingdom of Bhutan,” Rodriguez said. “I had sailed around the planet from the desert to the Himalayas and back again.”

In 2009, after earning her BFA at the University of Texas at El Paso, Rodriguez became the first international artist in residence invited to stay in Bhutan. There, she was asked to teach children about contemporary sculpture and public art.

Of course I realized fairly quickly that my understanding of what that would entail was so far from what it actually means to teach contemporary art in the remote Himalayas,” Rodriguez said with a smile.

While one might imagine that bringing contemporary art to a country unfamiliar with the form had the biggest impact on Rodriguez, what she said she ultimately learned from the experience was a new, universal way to communicate.

“The [TedxElPaso] talk evolved from those ideas because I didn’t like to speak and I knew I could communicate in other ways that were way more effective than speaking,” Rodriguez later said at her home in central El Paso. “And now my whole artistic practice is founded on these ideas of action versus words and living examples instead of stuff you see on a wall. Everything I make is about interaction and engagement without words so that nobody is excluded.”

Bhutan is where Rodriguez’ artistic revelation came to be, she said. She learned that art, as a universal language, has the power to help people transcend physical and cultural barriers and connect with one another.

Xochitl Rodriguez during her 2015 TEDx Presentation

“All the world has a right to be fluent in art,” Rodriguez said during her speech. “It is in fact a language and if a community can’t access it, can’t understand it, can’t create it or generate it and most importantly can’t relate to it, then that community will not thrive, will not participate in or contribute to the very evolution of humanity in the twenty first century.”

Rodriguez’ transformative experiences emerged through every project she led with her group of Bhutanese youth. One public exhibition she led was to explore the waste generated in Bhutan.

“It took me about two weeks to realize that my students had no concept of what waste actually meant in relation to their way of life,” Rodriguez said in front of a projected image of one of Bhutan’s landfills. “And so we hopped on a bus and we hitched a ride on some dump trucks and we rode for miles and miles to the top of the mountain to the country’s largest landfill.”

Most of the children saw the garbage for what it was, but one student compared the trash to an ocean wave, sparking the idea for the group to create a boat for their exhibition. Rodriguez said a fellow artist asked if she considered that no one in Bhutan had a concept of a boat. Later, the children discovered that the neighbors filled the boat they created with trash.

“They said, ‘Certainly now madam, this boat will sink in a sea of garbage,’” Rodriguez said. “That was the moment, the unmistakable moment, when the fundamental exchange of ideas occurred. They had become translators.”

They also projected images of rice paddy fields onto Changjiji, the government housing complex in the capital city of Thimphu, as a symbol of their culture being replaced by urbanization, Rodriguez said.

Exhibiting work that everyone can connect to was another important message Rodriguez wanted to convey during her speech, she said.

“Made of memory” Performance by Xochitl Rodriguez Photo by Federico Villalba — “Made of memory” Performance by
Xochitl Rodriguez
Photo by Federico Villalba

“It is a national problem where artwork isn’t made for people, but it’s made for some other audience that probably likes it, but their lives wouldn’t be changed by it,” Rodriguez later said. “You take art onto the streets and you take art to people who don’t have it and their lives would change. The whole city would change if we used art that way.”

As prayer flags danced in the wind outside her window, it was clear that a piece of the Kingdom of Bhutan would always be with Rodriguez. Talking about her experience at the small country was like ending a chapter, she said.

Her latest chapter has been a community artist collaborative she co-founded called the Caldo Collective. Every few months, a member of the collective hosts a “Frijol Feast” in which the community is invited to a dinner where several artists propose their project ideas.

From the collaborative came the Transient Triangle Project, which transformed an alleyway in Manhattan Heights into a two-hour multimedia pop-up exhibit this past July. As attendees traveled down the alley viewing video projections, interpretive performances and paintings, the exhibit echoed Rodriguez’ message at TEDxElPaso.

It’s about creating a moment in somebody’s life instead of a thing for someone,” Rodriguez said.

Culture, FeaturedSandra Paola Lopez, TED Talks, TEDx El Paso

Transformative Performance

The Art Avenue

August 16, 2015

At May’s TEDxElPaso conference, guest speaker Sandra Paola López prompted an audience of over 100 to introduce themselves to one another. The task was simple enough, or so it seemed.

“But before we start, I’m going to give you a performance direction,” López continued. “We’re going to do this in gibberish.”

Audience members shifted uncomfortably in their seats inside the El Paso Community Foundation Room, but what started off as shy mumbles evolved into a crescendo of made-up languages and, eventually, laughter.

“So what just happened?” López asked. “We took a very ordinary activity, something we do on a regular basis, but we changed how we did it. You transformed the energy of the room.”

This exercise, she later said, is an example of the message in her speech “Performance Activism: How You Can Change the World Without Changing What You Are Doing.”

By agreeing to participate in López’ task to introduce themselves to one another in gibberish, López said the audience members left their comfort zones and therefore opened up new possibilities.

“We cannot create change unless we are ready to do things we do not know how to do,” she explained. “The power of doing things like that is that it really breaks those hierarchical positions and it puts us all in an even playing field to create different kinds of relationships.”

This is a lesson López said she learned in her career as a multidisciplinary dancer. While at first she questioned her impact as a performer, she instead decided to focus on the process of her art and learned that in order for social change to be possible, people must leave their comfort zones.

A native of Colombia, López has been dancing since she was 4 years old, perfecting her techniques in ballet, jazz, tap, modern and traditional Columbian dance. After earning a bachelor’s degree in Dance Performance at Missouri State University and a master’s degree in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she learned about dance improvisation through a New York collective called Lower Left in 2009.

“Getting into improvisation in dance started opening my eyes to different ways of relating to my body, different ways of relating to movement, different ways of relating to other bodies in space when I was dancing,” López said. “I’m finding the kind of power that it has for me.”

Improvisation also helped López open up to new methods of performing and teaching, she said. The next year, she learned about performance activism while obtaining a certificate in social therapeutics at the East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy in New York.

The specific concept of performance activism López learned about was developed by the institute’s co-founder Fred Newman in the 1970s as a grassroots movement led by him and his colleagues. It suggests that the world is a collection of “stages” and that we, the “performers,” both improvise and write countless “scenes” in our lives.

As an instructor at the University of Texas at El Paso and New Mexico State University, López said she encourages new forms of interaction by allowing her students to help decide what will be discussed in classes. Through her organization in2improv, López promotes performance activism by challenging people of all ages to try collaborative improvisation.

“But when I talk about performance activism, I’m not talking about my dance career,” López said. “I’m referring to the quality of the activity that you’re doing. You could be a performance activist and be an engineer, an economist or a lawyer or a doctor and that’s where I think the power of performance activism lies.”

Performance activism takes place when we shake things up and decide to do things differently, challenging our everyday behavior and thought processes, López said.

“When my partner and I are having a disagreement, we can both step back and say, okay, let’s perform this argument in a different way so that we don’t fall into the usual patterns of becoming a victim and pointing the finger at the other person,” López said.

Lopez said such activism can be applied not only to social settings or professional relationships, but to relationships between loved ones as well.

“Another example is a mother and a child,” López said. “The child comes to the mom and says, ‘Mom, there are monsters in my closet.’ Maybe our go-to place would be to say, ‘Oh, don’t be silly. There’s no such thing.’

“But another performance would be saying, ‘Oh my gosh, let’s go find him!’ and then you create this this whole thing with the child to have a different relationship with the fear of having monsters in the closet.”

López’ approach to education and activism seemed so unique to community outreach organization Philosophic Systems Institute founder Juan Ferret that he introduced her to El Paso Community Foundation president Eric Pearson after she moved to the Sun City in August of last year. Along with Chris Cummings, executive vice president of real estate company CIC Limited, the foundation organizes TEDxElPaso to contribute to TED’s mission and share “ideas worth spreading.”

When Pearson asked if she would be interested speaking at the conference—she knew it would be her chance to expand her outreach in a new way.

“I felt very connected and transformed through a lot of TED Talks that I’ve seen, so I really think that you can have a big impact to talk with that platform,” López said. “It’s a great opportunity to not only reach people locally through the conference itself, but also to reach a broader community internationally.”

Aside from the fact that López has listened to countless talks covering technology, entertainment and design (hence the abbreviation TED), her other connection to the organization also lies in the fact that her brother Carloz López previously gave a talk called “Asombremos con sonrisas,” which explored the power of making people smile, for TEDxLasAguas.

It didn’t take long for López to decide that she wanted to share her profound passion for performance activism with her audience.

“Everyday, take a step to get out of your comfort zone,” López said in her last remarks at the conference. “After five years of doing this work, I have realized that I still don’t know what I’m doing and that if I’m lucky, I never will.”

[themify_col grid=”2-1 first”][themify_box style=”red” ]Learn more about TEDxElPaso at TEDxElPaso.com. To learn more about Sandra Paola López, visit SandraPaolaLopez.com.[/themify_box][/themify_col]

Culture, FeaturedTED Talks, TEDx El Paso

Intellectual Hunger

Kimberly Rene' Vanecek

May 13, 2015

Local activists and civic-minded individuals have gathered a group of speakers who want to color your world through art, engage your minds on the environment, define dignity, teach you technology and rationalize racism. Tired of hearing about the lack of civic pride in our community and eager to share innovative concepts that are on the brink of discovery, this group set out to debunk the theory that El Paso is a heterogeneous community in presenting 2015 TEDx El Paso.

TEDx El Paso is a non-profit organization with an independent series of small talks scheduled for May 30 at the El Paso Community Foundation. The talks are based off the national TED brand, which engages speakers to share information ranging from art and culture to science and technology, as well as every day life issues. TED has hosted speakers as famous as Bill Gates, as well as Joe Smith who teaches you how to reduce your paper consumption by using only one paper towel to dry your hands.

A few of the scheduled speakers on the list for the May talks include UTEP’s Dr. Stacey Sowards discussing communication—international conservation effort,” Tracey Jerome; the new director at the Museums of Cultural Affairs Department will speak on creativity and economic development; while Dr. Arvind Singhal, a UTEP professor, will be talking about the diffusion of innovations the positive deviance approach and organizing for social change. (For a complete listing of the speakers you can go to their Facebook page: TEDx El Paso.)

Chris Cummings, who works for CIC Limited, a local commercial real estate company is the sole-licensee of the TEDx El Paso independent talks. He is one of the organizers of the event and said it collaborated with The El Paso Foundation and numerous volunteers to effectively organize the 2015 series. There will be more than 12 speakers determined to challenge the worldwide perception of life in the Borderplex, but most importantly, our own preconceived notions at the local level.

The 100 audience members will be hearing not just from local participants, but there will be a few keynote speakers scheduled during the programming including Dr. Charlie Clements. Clements is the famed physician, human rights activist and the executive director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard. “I believe he’s an amazing human rights advocate and activist. TED talks don’t have a keynote speaker, but he’s ours…he’s coming from Harvard to speak here, so that’s pretty cool,” said Cummings. Clements wrote the book, Witness to War t he basis for the 1985 Academy Award-winning short documentary, for which Clements narrated.

Cummings hopes the panel this year will build upon the speakers from TEDx 2013. “One of the speakers was a farm rights worker advocate, Carlos Marentes. His talk was about human rights and about being a ‘La Raza’ activist. That was great and an interesting perspective to have. But we have to be careful with that and religion. We can talk about spirituality like Dr. Patel talked about similar to Deepak Chopra inspired concepts. Dr. Patel is a cardiologist but he’s talking about changing your ideas about health.”

The 2013 panels also included international photographer Monica Lozano who spoke about the misconceptions of life on the other side of the border, and her desire to show through photography there is beauty in darkness in Cuidad Juarez. Several other speakers were on hand, from Rosa Guerrero, Jim Ward and Dr. Richard Pineda.

Pineda, a professor at UTEP, spoke on identity: El Paso’s own identity and how others identify El Paso.

There is an intellectual hunger for ideas in El Paso. TEDx gives people a platform to express and empower others. It encourages you to engage in conversation after the talks and it’s so interesting to see what people talk about.”

Pineda explained that those not familiar with the TED series should go to the website (www.ted.com) and look up any topic they’d like to learn more about.

Cummings received more than 50 applications over the last two months through their website. Eight curators helped to narrow the field of speakers. “We actually do have a lot of applicants coming in focused on human rights situations which I think is very interesting and reflective of what’s going on, especially with all the shootings and questioning of civil rights in this country right now, so it’s naturally trending that way right now,” said Cummings. “We have to respect how it trends. We are not suppose to have a theme, but if [the] theme ends up being related to human rights somehow, even loosely, we are not going to stop that from happening. It’s reflective of the times. “

Once the speakers are chosen a team of volunteers, under the direction of volunteer Tyler Savage, groom them to the TED format. Cummings said the speakers have a time limit of up to 16 minutes to talk. “There is a formula to TED talks. Part of it is like an educational process. We don’t want to over formulate them and take their natural voice away, but there is a process.”

As TEDx El Paso is still perceived by some as a grassroots effort, its sustaining power in other parts of the world is substantial. “People are sort of enamored by it, there is a cult—a cult of TED. Actually there is a New York Times article that states there is a church of TED. So we go from this range where people in El Paso have never heard of it and you have to explain it to them and then you have those individuals that are complete fanatics—so that when they hear that this is going on in El Paso, they are amazed, which is nice. I think it’s great that El Paso can be on a global stage,” said Cummings.

Eric Pearson, president and CEO of the El Paso Community Foundation said the foundation sponsored TEDx El Paso 2013 and are honored to be a part of the 2015 series, “TEDx is a brand we like to be associated with and to be in a position of bringing people together and sharing ideas and showcase the brightest people in the community.” Pearson said the foundation provided $13,000 in funds in 2013, enabling the talks to come to fruition and believes the budget for 2015 will parallel that, “How can we make a difference? That’s important, the idea of ideas worth showing leave an open ended discussion to bridge the world.”

TED national has rules that limit the audience to 100 individuals and if the individual holding the license wants a larger audience, he/she must attend a national convention. “In order for the venue to grow I have to go to a national sponsored conference. Last year it was in Rio de Janeiro. These conventions can cost anywhere between $7,500 to $15,000 dollars.” In lieu of a larger local audience Pearson and Cummings both suggest locals watch the live streaming, with www.ted.com hosting the local forum as well. Pearson expects the videos to be loaded and available for viewing on the national TED website by June. The TEDx El Paso 2013 speakers received more than 115,000 views since they were posted online last year.

If you were not one of the 100 audience members chosen for the day of the talks, you can look for live streaming directions at Tedxelpaso.com. The 2013 speakers can be viewed on the Ted website and also through YouTube. [themify_icon icon=”fa-circle” icon_color=”#ec008b” ]

TEDx El Paso

The Art of an Uncaged Heart

Found in Translation

Transformative Performance

Intellectual Hunger