April 3-week:
From “Is this right?”
to “Do I like it?”
A non-hierarchical, consent-based approach to art-making
VIRTUAL: Mondays + Thursdays, April 28–May 15, 5–7pm PT / 8–10pm ET. For students who can’t attend class live, there will be optional sessions Tuesdays May 7 and 21, 10–11:30am PT / 1–2:30pm ET so you can still participate in exercises live.
Please note: If and only if I have to be on set and need to reschedule, makeup classes will be on Sundays noon–2pm PT / 3–5pm ET. Class recordings will be available to students who signed up before the program start date. The recordings will not be for sale after.
“I can’t summon connection down from the ether and expect it to land in my lap. But I can do everything in my power to create a welcoming environment for it when it does decide to show up.”
Who is this program for?
This is a personal, professional, and creative development program for artists of all kinds: musicians, creatives, writers, dancers, photographers, choreographers, directors, designers. It’s for people looking to deepen or return to their creative practice and for those looking to embark on one for the first time. It’s for anyone who wants to better understand or find their own voice and find more confidence in authentic self-expression.
If the idea of creating something out of nothing is daunting to you, this method can be really generative and inspiring. I know it was for me. Devised theater as an approach to making art in any and all mediums provides me with creative constraints that support—not detract from or constrict—the artistic process.
If you:
are looking for structure
are hoping to return to an artistic practice after burnout
want boundaries to contain your artistic practice
want tools to create freely, playfully
feel pressure around making art and want to loosen up
want to create something new but don’t know where to start
are stuck in the middle of a project and don’t know where to go
abandoned a project and want to pick it back up
have never made art and want to start
find it intimidating to create something out of nothing
this class will provide practical tools, exercises, and assignments to get you out of your head, into your body, and surrender to the creative process.
This class is also great for collaborators to attend together! Contact me for a discount code for 20% off if you sign up with a collaborator.
A sculptural series I created through the process we’ll be working with in “Is this right?”:
Devised theater is a non-hierarchical, collaborative form of theater-making that puts source materials in conversation to create something larger than the sum of their parts.
Why i made this class:
When I was taking guitar lessons in 2020 over Zoom, my teacher asked me which song I wanted to learn next. I told her I wanted to learn the Miley Cyrus song “Angels Like You.” We looked up the chords and I played them. My teacher said, “Okay, now play them in reverse.” I did. “No, play them major, minor, major, minor.” I did. Then, “Now minor, major, minor, major.” I did. She asked a life-altering question: “Which do you like best?”
Which do I like best? I’d never considered it before. I was too preoccupied with whether art was right or wrong, good or bad. Whether I liked it hadn’t entered my consciousness.
When we move from “Is this right?” and “Is this good?” to “Do I like this?” and “How does this make me feel?” we begin to know ourselves, find our desires, and express ourselves authentically.
I told my teacher, “This sounds kind of like devised theater.” Devised theater is a pretty niche and obscure theater practice, so I was surprised to hear her respond, “I actually have an MFA in devised theater from the only university in the world that offers it.” No way!!! Yes, way.
After that, our lessons changed. She brought in a picture of Tilda Swinton lighting a cigarette and asked me to create the sound of the lighter on the guitar. She asked me what sound a color made, what sound Tilda’s inhale made. We wrote a song that way. After a few weeks, I could listen to the latest Twin Shadow album and hear an underlying concept throughout the whole record. A lightbulb went on: I had done a project over many years, starting in 2017, where I wrote letters to my 16-year-old self every day. I wanted to make a concept album using those letters.
So we began. I found mix CDs I’d made at my parents’ house when I was 16 and used the songs as source material for chord progressions, basslines, song structures, tones, moods, guitar pedals. I used the letters to write lyrics. Thus my EP Costumes was born.
In 2023, I began working on a musical. I used songs from the EP and journal entries from the summer before. I was also working on a book (subsequently canceled; you can read read it on Substack) in which I used class materials, personal stories, and journal entries to write a consent manifesto told in memoir.
This process has allowed me to collaborate on new works with past versions of myself, artists in my life, and other artists who I will likely never meet.
“For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.”
How does this apply to my art?
Applying these principles to other mediums can look like:
Collage
Quilting
Music sampling
Using painters’ styles to create glaze styles for ceramics
Putting great thinkers into conversation with each other
Setting a script in a different time, or in the style of a different writer or director
Replicating a photograph using food
Taking an old piece of your own work and putting your current self in dialogue with it
Inverting, flipping over, doing it backwards
Finger picking instead of strumming, capoing it…
Sculpting a movie
Painting a song
Doing it slower, or faster
Making the whole thing red
Turning a spoken interview into a dance
This approach is collaborative. You can collaborate with:
Other people you know
Other people you don’t know
Yourself
Past selves
Future selves
Works of art in other mediums
You can find examples of other works I’ve done using this approach in sculpture and performance here: The Evidence of Her Limitations: For Carolee Schneemann, tEoHL: For Home, Homage to Sarah Kane, and my ceramics inspired by Agnes Martin and Nicolas de Stael.
“A creative connection brings a person closer to themselves when they have started to drift.”
What will we be doing?
We will meet virtually, twice a week for 3 weeks: Mondays + Thursdays, April 28–May 15, 5–7pm PST / 8–10pm EST. For students who can’t attend class live, there will be optional sessions Tuesdays May 7 and 21, 10–11:30am PT / 1–2:30pm ET so you can still participate in exercises live. If and only if I have to be on set and need to reschedule, makeup classes will be on Sundays noon–2pm PST / 3–5pm EST.
Mondays will start with a practice exercise, followed by a combination of lecture and breakout-room discussions. Thursdays will be work shares. 6–8 people each week will share what they’ve been working on with the class.
This is a hybrid live and recorded class. You’ll receive recordings of my classes Practice Saying No and Nonverbals (a $150 value) before we begin. You’ll also receive my Unblocked workbook, which will serve as a nice companion to this class. If you haven’t taken a class with me yet, please watch my free class What is consent? before we begin.
Class topics include:
Class 1: Creative constraints are a blessing: Picking your source material
What is speaking to you?
What do you notice that no one else notices?
Finding meaning in the relationships between sources
Collective consciousness: Whose work is it, anyway?
Discuss citation, differentiate between homage/borrowing/stealing, and find your own values around inspiration vs appropriation.
Class 2: Share your work
The class will reflect back to you what they see you noticing, what’s of interest to you.
You’ll get to share your source materials and the process you used to put them in conversation with each other.
You can ask other students what they’re seeing and feeling, or anything about their experience of your work
Students will ask you questions about your piece (if you want—consent!).
No critical feedback!! Woohoo!!
Class 3: Creating containers: What’s allowed in and out of you
Letting go of what you can’t control
Fears around feedback and scrutiny
Gauging and managing your capacity in creating art
Who is your audience? Who’s not? (Maybe it’s just you.)
Boundaries with your art
Your relationship with your artistic practice: Goodbye codependency with your art!
Moving from “Is it good” to “Do I like it?”
Class 4: Share your work
Class 5: How do you know when you’re done? Editing, sculpting, pruning
Using relevant external constraints to give you a clear “I’m done!”
Time as a piece of source material
Stepping back and looking at the piece as a whole within a context
Stepping back even further and looking at each piece within your entire body of work
What even is your body of work? What are the bounds of it?
Class 6: Share your work
Specificity is a creative muscle.
Payment + Pricing
This course is $299. Early bird pricing at $199 is available through March 28. A payment plan is available to pay in two installments, 3 weeks apart.
Save $100 or more when you bundle this class + Unblocked Again: Cancel Culture Edition (May 26–June 16).
You can read more testimonials here.
You can read about why my prices are what they are on my Business + Financial Transparency page. If this is cost-prohibitive, you are always welcome to make me an offer, especially if you are in a country where the exchange rate makes this class financially inaccessible.
Have questions?
Email me!
Register
HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING:
“Learning about consent has given me a lot of structure to work with. And in that way, has made a lot of my interactions more restful, and less anxious because I have some kind of framework to lean on where I can build a request, and I’m not inventing the language, and I’m not inventing the structure....I think the thing that’s most exciting thing that I’ve gotten from this work was something that I didn’t anticipate at all, which is food for creativity.”
“Mia is a patient and generous educator. The way they conceptualize consent is so rich and nuanced that, once you’ve encountered it, going back to a binary or reductive approach is inconceivable. It’s nothing short of a revelation. In this course, I found myself connecting with others around obstacles to creativity, and in so doing, I experienced increased lightness and ease around being creative. My expectations were met and exceeded as I found discussions on people pleasing, the inner critic, and perfectionism facilitated more comfort and confidence in my own creative aspirations and projects. The exercises, journalling prompts, and discussions enriched my creative practices and sparked self-reflection. For me, there is immense value in engaging with this approach to consent—for creativity and beyond—and I enthusiastically recommend it to anyone.”