3-Week || From “Is this right?” to “Do I like it?”

A non-hierarchical, consent-based approach to art-making

with Mia (they/them)

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.

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.

Please note: Class recordings will be available to students who signed up before the program start date. The recordings will not be for sale after.

Is this program for you?

This program is both a personal, professional, and creative development course 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. It’s also great for collaborators to attend together! Contact me for a discount code for 20% off if you sign up with a collaborator.

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.

Devised theater is a non-hierarchical, collaborative form of theater-making that puts source material in conversation to create something larger than the sum of their parts.

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 or not I liked it hadn’t entered my consciousness.

This is a consent question. 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. Do you know what that is?” As it’s a pretty niche and obscure theater practice, 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 of this, I was listening to the latest Twin Shadow album and could hear an underlying concept throughout the whole record. A lightbulb went off: I had done a project over many years starting in 2017 where I wrote letters to my 16-year-old self everyday. I wanted to make a concept album using those letters.

So we began. I found mix CDs I’d made at 16 at my parents’ house and used the songs as source material for chord progressions, basslines, song structures, tone, mood, 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 to write. I was also working on a book (subsequently canceled — you can read Unsolicited Advice: A Consent Educator's (Canceled) Memoir on Substack) in which I used class materials, personal stories, and journal entries from a particular period of time to write a consent manifesto told in memoir.

As you can see, I’ve collaborated on new works with past versions of myself, artists in my life, and other artists who inspire me who I will likely never meet.

Specificity is a creative muscle.

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 with 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. You can also see my ceramics inspired by Agnes Martin and Nicolas de Stael.

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 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

Consent and boundary knowledge can help you find ever more nuance and subtlety in your communication. It gives more options, expands structure, and opens up space for creativity. My background as a consent educator informs the foundation of this program.

Read what people are saying about my classes.

Payment + Pricing

This course is $499. Early bird pricing at $399 is available through March 28. A payment plan is available to pay in two installments, 3 weeks apart.

Get a discount by registering for the bundle option with this class + Unblocked Again: Cancel Culture Edition (March 3–April 14).

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.