Welcome To the Playground
Careful. We Artists Can Be Dangerous! And Healing.
Hello there!
Is this your first time here? Oh, you're not familiar with my arts and adventures? Well, come on in! And you--hi! You followed my breadcrumbs over here? Shweeeet. Please do NOT keep your hands and faces inside the vehicle, but do be aware of the dangers inherent in waving them about in the wind. Also dangerous: tinkering with my toys.
Why?
Because they're artsy. Don't you know that artists can be dangerous? Especially those of us who mix mediums, color outside the lines, muck about in unconventional ways, randomly color inside the lines just to be anal-retentive and show that we can, then go and splatter a bunch of stuff against the wall--stuff, I might add, that is customarily NOT splattered at the same time--just to see what sticks.
Or what falls on the floor and can be smeared around with bare feet. Because it's fun.
(Safety gear may be recommended for that.)
Artists are particularly dangerous when we spill outrageous sentiments across our pages, stages, or canvases, because art has the power to communicate on a deeper, more instinctual level than lectures or articles.1 Why do you think certain regimes like to ban, censor, exile and execute us? (While adopting the brilliance of our techniques for their own regimented purposes.)2
“Art speaks where words are unable to explain.”
~Threadless Artist Mathiole
“Words cannot always do the work we need them to.
Music is there for when words fail us.”
~Kvothe from The Wise Man's Fear by Patrick Rothfuss
INTRO TO MY ARTS
Under my stage name, Isidora Hart, I am most well-known in dance. Apparently I am most notorious in writing.
Okay, I'm also notorious in dance because I've never been able to make myself do it "right," even though I started out desperately wanting to. But I lived in a rural place and fell in love with a dance style that I could barely find any information about for many years.
The style: belly dance.
The location: northern Minnesota.
Yeahhhh, not much belly dance up there in the conservative north woods, but in all my nineteen years and a lifelong devotion to dance, including a college degree, no other style had ever entranced my heart and exploded open my mind and movement like that. I was instantly obsessed. So I found myself tossed into Fusion Arts by necessity, not by choice.
Now Fusion is absolutely my preference and my passion, as well as my thirty-year profession.
Unfortunately (fortunately?) for my dreams of being a belly dancer who was "proper, authentic, genuine"...ahem...I had bigger, more driving dreams of being a Warrior Woman. When I discovered Medieval armored combat at twenty-two, that altered my dancing forever.3
It altered my writing, too.
I don't "do it right" in any of my arts any more than I do in dance. In writing I blend genres that are considered by many to be mortal enemies. Fantasy fiction and high-heat sex? Noooo! Soul-searching, gore, and kinky erotica all in the same novel? We can't have that! Fist-raised, froth-mouthed social activism with a childlike awe of life's mysteries? Off with her head!
The moment I started sharing my blog about surviving a drunk driver and other acts of violence, I found myself shadow-banned on Facebook after many years of using it for pretty-pretty dance and pretty-pretty nature. The exact same thing happened when I did a year-long experiment on Instagram, just to see if the FB timing had been coincidence. Nope. It took five posts.
BOOM. Booted from IG with no warning.
Considering how I feel about a lot of social media, I kinda considered that a compliment.
So now I play in my own little sandbox with my handful of friends. I run creative experiments and twist my mustaches in the artsy laboratory. I wander the woods in search of wonder.
(If alliteration drives you bonkers, this is not the place for you. Blame Dain Bramage. My brain had to jerry-rig the communication center of my bashed left side. Amidst my recovery, I had to rely on visual imagery for vocabulary recall, and I suddenly couldn't stop rhyming or writing in cadences to save my life. I still have to make myself NOT do it.)4
We do a lot of jerry-rigging around here. We have to.
And we like to.
ELEMENTAL ALCHEMY - CREATION & INNOVATION
Once upon a time I got overwhelmed. I couldn't maintain all my weekly local dance classes while also touring internationally on TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury), so I had to find a way to bridge the gap between monkey-see-monkey-do basic technique vs. teaching my students the deeper arts of Dance with a capital D. I'd always done this by delivering a wide variety of choreographies, then putting it all together in guided exercises for learning how to make their own dances. But once I had to switch to workshops and short, sporadic class series between travel gigs, I had no idea how to convey all this...this...
What I Do as a dancer.
So in 2010, the Dance of Elemental Alchemy was born. It is a combination of 5 Elements in East-West Fusion:
EARTH
AIR
FIRE
WATER
METAL
ALCHEMY - the fusion of all 5
The main styles of the dance correspond to these Elements:
BELLY DANCE
ECSTATIC DANCE
SPANISH & INDIAN FLARE (that's the fiery version of flair) 🤓
MODERN DANCE
MARTIAL MOVEMENT
ALCHEMY - the fusion that is My Dance
Oh, you're an audio/visual/kinesthetic person, too? Here ya go:
Around 2015, this dance teaching system spawned something inside me. It was huge. It was overwhelming. (Still is.) I didn't know what to do with it for a long time. Half the time, I still don't. That's why I'm doing a bunch of platform experiments right now. I'm searching for a way to organize, distill, and communicate--not just What I Do as a dancer, but What I Do as an innovative creative.
Okay, I'm trying to organize, distill and communicate this stuff in any way that anybody outside my head can possibly digest.
Because this System is also my means of organizing and plotting out What I Do as a neurodivergent HSP, healing numerous bodily injuries, TBI, memory loss, and C-PTSD through a variety of modalities.
While driving home through the autumn foliage one morning, the Muse chuckled at me and whapped me upside the head. Like She does. "You already have the vehicle," She told me. "You just need to use it for all your arts, not just dance. You need to use it for your whole life."
Thus was The System born. I call it this because, when I tried to map out what She had shown me into a circle graph, it wound up looking like a huge solar system with a bunch of planets, moons, and asteroids spinning around.
At its barest bones it is:
EARTH: Domain of the Body; Realm of Dance
AIR: Domain of the Spirit; Realm of Magic, Music & Muse
FIRE: Domain of the Heart; Realm of Passion & Emotion
WATER: Domain of the Mind; Realm of Story & Meditation
METAL: Domain of the Persona; Realm of Martial Movements & Mindset
ALCHEMY - Domain of Being; Realm of the Life Cycle
So what does all that mean?!?!
Explaining that and playing with it is why I made this publication.
HARTEBEAST
Pronounced "heart...a beast." Because my mom and I are punny gals. Wut? My last name is Hart, I'm a martial artist, and one of my nicknames is Bella. Another one is The Beastie. So it's not a wildebeest…it's not a hartebeest…it's the HarteBeast. Badum-tssss!
Seriously. If you don't like geeky, nerdy, dorky humor, this is not the place for you. If you do, come gnork out with me!
THE LINKS
Where can you find my arts?
✨ I’m going all-in on Substack, migrating all my stuff here from a variety of platforms. This Stack, TINKERINGS OF AN ELEMENTAL ALCHEMIST, is where I’ll share my Elements System, including how it was developed, the history of my most inspirational Muses and mentors, my general creative process, and yes, those pretty-pretty art & nature adventures. Sections you can opt in and out of receiving notifications for are:
The System - tools & toys of my Elements System
DanceStory - my dance memoirs & greatest dance influences
Hyperfixator’s Haven - my most obsessive creative rabbit holes
Art & Nature - ooooh, shiny!
✨ BELLA & THE BEAST SUBSTACK - my Damsel To Dangerous Tales, including my writing about drunk drivers, TBI, neurodivergence, and the touchy topics that inspired me to take up martial arts. Be warned: my memoirs are sometimes NSFW. So is the fiction I plan to post on B&B, hence why the separate Stack. Ye be warned: There Be Beasties Over Yonder!
In my best Hermione Granger voice - For example:
✨ TWISTED HISTORY & MYTH SUBSTACK - Where I’ll be migrating my fantasy fiction. Also can get NSFW.
✨ IZZY DANCER YOUTUBE - my original belly dance fusion channel from my stage performing days.
✨ HARTEBEAST YOUTUBE - Dance of Elemental Alchemy, arts & innovation, nature & creation, videos & vlogging to accompany my blogging.
✨ WORK IN PROGRESS GALLERIES - real-time shenanigans & updates on the stuff I'm currently creating.
Once the setup of my Substack-triad is completed (enough) and we can really get this party started, I’ll share those work-in-progress updates as well as other fun stuff here:
So there you have it. Welcome to my playground. Let's have some fun together!
Oh, yeah. If you're familiar with my writing then you already know that the end of a post is almost always guaranteed to introduce you to my obsessions--I mean, my favorite music, movies, shows, books, and fellow artsy creators. Enjoy!
© 2023 Hartebeast
A couple examples of bypassing resistance to a deep message by expressing it through art—and how this gets artists labeled “dangerous”. There are countless others.
Banished “Witches” sing of their pain - and their dreams. "Music has a great power," Umuhoza Delli says. "People will listen to messages in songs they would never tolerate otherwise."
A few examples of what happens to “dangerous” and “degenerate” art and artists…unfortunately there are countless other examples of these, too.
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