100 thousand praises

February 29, 2024 was a leap-day. This date’s an invitation to a social reflection on praise.

As a rough orientation – praise is maybe: a return of language to its source… A response to creation that leads in grateful overload to spill; a letting go that leads to decreation. Our hands take a gift, we empty our hands (our language) in imitation.

For what, in these times of urgency and high need, will we let go and look out? Judith Butler describes the ground of our formation as the progressive questions – Who are you, and what are we becoming? (So different from “I think therefore I am.”)

How may we break open our media through ecstasies of generosity, spurred by generous encounters? Can we reflect together on our “you” and on the hope (often hard, often lined with challenge) of our becoming?

A use of this gathering: we work art (make changes) to celebrate and cause susceptibility to change. If we are falling, we can teach and learn a falling forward, toward each other, toward what we have in common. Disasters of conflict and expiration can be drawn up into an evolutionary ecology?

A thousand artists commit to generating a hundred artistic gestures each, on the theme of praise, over the course of the nearly-year ahead.

These gestures can be microscopic (a five-word play), a physical move somehow notated or recorded, a few lines of a song, a sketch… A poem of a hundred words? A prose piece of a hundred reflections? A drawing made with a hundred strokes? A hundred breaths on an ice shelf?

Celebrated in February in a live and virtual gathering at La Mama, NYC.