Name: Trance and Creativity with Sean Negus
Start: 2024-07-31T19:00:00-07:00
End: 2024-07-31T21:00:00-07:00
Location: The Alembic

Trance is a natural yet altered state that sublimates the ordinary mind, giving access to the subconscious. Through this approach, the matrix of creativity can be accessed and channeled — the same source that poets, artists, and psychonauts have explored through their works and experiences. This workshop offers participants the chance to learn about, engage, and experiment with the intersection of 'trance' and creativity. We will begin by exploring representative works by artists and writers who worked with trance, before a doing a series of practices that lead into light hypnotic states from which we make contact with the creative contents of our own subconscious minds. We will then be using a variety of means to translate these creative findings into expressive form, such as writing or art.
Sean Negus is an artist who works in the expanded field of poetics. In addition to his book "Hurrican Music," a book of poems published bilingually in Portuguese and English, Sean has also published an artist book in limited edition, "Congeries". As a translator and editor of contemporary Brazilian and Portuguese poetry he has edited the ongoing Saccades as well as DUSIE 21. A professor in Writing & Literature and also Critical Studies at both California College of the Arts and Santa Clara University, Sean's recent inquiry into archival poetics has been exhibited in publications by the Goethe-Institut and Tasaworat Collective. Sean is currently in training to become a certified hypnotherapist, and has been steeping in emptiness and attuning to the oracular for a good while.