Dancing in the Ashes

When the lives and worlds we planned for fall apart, how do we keep moving with grace and curiosity? Dancing in the Ashes is ten’s biannual grassroots fundraising campaign, born from the literal fire that transformed Liquid Cartographies — our long-awaited seasonal festival in Red Hook, Brooklyn — into an emergent celebration of the magic in the minor and of the power of community solidarity and reciprocity.  Since our inception, The Emergence Network has been asking the question: are the ways we’re currently responding to the crises of our times part of those very crises? After a decade of inquiring, we can pretty assuredly say, “Yes. Many times we feed the overculture even in our attempts to fix intractable problems, catalyze social change, or attain some ultimate sense of peace or justice.” Our first in-person seasonal festival offered us a powerful opportunity to find out what’s on the other side of that question. We practiced living emergence in a situation that was devastatingly disappointing and simultaneously full of creative place-based experiments to support people to perceive commonly-held concepts differently. As we hospice one cycle of our work and compost what’s ready to decompose, we’re also nurturing the seeds of what wants to emerge next. 

This season, we invite you to support us in staying open to joy, experimentation, and renewal — learning to dance, together, in the ashes of what was and the questions of what might be.