Joining Heaven and Earth in Rocky Mountain Spring

Joint Performance of 6 Japanese artforms Ikebana, Enso Calligraphy, Haiku, Shakuhachi (Japanese Bamboo Flute), Ryuteki (Dragon Flute), Dance 

We invite sponsors to join us at the opening event by purchasing a sponsor ticket the suggested amount is $75 or more. Thank you for your support.

• There will be a contemplative art offering/Ginza in an adjacent studio.

Artists

Ilse Beunen | Ikebana 

The ancient Japanese art form, ikebana, reconnects you to nature and to yourself; it brings you into the moment while your creativity gives flowers and branches a second life.  Ilse's mission is to inspire, educate, and empower people to connect with nature and express themselves through the creative art of ikebana, thereby facilitating a deeper understanding of self and the world around us.

Ilse studied landscape design in Belgium. Her Sogetsu ikebana career began when she moved to Japan in 1989 for 11 years. She became a teacher in 1997 and opened her Antwerp studio in 2000 upon her return to Belgium.   She has her 1st-grade Jonin-Somu teaching certificate and received the 90th Anniversary Commemorative Overseas Akane Teshigahara award. She is known for her weekly newsletters, amazing teaching videos online, and ikebana books. 

Janine Ibbotson | Enso: Contemplative Brush 

Janine Ibbotson is an artist and meditation practitioner who draws the Enso Circle as a form of contemplative practice. As a contemplative artist, Ibbotson's goal is to let a spontaneous creative force work through her as she holds the brush with focus. Besides sumi ink and rice paper, essential elements of her art are awareness, concentration, and an open heart and mind. 

The Enso Circle represents many things, including balance, elegance, awakening, everything, and nothing (Mu). It is the symbol of the spiritual goal of a lifetime as well as of this moment, right here now. Ibbotson is a former Naropa University staff member who had the pleasure to study the brush arts with faculty members Marlow Brooks and Keith Kumasen Abbott, with Chinese Brush Painting Master, Henry Li, and with Japanese Calligraphy Master, Kazuaki Tanahashi. She lives and paints in Boulder, CO.

James Wagner | Ryuteki - Dragon Flute

Jim Wagner studied theater at the University of Alaska, Anchorage in the mid 1970s. In 1982 he began studying bugaku with Arawana Hayashi, a dancer and choreographer in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Meeting Suenobu Togi Sensei in 1986, he began to practice the ryuteki (dragon flute). In 1991 he settled in Montréal, Québec to live with his wife and start a career as an art director for several trade magazines.

He is currently working as a freelance web designer/photo-videographer.

Gagaku—the music and dance of the Japanese Imperial Court—remains for him a profound and brilliant means of offering heart and mind to the world.

Wendell Beavers | Space made Visible

"Reaching the ecstatic through subtle travails of the flesh...." Village Voice

"movement artist" is a name associated with Wendell Beavers while consciously moving or not moving in space and time since 1976 when he abandoned words that make sense as a medium for expressing being through form. Since then he has moved with many other artists, famous and infamous.

As Wendell Beavers he founded the MFA Theater Contemporary Performance Program at Naropa (2004-2020), previously teaching and occasionally directing NYU's Experimental Theater Wing (ETW) from 1978-2003. He was a founding artist and director of Movement Research in NYC (1979-present) and continues to teach and support art and artists who strive to be and share truth and beauty without hope or fear. His most recent guest faculty positions and residencies include MIT, The Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Concordia University (Montreal), Nine Years Theater (Singapore) and a "Morning Class" installation MoMA(NY).

Mark Miller | Shakuhachi Japanese bamboo flute

Mark Miller is a Grammy-nominated woodwind specialist and Emeritus Professor of Music at Naropa University. He has toured and recorded with a wide variety of jazz and pop artists including Art Lande, Paul McCandless, Valerie Carter, Tuck and Patti, David Darling, R. Carlos Nakai, Nawang Khechog, and poets Anne Waldman and Allen Ginsberg. His recordings include World Without Cars, named a top ten album of the year by Cadence magazine, and eight albums with pianist Peter Kater including Illumination, nominated for a Grammy award in 2013. Mark is author (with Art Lande) of the book Being Music: The Art of Open Improvisation from University Professors Press.

Gary Allen | Haiku Poet

Gary Allen has practiced meditation for more than forty years.  He’s taught meditation programs around the United States, in Canada, and in South Korea.  He is the Education Director of the Mindfulness Peace Project that does programming for prisoners and veterans.  He’s taught Buddhism to prison inmates since 1990.  He conducts mindfulness programs for military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.  He’s authored secular mindfulness books for inmates (Discovering Sanity) and for veterans (Warrior’s Heart).  He has two degrees in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, and has published five books of poetry, most recently Transmigration Suite.  He’s been working for the past 15 years on a four volume book on Indian tantric master Tilopa and the origination and practice of Vajrayana.  

Alexandra Shenpen | Ph.D, appointed master instructor, a Kalapa Court artist of Shambhala & a Sogetsu Riji

Alexandra has been a student of Kalapa Ikebana & Sogetsu Ryu for over 35 years, teaching since the mid 90's.  Shenpen Sensei also enjoys the study of chado, shodo (tea & brush), bugaku (imperial court dance of Japan & watercolour painting. Faculty at Naropa University since the late '80s & local chair of KIS Colorado, she is expanding & developing the activities, culture, & presence of KIS through events, demos, teaching & arrangements in community venues.

She is active privately, publicly, in meditation centers wherever wished, developing hybrid skills for teaching in her atelier - Juniper Ocean Studios, empowering others in the creative process & sharing contemplative arts.  She is currently working on a 5 volume series entitled A Raindrop in the Ocean, a guide to the creative process & ikebana/kado.

SCHEDULE

02:00 PM: Arrival, Mingling, and viewing in the pop-art gallery

03:00 PM: The improvisation starts

The whole event will be photographed by Ben Huybrechts, Ikebana photographer from Belgium.  

Event Organized by Kalapa Ikebana Society - joining heaven and earth restores the life-giving spark between human and nature.

"If as artists, we never give up, we can have an effect on the rest of the world."

—-Chogyam Trungpa,founder of Kalapa Ikebana (Society)

Organiser:   Alexandra Shenpen, Kalapa Ikebana Society, ashenpen@gmail.com