Berkshire Bohemia: The Art of Collective Expression
The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress...
The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression. “Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and DANCE... There is no ‘point’ to it-no religious overtones, ideological message- just the chance,to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration. Excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich, “Dancing in the Streets: