About Dancing Octopus
Dancing Octopus Health & Media strives to create media that helps makes things better.
In many traditional cultures, storytelling is a form of “medicine”, something that restores balance within one’s self, among one’s tribe, or between people and the environment. Dancing Octopus seeks to explore and share this concept of “story as medicine”.
Dancing Octopus also participates in digital storytelling education.
Dancing Octopus gives youth and adults the inner tools and technical skills they need to construct their own media and to deconstruct the media around us.
WHY Dancing Octopus
We live in a hyper-mediated world. So many sounds and images, like the world we live in, move too fast, focus on violence, and portray regressive representations of race, class and gender.
Art—and commerce—reflect life, and the human condition is rarely “politically correct”. Dancing Octopus does not seek to label challenging media as “good” or “bad”, but rather suggests that a steady diet of certain flavors of media and only such media can eventually feel toxic. It can elevate stress levels, effect self-esteem and reinforce stereotypes that reduce our sensitivity to one another’s humanity.
Dancing Octopus poses the questions: If media can become toxic sensory overload, can media also be used to create a healing effect on the body, the heart, the mind, and in communities? If so, what does that media look and sound like? How can we add more voices to the mix? And how can we bring out those stories buried in our diverse selves?
While the written and spoken word, dance, theatre and art are still powerful means of storytelling, today we have more tools than ever to express ourselves in innovative ways. Digital photography, video, collaging, the web, text messaging, game engines, locative media, projection and augmented reality are all becoming more accessible to users. Imagine what tomorrow will bring.
Dancing Octopus invites you to open up, DIVE IN and find your stories. Then learn how to communicate them. SEE: SERVICES/WHAT WE OFFER.