This correlates with what I know about teams, and about making theatre.
TECHNICIANS OF ECSTASY
Religious historian Mircea Eliade referred to shamans as "technicians of ecstasy," and that's exactly what San Francisco's Grateful Dead were, on a grand scale.
I'D NEVER SEEN SO MUCH JOY IN MY LIFE
You'd thought you were in it by yourself, blessed with a private experience, but the Dead proved you wrong. If heaven were a dance party, this would be it -- I'd never seen so much joy in my life, surging up though people. It just made you want to move toward others. Joy out in the middle, between everything, that no one could own, but that was there for everyone -- there to catch and twist and chase breathless.
YOU CAN FEEL THE ENERGY ROARING OFF THEM
"What posesses our audience, I can never know," drummer Mickey Hart writes in Drumming On The Edge Of Magic. "But I feel its effects. From the stage you can feel it happening -- group mind, entrainment, find your own word for it -- when they lock up you can feel it; you can feel the energy roaring off them."
JUMP INTO THE CENTER, EXTENDED AND VULNERABLE
What was the secret of that magic identity we all took part in, that thrilling, almost unbearable loss of control? Usually, the thought of losing control is terrifying. But the Dead made it easy to jump into the center, extended and vulnerable. They played and our attention leapt away from ourselves; there was a whole world there to meet, to encounter.
IMPROVISING ALL TOGETHER, ALL AT THE SAME TIME
Instead of sticking to individual solos over background accompaniment, like most rock bands of the day, they took the lessons of John Coltrane and free jazz to heart, improvising all together, all at the same time. To do that successfully, they had to listen intently to each other; each individual responding spontaneously to the movement of the whole.
NO IDEA WHERE THEY WERE GOING BUT INTENDING TO GO THERE TOGETHER
And it was while jamming this way -- having no idea where they were going but intending to go there together -- that they stumbled upon the fantastic sense of a creative intelligence far greater than themselves as individuals, an intelligence that enveloped the group.
A FLOW OF ITS OWN
When it was really happening, lead guitarist Jerry Garcia remembered the music "had the effect of surprising me with a flow of its own." When it was really happening, they flew as one. "Those hookups are like living things," bassist Phil Lesh said. "Like cells in the body of this organism. That seems to be the transformation taking place in human beings. To learn to be cells as well as individuals. Not just cells in society, but cells in a living organism."
WE EXIST BY THEIR GRACE
"The audience is as much the band as the band is the audience," drummer Bill Kreutzmann said. "There is no difference. The audience should be paid -- they contribute as much." Even more surprising is the fact that the musicians themselves couldn't enter that space without others there to listen. Jerry confessed that he'd "never experienced the click of great music without an audience...We exist by their grace."
BE A CONSCIOUS TOOL OF THE UNIVERSE
Jerry described it this way, in a 1972 article with Rolling Stone: "To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe... When you break down old orders and the old forms and leave them broken and shattered, you suddenly find yourself in a new space with new form and new order which are more like the way it is. More like the flow. And we just found ourselves in that place. We never decided on it, we never thought it out. None of it. This is a thing that we've observed in the scientific method. We've watched what happens."
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