Dessert Stomach

(A series of short and sweet stories)

Written April 2024 by Madison Falconer

In a time of intense over stimulation, more access than ever before, information fills us up, the main meal of our days.

Art is the dessert of life; providing interest, excitement, inspiration, nuance. It may not be necessary for survival but it is vital for a complete life.

Every six year old knows, there is always room for dessert.

The dessert stomach opens not for a title of treat but rather responds to variation of sensory stimuli. Sensory-specific satiety is the phenomenon that explains why the more you consume of the same kind, the less interesting it becomes. Stimulating a new sense invites new interest. This is why art is imperative for the continued interest, compassion, and willingness to consume. Art stimulates our different senses, developing a varied perception of life.

Ideas are like cookies, Creativity is PIIE

Ideas are like cookies, best enjoyed fresh. The longer they sit, while oftentimes more certain, they’re also more rigid. Rigidity is hard to consume. 

To preserve, we document by writing down the recipe and use it as a launch point for fresh cookies. New iterations for specific contexts. But, even the same recipe in a different kitchen, will result in a new experience. Consider, the way we document the recipe is not the way we value the experience of the cookie. When someone says they "really want a cookie” we wouldn't hand them a recipe.

Dance is a living creative capture of time. This ephemerality is its beauty and also why it is one of the more difficult forms to build protection around. It is documented through mediums that remove it from its context. Creativity in context is important. In other words, it takes about 7 minutes to transform cookie dough into cookie, but the process to create a cookie is far more significant than those 7 minutes.

To understand the nuance of a cookie, let’s indulge in PIIEE. One slice of the alphabet for each of the five stages of creativity as outlined by Graham Wallis back in 1926. As you can imagine, lots of fresh iterations have emerged since then—this is the iterative nature of recipe making—but the concept remains, it is still pie, or rather, PIIE: Preparation, Incubation, Inspiration, Evaluation, and Elaboration. 

Preparation is the subtle anticipation phase. Whiffs of the ice cream shop, Great British Bake Off, a Harry Styles Watermelon Sugar high... and now I want something sweet. I clean my kitchen as I think about how I am going to address that craving.

Incubation, this is absorbing and processing. I want a cookie. What kind of cookie? I'll look up recipes, look in the cupboard, maybe I’ll just go on a walk.

Inspiration, the eureka. Oatmeal chocolate chip, recipe from my dad, I need more than a cookie I need the comfort of home. 

After inspiration I gather ingredients from the store and head into the evaluation phase.

Evaluation is the recipe testing. In a choreographic context these are the rehearsals and sometimes the performances. This is the assembly of ingredients, the chilling of the cookie dough, and oven time, 7-11 minutes. (In most cases, artists only get compensated only for those 7-11 minutes.)

Elaboration is the final phase; it is the editing, iterations after some bakes. For my dads cookies, I added less flour, brown sugar instead of white, swap semi-sweet for dark chocolate, and then double it because I am addicted to chocolate. But one habit around cookies that I will never change is that I only bake how many I need, then I keep the rest of the dough in the fridge, so that my cookies are always baked fresh. 

Cookies are like ideas, best enjoyed fresh. Kept sacred through their recipes. Reviewed and exchanged, edited for preferences. Valued in context to the experience.

Always gone in just a few moments. 

When it comes to contracts, credit and communication of ephemeral work, this change must start with the way we perceive the world as a space for creative exchange.  Acknowledgement and appreciation of the many ways of communicating and researching beyond words and numbers. Both of which need space. This is not about trading out space for art to take up, its not about compromise, its about collaboration, enhancement, awareness of how we research and develop ideas from an early age. No matter how much information we consume, there is always room for dessert. 

Saturday’s Birthday Cake

My Dad baked cookies often, but he never bought “sugary” cereal.

Most of my mornings were kissed with smooth jif on extra toasted whole wheat sandwich bread.

A convenient morning routine:

Four slices. Two to tan in the toaster while I ‘double stuff’ peanut butter between the other soft slices for my lunch that day– baggy. POP! Same knife. Same jar. Two pieces of extra bronzed bread, diagonal cut– breakfast. Conveniently redundant. 

When I got a hold of pancakes, my world was rocked.

Dad made pancakes on the weekends. I knew pancakes as Saturday's birthday cake, an extra special way to acknowledge the weekend. Why else would we be eating cake for breakfast? 

“Breakfast is the most important meal,” I was told. It sets you up for success, opening your appetite for the new day. There is some nutritional validity to this argument; in its simplest truth, the primary macronutrient of the first thing one eats in the day persuades the brain and body what to seek for its first source of energy throughout the day. Not necessarily what you will crave, but rather, how your body perceives the information it receives from the food. How it metabolizes and makes sense of what we consume. 

So pancakes were the first thing I learned to cook because I couldn’t wait 

5, 

4, 

3, 

2,

 even 1 more day until the weekend. 

On Saturdays, I paired them with maple syrup (the fake kind in the lady bottle). 

On school days, I ate them with peanut butter. After all, pancakes are a far superior vehicle than my sandwich bread. Pancakes and peanut butter was my way of eating dessert for breakfast in a way that still supported my understanding of a healthy start to my day. 

When art is integrated early into education, children are prompted to perceive, understand, and communicate through an artistic lens. Supporting this practice of initiating informative decisions on a multi-sensory and creative foundation breaks the barrier of redundancy and opens up our dessert stomach. This early practice supports the resiliency of creativity helping to build creative problem solving skills, social emotional development, and compassionate curiosity.

The inevitable infiltration of dessert into all times of day indicates the need for creative innovation in all aspects of life. Without stimulating different senses, and approaching recurring information with an alternative lens, we lose our appetite, work gets stale, and we starve. 

Pancakes are delicious on their own, but peanut butter makes it a sustainable and intentional breakfast. The integration of this early artistic education must be based on information of community and global contexts. Creativity always exists in context and the more consciousness we can bring to this the more artful each moment becomes and the more value each moment will hold. 

Choreography is bringing value to moments of space, pace, and relationship, value to moments in shared life. The more we value this life as shared, the more generous we will become with sharing it.

assiduous love

I knead with my hands

what my nose tell my heart

beating with the rhythm of the whisk

(just right)

(until risen)

(well-folded

with memories of you)

attention to:

the balance in extremes

the subtle stability in familiar flavors

organized and color-coded to match your present pallet

measured in aroma

and painted with practice and patience—the art of awareness.

Baking is an assiduous love (which gives life):

a blissful yoking of senses

digesting dimensions undiscovered by 

phonetic fronts

(a listening language)

the crackles converse

to the smell

to the heart 

to the ear

to the touch 

to taste.

(devour)

for a mouth that is full 

cannot speak with precision

(but conversation was never the goal) cooking seals our lips 

enveloping attention 

with an invitation to open our soul.