The Communitas Project is a global anti-violence project. In it, we send multidisciplinary teams of artists -- storytellers, musicians, dancers, visual artists, actors, and writers -- into schools, colleges, community centers, libraries, and prisons to teach people how to use collective creative process to transform conflicts before they inflict harm.
    Communitas is an anthropological term that means spiritual fellowship. It's sometimes called "collective resonance." Resonance is basically a musical term meaning sympathetic vibration. When we tell and listen to one another's stories or make art together, we experience communitas.
    Communitas reveals our profound kinship as human beings beneath our differences -- crucial in this era of fear, hatred, and demonizing of those who hold different beliefs and cultural lifestyles. Establishing communitas in a relationship, group, or set of circumstances makes it safe for people to reveal deeper levels of the conflict or crisis, risk greater emotional vulnerability, and discover more authentic, creative, and enduring solutions.
    Our communitas workshops are designed to help people connect at this deep level by translating the issues at hand into creative metaphors and using them  in dynamic ways to create collective resonance. Storytelling and writing, music and muralmaking, and dance helps people arrive at a place outside conventional thinking and limitations, where the creative question can be asked: "What is possible now?"
    We have observed the following impacts on groups participating in these workshops:

• People experience what it's like to tap into sources of nonrational information, such as their sensory intelligences and their intuition;


• They learn how to listen deeply and without judgment to one another and to tell their own story without shame or blame;


• They gain a heightened sensitivity to nonverbal communication, and hidden dynamics and possibilities in seemingly closed-circle situations;


• They leave with an expanded vocabulary for conflict resolution.


• They establish a powerful spiritual bond that moves them beyond impasse.