What is the Berkshires Culture Expression Salon?

The Berkshires Culture Expression Salon (BCES) is a community for creative people to share their work where participants engage through attentive presence, thoughtful discourse, and even collaborations. The Salon values the exploration of the creative process.

Berkshire artists and others drawn to creative process are welcome in the BCES community, where care, creativity, and connection come together.

What would a truly sustainable culture-making model look like, especially in a place like the Berkshires where the population of creative people is impressive, but where most struggle with finding support?

Let’s find out together.

 

Berkshires Culture Expression Salon Defined

Here’s one way to describe Berkshires Cultural Expression Salon:

Berkshires: Our home

Culture: The system that evolves to handle the meaning of being human

Expression: Making something known through words, gestures, music, art

Salon: A gathering of people held by a host, and consciously following Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate"

The challenge is to create structures that help creative people support one another and share their work and process in a way that builds community and a sustainable local cultural model.

The Salon is Based on Three Factors

Geographic proximity. We draw from local creatives to form a cultural ecosystem of shared work and support.

Cross-discipline orientation. People from different disciplines often discover that they share similar internal impulses. These crossover connections create fertile ground for shared expression.

Active participation. Everyone participates in some manner, whether presenting an aspect of one’s creative work or joining the discussion where the focus is on the various presentations and on queries into the many aspects of the creative process.

The Salon is an Experiment that Matters

The Berkshires Culture Expression Salon is an experiment rooted in our creative lives. The Salon can provide belonging, validation, exploration, support, and meaning.

And that matters, because human beings need meaning to feel fully alive.​