The Boston Globe calls Deborah Henson-Conant’s stunning performances  “A cross between Leonard Bernstein, Steven Tyler and Xena, the Warrior Princess.”

Rock guitar legend Steve Vai calls her the “Jimi Hendrix of the harp” and the New York Times credits her with “Reshaping the serenely Olympian harp into a jazz instrument.”

Now she brings a lifetime of creative achievement to a musical talk that resonates with audiences hungry to know about the steps to creative expression. From symphony patrons to the creative corporate team – the seven strings of passion takes your audience inside the creative process, to a distillation of the step that can be used for teams or individuals  – to create or reinvent anything.

“I’ve spent the past 2 decades reinventing my instrument, creating One-Woman shows, online learning programs and even a fully-orchestrated PBS music special.

 

What this journey taught me was how ideas resonate through people, how groups collaborate, how leadership – and followship –  takes many different shapes.

 

This is what “Strings of Passion” is all about – expressed in words and music – a distillation of the process of creative expression.” (DHC)

Using the 7 strings in each octave of her instrument, Henson-Conant introduces the seven principles that take us from creative IMPULSE to creative EXPRESSION: Impulse, Structure, Character, Roles, Practice, Deconstruction and Liftoff.

She shows us that every creation begins with an impulse – and to harness that impulse, you need the support of a flexible internal structure. To bring that structure alive, you need character, and to put it into action, or collaborate with others, you need to understand how roles works – not just leadership and followship, but the unique roles in any collaboration, and the internal, archetypical roles we can use to support and illuminate the ways we show up.

To think in new ways you need to have a practice of inquiry and exploration, embracing and nurturing the imperfection of nascent ideas, and use the roles of both active leadership and followship for a powerful performance. In order to be able to play with your ideas, you need to be able to deconstruct old assumptions and take the work down to its most distilled form.

Once you have form and structure, the individual or team, has a resonance with what it’s doing. All this leads to the moment of lift-off, or inspired, informed performance – not the moment when everything achieves perfection, but the moment of letting go, when you glory in what it is, exactly the way it is right now.

The more an individual or a team works with these seven concepts, the more resonance builds between the outer expression and the internal intention.

“I’ve broken the concepts into 7 strings, so we can explore each idea separately – but the excitement comes, when you put them all together and discover the richness from the whole and it’s the resonance of the strings we don’t consciously play that give resonance to the ones we do.” (DHC)

Innovation, bold ideas and action teams result because they dare to explore and excite the world around them. “Strings of Passion” opens the mind-share and heart-share of the attendees and inspires them to dare that exploration.

“Strings of Passion” is a powerful exploration of possibilities – moving your audience out of the ordinary and into the extraordinary. And in the end your team experiences the powerful resonance of collabrative expression – like a symphony orchestra.

Deborah Henson-Conant (“DHC”) is a Grammy Nominated recording artist, a favorite speaker of the “Ideas Boston” conference and the creator of her own PBS music special “Invention & Alchemy.” Her collaborative, cross-discipline performance project “Inviting Invention” was a feature of the 2nd annual Boston Science Festival. She’s known as a boldly creative performer and thinker. “Strings of Passion” pairs those two together in a performance lecture like none you’ve ever experienced.