Come be a part of bringing our vision to life!

02 Sep

Chris Headshot 1-web(1)

Summer is ending, autumn days come quickly and soon the 3rd Annual BolderLife Festival will be taking place for the first time at the new venu e in Denver. There’s still a lot to be done for Artistic Director, Erin Kelly, and the staff members of BolderLife Festival. Today communications manager Chris Schenk is revealing about his work for the festival.

Chris, it’s your first year at BolderLife Festival. How did you get involved?

Chris: This is the first year I’ve been involved with the BolderLife Festival. Erin and I met in 2010 when I arrived as a last-minute actor for a Hitching Post Theater play performance and I ended up acting in 3 other plays at Hitching Post. I ended up taking two years off acting in order to dig in and understand my own health issues and when I came back to acting this year, Erin was one of the first people I contacted and asked how I could get involved with film. I agreed to help with the website which ended up being more about clarifying the vision of BolderLife and we began our work there. We spent two great hours creating the wording to capture the vision in Erin’s head to describe BolderLife.

You created the vision/mission statement together with Erin Kelly. How did you find the right words. What did you want to let her say?

Chris: The first thing Erin said to me when we initially emailed is that “people are having a hard time getting the information they need,” which immediately told me that her message is not clear. One thing I’ve learned in my day job working with entrepreneurs building websites is that when the owner knows why they do what they do, telling the story on the website and selling the product is easy. There’s still hard work of course creating a good look, but when the message is clear, the site designs itself. But everything we create is always from a person. One of the problems of many major corporations is that they forget that they were created by a person who had a story and a desire to create and change something. Finding the message all starts with an individual’s story, and so I asked Erin about how she arrived at creating the Festival, and that story included her pursuing of acting in Los Angeles and getting sick and moving back to Boulder, Colorado. The truth of her own experience evinced tears from her and subsequently within me when I heard it. She has a vision of the world healing as she has done and continues to do her in her life, and she desires to show people that it is possible even through the most difficult experiences of life. I simply helped her distil her own story and desire into two paragraphs because I am outside of the story and can see it more clearly. We can’t do this alone, we all need help, and it is an incredible pleasure to be a part of bringing such a powerful story into a potent and clear message with Erin and anyone else who is driven by a greater vision of the world.

Why do you believe in the vision and the mission of BolderLife Festival?

Chris: One thing I know is that ultimately we all want the same things although we have many words to describe those things. We all want love, we want to create, we want freedom to pursue our dreams and empowerment to do so. But the means each individual chooses to implement those desires is vast and full of infinite possibility. That’s where the real beauty in the world resides for me. When someone makes a decision to create their version of freedom and love and express that in the world, I am excited, surprised and delighted by what someone creates, and I am inspired to do more of that myself! Specifically about what I believe in the vision of BolderLife is that freedom and love come at the price of hard work of self-reflection and earnest investigation of one’s own truth. Of course, that only happens when someone identifies what it is they want but then doesn’t know how to get there because of fear or pain. What that means practically is opening up all of the wounding we’ve experienced through life and understanding the walls we’ve created to protect ourselves from that pain and ultimately the treasure of our own heart that also resides in the same place. To me there’s no better way to bring people to the truth of their experience than by experiencing others as a living example, choosing consciously to go into the pain and grief. We have great leaders in our history like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln working in the context of their time and living to create what they believe. But we also have our own stories which hold just as much power and potential to change the world, and all we need to do is connect and listen to each other. The intention of the BolderLife Festival is to do exactly that: connect a community of people and shine the light on the truth of where we are now and ask the hard questions about how we’re separate from our desires of freedom and love or fill-in-the-blank with your own words. Storytelling is how, as a community, we explore ourselves and our experiences that are too difficult to do alone. At the festival, we do that through all forms of artistry in film, theatre, art, music. It doesn’t end there, as all of art is followed by support from experienced educators to be able to ground the stories and experiences back into reality for the attendees after touching on hot topics. That’s a critical part of the festival. The topics of BolderLife can be very challenging and can trigger people into their fears and pain. We need help coming back to reality and then ask questions about what we can do as individuals and together as a community. Like we’ve said in the mission, we believe in creating a space to explore all of the human experience so we can have these difficult conversations and really create the world of our deepest desires.

What is your job in the team of BolderLife? What are you doing within the next weeks?

Chris: I am the communications manager of the festival and it is my job to make sure that everything we do ties into the vision of the festival. There are practical things in that regard like updating the website and making sure each page is succinct and clearly tying into the greater message, and so that is my current task. Once that is done, we are planning on a series of promo videos to ask how others relate to the vision of BolderLife in their own lives and I manage production of those videos.

What are you doing if you are not working for BolderLife Festival?

Chris: I am creating as much as I possibly can! I am an actor and I am consistently auditioning for commercials and theatrical roles in film and also filming semi-regularly. I have a role in a play running in November and rehearsal begins soon for that. I compose music both for myself and for commercial projects, and I take acting classes twice a week in Denver, Colorado. I am currently on leave from my job as a web programmer and Computer Scientist but will be starting that job up again soon.

And now some thoughts about the films applying for the festival. You are one of the film judges as well. Do you have already a personal favourite film?

Chris: I have yet to actually start my round of judging, so I can’t give you an answer to this one yet.

What do you expect from the festival films and plays?

Chris: I honestly don’t know, and I’m excited to find out! I love watching what people create, especially when they believe in what they are creating. I certainly expect to be surprised and moved, and I can’t wait to experience how that happens.

What would you say to the world: Why should people come to the festival?

Chris: Come be a part of bringing our vision to life! Come to a place where together we are exploring the challenges we face as a community in ways never before experienced. We have so many cancers, so many food allergies, so many degenerative diseases and we are stumbling along figuring out what to do. Let’s explore it together and make a difference in our own lives and give others a new perspective and show them what’s possible.

What are you look ing forward to mostly?

Chris: I’m really looking forward to creating something and feeling proud to be a part of it. For me that is all about creating a festival that truly implements the vision of BolderLife. If it isn’t received well by the community, I won’t mind, because I’ll know I set out to create exactly what we wanted to create as a team for this festival.

Good luck and thank you, Chris!