I have been told that among the many old Wild West potboiler stories one began: “Bang! Bang! Bang! Three bullets ripped through my chest and I knew that I was off on the greatest adventure of my life.” Somewhere in the adventures of my working life I remember a lecture in which a man said that participatory arts were about experience, encounter and event. Well, indeed. But then again that’s what life seems to be mostly about for us humans. Its all about relationship – even isolation. There are certain encounters, experiences and events that alter the course of where one’s heading. Let me wind my way towards one such encounter and begin the story of two wandering, nay wondering, travellers of similar persuasions. But first a question.
As the world fills with more and more – more people, more perspectives, more commodities, more information, more poverty and inequality – how do we create learning systems that can accommodate these increases? And, if that was not enough of a pedagogical challenge, there is the paradox of decrease that attends these increases – less forest, less species, less languages. How do we negotiate the polarised 21st Century paradigms of a sub-atomic universe full of uncertainty, systems theory, ecology and the dogmas of Religion, Consumerism, Globalisation and Mechanistic Scientism? How do we reconcile the paradoxes and contradictions of our times?
Warren, who hails from Saskatchewan, Canada and Tony from a Londoner who lives in Devon, England first met in Bergen, Norway. We didn’t know that we might meet much less where, much less how and even less that it might have any significance and the idea that it might lead to a book, well that simply did not exist. From where I sit in this moment, it happened something like this.
I was doing a part-time Master’s Degree in Applied Drama at the University of Exeter. I was doing the course to deepen my understanding of Workshop as a distinctive form of contemporary arts practice…
For twenty years I had been running puppet workshops. One day, long before the Master’s Degree, I was in the bath and thinking about what my young son had written and, a bit like a puppeteer version of Archimedes, I had a “Eureka!” moment. My son showed me some writing he had done for his primary school about jobs that people did in our town – he said there were shopkeepers, bus drivers, dentists etc., and puppeteers. Of course, his father being a puppeteer that was a natural thing for a seven-year-old to write but there was something else. Due to an unusual kink in the structure of the universe, there were indeed an exceptionally high number of puppeteers in our little old quirky town. “Eureka!” for me went something like this – I could gather all the puppeteers in town together and we could make a huge show in a day in the large Civic Hall in the centre of town. It would be so big that we might set a new world record for The Biggest Puppet Show on Earth! So, we could publicise it as a world record attempt.
A phone call and a day later I was sitting in my so damp that sometimes it rained harder inside than outside, lean-to workshop with the promoter from a local arts organisation who put on events. He had already said that he liked the idea and now we were searching for a title. I opened a book from a drier corner of my garret and with random aplomb it opened for us on a Wordsworth poem and these lines popped out:
If we, who thus together roam
In a strange Land, and far from home,
Were in this place the Guests of Chance:
Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,
Though home or shelter he had none,
With such a sky to lead him on?
“Guests of Chance”, seemed to be the perfect title for our endeavour. Every step we took was a step into the unknown, for all involved – the promoter, the director, the workshop leaders and all those who took part. As soon as tickets went on sale, the switchboard jammed. And thus a tale of giants, judges, superheroes and houses told by over 200 to over 200 released its potency across a day. I was simply amazed. I stood there watching the final event unfold and it was as if I had climbed and clambered up a great mountain and now, I could see the whole beautiful world all around me. It was both of my imagination and beyond it. My horizon had shifted. Bang!
Invigorated by the new possibilities of being a Guest of Chance, I began to re-shape my practice. The formula was a simple one: 3 Puppeteers x 5 days = 15 puppeteers x 1 day. This meant that we could reproduce the experience of that day in organisations and institutions across a week. Whilst I am on the mathematics of this, it is worth bearing in mind that 250 people working with common purpose across a day is equivalent to one person working for the best part of a working year. And here is another little mathematical snippet – 42 people working together in a space can mix in over 4.4 billion combinations. And we are asked to ascribe marks out of 10 to our experiences before the impact of an experience has even left port to begin the course of sinking into the sea of our memories and find its shape? Why? For whom do we do this crude marking?
In this week’s newspaper a 9-year-old poses the question: Is everything just coincidence or does it happen on purpose? It happened that the first school to approach me after the Guests of Chance asked if I could make a show with over 100 children from an African story. My search for the right tale took me to a West African Creation Myth.
In that coincidental invitation a question arose and attached itself to me. It was unforgiving but potent too. The question was: What is Workshop? The question arrived after leading and watching those 100 children animate their puppet telling of that African creation myth about creativity and the beauty of diversity. How could a few days in young lives be so potent? The making and animating of puppets do wield a certain primal power. The resonance between the symbolism and content of the creation myth and the process the group were participant in, although unexpressed, provided a dynamic motor. Recently, bringing that same tale to light, a seven-year old making her child puppet offered her insight, “I’m just thinking that we are doing the same thing as the sky spirits. Only they moulded their children from clay and we are using newspaper to mould our children.” Out of the mouths of the young comes
insight so often ignored as fantasy and fancy. Of course, myths of origin are a symbolic telling of any creation in which something that previously did not exist in the world of our consciousness is made manifest from the deep and invisible oceans of our subconscious. The myths are essentially about the relationship between the finite and infinite. Ted Hughes talks about this with characteristic luminosity in his essay Myth and Education:
The real problem comes from the fact that the outer world and inner world are interdependent at every moment. We are simply the locus of their collision….And whether we like it or not, life is what we are able to make of that collision and struggle. So what we really need is a faculty that embraces both worlds simultaneously. A large, flexible grasp, an inner vision that holds wide open, like a great theatre, the arena of contention, and which pays equal respect to both sides. This really is imagination.
But there was something else going on. There was a distinctive environment in which the conditions for creative discovery encouraged imagination to do its stuff and the word ascribed to that environment is Workshop. But what did that word actually mean? And is it a distinctive form of practice and where could I improve my ability to devise and deliver workshops? Those children and that myth had propelled me on another trajectory that was bound towards Bergen in Norway, a fellow traveller and beyond.
In my own story there was time that now seems ancient when I was on a journey in Peru. I knew very little about the country before leaving. There were no Rough Guides or computers back then. I knew a few Spanish words and that Peru had an incredible variety of bird species. On our journey I failed to see many birds at all and my expectations were confounded until we teamed up with some Americans to walk the Inca Trail. One of them was a Bird Watcher and suddenly there they were – birds everywhere. The creative process often seems to follow a similar pattern. Something does not exist and then, when it is pointed out or appears on your horizon, it is suddenly all over the place. My workshop dawn worked like that. That first Biggest Puppet Show, then the sudden appearance of the question: What is Workshop? Then all sorts appeared.
One appearance was when I went to one of those gathering of artists where you get together and talk about what you do and what you can do about what you do. At coffee I found myself talking about my interest in Workshop to a woman who turned out to share my suspicion that Workshop might be a distinctive form of contemporary arts practice. It turned out that she held a lofty position in the Arts Council in London. She invited me to come to London for a chat. After we had this chat, she said that she could offer me some money to research and develop my idea. And again, there it was: Bang!
I had some money to conduct The Workshop Interviews. The puppeteer and myth-maker had become an interviewer and, knowing his own foibles and shortcomings, had luckily realized that without a structure around him he needed a structure. And so the Workshop Interviews formed the central exploration of my MA in Applied Drama. New worlds opened in front me. I travelled around from The National Theatre to a Community Play and back home to the local Scrapstore and then off to talk to the Head of Education at the RSC, off to a psychotherapy weekend and into the wilds of North Devon to talk to a poet and painter and on…all my conversations began with that question: What is Workshop? All these conversations spun out in their own ways and added insight and thought-provoking ideas, layer upon layer and all these diverse practices and practitioners agreed that Workshop is distinctive, that they had not been asked the question before of what it is and that what is, is a journey that forever changes to the people and context and is about those, then and there, and their discoveries. In my formal studies another world opened, the world of Academic Conferences.
These bespoke events for like-minded practitioners to share thoughts and skills and get fed and accommodated was food for thought. When I listened to the discourse and dialogue, the language differed but the content shared much of the concerns aired at the end of hard-working day around campfires at festivals or in the van on the journey home from a school. This conferencing though gave a new focus to my research. The research could be used as a basis to create an event to support workshop artists. As the unifying media in question was workshop then the whole event should be a workshop – a workshop on workshop. So one day a puppeteer who had had a Eureka moment in a bathtub, celebrated the luminosity of creation myth and had coffee with the right person at a gathering found himself surrounded by 39 artists awaiting his words of wisdom on Workshop and big winged insect fluttering in his stomach. The story of the workshop that ensued is told in another book called Workshop – A Moveable Feast. I’ll just say here that it was an extraordinary experience that for me as director was something like workshop as an extreme sport.
On the way to creating that first Moveable Feast, I ran my first and much smaller workshop on workshop at the conference in Bergen. My intention was to use the making of puppets as an exemplar of the journey of discovery inherent in participatory workshop practice. In the end, I think we mainly just made puppets. I remember lots of playful professorial types peeping their puppets out from behind the pillars of the rather grand Greig Hall in Bergen and surprising the other participants at the conference. I remember one particularly gleeful Canadian who was awed by his own creation and very struck with the idea of a workshop on workshop. He suggested we stay in contact and write a book together. That was Warren.
We renewed our acquaintance at the next IDEA conference in Ottawa. By then Warren had completed his doctorate and I had written a small book on Workshop. Warren was still keen to put our ideas together in another volume. Years passed and on either side of the Atlantic we both followed our workshopping paths. Warren got a job in a University and I remained freelance – running occasional university courses, making shows and starting a new collaborative workshop company that combined art forms to create bespoke workshops in areas of social need (are there any other areas?). Then one day Warren appeared on Skype. He announced that he had a year’s sabbatical and that the time was right for us to write a book together. Bang!
I am going to tell the great adventure – Warren and Tony journey far and wide and deep into the workshop universe adventures. I shall try and tell what has happened and what hasn’t happened since. We share a passion for tennis, are politically engaged , tell silly jokes, are ethnic if not religious jews and both of us have written about and are interested in Workshop as a form of arts practice that has specific qualities that cross conventional art form boundaries. Both of us are usually busy running workshops but its a time of pandemic and isolation has given us all a different sort of moment.
