Seventeen – Knowing Me , Knowing You

Friedlander, the great Max Friedlander, is very good on this. ‘Correct attributions’, he says, ‘generally appear spontaneously and “prima vista”. We recognise a friend without ever having determined wherein his particular qualities lie and that with a certainty that not even the most detailed description can give.’ [Frayn – Headlong]

Fly like an Eagle…

I went to an all-boys school in the centre of London. I can’t say that I liked it. It had its moments but I missed my last year of my much-loved Primary School and got a scholarship to a grand establishment – The City of London School just near Blackfriars Bridge. I threw up on the front steps on the first morning.  I remember a new Maths teacher.  Our Maths book was written by a man called C.G.Nobbs. The new teacher strode in with great aplomb, complete with robe, because that’s what the teachers donned in these hallowed halls with cloisters and all, and commanded the class, “right boys get your Nobbs out!” This was not a good start. Mayhem, Lord of the Flies, Mutiny on The Bounty in a classroom of 14-year-old pubescent boys. What a cruel mess ensued and continued! More than 50 years on, it makes me squirm to think of that poor teacher.

And, some 50 years on, I found myself on a plane bound for Saskatchewan in Canada and about to work with a team of facilitators from the Indigenous Peoples Health Research Centre at Regina University where I would embark in a state of ignorance and innocence to enter a new world. And I don’t mean The New World, which is such a loaded phrase. I mean a world new to me with different ways that had been subjected to systematic cruelty, humiliation, abuse and exoticisation by the very culture and nation I was departing from. My understanding was thin and the first workshop was a frightening prospect.

These first moments matter. Those beginnings start a universe. The beginning of any universe requires a discharge of energy that can expand into something bigger. A sort of Big Bang but the right Big Bang. Not an easy thing to judge in a workshop. It’s when the group decides and where the motivations can meet or can evaporate into chaos, or less dramatically, into a group of separate individuals doing their own things or not as the case may be. Warren, who is a fixer of such things supreme, had organised a series of workshops for us to work on in Canada as part of our Mindfield project. The project had begun with us meeting and participating in a workshop in Parma in Italy. And we were trying to write a book about the form ‘Workshop’, which extrapolated commonalities from the specificities of a series of workshops on both sides of the pond.

After Parma we ran our first workshop on workshop together. It was called Image of the Hour. It was a little hurriedly assembled and a wee haphazard in its design but what emerged were the “Rules of Praxology.” Then there was a gap of several months until Autumn arrived in England and I flew towards Fall in Canada. The Canadian part of Mindfield looked like this:

  • A two-day workshop with a Health Research Team looking at the use of Applied Arts in improving health conditions in First Nations people around Fort Qu’appelle and based at Regina University.
  • Immediately followed by two days with the young people of Peepeekisis who are part of the Cree Nation at a The All Nations Health Centre near Fort Qu’appelle.
  • Then a flight back to Montreal and a weekend with the Living Histories Ensemble, a group of practitioners who employ various forms of interactive theatre to engage with the stories of refugee communities and genocide survivors.
  • Immediately followed by four, half-day workshops at Concordia University – three in Theatre for Development and one for a Facilitator Class.
  • Finishing with a two-day course for facilitators at Concordia called The Laboratory of Imagination.

That more or less is the outline of what I/we are doing here and then in January there is the final workshop in the Mindfield series back in the UK – Guests of Chance.

I try to walk the talk. In the first workshop we were looking at the use of arts as a tool for intervention in First Nation communities. I am not cut out to go and lecture on such matters, I am an artist. I make things. I am a workshop artist. I make things with others. What to make in that first workshop? Someone said that the hardest thing about writing is the waiting; and Tom Petty has a song called ‘the waiting is the hardest part.’ So right. Waiting for that spark when devising a workshop for an unknown and diverse group of people is the hardest part. From somewhere I had the idea of a pack of cards. We would make a pack of cards with four suits. Each person would make four cards and then we would bring them together as a catalyst for discussion and the devising of a collaborative workshop to take into the community, which was the second part of the Mindfield journey.  It dawned on me from my cloudy recesses that there was a correspondence between the four suits of a deck of cards and the four directions of the Medicine Wheel, which is fundamental to indigenous knowledge. And, it seems to me fundamental to us all:  physical, mental, emotional and spiritual; north, south, east, west; red, black, white, yellow and much more. I had a key and began devising an arc for the first workshop. The next question was the way in for the group, the first moment.  When I arrived, I set up the studio at the university before the group got there. I decided, I’d meet them just outside the room, one by one as they got there and then do a very simple group collaborative exercise that I had learned at a skill swap group for participatory artists.

A group splits in half and holds out their index fingers so that a long bamboo can be rested between the two lines of 4-6 people they have formed.  With the bamboo balanced between the two closely grouped lines of fingers, the group are given the task to put the bamboo on the floor. The effect is quite bamboozling. It is as if the bamboo has a life of its own. The bamboo goes up, half up/half down, takes the group for a walk around the room and generally creates mirth and mayhem as the group tries to perform the simple task of grounding the damn stick. This task has proved a great boon and group warm-up in many workshops I have run.  It causes a wonderful mix of bewilderment and hilarity. Having set this task to many groups my expectation is that there will be an initial struggle with task, laughter, a little frustration and then the group will sort themselves out and find an agreed method.  In Canada this exercise was used in each workshop. First with the research group and then with the Cree youth near the reservation; later with the theatre group, the students and finally, at the Concordia Laboratory of Imagination with facilitators. It worked in all the workshops bar the last one. By worked it meant the group worked together to achieve as simple task that caused laughter and mayhem but ultimately required the group to find unity.

In that final workshop with the life coaches and facilitators, a few people found this exercise very challenging. Accusations began to arise within and from the group. Firstly, one person tried to take leadership of the group and lost their own physical contact with the bamboo – it is a rule of that each person’s fingers stay in contact under the bamboo – as they accused the other end of the line of pushing the bamboo in the air. Then, people thought that I had tricked them and weighted the bamboo in some special way. In short, the group dynamic was quite wild and there were a few participants feeling that this exercise was trickery on our part and even the idea that we were trying to make people seem foolish.

Apart from the usual hilarity and disbelief that bamboo task engenders, I also love it because it reifies the invisible space between individuals. When I watch groups doing this exercise, I am struck by how minds have to meet in order to achieve even a simple collaborative task. And whilst the bamboo is being put down by the 20 or so connected fingers then there is a wonderful collective focus – individual brains have melded into a single mind.  Of course, this sort of melding is not easy and the more you try and impose your brain’s idea of what is going on and what needs to happen upon the group, without their willingness to follow, then the more the bamboo will travel any which way.

Many years ago, I had witnessed some difficult youth do this task very efficiently. When I say difficult, these were young people who were in care, had offended, were at odds with each other and presented us with a lot of challenging situations across the project. They did the bamboo well though. It worked like this. One of that group was a gang leader. He said, “right we do it like this” and the group took his direction and so by following one person the task became easy and down went the bamboo. I have never seen the task done so well until working with the Cree youth in Fort Qu’appelle. We explained the task and, in the same instant that we placed the bamboo lightly resting on their fingers, the group were silent. In unison, down they went with bamboo.  I had never seen that level of spontaneous and embodied collaboration and understanding before.

At Concordia with facilitators and life coaches, one or two absented from the exercise. They refused to do it. They walked around the outskirts looking thoughtful and working out what was happening. And when it finished, there was a general clamour for explanation.  I told them what I knew from witnessing the bamboo in action. I said that blame is inhibiting. A way has to be found to become mindful and physically present – over-thinking does not help this. And, of course, that the group has to work together. I told the two stories of the gang leader and the Cree youth to illustrate different ways these conditions had been arrived at – two instances in which the group became present enough together to allow the bamboo on their fingers to go down.

Later I heard that the telling of these two tales had been regarded by some of the facilitators as a further attempt to make them feel foolish as I had related how children had put the bamboo down easier than they had.  Not my intention at all.  My only intention in all the workshops was to create an environment in which all who participated could negotiate their own journey of discovery. It is perhaps ironic and certainly interesting that the first nation people who would be thought of as being colonised discovered their own easy way to find common purpose within a somatic task whilst the urban, middle –class, highly educated community were divided and felt belittled. It is impossible to know beforehand how these things will turn out. We know when we know. Telling what we know is a different matter.

For me the journey from community to community over less than a month was definitely one of discovery. Each time, the same things were applied they had different and unexpected outcomes. It is the least connected to the geographical terrain that I have felt in travelling but the deepest connection I have experienced to the people. Over 25 days, I worked with eight different groups in five different communities and with over 200 people.  Comfort zone? What comfort zone. Each time I began afresh and the not-knowing at the outset was both painful and compulsively exciting. Each time a workshop ended it brought a corresponding mixture of satisfied relief and a tinge of regret that the moment had passed and the people had gone. Discovering that which already existed before you happened on it is not necessary a colonial act; not if that knowledge is self-discovery  and through your own creative expression. Of course, the claiming of territory that belongs to others for your own is an act of colonising.  It is all a matter of intention.  In Workshop, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and in workshop if we do not eat together, do not learn from each other then it is not a workshop. The intention of Workshop is that we journey together to learn from each other.

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