Buy The Intercessor paperback or ebook from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, or Ingram!
I’m writing this on a transatlantic flight home from the International Community Arts Festival in Rotterdam, where my friend and podcast cohost François Matarasso and I led two workshops, one on cultural policy and one on ethics. We are grateful to ICAF for inviting us into these and other very interesting connections with people from many countries (all of whom spoke perfect English, reminding me of my linguistic shortcomings and filling me with gratitude for understanding and being understood). We recorded the workshops for future episodes of our podcast “A Culture of Possibility” on Miaaw.net. (You can listen to an earlier podcast episode about ICAF featuring a founder, Eugene van Erven, here.)
I need more time to process all the thoughts and feelings ICAF catalyzed. Today I want to write about one subject at the forefront of my mind: learning through presence—the full, embodied kind, not the kind that can be achieved online.
My husband Rick generously accompanied me on this trip, and ICAF generously welcomed him and offered him access to the entire event. He anticipated only attending some of it, ducking out to museums and so on while I took part in sessions demonstrating the work or engaging its issues. But as it turned out, he took full advantage of the festival right alongside me.
Why? I put it down to a workshop led by Chen Alon, a core member of Combatants for Peace, a group co-led by Jews and Palestinians and the subject of There is Another Way, a film about the group’s heartfelt and courageous work for justice and peace. ICAF features multiple art forms, but theater definitely leads, and many of the teachers and participants are experienced in the work of Augusto Boal, the late, great maker of Forum Theatre and other interactive performance modes, and deviser of generative theater games.
To start the workshop, Chen, drawing on Boal, asked the hundred or so participants to gather on the stage of the black box theater that housed us. He led us through some warm-ups, then through a multi-step exercise to offer what had been one large and miscellaneous group the opportunity to experience connection, difference, fear, and alienation. First each of us picked out an ally (and kept that person’s identity quiet); then similarly picked an “enemy,” all the while moving around the room. Then he invited each of us to experience the challenge of keeping our ally between our enemy and ourselves even as we remained in motion. When that sequence ended, we had transformed from a loose multidirectional mob into an anxious outer circle surrounding a large empty space.
Rick was excited to have experienced all the dynamics Chen and others offered, seeing with perfect clarity both the exercises’ intentions and effects. He and I have been together for quite a while, so he’s had many occasions to read about such work and to hear others talk about it. But that half-hour of experiencing his own body as it moved through relationships and emotions brought the depth and meaning home to him for the first time. He was thrilled and so was I. In fact, he was thrilled enough to skip museums altogether and take part in every session on our schedule, including those François and I led. This delights me, and I am more grateful than I can say that he took this opportunity.
One of the large sessions at ICAF was called “The Hardcore Club,” featuring people from several community-based theater companies that have been around for 20 years or more. A few people made dinosaur jokes, but I was busy calculating that my first community arts job was in 1973, making me a truly senior dinosaur.
Most of the issues that came up were evergreen. Practicalities of sustaining the work, keeping it stable and lively as everything around us changes, navigating specific challenges such as the COVID pandemic, which hugely transformed people’s ways of working. And also the problems of support. If you’ve followed this blog you’ve seen me complain many times about funding systems, how funders often judge work by imposed criteria not at all organic to its values and methods, about the distorting effects of competition. One panelist asked if people in the room had been required by prospective funders to produce “theories of change” and “logic models,” documents that so far as I can see function primarily as antes into the funding game, required to pass go, but almost certain to remain unread.
The way things are most often conducted, community-based artists and groups that have fundraising staff and resources are privileged because they can fulfill funders’ requirements without stressing everyone beyond capacity. There’s a simple fantasy antidote to the problem: if we could only beam funders into the thick of excellent community arts projects to experience with their own bodies, feelings, and perceptions what Rick was able to grasp at ICAF, they would be able to comprehend what no amount of written description can fully convey. I’ve been saying this for ages, and I’m by no means the only one. Trying to portray community arts’ depth and transformative power with nothing but words is like trying to depict a rainbow using only numbers.
This is not a new thought, but it gave me a new idea. The codirectors of a Singapore-based group on the panel, Drama Box, described returning to presenting work outdoors after a long COVID-inspired pause, and discovering how much more difficult it had become to compete for time and attention from people glued to their phones and subject to innumerable claims on their attention. In many other sessions, participants brought up the digital challenges of working with young people, their worries about the erosion of imagination in a world replete with readymade fantasy. I’m not entirely sure about that (I’ll save it for another blog), but it seems self-evidently true that no matter how cool interacting online is (and goodness knows, it’s a mainstay of my life), it cannot impart the same embodied knowledge, the fullness of presence and experience, the totality that Rick experienced at ICAF by actually being there.
My new idea is simple: since this issue is increasingly commanding attention (for example The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt’s newish book about kids and digital culture), the antidote that can engage funders can be generalized to the society at large: showing up—being there in body, mind, emotion, and spirit—engenders awareness and understanding that cannot be achieved by other means.
So what would it be like if community-based arts groups began to tell their stories of the power of being there not just as a way to enhance artistic experience and communicate with funders, but as a way for everyone to awaken from the digital trance and bring all they are to what they do? What if we have a kind of knowledge and power that could be useful to all if only it is let out of the box labeled “art?”
What if?
“Stand” by Sly and The Family Stone.