Nightswimming 55 Mill Street, #310 The Case Goods Warehouse, Toronto, ON, M5A 3C4, Canada June 7, 2010 Dear Brian and Naomi, Here are some notes on our Pure Research proposal as requested. The Worst Thing How the process might look: Below is a tentative outline for the 3 days, drawing on permutations of approaches we commonly use at Jumblies for arts-based research and interdisciplinary creation. Actually, I would take more advance time to reflect on and refine the activities before the time came – pushing each one from a familiar starting point into a less familiar zone. I find this already starts to happen as I write about it. I would invite some of the core artists to contribute to this planning from their own disciplinary perspectives and interests. Day 1: Research We would start with a review of our ethical practices for eliciting people’s personal stories – e.g. in oral history interviews, allowing the person to talk freely without too much direction or interruption, encouraging but not coercing more depth and detail, especially for difficult stories etc. All the participating artists will already be familiar with these general protocols, but will need orienting to how we are applying them in this case. We would then move into various arts-based research activities, lead by different artists according to their areas of skill, for example: Visual arts mapping: - a drawing exercise using large paper, oil pastels and other mixed media, to chart out all our worst moments large and small – from childhood, family history, recent personal life, world events, personal traumas, embarrassing incidents. We will be encouraged to keep the content mostly abstract and symbolic, so that it serves as a guide for our own memories, but requires explanations for someone else to understand the specifics. The maps will contain visual imagery and words, and will serve as a reference point for the rest of the workshop. Group storytelling on a theme: Everyone picks out one event from their maps, prompted by a specific theme (e.g.
something about your physical self, or about love or relatives, or from your family history, or a secret) –to share in a storytelling mode (there could be some more guidelines here – about length, structure or form). Or we might have asked everyone to bring an object that contains a sad or disturbing personal story. Then the objects could prompt the story-telling session. Each person would tell their story (again with some sort of time and stylistic parameters) and place their object in a special place (e.g. me might have a small table, or floor cloth, or they could pick their own placement). The storytelling would be recorded by note-takers (who could draw as well as write words). The note-taking might be part of the activity – e.g. each person has a 3-part story-board to record the key elements of their neighbour’s story, so that each person tells and records one story. Individual interviews: People pare up and take it in turns to interview each other about their maps. This would be open-ended, but with the interviewer encouraging the interviewee to explain the structure and stories of the map. We would use digital recorders for these interviews, to capture verbatim text. Non-verbal performance: A choreographer amongst us would lead an activity where we express something from our maps through a movement. These could be recorded by photography, video or simultaneous life drawings (an idea we’ve been enjoying playing with recently). Voice and sound could be used and recorded in a similar musician-lead activity, or the two could be combined. Clown: Our participating clown (Lisa Marie DiLiberto) would lead an activity in which we disclosed a specific moment from our map in a context of keeping it as funny as possible. She would interject us as a clown master as we went along – finding ways to stay within the distressing story – in fact, exaggerating and reveling in it - without getting bogged down in earnestness or sadness.
End of day: We would discuss and compare notes, , as artists and participants, on the separate and cumulative affect of each of the activities. We may also have paused mid-way or
along the way for comments and responses, but would avoid breaking the flow of activities too often. To this end, each participant, might be asked to keep a notebook along the way to refer back to at discussion times. The discussions and reflections on how we are being affected is, in fact, the point of the whole thing, but in order to make these reflections, we’ll need to immerse ourselves a bit in our own process. Day 2 – Creation & Presentation of our own stories The material from the previous day would constitute our subject-matter for the next 2 days. First we’ll explore the idea (commonly-held in the popular and applied theatre world) that it’s of value to be the confessional performer of your own traumatic story – that this is moving for an audience and “healing” for the performer/subject of the story. This is often assumed to be the case as a matter of course and regardless of the quality of the performance – because the confessional voice compensates for aesthetic quality of artistic delivery. My bias is to regard such views with great suspicion, and it is my preference, when performing personal stories – however transformed - never to cast someone as the teller of their own material. On this occasion, I will allow the process to test this my own tenets. Each of us will be asked to create a monologue based on one of the episodes on their map that we are willing to explore but that is a shade beyond our comfort zone for sharing. Each will have a choice between working solo, with a director, or requesting another artist to support their work in some way (e.g. someone to provide musical accompaniment). We will all be required to be the centre and lead performer in our own piece, and to somehow engage with our text, but the form this takes will be able to vary according to our own arts practice. We will take the morning to prepare and rehearse our pieces and the afternoon to present them to each other, with, once again enough time at the end to critique and reflect on the experiences, both as witnesses and performers. Day 3 – Creation & Presentation of each other’s stories On the third day, we will each take a story from someone else’s map. These might be chosen from the previous interviews and presentations, or we might choose to return to a paired interview process, in order to collect fresh stories – perhaps choosing episodes not yet touched on, or specifying a new theme – more personal or more historical depending on which way the emphasis has sat so far. We will again take the morning for the creative process and the afternoon for presentations and discussions. We will again be permitted – even more than the day before, as we don’t have to be our own protagonists – to call in the talents and services of our colleagues to support our pieces. There would be certain given parameters (e.g. they have to include at least 3 arts disciplines, and works would be durational within a strict time frame) and also possibly some individual directions to cover areas we’d still like to explore or haven’t yet touched on (e.g. work with ritual or comedy or through fiction, abstraction, naturalism, site-specificity, using verbatim text, music etc).
The final presentations could somewhat flow together to some extent, with some attention to transitions, without trying to create a unified piece. Through all of these days and activities, our intention would be to push ourselves into areas and material that has a tendency to weigh us down and make us too distressed, depressed, embarrassed or uncomfortable to function well as artists and participants – and then to find a way out through artistic approach: a way to do justice to the material, but to maintain a balance between identification and distance... I imagine a feeling of evading collapse by shifting and turning – mixing motion and silence – skipping or swimming upwards again each time we’re sagging or sinking – seeing all the places this takes us, and what we can learn from it for our work. The final feedback session would aim to synthesize the entire experience and what we’ve learned from it that might enlighten and change our community-artistic practices. We might end with an arts-based evaluation exercise – e.g. through drawing/ sound or movement to support and inform the conversation. I would also invite the group to take part in an ongoing subsequent e-mail reflective conversation for as long as we all had new idea that emerged over a longer time.
Please feel free to ask for more info. Thanks for your consideration, Ruth