What is Care?
“The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.”
HONOUR OF FAILURE
Poem by Deanna Rodger
We listened to the bottom line to the same, same clock. Tick tock, tick tock. Peered carefully at the jargon Exhausted the ‘if you can, then you should’ conversation.
We can not hold guilt for needing
Our hands are catching sick
Our hands are communicating are accomplished at changing bags in 2 minute breaks steering the narrow ledge Sizing up closed doors
Now we will take a break. Move away
Put on glad rags to serve needs, width, steps, arms, floors - full glam. Our entrance will be on our terms.
Do you see?
This flesh, this magic, this health, this work, these practicalities this relieved process. All of this will look like failure in the miser face of the coin.
Let us get comfortable
Let us get to know ourselves
Let us get to know each other
If you have been severed from yourself. If you forgot ‘you’ in the opportunity. The yes leaping beyond the ideal
We will sprinkle thanks Our exercises will soften each fall fixed hands will thaw Relearn how to receive care will fill your cuts.
Moving Forward
Reflections
Reflections from Suzanne Alleyne, Care Lab Facilitator Tensions, oppositions and more
Toni spoke about us thinking about commissions maps, where we are in the same space but we don’t know the destination. I was struck that when I’ve been a producer or commissioner, I often like to talk about maps and about being somewhere where we are agreed on the destination but don’t necessarily know the agreed route. That made me smile and think about how a lot of the conversation was about tensions, and whether that is the tension of ‘what is harmony for one may be discord for another”.
The notion of common ground was talked about a lot, and even in this there can be tension as common ground has layers and may feel and impact differently for individuals.
And finally Toni talked really articulately about the constricts of capitalism and how care is in opposition to capitalism, but that we work within this construct. For me I want to remove the angst of tension and invite you to do the same where possible. Someone once encouraged me to separate the tension of something from the desire to “fix” the tension, because in the space of not trying to solve the “problem, challenge or tension” comes the solution or evolution of the action towards better.
By Suzanne Alleyne
I was left with the overriding question from these provocations:
How do we take action whilst listening to our bodies and emotions and that of those around us?
How do we not become rooted in the fear of failure?
What is tension and what is lack of care?
Where do the two meet and overlap and for whom, how and when?
Why is care important between artists and organisations and beyond, funders, wider society?
Three prompts to begin
Sidenote:
Focus on what resonates with you but if you feel a desire to run from something, in this moment, try to think about sitting with your feelings and examining them.
Care and disruption:
Asking to work with embedded care is fundamentally disruptive.
How can we reduce fear around this to encourage disruption?
Relationship:
Usually there is a transactional relationship between artist and commissioner.
How might a brief centre care rather than have a separate agreement?
Change:
All systems need review in order to centre care.
In what ways can we use what we have more usefully?
How can we communicate if systems are not fit for purpose?
How can we start again?
IN
- ‘Johanna Hedva, quoted by artist Emily Beaney in Breaking the Fall: exploring care through creative collaboration
The problems of a practice of standardisation.
Care doesn’t look a specific way.
It will probably never look the same way twice, especially when we think about care from commissioners.
If we are caring in ways that make a difference – with patience, generosity, openness and clarity – it will not fit into the models that are currently set up – because those models have no space for care, they don’t even consider it.
The establishment of theatre, performance, art, expects us to be able to harness trauma, pain, marginalisation as means of profit, but it doesn’t want that to slow us down, give us migraines, make us nauseous, have panic attacks. It wants us well enough to perform, and deliver, without disruption – but I think we have to work with disruption.
Care has been co-opted as a buzzword.
Care is now being co-opted by people who do not know what it means, or how to practise it, but they know it is something they should talk about.
Similarly to access, it’s another way people- who want to seem to be doing something – can claim they have had a conversation about this thing, but with little to no intention of interrogating it, unpicking it, or even spending time writing a one sheet about.”
Care is service work. It is maintenance work - we are maintaining our artists, ourselves, our practices so we can keep going, so we can function, so we last and endure.”
ACTIONS
What if I/You/We…
“It is slow - it is even the most patient able bodied folks starting to freak out”
Rick and Morty put it this way - ‘the thing about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning is it’s not an adventure’
Care is investment in me as an individual, the company, our way of working and what we were trying to achieve- a core set of principles that we have all agreed on.
“I’m going to talk to you as a person and acknowledge that you have needs and a body and brain that doesn’t function like mine does” - Toni-Dee Paul
“Even if you don’t know the destination we are all looking at the same map”
Importance of deep-listening and hearing other people. Figuring how not to communicate past each other.
Receiving care is just as important as giving care
How does our preoccupation with putting something new into the world stifle the care work needed to make and sustain an ecosystem of folk that make and experience art?
How do we provide 360 degree care?
Made our contracts, policy and practice docs easy-read
Removed the labour from artists with access needs by asking everyone what they need to do their job as part of the induction process?
Planned with multiple scenarios built in?
(If A is not possible then B is, If B is not possible then C is)
Built care contingencies into every element of a budget
Had moveable deadlines
Had care practices mandated by funders
Created easy-read contracts, policies and procedures
Used plain language as common practice / standard, evolving the creative industries by learning from health sector practices
Were asked by our funders to evidence health and wellbeing practices as a core competency before funding contracts are agreed
Reprioritised what we already have rather than delaying until we have more resources to centre care
Acknowledge that care riders and/or access needs evolve during projects and build in scope and capacity for needed adaptations
…exploring and disrupting current/ traditional commissioning models • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
