CARE LAB

How do we create conditions for building and sustaining care-centred collaborations?

Care is complex and unravelly. Dictionary: Care is “serious attention or consideration applied to doing something correctly or to avoid damage or risk”. Care is 2-way and reciprocal. Care is open communication and making no judgment. Care is Love. Care is the process of protecting someone or something and providing what that person or thing needs.

What is Care?

Poem by Deanna Rodger

Reflections

Reflections from Suzanne Alleyne, Care Lab Facilitator

Moving between spaces and working with our worst fears

The common theme of tensions and opposites came up immediately. Dre started by talking about the challenge of giving this provocation by “moving from a producer’s space into an artist’s face, and suddenly looking at themselves as an artist”. This got me thinking about each of us as individuals and the challenges of thinking and doing care. There are all the outside tensionsbudgets, time lines, deadlines, reporting and process procedures - but there is also the tension and challenge within ourselves. Part of Dre’s provocation explained to us, the participants, what clown practice is: “basically the clown nose is the is the smallest mask and what it allows us to do is remove the mask that we have in the world and put on this other tiny, tiny little mask, which enables us to be our most vulnerable self”. I wonder how care would look and feel differently if we could all be our most vulnerable selves, knowing that we would be cared for in our process of revealing what we need. How could this human-centred approach apply to everyone in the creative process? And it feels important to come back to that theme of what is harmony for one is discord for another - for Dre just thinking about the notion of care is a really heavy subject that brings out visceral and seemingly painful feelings, which is why she finished by asking “can we have more conversations to address issues around care and drive change without it feeling heavytackling it seriously whilst holding it lightly”.

Moving Forward

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 the bodies and emotions 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?

Tricia Hersey is an artist, thinker, writer and self-proclaimed Nap Bishop. She connects the relationship with our current grind culture with the impacts of the slave trade and capitalism.

Tricia found that rest as resistance saved her life. She created the conditions to thrive for herself.

This made me think of myself as an artist. An artist who studied clowning because I was a bad actor. An artist who was always behind in academic studies and in physical theatre training because I couldn’t really take instructions.

The clown is the most human character and to be human is to be flawed and contradictory. The clown faces all sides of itself at the same time.

Clown is also a highly sensitive space (as an autistic person this is what enriches my clowning).

I often work with objects as a way to create abstraction in such a dense emotional world.

Right now, when I think of care, am overwhelmed by that big responsibility. It is so heavy. The weight of it is huge - caring for my friends, family, the environment, anyone the government isn’t caring for…

With abstraction I can bring lightness.

Sometimes with the pressure of it all and the weight of responsibility, especially working with a care centred organisation, the weight can crush us, the work or the people we work with.

There is so much seriousness that comes with care and that seriousness sucks the oxygen out of new possibilities

Where is the lightness in care?

How do we play our way into it?

Care is a heavy subject - it can be overwhelming It takes a lot of bravery to honour our care. It’s not possible to think about care without also thinking about really intense bravery

We make assumptions that other people’s communications needs are the same as ours Centring care can touch deep emotions/memories of not being cared for.

You won’t get a different outcome with the same action. Lean into the discomfort of new, difficult ideas. Abstraction can sometimes help you move forward. The reality is that in any one conversation both people can be aware that everyone communicates differently, and be trying to take that into account, and still talk past each other.