Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry 9819922909, 9789819922901

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Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 8

Warren Linds Tony Gee

Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry

Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research Volume 8

Series Editor Barbara Bickel, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, USA Editorial Board Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA Barbara Bickel, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, Carbondale, IL, USA Pam Burnard, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Qiana Cutts, Mississippi State University, Mississippi, MS, USA Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA Peter Gouzouasis, University of British Columbia, North Vancouver, BC, Canada Andrea Kantrowitz, State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, USA Kelly Clark-Keefe, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA Diane Kuthy, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA Morna McDermott McNulty, Towson University, Catonsville, MD, USA Layal Shuman, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, ON, Canada Richard Siegesmund, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL, USA

Arts-Based Educational Research continues to garner increased interest and debate among artists, arts writers, researchers, scholars and educators internationally. Further, the methodologies and theoretical articulations associated with Arts-Based Educational Research are increasingly employed across the disciplines of social science, education, humanities, health, media, communications, the creative arts, design, and trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. This book series offers edited collections and monographs that survey and exemplify Arts-Based Educational Research. The series will take up questions relevant to the diverse range of Arts-Based Educational Research. These questions might include: What can Arts-Based methodologies (such as Arts-Based Research, ArtsInformed Research, a/r/tography, Poetic Inquiry, Performative Inquiry, Arts PracticeBased Research etc.) do as a form of critical qualitative inquiry? How do the Arts (such as literary, visual and performing arts) enable research? What is the purpose of Arts-Based Educational Research? What counts as Arts-Based? What counts as Educational? What counts as Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research be responsibly performed in communities and institutions, individually or collaboratively? Must Arts-Based Educational Research be public? What ways of knowing and being can be explored with Arts-Based Educational Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research build upon diverse philosophical, theoretical, historical, political, aesthetic and spiritual approaches to living? What is not Arts-Based Educational Research? The hinge connecting the arts and research in this Arts-Based Educational Research book series is education. Education is understood in its broadest sense as learning/transformation/change that takes place in diverse formal and informal spaces, places and moments. As such, books in this series might take up questions such as: How do perspectives on education, curriculum and pedagogy (such as critical, participatory, liberatory, intercultural and historical) inform Arts-Based inquiries? How do teachers become artists, and how do artists become teachers? How can one be both? What does this look like, in and beyond school environments? Arts-Based Educational Research will be deeply and broadly explored, represented, questioned and developed in this vital and digitally augmented international publication series. The aesthetic reach of this series will be expanded by a digital online repository where all media pertaining to publications will be held. Queries can be sent via email to Mindy Carter [email protected].

Warren Linds · Tony Gee

Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry

Warren Linds Concordia University Montreal, QC, Canada

Tony Gee Creation Myth Puppets Devon, UK

ISSN 2364-8376 ISSN 2364-8384 (electronic) Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research ISBN 978-981-99-2290-1 ISBN 978-981-99-2291-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2291-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design by Sun Kyoung Kim This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Managing Editor’s Foreword

In Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry, authors Warren Linds and Tony Gee explore the insights and wisdom they have gleaned from using the long-respected theatrical device of workshopping. In educational settings, exploratory performance and dialogue become tools for critical reflection. Written as an epistolary, Linds (a professor of applied human sciences) and Gee (a teaching theatrical artist) eschew a linear exposition of methods. Here, in the tracings of hermeneutic dialogue, they take us on a journey into a procreant imagination to witness the transformational power of artistic inquiry where thought and sense assume form. This is not a cookbook where novice researchers can copy a careful roadmap in the hopes of duplicating empirical results. Rather, this is a passage into the ephemeral where skill, training, and acute sensitivity allow the arts-based inquirer to recognize the unforeseen and seize the conjured teachable moment. Leveraging the work of diverse artists and scholars from across the field of Applied Theatre, Linds and Gee demonstrate the educational power of workshop as a form of reflexivity for facilitators and practitioners to generate meaning from what had previously been only felt but not yet brought into language. This book is published by Springer as part of the editorial series overseen by the Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). The ABER SIG, founded in 1996, seeks to explore how the arts inform both ways of knowing and communicating significant educational meaning that may be too elusive to capture in didactic text or statistical analysis. The arts have always served as a pathway for making sense of experience. They are catalysts that provide insight into the effervescent moments when life events are first coherently grasped and reflected on in ways that promote educational development. They also offer a means of inscribing a record of these phenomena that can serve as a reference over time. The ABER series focuses on how

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artists and arts-based educators aesthetically guide others in developing, fostering, and refining these capacities to stimulate reflective dialogue that enhances personal growth. Richard Siegesmund, Ph.D. Professor Art and Design Education, Emeritus Northern Illinois University DeKalb, IL, USA

Contents

1 An Interview with Authors Tony Gee and Warren Linds . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Siegesmund, Tony Gee, and Warren Linds References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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2 Prologue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.1 Unanticipated Worlds Arising . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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3 What Is Workshop? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Warren Linds and Tony Gee 3.1 What Is Workshop? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.2 Why Workshop Is a Form . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.3 The History of Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4 Workshop as a Form of/for Research and Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3.4.1 Reflective Lenses of Arts-Based Research . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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4 Devising Workshop: The Dance of Potentials . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tony Gee and Warren Linds 4.1 Facilitator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.2 Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3 Common Purpose . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.3.1 Conceit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.4 Creative Agency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5 Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5.1 Freefall . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5.2 Diving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.5.3 Safe Uncertainty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.6 Safety and Risk . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.7 Motivation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.8 Devising the Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4.9 Presence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Workshop Toolkit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phase One . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phase Two . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phase Three . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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5 The Arc of Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Warren Linds and Tony Gee 5.1 Beginning—Interaction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2 The Middle—Infectious Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.1 Listening, Witnessing, and Observing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.2 Use of Creative Tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.3 Forming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.2.4 Intuition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3 The End—Bringing the Story Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.1 The 6-Part Story Method . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.3.2 Collective Murals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5.4 Sharing and Presenting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Workshop Dictionary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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6 Recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Tony Gee and Warren Linds 6.1 Recovery from Workshop and Re-Covering the Ground We Have Traversed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.2 A Workshop Atlas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.1 Praxology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6.3.2 Our Definitions of Workshop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

82 108 110 113 116 117 127 129 133 135 137 140 140 141 145

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Chapter 1

An Interview with Authors Tony Gee and Warren Linds Richard Siegesmund, Tony Gee, and Warren Linds

Richard: Tony and Warren, your book offers insights and wisdom drawn from the field of Applied Theater and the long-respected theatrical device of workshopping. Since 1995, a critical part of the ongoing international dialogue around Applied Theater occurs at the conferences of the International Drama in Education Association (IDEA). You both met at the 2001 IDEA conference in Bergen, Norway. How have your ideas blossomed over time from your first forays into Applied Theater and later intersections with the IDEA conference? Tony: In 2001, I was doing a master’s in Applied Theater at Exeter and researching Workshop as a distinctive form of arts practice. I felt that the best way to explore Workshop with other practitioners was to run workshops on Workshop, which sounds circular, but it isn’t if you think that there’s a power to the form, why not employ it? So, I went to the IDEA conference and Warren participated in my first ever workshop on Workshop. That conference was really important to my work because it put me in touch with an array of different theatre and education practitioners who had a huge effect on me. The Brazilian theatre and community development practitioner Marcia Pompeo Nogueira devised imaginative exercises for group investigation that I went on to endlessly use and adapt. She did fantastic work with Indigenous groups (Prentki, 2019). R. Siegesmund Professor Art and Design Education, Emeritus, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, USA T. Gee Creation Myth Puppets, Devon, UK e-mail: [email protected] W. Linds (B) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 W. Linds and T. Gee, Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2291-8_1

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In England, possibly my biggest influence was John Moat, who started the Arvon Foundation (2022). Arvon runs week-long, residential workshop courses for writers (Home of Creative Writing, n.d.). John was a constant reference point, a mentor, to visit and discuss what makes Workshop such a substantial and relevant form. Wendy Greenhill ran the outreach program at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. Wendy and I discussed the nature of self in Workshop—the I and I, or as the philosopher Martin Buber (1923/1970) coins it “the I and thou.” We talked about the specific aesthetic and creative potentials that Workshop as a collective form offers. Sadly, these three wonderful individuals—who just stick out straight away as people who really affected me—are now dead. Thankfully, someone who’s still alive is John Somers, my tutor at Exeter University. John tutored me through my two years of writing my Masters dissertation, based on the Workshop interviews, called Pudding Proof —as in, “the proof of the pudding is in the eating”: the sealed bubble that a workshop becomes with its own language that has meaning in that moment then and there. Thus, it has an in-built protection against being colonized by “puddings.” The idea of Workshop puts you in contact with an expansive international community. I remember being blown away when I discovered that there was a whole strand of participatory work going on in Scandinavia. One practitioner who I stayed in contact with was from Finland, Riku Laakkonen, who works in applied circus and puppetry. While a student, I had missed a lot of Scandinavian practice as the literature had not been translated into English, although fortunately this is beginning to change (Hulkko & Laakkonen, 2022). The work was authentically international. There were people running workshops in Nigerian prisons (Okhakhu & Evawoma-Enuku, 2011) and with people suffering from AIDS in Uganda (Frank, 1996). My workshop practice has grown organically through interaction with other practitioners. So, workshops grow by going to each other’s workshops. That means that it’s quite difficult from the outside to prescribe how you should do it. What Warren and I draw from in our approaches is that we both saw Workshop as a form of practice in its own right. Warren: I attended the recent summer 2022 10th IDERI conference at the University of Warwick, UK. There I went to presentations and workshops that articulated the difference between research-based theatre and theatre-based research. Researchbased theatre collects interviews and data, helps participants to tell their stories, and then has these narratives performed on stage. George Belliveau has a lab at the University of British Columbia (Prendergast & Belliveau, 2018), and works with many doctoral students. Diane Conrad (Conrad & Beck, 2015) teaches at the University of Alberta. Together, they did a session as well on ethics and research-based theatre. I’ve always followed Diane’s work and that of Joe Norris, her predecessor at the University (who was also the external examiner on my Ph.D. dissertation defense). Joe contributed to the development of research-based theatre through his work with

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Mirror Theatre (Norris, 2009; Sawyer & Norris, 2013). Another form of researchbased theater is ethnodrama, where traditional ethnographic methods as re-presented through dramatic research (Saldaña, 2005). In qualitative research there is this whole debate about data. For a long time, it was still based on quantitative models: there are data out in the world; stories to be collected. The qualitative researcher carefully, objectively, without bias, gathered data and analytically presented findings to an audience. Then there’s this whole area called arts-based research (McNiff, 1998), arts based educational research (Barone & Eisner, 1997), or arts-based action research (Jokela & Huhmarniemi, 2019). And sometimes it conforms to a kind of data driven process, like, we have this question, and we want to interview people and then we’re going to create something together. An extension of this data-driven approach is critical arts-based research (Finley, 2018). These researchers work for a cause. They seek to be advocates for a point of view. All of these forms of research-based theater are a reflective process of bearing witness to one’s previous experience. I align more with theatre-based research, which is more embodied action. Theatre based research is a process of making something new that was not previously imagined. It is about being in the experience. Theatrical and performative process is employed so that new knowing emerges. I actually believe this is a different form of research, and it’s daunting to find its place. It’s kind of marginalized in a way. It’s also a challenge for people to reflect on their own processes of research. Participant Action Arts-Based Research (Daniels, 2002) is also closer to this model. However, often even in Participant Action Arts-Based Research, there is an outcome that the facilitator is attempting the participants to work towards. The end point is already foreseen before the workshop begins. I was in a workshop at IDERI in the summer of 2022 where they were illustrating really interesting work being done in New Zealand by Peter and Briar O’Connor (O’Connor et al., 2007). What was interesting about that is it was as in most conferences, you’re illustrating your work, you’re exposing your work. There’s often not enough time really to delve into the issues that they were processing in the workshop. But there were moments where I could see an opportunity to go on a useful tangent to explore what was happening in the room. But it’s hard at a conference for that to happen where people are presenting their work and short scenes and things like that. But they were doing really interesting work with schools around training around to recognize violence against children. And there was a whole process there. But it really depends on who’s in the room and when you’re at a conference it’s quite an eclectic group of people. Tony: Enzo Cozzi (2008) also has to be mentioned here. Enzo is retired now, but was a professor of theatre at Royal Holloway, University of London and kicked off my puppet theatre career in the mid 80s. As Enzo said when I interviewed him on the question, “What is Workshop?” “He said, “Every workshop tells its own story. It is a story that is told then and there by those people. One thing leads to the next and to the next. It is a unique story. It is told then and there by those people and can never be told again.” For me, this goes to the heart of Workshop—story. We inquire

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by creating and retelling narratives by employing different art forms in a collective environment. Richard: Are there individuals outside of the field of Applied Theater who have been significant theoretical sources for your thinking? Warren: I am influenced by the work into embodied action (enaction) of the Chilean polymath Francisco Varela. This concept means that meaning emerges in the interaction between people and their environment—what Varela and Maturana called “structural coupling” (Maturana & Varela, 1992; Varela et al., 1992). What emerges in the creative process? I also became interested in complexity theory, particularly in the work of management professors Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin (2005) and how the role of the facilitator is to engender conditions for creativity. That is, this lens says, you can’t actually ‘create’ creativity itself. But you can create the conditions that allows creativity to emerge. So, I got interested in that in my doctoral exploration of the role of the theatre facilitator, and then carried it on because I use it in my teaching. So, the arts themselves are as I said, the site, methodology and representation of the knowing of the group. I connected that with the work of John Heron (1999), who takes a transpersonal approach to facilitation, where he says you have an experience and you make sense firstly of experience through the imaginal or imaginative or the creative means, and then you can use these previous stages to frame a discussion about the concepts that have emerged. When people are centered in their experience, making sense of that experience doesn’t happen through the verbal, but it happens through the artistic. And what emerges from that artistic process is something different from what you would otherwise have if you started talking about the experience. Returning to the field of Applied Theater, another influence is Augusto Boal’s (1985) Theatre of the Oppressed and its variants. Boal sought to bring the liberatory pedagogy of Paulo Freire (1970) into immediate civic action. I was introduced to this by David Diamond’s Headlines Theater in Vancouver, British Columbia. Diamond went on to adapt Theatre of the Oppressed to a form that he called Theatre for Living (2007). I’ve been a part of the Theatre of the Oppressed North American network and have attended the yearly conferences. Adaptations of Theatre of the Oppressed is a cornerstone of international contemporary practice (Bermudez de Castro et al., 2022; Cahnmann-Taylor & Souto-Manning, 2010). I also want to acknowledge Rick Arnold and Bev Burke, who, way back in a 1983 workshop I co-organized, introduced me to the concept of applying Freirean approaches from Latin America to North American contexts through popular education. So my influences would be mostly Paulo Freirean approaches. Tony: Theater has had major influence on my work, but I’ve been a freelance artist for 40 years and, particularly in the last 20 years, I’ve worked with artists from just about every artistic discipline. These artists have done more than anyone else in developing my practice and helping me ask the right questions. I am thinking especially the 21 artists in The Moveable Feast Workshop Company (2005–2015). As one artist said, “Questions are our rocket fuel.”

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There is one other group of people, probably both of us would mention, and that’s the First Nations in Canada. Warren was part of the Indigenous People’s Health Research Center in Saskatchewan for 10 years. He brought me over to work with them. That had had a big effect on me, reading and dialoguing about Indigenous knowledge (Victor et al., 2016). So, Linda and Keith Goulet and Jo-Ann Episkenew (2009), David Benjoe and Dustin Brass all had a big effect, once I started talking to them in Canada, because it’s all these different ways of seeing, as John Berger (2001) put it, that open you up. That’s one of the beauties about Workshop as a form. It allows people to see their world through different lenses. Warren: I also work with the single, double, and triple loop learning theory developed by Chris Argyris and Donald Schön (1978). This theory is built on Gregory Bateson’s five levels of learning (1972) where he proposes that the fourth level might be “beyond the reach of language” (p. 301) and emphasizes the role in learning of the unconscious and the aesthetic. As an illustration of this, I recall a group of students who were facilitating a workshop and decided to ask their fellow students to design the ideal campus. They had just a bunch of materials in the front of the room and said, ‘Use these materials to design the ideal campus.’ This class happened to be scheduled over the supper hour. And lo and behold, one group designed a series of classrooms around a circle and in the middle circle was what we call a food court. The doors were all open, so that in the ideal campus they were able to leave the classroom, go buy some food, then bring it back to the classroom. They were working with their own hunger having the class during the supper hour. As a facilitator, it is interesting to see how the conditions of the moment influence thinking. The difficulty, of course, is how to build on this moment. Now that this thinking has been given a form where it can now be talked about in language, where do you take it next? I’ve seen this approach in architecture charrettes or innovative design where you are trying to reimagine building design. I feel the arts and creativity are ideal for innovative prototyping. Tony: However, I had a wake-up call where I was invited to a forum of workshop leaders at the Royal College of Arts and found that I was talking to a guy from the missile industry who told me that they employed 700 workshop leaders to innovate missile design. So that’s an absolutely difficult issue to the ethical ends to which we use the power of the arts and creativity. Two other theorists and practitioners that need to be noted are the San Francisco dancer Anna Halprin and landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (Hirsch, 2016). Inspired by Happenings (Garoian, 2018), in 1968 they conducted ‘Experiments in the Environment’ as a 24-day outdoor event with designers, dancers, musicians, visual artists, writers, teachers, and psychologists and were intended to “investigate theories and approaches leading to integrated, cross-professional creativity and heightened environmental awareness” (SFMOMA, 1986, p. 132). In 1974, Lawrence’s book Taking Part (Halprin & Burns, 1974) explored their workshop cycle of RSVP—a circular process involving Resources, Scores, Valuaction and Performance. It’s a unique book from MIT Press with a hand produced feel and very few copies were produced.

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Richard: Is there an orthodoxy to workshop practice? Tony: That’s an interesting question. Well, no, that’s the point, there isn’t. But there is perhaps an overriding form that exists in people’s minds when they’re doing it. And that’s what my research into Workshop affirmed, that there was a not an orthodoxy, but a common idea that centered around first-hand experience, participation, collective experience, context, and facilitating or leading an event in a space over an amount of time in which people discovered something. A workshop could be about a particular question, but it was always about those who were present. Everybody I interviewed for my Masters said that to me. It didn’t matter whether they were National Theatre or the local scrap store (which I don’t think you’ve got them in the other side of the Atlantic, but they’re places that collect junk and recycled stuff and we use it for a lot of materials), the Birmingham Ballet or writers or visual artists or musicians: everybody said the same thing. So that’s where Warren and I agreed. Workshop is a form of practice. I don’t think there’s an orthodoxy to it. I think it can range from a happening and putting a load of materials in the room and saying, ‘make what you want’, to the sort of events that I run quite often, where we take a world myth, and then we get a group of children to animate—an event with a rigorously planned framework. Richard: This book is published by Springer as part of the editorial series overseen by the Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER) Special Interest Group (SIG) of the American Educational Research Association (AERA). How do you see Workshop as a form of ABER? Tony: In my view, one of the biggest alienations that there is in education is the separation of self-knowledge from subject knowledge. What Warren and I advocate, and practice, is that the two things are always connected. So, although I might explore a question with a group, in that workshop moment then and there, what happens doesn’t alienate the group from finding out stuff that’s relevant to them. This is an essential ingredient of workshop. The research question is a catalyst for the participants to work in that cauldron that connects topic or issue with self-discovery. Warren: I can give a really good example. I was part of a five-year research project with a Playback Theatre (Fox, 2003; Salas, 1996) company called Living Histories Theatre Ensemble/la Troupe Théâtrale Histoires Vivantes. In the original approach to Playback Theatre, you’re the neutral actor and you listen to the stories of the audience. You re-enact them in service to the audience, to the service of the teller. This project was about listening to the life stories of Montrealers who had been displaced by genocide and other human rights violations. We had been working with different groups from, among others, the Montreal Cambodian, Rwandan, Haitian and Jewish communities. We were performing our research.at a conference of oral historians and were asked, “What is happening for you as the actor when you hear these stories?” In traditional Playback, you don’t have any role other than being in service to the teller of their personal stories. From that question, we developed a new technique, a new form which responded to this question. Some people said it wasn’t Playback, but we felt it was our responsibility to actually link the story of the teller,

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which was a very traumatic story, to our story, as a lens on that story, whatever that lens might be. The five of us would perform our story in fragmented ways to connect our responses, our internal responses, to the story of the teller. I acknowledge that is not a workshop, but I think it takes the idea of Workshop that is an instance of creating a response to somebody saying, “we don’t get how you can act this story’s out without responding from your own feelings about that story,” which is in the sensibility of what emerges in a particular audience. What’s ironic, of course, is that, like in Workshop, Playback is all improvised but within a structure that uses specific dramatic forms to perform to both teller and the audience. But we rehearsed every week and in one of our rehearsals, we developed this method, and we wrote about it (Sajnani et al., 2011). It’s an interesting thing where, when you have an orthodoxy, like in the Theater of the Oppressed or Playback or any kind of art form, there is an orthodoxy. I suggest that any artistic form, there’s an orthodoxy, but you always are tweaking or adapting the orthodoxy in the creative process according to the context you are working with and in. Richard: The tweaking of orthodoxy seems to be an important concept in postqualitative research theory: you can’t break new ground by adhering to method (St. Pierre, 2019). Tony: I just wanted to say the intensity of collective experience that can happen does create relationship as well. We are social beings. In terms of healing, in terms of what’s happening, in terms of inquiry, you’re finding out about each other in a very different way than you’re allowed to in a classroom or during a lecture. Relationships are formed because as you were talking now, I was just thinking, I ran a five-week, cross modular course for 4 years at Dartington College of Arts in Devon called Workshop Skills. The course was a very small constituent of degree course in different art disciplines. Despite its relatively minor role in their degrees, I still know all these people that were on that workshop course. They still keep in touch with me. One of the joys of getting older is people come up and say, “You ran a workshop with me 30 years ago, didn’t you? I’ve still got that puppet. I ended up doing this because of that, you know…”. Warren: I keep running into people who Tony and I worked with, which was a somewhat, not totally, successful workshop. Nevertheless, I keep running into these older women who still talk about it. I run into them on this campus where I work. They just loved it. Tony: It was called the Laboratory of Imagination. We’d worked on ten workshops in a couple of weeks together. We were nearly sick of the sight of each other. We travelled all over the place. In the final workshop in the series, The Laboratory of Imagination, we took a huge amount of risk. We had all sorts of people. We had somebody from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), professional and personal coaches, consultants and executives and all sorts there. And we got them to do really mad things. Like you say, a lot of them felt vulnerable. Yeah, but it sticks. You know, we took the risk and they’re still talking about it.

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It can stick. It has an adherence. A strong experience sticks. We’ve all had it. We all know it. We all have instances of it. Richard: What challenges do you face? Tony: There are just huge challenges for the future of the planet. In Britain there are initiatives like Arts Alliance that are given participatory arts new credibility. There are university courses in participatory arts. I think the big challenge is still we have to stay open. This is the challenge. We have to stay open. And we live in such divisive times, so we need to have open dialogue … dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. And I don’t mean just talking either. That’s what workshop is, a dialogical form. It allows conversation. The arts as a learning media are all about relationship. Relationship to material, to each other and to a process. All of which coalesce to facilitate a different relationship to time and space. It is not the same as being lectured at. It is hands on and participation. The challenge is to do that. The preaching doesn’t work. The preaching is always going to end up preaching to the converted and losing the alienated. Workshop, as a way of learning, needs putting at the heart of education. We have to explore things together and workshop allows us to do it. So, I think that the more facilities and the better resources are, especially for young people to get into that. We have managed to get ten-year olds to run workshops for each other quite quickly. You introduce them to some basic concepts, and they sort of get it. They have had some wonderful experiences with them. Openness in a time of divisiveness is the way I characterize the challenge like that. Warren: One challenge I see is in the students I work with who I see are mostly interested in ‘helping’ in whatever context they are, or will be, working in. Going along with this is they see this as involving control over a situation. For me, working with creativity means giving up a sense of control over outcomes as one enables the group or community you are working with explore whatever they want to explore. And that involves, for the facilitator or leader, a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity and being comfortable with that. That includes me because in every situation I won’t know what will happen. I have a purpose or intention in whatever creative activities I lead, but that purpose or intention is always going to shift as the group or community engages. Tony: It’s a very good point about where we are. I’ve always said, I work in the cavity of the walls. I get to come out occasionally. Even within the arts, I think participatory work has tended to be marginalized or seen as lesser than ‘real art’. It took me ten years to get any funding to develop Workshop as a practice because everyone just said, well it’s process. It’s not process. It is ontology. It’s an experience. It’s not commercial. It’s not a product you hold, or is displayed in a gallery, or is auctioned off at Sotheby’s. Workshop has different qualities, aesthetics and represents different values. I think that marginalization of the creative experience of Workshop is a power struggle because if you put ontology in the middle of things, you end up almost with a version that is not a consumer society version of the world.

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Warren: Well, here’s an interesting thing. I’m currently working with a student who’s just starting his PhD on design ontology, which is about how to work with progressive groups who don’t think about design. They just act. But how to help them make their decisions ontologically because they’re so action focused? I’m always thinking about how the progressive world can learn through the arts and not to see itself as only action oriented (Escobar, 2018). Tony: This is true, Warren. Warren: I’m eclectic, and I’m kind of in-between two worlds. I did an education graduate degree, but I had no background in teaching education. I did stuff on theater, but I had no training in theater, or theatre education (except being part of a political theatre collective that linked social issues to theatrical presentation). I was always in between two worlds, and I’m in a program/department now that is full of people who are between worlds and from multiple disciplines. What is foundational in my work is arts-based educational action research, not just educational research. It’s not using the arts to transform, but the arts as a place where transformation occurs. I make the distinction between the what-if world and the as-is world. When you’re in the theater, when you’re working in theater, in a theatrical story or whatever, you’re operating as if you had power. As if you have power rather than what if we had power? It’s a slight difference. I’ll give an example. We had a student for two straight years in workshops as part of this arts based educational research project that used a Theatre of the Oppressed approach to explore wellbeing. In the first year he left the group when they were developing short scenes about life as a youth in their community and watched from the sidelines. In the second workshop about a year later he was more engaged. And we asked him afterwards, “What did you learn in the first year?” He says, “I learned I have choices that I can make.” That’s what he learned. It doesn’t sound like much, but for him it was a lot. They were doing a play about what basically happens after school: a little bit of lateral violence, bullying and stuff going on. He learned that he didn’t have to get involved with that. Small in a way, but large in another way. I recall another workshop where in the middle of the workshop, something happened in the youths’ lives that we had to deal with. And we dealt with it through the arts. We didn’t deal with it by counselling or talking about it, but we actually explored it through the process we were using. And we had another plan and another plan entirely that we had to ditch because this is what this is what happened over lunch. So sometimes that’s what happens. You’re dealing with people’s lives as they are, not as they want them to be, but exploring what, as that other student e said, it means to have a choice. Tony: I find it constantly a profound honor to be in rooms with people making those choices in front of me and doing that. Being able to invite them to make choices and see. It is simple in one way. And that’s the other thing. Let’s not complicate it. You know, simple. It’s simple. You stick that masking tape on there, and you’re going to make something that you’ll feel really proud of. This is a kid—in some cases, an adult who’s never felt proud of anything he’d made before or not since they were

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twelve years old (Warren starts the book like that). And some teacher told him they couldn’t do something. So, he just gave up? It’s just incredibly profound. To me, that’s an inquiry. Warren: In any way, breaking the rules. The arts do break the rules.

References Argyris, C., & Schön, D. A. (1978). Organizational learning. A theory of action perspective. Addison-Wesley. Arvon Foundation. (2022, November 3). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvon_Founda tion Barone, T., & Eisner, E. W. (1997). Art-based educational research. In R. M. Jaeger (Ed.), Complementary methods for research in education (2nd ed., pp. 73–94). American Educational Research Association. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. Jason Aronson. Berger, J. (2001). John Berger: Selected essays (G. Dyer, Ed.). Vintage Books. Bermudez de Castro, J., Berbel, N., & Jaume, M. (2022). “Your luxury loft, my daily misery!” University theatre, neighbours, and schools combat gentrification through applied theatre practices in a marginal district of Majorca, Spain. Ride-the Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 27(1), 106–120. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569783.2021.1991782 Boal, A. (1985). Theater of the oppressed. Theatre Communications Group. Buber, M. (1970). I and thou (W. A. Kaufmann, Trans.). Scribner (Original work published 1923). Cahnmann-Taylor, M., & Souto-Manning, M. (2010). Teachers act up! Creating multicultural learning communities through theatre. Teachers College Press. Conrad, D., & Beck, J. L. (2015). Towards articulating an arts-based research paradigm: Growing deeper. UNESCO Observatory Multi-Disciplinary Journal in the Arts, 5(1), 1–26. Cozzi, E. (2008). A performattic nightmare and a performantic dream. Performance Research, 13(2), 46. https://doi.org/10.1080/13528160802639276 Daniels, D. (2002). Using the life histories of community builders in an informal settlement to advance the emancipation and development of women. In R. M. Cervero (Ed.), The Cyril O. Houle scholars in adult and continuing education program global research, volume 2 (pp. 56– 69). The University of Georgia. Diamond, D. (2007). Theatre for living: The art and science of community-based dialogue. Trafford Publishing. Episkenew, J. (2009). Taking back our spirits: Indigenous literature, public policy, and healing. University of Manitoba Press. Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press. Finley, S. (2018). Critical arts-based inquiry: Performances of resistance politics. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (5th ed., pp. 561–575). SAGE. Fox, J. (2003). Acts of service: Spontaneity, commitment, tradition in the non-scripted theatre. Tusitala. Frank, M. (1996). Theater in the service of health education: Case studies from Uganda. New Theatre Quarterly, 12(47), 108–155. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0266464X00009933 Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Continuum. Garoian, C. R. (2018). HAPPENINGS: Allan Kaprow’s experimental, inquiry-based art education. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (2nd ed., pp. 147–162). Routledge.

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Halprin, L., & Burns, J. (1974). Taking part: A workshop approach to collective creativity. MIT Press. Heron, J. (1999). The complete facilitator’s handbook. Kogan Page. Hirsch, A. (2016). The collective creativity of Anna and Lawrence Halprin. GIA Reader, 27(2). Retreived Novemeber 4, 2022, from https://www.giarts.org/article/collective-creativity-annaand-lawrence-halprin Home of Creative Writing. (n.d.). Arvon. Retrieved November 3, 2022, from https://www.arvon. org/about/arvon-home-of-creative-writing/ Hulkko, P., & Laakkonen, R. (2022). Actor education, object animation and care. Theatre, Dance and Performance Training, 13(2), 309–323. https://doi.org/10.1080/19443927.2022.2052175 Jokela, T., & Huhmarniemi, M. (2019). Art-based action research in the development work of arts and art education. In G. Coutts, E. Härkönen, M. Huhmarniemi, & T. Jokela (Eds.), The lure of Lapland: A handbook for arctic art and design (pp. 9–23). University of Lapland. Maturana, H., & Varela, F. (1992) The tree of knowledge. The biological roots of human understanding. Shambhala Publications. McNiff, S. (1998). Art-based research. Jessica Kingsley. Norris, J. (2009). Playbuilding as qualitative research: A participatory arts-based approach. Left Coast Press. O’Connor, P., Holland, C., & O’Connor, B. (2007). The everyday becomes extraordinary: Conversations about family violence, through applied theatre. Applied Theatre Researcher/IDEA Journal, 8, 1–16. Okhakhu, M., & Evawoma-Enuku, U. (2011). Enhancing correctional education through community theatre: The Benin prison experience. Education, 131(3), 525–532. Prendergast, M., & Belliveau, G. (2018). Misperformance ethnography. In M. Cahnmann-Taylor & R. Siegesmund (Eds.), Arts-based research in education: Foundations for practice (2nd ed., pp. 99–114). Routledge. Prentki, T. (2019, September). Remembering Marcia. International Child Art Foundation: News. https://icafrotterdam.com/blog/2019/09/11/remembering-marcia/ Sajnani, N., Linds, W., Ndejuru, L., & Wong, A. (2011). The bridge: Towards relational aesthetic inquiry in the Montreal Life Stories project. Canadian Theatre Review, 148(1), 18–24. https:// doi.org/10.3138/ctr.148.18 Salas, J. (1996). Improvising real life: Personal story in playback theatre. Tusitala. Saldaña, J. (2005). Ethnodrama: An anthology of reality theatre. AltaMira Press. Sawyer, R. D., & Norris, J. (2013). Duoethnography. Oxford University Press. SFMOMA. (1986). Lawrence Halprin: Changing places (p. 132). San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. St. Pierre, E. A. (2019). Post qualitative inquiry in an ontology of immanence. Qualitative Inquiry, 25(1), 3–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800418772634 Stacey, R., & Griffin, D. (2005). Introduction: Researching organizations from a complexity perspective. In R. Stacey & D. Griffin (Eds.), A complexity perspective on researching organizations. Taking experience seriously (pp. 1–12). Routledge. Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1992). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. The MIT Press. Victor, J., Linds, W., Episkenew, J.-A., Goulet, L., Benjoe, D., Brass, D., Pandey, M., & Schmidt, K. (2016). Kiskenimisowin (self-knowledge): Co-researching wellbeing with Canadian First Nations Youth through participatory visual methods. International Journal of Indigenous Health, 11(1), 262–278. https://doi.org/10.18357/ijih111201616020

Chapter 2

Prologue

In 2001, two participatory artists met at the International Drama and Education Association Conference in Bergen, Norway. They found that they had a common field of inquiry and interest. There was substantial crossover in the way they were researching and documenting their inquiries. One of them suggested that they write a book together. Over the next few years, they met, communicated online, played tennis, and collaborated on several projects. This is their story and the result of their explorations into workshop as a form of arts practice and inquiry. The key question that we are addressing in this book is: What is Workshop? The question carries no prefixing article, ‘a’ or ‘the’, before the word ‘Workshop’. The question does not ask about a specific instance of a workshop such as, how was that workshop? Rather, that question assumes that Workshop might be a specific form of practice. For example, “yesterday I ran a puppet workshop”, refers to a specific workshop. Whereas, if I said, “that puppet workshop was an example of my Workshop practice as an artist/educator”, then, in this book, we have capitalized Workshop to indicate that we are discussing the form rather than a specific instance of a workshop.

2.1 Unanticipated Worlds Arising Totnes, United Kingdom Good morning, Warren, Now it’s real. All that talk together over the last twenty years. Running workshops together, sharing readings, writing bits and pieces for a prospective book. Now we are actually writing it. I would like to start by beginning to say a bit about myself and how we arrived at this point.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 W. Linds and T. Gee, Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2291-8_2

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I’ll tell you why I want to write this book and how I think it might work doing it as a dialogue. So, as you know I am part storyteller, part puppeteer and big part workshop artist. This has led me to many places to meet thousands upon thousands of people, have rich and varied experiences, collaborate with many talented artists, and get a taste of different ways and diverse cultures. Going way back, I studied Philosophy and Sociology at a university that was infused with a political zeal in the early 70s. I then went on to become a Youth and Community worker before an encounter with Enzo, a Chilean friend and applied theatre practitioner who, as if by some peculiar conjuring trick, turned me into a puppeteer overnight—a trajectory that had never even appeared in my dreams before that moment. Quite soon after, I began to notice something extraordinary happening in the workshops we developed as a financial survival strategy for our small puppeteering company, which by then was located in rural South West England. An alchemy was apparent, a strange sort of magic was evident when we showed people how to make puppets and animate them. Behind their puppets, children were transformed, and adults lost inhibitions. These mostly one-off puppeteers glowed and as a fellow artist once said after a big workshop, the kids were all glowing but how do you measure glow? I didn’t know it then, but a spell of sorts was being cast over me too – I was hooked on Workshop as the form to hone as my artistic practice. That was nearly forty years ago, and I am still hooked. I guess that’s why I want to write this book, as performance theorist Richard Schechner (1973) wrote, “workshops are more important than most people dream of” (p. 36). For me it seems essential that we develop participatory ways to learn, gain knowledge and deepen our understanding of Workshop. As poet Robert Graves (2003) wrote in Warning to Children, “Of the greatness, rareness, muchness, fewness of this precious only endless world…” (p. 15), to which we are connected to each other and from which we are bound to making meaning. Workshops matter because they can combine creative process and the collective process so that what emerges and becomes manifest enhances our humanity in inquiries into the how-to and why and wherefore of the topic, skill, or process at hand. This model emerged from practical and poetic practice and is grounded in action research with Workshop artists and practitioners in many different fields. A workshop is always specific to those people in that time and place. So, inquiry in a workshop simultaneously works as research into content and a journey of self-discovery by those people, there and then. In a good workshop, subject and object seamlessly coalesce. These inquiries can amplify us as people who come into a space from a specific social context and a moment in an individual biography. We embark on a hands-on and lived through experience in the moment of the workshop and then return to the specificities of our world afterwards. It’s a journey. As jewellery maker Bronwen Gwillim (in Gee, 2001) shared, Transformation is the essence of the creative process, that’s what creativity is, it is making something that has never existed before, whether it is bringing together existing elements in new ways or whether it is something completely original, yeh, absolutely about not being in the same place as you were when you walked into the room. (p. 67)

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So, making creative environments for groups to explore and investigate is my business as an artist. There are four key tools in my practice as a Workshop artist: story, play, puppeteering, and theatre. This book is an opportunity to share some of what I have gathered through workshops in schools, trainings, organisational development, communities, and collaboration.

Montreal, Canada Good day Tony, Like you, for me the impetus for this book goes back beyond our connections. The first moment I remember being affected by social justice issues was in the summer of 1968, sitting in a living room chair watching ‘live’ on tv the attack of the police on demonstrators in Chicago during the Democratic national convention. I remember taking out a pad of paper and writing my thoughts and feelings and anger. Asking ‘why’ was this happening and what can we do about it? I have always been an experiential learner, but I didn’t realize this until I encountered a student in my first year teaching full time at a university. She had come up to me at a break in my class in leadership of small groups and asked me to tell her before we did an activity what she was going to experience and what she would gain from it. I told her I wasn’t her, so how would I know what she would learn from the activity or what she would experience. I realized then and there, although I probably knew this intuitively, that I engaged in experience differently from others. I always found it difficult to explain the step-by-step rules of an activity, because I always jumped into experiencing something without really knowing what I would experience. In the mid-70s I decided I wanted to learn to mountain climb while I was living in Vancouver, British Columbia. I discovered then and there that I didn’t really want to learn to mountain climb, nor to climb Everest, Denali, or my local mountain peak, but I wanted to experience how I might engage in mountain experiences in a safe manner. How does this relate to this book and this dialogue? The mountaineer Richard Mitchell (1983) characterizes planning as both creation and calculation. It is an approach of both “fantasy and dream, of imaginatively constructing future and potential experience” (p. 3). It is also forecasting in that there is an enumeration of possible outcomes and preparation for contingencies. But that forecasting is based on the experiences of the mountaineer and involves preparation for contingencies of weather and terrain and the teamwork necessary to summit. Back then, even in my limited experience of climbing I realized I could learn to trust my body, my climbing partners, and my relation to the rock. I hadn’t taken the course in order to take up the sport of climbing, but to learn to trust myself in the outdoors. I wanted to become comfortable with the unpredictable and the uncertain

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and to know the skills required to live with the unfathomable which might be just around the corner; be it a grizzly bear, an unforeseen storm, or broken equipment. Around the same time, I took an outdoor survival course. Again, I didn’t take it to prove myself in the outdoors, but to learn the skilful trusting that enabled me to realize I could ‘survive’ in the outdoors if I had to, if some unforeseen, invisible, unknown event happened. I remember our instructor, a former Outward Bound leader, who kept talking about the course being about seeing the wilderness as a place we could live with/in with healthy respect, not as some dark unknown that we had to fear or overcome. When you live in parts of Vancouver, the wilderness of the North Shore mountains is always present in your view to the north, unless of course there is rain or fog! I remember returning from that course realizing that those mountains weren’t a place I wanted to escape to when the city became overwhelming, but rather as an environment that involved risk, but that I could trust myself to be in. In 1990 I was privileged to be part of a training program for Headlines Theatre of Vancouver, BC. David Diamond, the director of the theatre company had received a grant from the Canadian government to do a series of what they called at the time ‘race relations’ theatre workshops and performances in Canadian schools across the country. Tied to this was the training of Canadian high school teachers. I had always been asking David, who I had known for several years, to be part of such a training program. The initial part of the program involved his coming to the city and working with a group of high school teachers while we ‘apprentices’ observed. I remember clearly at the end of that week being intrigued by the effect of a 5day workshop on the students and of their consciousness of how they had changed with reference to issues of bullying and racism in the classroom (which their plays had focused on). What was it about the process, the techniques, the relationship of leader/facilitator to the group, the content that enabled this to happen? I knew David had been trained in Paris by Augusto Boal (1979, 1992), the developer of the Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) political theatre process. Augusto had also written many books on the process, but, for example, one of them was basically connecting theatre and practice and a list of games and activities and processes to engage in TO. But David had taken those activities and created a workshop process called Power Plays which systematized those activities in a sequential fashion. That question I raised back in the early 90s is still a question for me and has been part of a lifelong journey that began in a living room in Saskatchewan, extended into the mountains of British Columbia and beyond, and now to Montreal, Quebec as I ‘teach’ leadership, facilitation and community development skills to both undergraduate and graduate students. You will recall, Tony, that we first met in Bergen, Norway at breakfast at the beginning of an International Drama in Education Conference in 2001. You invited me to join your workshop the next day. I agreed to come but I felt an enormous anxiety I had in entering into the workshop space to make a puppet. As I said, I am an experiential learner. I learn by doing. I always explain this by saying if you describe a car engine to me, I wouldn’t understand a word. But put my hands on the engine part I start to understand. So, in order to learn I need to participate in activities

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(I often turn my brain off when people give extended instructions…. let’s do it!). So, participating in a puppet workshop with your encouragement made sense to me, even if that sense was an anxious one! It was this anxiety that was assuaged when you had a step by step process in making of that puppet. And it is this step-by-step process we explored together, guided by your humour and skill. Why am I telling you this? Because I feel Workshop, and leading/facilitating in any workshop space is also taking people into a ‘risky’ space and that space is something that is hard to explain, but we are going to try and do that too. Trying to explain what it feels like to be in the mountains is near impossible. Painters have attempted to do so of course and so have poets. Similarly, we, as artists will try to elaborate, explore what Workshop is and can be through our own stories and musings. A workshop is not just what happens there. It is not just an event, but incorporates all its relationships, or as one of my graduate school professors, David Jardine (1999) puts it, workshop is not a given, not simply because of the vastness of arrays of intersection, life-worlds that make it what it is. It resists because such worlds are unanticipatedly arriving. (p. 98)

The course of our book is an exploration of how our practices connect and where they diverge in our use of Workshop; and our shared belief that Workshop is a specific form with specific qualities and principles. We found agreement around the notion that a good way into practicing those qualities and principles with skill is to look at the form. So, the question: What is Workshop? We have both prospered as facilitators in guiding emerging practitioners by looking at this question using Workshop as a basis for developing workshop practice. We have a shared understanding but also, we have worked together to research that question whilst pursuing our own investigations through quite diverse settings that set different demands on us as workshoppers. I hope that through the commonality and diversity of our practice we can develop a written dialogue in which we can inform each other’s ruminations on workshop. Take ourselves, and hopefully the readers, to a different place than we were before we walked into the room. In this book we are attempting to ‘reflect’ Workshop as well as ‘describe’ it in the form and content of our writing. In our duologue we have thus allowed the sense of how we see Workshop as a form of practice to emerge from our responses to each other. Therefore, our voices and frameworks and, thus, our writing, emerge from the condition of our practice. In fact, this book is an engagement in praxis, where action and reflection are dependent on the conditions of our practice. Tony works as a puppeteer and artist with schools and communities, including communities of practitioners. Warren works integrating artistic and creative practice into the formation of practitioners in an academic setting. So, our way of writing in this dialogical

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conversation brings our background and thinking to the fore. The knowing of Workshop emerges through Tony’s stories of his work and through his understanding of Workshop as it has been developed through the years; the knowing of Workshop for Warren emerges through an intermingling of practice and experience being deepened not by theory as an abstract process of thinking and analysis, but through grounding a deeper understanding of experience through theory, be it through referring to other thinkers/practitioners in parallel explorations or by integrating their thoughts into Warren’s understanding of workshop practice. This is praxis, being, in Paulo Freire’s (1968) words, “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p. 33).

References Boal, A. (1974). Teatro de oprimado. Ediciones de la Flor. English Edition. Boal, A. (1979). Theatre of the oppressed. (trans. A. Charles & M. O. L. Mc-Bride). Pluto Press. Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors. (trans. A. Jackson). Routledge. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogia do oprimido. Facsímile digitalizado (Manuscritos). Instituto Paulo Freire. English edition: Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (trans. M. B. Ramos). Continuum. Gee, T. (2001). The Workshop interviews. (Unpublished manuscript). Graves, R. (2003). The complete poems. Penguin Books. Jardine, D. (1999). “Being-in-the-world is not present-at-hand”: An eco-biographical review of Martin Heidegger’s being and time. JCT, 15(1), 95–99. Mitchell, R. G., Jr. (1983). Mountain experience. University of Chicago Press. Schechner, R. (1973). Drama, script, theatre, and performance. The Drama Review: TDR, 17(3), 5–36. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144841

Chapter 3

What Is Workshop? Warren Linds and Tony Gee

Abstract Workshop is a specific form of artistic practice. We see it not as a term of convenience, used to describe largely non-participatory events such as long talks, question and answer sessions, or power point presentations with only a nod towards, or a complete absence of, participatory activity. As two artist educators, we share the ideas behind Workshop as an experiential and participatory form of contemporary arts practice that always involves embodied or creative inquiry by participants and facilitators. It is an event made then and there by those people who are present, so that they are guided through, and guide, a process of exploration and discovery on an issue of a common social concern. We elaborate on this idea, drawing on historical and theoretical lenses, looking at several perspectives: our practices, lived through experiences, encounters and events. Workshop enables the emergence of a community-in-the-making. We invent worlds inside our workshop bubble so that we can reinvent the world outside that bubble. We share how Workshop is a form of research and inquiry, artistic creation is research, and elaborate on how the creative process can only be grasped through experiential engagement. Keywords Artistic practice · Experiential learning · Participatory learning · Enabling community · Creative inquiry

From our first discussions, at the International Drama and Education Association Congress in Bergen, Norway, we agreed that Workshop is a specific form. We were clear then and are even clearer now that Workshop, as we are referring to it throughout this book, is not a term of convenience used loosely and regularly to describe events that are largely non-participatory such as long talks, question and answer sessions or power point presentations with only a nod towards or a complete W. Linds (B) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] T. Gee Creation Myth Puppets, Devon, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 W. Linds and T. Gee, Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2291-8_3

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absence of participatory activity. These events are not what our book is about. We are two artist educators who adhere to the idea that Workshop is an experiential and participatory form of contemporary arts practice that always involves embodied or creative inquiry by participants and facilitators. We base this idea on several perspectives; our practices, lived through experiences, encounters and events; and on historical and theoretical perspectives.

3.1 What Is Workshop? Warren, as Enzo Cozzi (in Gee, 2001) told me, “every workshop builds a story and it’s an original story” (p. 43). It was back in what now seems like the historic mists of a long career as a freelance artist and lecturer that this question arose for me. Since then, I have researched this question through interviews, reflection, discussion, and indeed, through a series of workshops on Workshop with workshop artists in The Moveable Feast workshops. Moveable Feast began in tandem with Dartington College of Arts in Devon, UK. The idea was a simple one. We would invite creative applications from artists in any form for whom Workshop was important to their practice. The invitation was to participate in a four-day residential workshop in the incredible medieval surroundings where the college was the situated and explore Workshop together. The workshop would be led by myself and two core artists who I had worked with for years. This event led to a book, new practice and collaborations, several more such events and the formation of a cross-art form company called The Moveable Feast Workshop Co., which shared a company methodology. It also opened new horizons for my practice and raised many questions. I recognized that there is a paradox about defining the term, and indeed, a paradox in writing about it, because a feature of every workshop is that each one is different. Writing is fixed by a page and Workshop is a fluid form. Moveable Feast stemmed from my inquiries into the question: What is Workshop? A question that led me to the notion that regarding Workshop as a form would be a useful lens and resource for practitioners. This notion began to take shape when I received funding from Arts Council England to interview practitioners around the country from The National Theatre to the local scrapstore, where they recycle materials for creative projects. Dancers, lecturers, therapists, poets, puppeteers, visual artists, photographers and painters took part. Each of them said that they had never been asked that question before. Workshop is a sort of assumed form that shapes itself in the moment and according to need. Workshop practice develops through participation and more practice. This does not though negate the value of stopping and reflecting, ‘What is this thing that I do called Workshop?’. There is each instance of a workshop and then, there is the thing-in-itself that informs how we practice. When I ran the first Moveable Feast, I wrote a book. I should explain that Moveable Feast began as a resource for artists who ran workshops to explore and develop their practice and later became a company of artists who collaborated with a shared

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methodology and ethos to run workshops. As I considered how to write about Workshop as a form, it seemed that the best way into the concept of Workshop was to extrapolate from an actual workshop. And that’s what that initial book (Gee, 2003), ‘Workshop: A Moveable Feast’ was. Warren, I am going to employ the same logic here and relate a recent experience of a four-day workshop that I ran. This workshop was an inquiry into that specific ‘bread and butter’ workshop the company I lead run in schools where we make largescale, spectacular puppets productions in a short space of time with whole schools. Here’s the story of those four days. One of Hatu the storyteller’s favourite tales was the one in which he slept for three hundred years. This is what happened. Hatu went to the storyteller’s market to tell his tales. He began his story in the traditional way: ‘Once upon a time…’. This time though, instead of an enraptured audience, the other storytellers heckled and mocked him. They complained that he always began his stories the same way. And so, Hatu lost confidence. He fell into the deepest sleep curled up underneath the great tree of inspiration. In his sleep, a dragon visited Hatu. The dragon eyes lit up and changed colours. The dragon told Hatu that he should sleep and dream, sleep and dream … and Hatu fell so asleep that he dreamt across years, across centuries and right into a new millennium. In Hatu’s long dream, he encountered all manner of creatures—a sloth, a salmon, a frog, a kingfisher, a hummingbird and even a grinning, ginger cat. Each of these animals had one message for Hatu, ‘Believe in yourself and tell your story.’ When the dragon returned, its eyes glowed and it ordered Hatu to awake and return. The tree of inspiration was in its third cycle. It had grown and spread for 300 years, lived for 300 and now it would spend 300 years dying. As it began its third cycle, Hatu awoke. The market had changed. It was now a shopping mall. The storytellers were still there though and were extremely impatient about Hatu not showing up for three hundred years. News of Hatu’s awakening spread. The storytellers were excited that the legendary grand teller of tales had at last returned and would once more entertain them. Hatu arrived and began his story again exactly as he always had done, ‘Once upon a time…’ The same beginning that had triggered heckling three hundred years ago. And so, yet again, he was heckled and derided for not beginning in a more original manner. This time though, Hatu, strengthened by the encounters in his dream, responded differently, ‘I tell my story and you tell your story. Each one of us has our own story to tell.’ The storytellers had no answer to that because the message was true. And so, once again, after many years of waiting, the storyteller’s market was full of stories. The celebrations and tales went on right through the night.

The story of Hatu’s Dream emerged at the end of a four-day workshop that was an inquiry into a workshop practice by a group of artists and educators. The workshop was called ‘Making Worlds’ and its objective was to share the methodology of the Creative Myth Puppets Company to enable participants to acquire new techniques that develop their individual practices. Each participant was asked to bring two objects—one to represent what inspired their creative spirit and the other to represent what inhibited it. They used the objects as a focal point to share stories with each other about their practice and one thing that they discovered was that each one of them shared a common inhibiting factor—their self-judgement and their fear of the judgement of others. Their common creative inspiration was to share stories.

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In the next stage of the workshop, we put the inhibition and inspiration stuff to one side and, for two days, concentrated purely on creating puppets using different techniques. The group made human character rod puppets and then collaborated to work out a story outline by exploring and animating the puppet humans that they had made: Who were these puppets? Where were they from? And what happened to them there? In exploring these questions through the puppet characters, each decided on a ‘spirit’ animal, a daimon, for their character. A collective story emerged that was an allegorical expression of the participants’ own creative inspirations and inhibitions. The outcome was the performing Hatu’s story as told above. Each point of the workshop led ‘to the next and to the next’ until we arrived at a twenty-five-minute public performance of ‘a story that was the participants, made and told then and there by them’. Before the workshop I had thought deeply about the structure, aims, use of space, materials and all the aspects of what would, or could, happen. Then, the participants arrived in the space I had prepared, and the workshop began to happen. What emerged was their exploration through certain questions, exercises, tasks and the encounters during their time together in that space. At times I facilitated what happened and others it just ‘took off’ and I followed the trajectory. All of us offered our ideas and, as facilitator or leader or story guide, as long as I had the group’s trust, I had a certain authority. I had absolutely no notion of Hatu’s Dream though before the workshop. They made that and I helped in any way that I could. Afterwards, they sent me their reflections on the workshop, and I also re-covered the ground and had a period of recovery because there was an intensity to the experience. There were phases to the workshop—the devising and preparation, the delivery and the recovery. The devising phase was, as all creative processes, part seeking inspiration and perspiration of putting all the practical resources together. The delivery, which was their emerging story guided by my facilitation, like all stories, had a beginning and middle and end. After a workshop there is a recovering of the ground of that workshop covered. It a literal recovery for the leader and an evaluation, which sometimes involves documentation. This recovery is a pathway to integrate from the imaginative bubble of an intensive creative experiences and encounters back into the everyday world. So, what is Workshop? In some ways its meaning is currently pretty vague. It’s certainly used as a term of convenience used to describe everything from a longwinded, dry lecture with a few questions at the end, to a free-for-all spontaneous group happening. But is there a core idea—a definition held in the collective consciousness, like that of a song, a concert, a play or a novel? Workshop is essentially about learning by doing. Learning and doing are no longer separated into first you learn to do and then you do. In a participatory workshop everything tends towards connection, we learn while and where we do. Whether its productions are co-authored or authored by an individual they arise out of the encounters, experiences and events within that group, then and there. Nothing is turned into something. There is co-incidence as we, that is everyone in that workshop, engage with our most imminent ecology: each other. Seen in this light, the essence of Workshop is precious, and we should be careful to keep its definition clear.

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The workshop artist has a unique dual focus on social process and creative process. The combination of these entwined dynamics give form to a transient narrative community and the most important ingredient of this, as with all workshop experience, is story. Experience is a story. And always there is more than one story involved: the story of the leader (or guide or facilitator), the story of each participant and the story of the unfolding material. The glue that binds these tales into a manifest shape is their locality: time and place. Each time a group embarks on a workshop journey a new story is made that is unique to those people, then and there. A narrative community is formed. This is what I mean by a workshop: An event made then and there by those people so that they are guided through and guide a process of exploration and discovery into an issue of a common social concern. Hatu’s Dream didn’t exist for that group before the workshop. It could be called ‘the product of the workshop’ but, in truth, the workshop processes kept producing story—individual tales became collective tellings and were absorbed into individual memories and gave birth to another collective sharing, even though we don’t know what will be shared. There was fluidity between witness and spectator that amplified each other’s stories through a shared creative process. The workshop was a series of stories within stories, and my function as workshop leader was to facilitate and guide those stories.

Tony, when you speak about workshops enabling the amplification of stories, my mind shifts to the Workshop form most of my work has been based on: Theatre of the Oppressed. I spoke in the prologue about my introduction to it in 1991. For many years before that, I had wanted to learn about this Applied Theatre approach which is heavily rooted in social justice and anti-oppression work. In the Workshop form we were working with stories that emerged through theatre games and a method called Image theatre where the participants’ bodies in relation to one another tell a story. I want to share an instance where form as both structure and something that was emergent became apparent to me. David Diamond, the facilitator, was working with thirty high school students from across the city ‘exploring race relations’, and I and two other adults were taking part in theatre games. While observing the students exploring, through drama work, the topic at hand. In other words, I was a facilitator in training, but participating at the same time. One eye on what was being said and done, one body involved. It was the first day. We had an introductory circle, shared a bit about ourselves. It came time for an activity where participants were introduced to Image Theatre, which meant using their bodies in relation to one another to create static pictures expressing a theme. After playing around for a time with a series of images which had no focused theme but were just playful relationships of one student to another,

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rather than asking the students to go into small groups to play around some more, David said, “Ok, now the picture you are creating is of school life”. All of a sudden, the images became less playful, their faces became serious, their movements slow and deliberative, as they built up pictures using their bodies in relation to one another of Isolation

alienation

accusation

the playful level of energy changed

Afterwards I asked David to explain why he had chosen to do that particular step. “Normally”, he said, “we don’t get to that until the second or third day …as I wait to see how engaged the students are; how much trust there is and how safe it is to explore these hard issues.” “But here I felt they were ready”. End of story? This happened in 1991. I still remember as if it were yesterday. I remember being there in the moment. …the shift in temperature, the tension in the room at that moment. It was like a cold wind after a prairie blizzard, as the low pressure system moves through in January and, behind it, an Arctic chill descends on the landscape. I’m not referring to that chill, I’m talking about the moment of the shift in winds, or perhaps it was like being in the outer winds of a hurricane and moving into the calm, and eerily quiet, eye of the storm. That moment of transition… from a lively, chatting, joking, laughing group of teenagers to a serious commitment to the ‘work’ in the workshop. Work that is not only a noun but also a verb. Since then, I have had this experience many times as a facilitator in, and through, workshop spaces. Sometimes I noticed the moment of transition; other times, I didn’t. Or noticed it but did not take the risk. What was it that drew the facilitator to decide, to take that risk that would bring participants into ‘serious play’? Relating this story leads me to ponder the relationship of form as a structure, such as Image Theatre), and form as emergent exploration in a workshop space. How did the dynamic relationship between the two enable facilitators to take risks, to make a move from play to serious play as we did, and deepened the inquiry into the themes and issues in our lives? I think what is termed as ‘risk’ by the facilitator is that they can lose the trust of the group. In moments of play, you are not only always risking failure, but also the effect of that failure might be a lessening of trust by the group in the facilitator and their process. The playing that we encourage to happen within this space of exploration “therefore becomes a product of the dynamic tension between known (safe) processes and unknown (risky) outcomes” (Hunter, 2008, p. 8). The less the group trust the process that is being unfolded through the facilitator’s actions, the more at risk they are likely to feel. At its worst, a facilitator might talk about “losing

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the group.” As holding the group is a primary function of facilitation, then losing the group represents failure. As I reflect on the above, I am thinking about this workshop as an example of arts-based research as embodied creation. Though at the time this was a workshop on race relations, it was also an instance of action research whereby the students, and adults, were exploring race relations through their embodied work together. During my doctoral work I explored my own experiences as a drama facilitator leading Theatre of the Oppressed workshops. At one point, I happened onto the etymology of the French translation of the word ‘research’—recerchier: parcourier en cherchent (Rey & Rey, 1989, p. 1623) … Translation: “to travel through searching”. To me, Workshop is a form where we travel through while learning what it is emerging. If you add the arts, that travelling is a creative journey or, rather, a journey into creation. It is this travelling through that forms the over-arching metaphor of this book. Tony, how did you start to conceptualize Workshop as a form that helps arts practitioners?

3.2 Why Workshop Is a Form Warren, a series of experiences convinced me that Workshop is a specific form of practice. There was an actual moment where that question—What is Workshop?— arrived. I was in a van, and we had just made a show in a week with 100 children. I witnessed the energy of the children completely transform over the week so that they were visibly glowing with joy by the end of the week. I thought, ‘What just happened there? What was it we did?’ This was many years ago now, and it occurred to me that what we had done was run a workshop. That’s when that question arrived to me in the front of the van where I was thinking. Socrates is reputed to have said that the object of philosophy was to find a good question. The instant that question arrived it seemed like it was indeed a good one. I was launched into a new trajectory of on-going inquiry. The next thing that happened was two-fold. There were the Workshop Interviews and the embarking on a Masters Degree in Applied Theatre. My dissertation was built around the findings from the twenty-one interviews with practitioners and it was called ‘Pudding Proof’. It had that title because as the saying goes ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. I knew my intent was to create a foundation from which I could run events for artists to investigate and develop their workshop practice through a purpose-built workshop.

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As Wordsworth (1888/1999) says in the poem, “we are the guests of chance” (line 6) and, through a chance encounter, I was given an associate lecturer post at a local university, Dartington College of Arts, teaching a cross-modular course in Workshop Skills. This put me in touch with a centre at the university which was seeking to form partnerships with the wider arts community. I submitted, in partnership with the Centre for Creative Enterprise and Participation, an application to run an event called, ‘Moveable Feast—A workshop on Workshop for Workshoppers.’ There were thirtynine places and over one hundred and twenty applications for this four-day event, which is described in detail in the book Workshop—A Moveable Feast (Gee, 2003). This event was the first ‘pudding’ we were going to test by eating it. The pudding being Workshop and the test being how well did a workshop-on-Workshop work? Those four days had immeasurable effects for many who took part. We prospected the nature of Workshop by doing one, and then reflecting on it. It confirmed to me that it worked to look at Workshop as a form.

3.3 The History of Workshop Perhaps Warren, this is a good point for a potted history of Workshop; a short reflection on how the word ‘workshop’ metamorphosized from indicating a place of production to being attributed to a creative process or a group involved in that process. In terms of our inquiry, the crucial change occurred across the twentieth century and reflected changes happen in many fields of investigation, renegotiation and experimentation; particularly, between the World Wars and after the Second World War. In the UK there was a heightened awareness of the collective that was reflected in the national consensus that led to the formation of the Welfare State. In theatre the rehearsal process was expanded by some of the major practitioners such as Grotowski, Ewan MacColl’s ‘Brook and Stanislavsky and became a workshop so that plays were devised through collective authorship. This aim was to widen participation and audience reach. A theatre group who might have first used the term ‘Workshop’ in their name was Joan Littlewood’s and Theatre Workshop’. MacColl (in Goorney, 1981) explained in an interview that “the formal theatre of that time [The 1930’s] was not concerned with the lives of ordinary folk, and it had become stultified as a result. Its language was artificial. It was the language of the cocktail bar rather than the workshop” (p. 2). One cannot isolate the change in theatre from parallel changes in the visual arts and design. For example, the enormously influential Bauhaus movement: or music, where Jazz, Rhythm and Blues, Rock’n’roll were popularising, improvising and hangin’ loose; or therapeutic movements such as Moreno’s Psychodrama and the Gestalt Movement. All these, and many more, have had a deep effect on the formation of a popular movement of applying Workshop to all sorts of processes from

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personal relationships to social issues to learning a skill; the list is endless. My working background is a theatrical one and it was in theatre that the Workshop form was consciously developed as a creative process. I imagine that whilst Grotowski, Stanislavski, Brook and many others were looking at new ways of making theatre with their companies, Workshop tiptoed out of the stage door and began to spread into common usage as a form. John Moat, who co-founded the Arvon Foundation, an organisation that has centres across the UK that lead week-long, residential workshops for writers of all kinds led by established, published poets, novelists, playwrights and journalists, said this early on in one of my first Workshop Interviews as he reflected on the nature of Workshop: One of the things we sometimes talk about is individual imagination, and I think that’s misleading. I think we get misled about that because there are all sorts of hubris, all sorts of inflation of the personality that get caught up in this, my imagination. If you see a group of childrens’ work, you suddenly realise that actually the imagination is this limitless store, mysterious, indefinable, which is the common source of all imaginative product. We, as individuals, have intercourse with that in a funny way and out of that experience we have the gnosis of making something. So, there is always this element of this great, shared store, like Jung’s collective unconscious, and there is the other side which is the individual’s experience of it. Those two elements, the group and the individual, are at work and become a sort of metaphor for the collective unconscious that can form a matrix from which the individual can draw energy. (Gee, 2001, p. 116)

Workshop arose from a recognition of group process. As John alludes to Carl Jung, who coined the term, the collective unconscious which is formed from two components, the instincts and the archetypes. Instincts are impulses, which carry out actions from necessity, and they have a biological quality, similar to the homing instinct in birds. Instincts determine our actions. Yet, in the same manner, Jung suggests that there are innate, unconscious modes of understanding which regulate our perception itself. These are the archetypes: inborn forms of “intuition” which are necessary determinants of all psychic processes……Both instincts and archetypes are collective because they are concerned with universal, inherited contents beyond the personal and the individual and they correlate with each other. (Hyde & McGuinness, 1999, p. 59)

And here then is the Gestalt of Workshop, the idea that the whole exceeds the sum of the individual parts, in the group. In therapeutic movements, the group was increasingly seen as the base unit for work. Psychotherapist Malcolm Stern (in Gee, 2001) talked about the group process of Workshop: There are four stages the group goes through. They start from a place of pseudo-community where everyone is presenting their projected persona that they want people to see. That will stay for a while and that coincides with my statement that the first place you have to encounter is the place of trust. Once you’ve got trust you can move away from the place of pseudo-community and go into the place of chaos. Pseudo community is broken by trust, so it becomes chaotic. Often what happens when it gets chaotic out in the world, we retreat back to the place of pseudo community. But, in the workshop, we want to go right through the place of chaos so that we come out in the place of emptiness where there is no judgement of how it ought to be, or how people ought to be, but people are able to be themselves. From that acceptance comes the place of real community. So, you are travelling through a circuit that takes you to the place of real community. (p. 6)

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This ‘circuit’ can be described in many different ways, but the point is made that a group has its own potential and dynamics, which can be described as a ‘group process’. If I was to excavate deeper for how a form is geared to enable a group process to amplify individual expressions and contributions, thus going beyond this small potted history, I would look at changes in: . . . .

Political awareness and inclusivity. Theatre and the Arts. Contemporary science and uncertainty. Collective unconscious and related therapeutic movements.

If I was going to extend this history, the next stone to search under would be education. I would look to Paulo Freire, Ivan Illich, John Holt, A.S. Neill and so on because here is another deep and clear line. I believe that Workshop is the place where the arts and education authentically meet and, by looking at its origins, you find the essences of the form. Workshop as a form is collective, democratic, dramatic, uncertain in shape, dynamic, route and outcome, experiential and a pedagogy. But what is a form? Theatre Director, Peter Brook (2005): The central question, then is one of form, the precise form, the apt form. We cannot do without it; life cannot do without it. But what does form mean? However often I return to this question, I am inevitably led to sphota, a word from classical Indian philosophy whose meaning is sound—a ripple that suddenly appears on the surface of still waters, a cloud that emerges from a still sky. A form is the virtual becoming manifest, the spirit taking body, the first sound, the big bang. (p. 88)

This resonates for me. As workshop leaders, we take an idea that we hold of what the form Workshop is—in other words, a virtual notion—and we give it shape by preparing the ground for the participants to reshape it with their stories and co-create a new narrative. To quote the bard: And as imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name (Shakespeare 1595/20 lines 1844–1847)

In my case, I had been running workshops for many years before it dawned on me just how specific it was as a form. This was driven home by the experience of that first Moveable Feast. By being conscious of Workshop as a form, new pathways of inquiry and practice were revealed.

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Tony, form doesn’t necessarily mean a straight-lined structure. It is linear in that in the design one step follows another. But each step is complete until the next step begins, and then the first step is understood differently. Each part expresses something of, and has significance for, the whole, just as its own significance is determined by the whole. In addition, the form could be curving, it could be amoeba-like. All these forms have structure, but they are not necessarily linear. I am fascinated in particular by the spiral form inside the process of Workshop. As the writer Jeannette Winterson (1996) writes, “our mental processes and experiences are closer to a maze than a motorway, every turning yields another turning, not symmetrical, not obvious when we enter the maze” (p. xiii). A spiral is fluid, allowing for infinite movement, backwards and forwards, high and deep. Spirals drift one into the other as (a) maze/ing interminglings emerge. Learnings, too complex to grasp in a single occurrence, spiral past me again and again. Partial understandings emerge through “experience,” allowing for later returns. Therefore, form is always shifting. When we talk about form, we are not referring to something that constrains, but something that enables creativity to emerge. Each workshop takes on a different tone as it intertwines with the histories, landscapes and creativity of the participants. I have often struggled to explain how linearity and circularity in creative inquiry co-exist, are in tension with, and overlap, one another. So, when I am confronted with this challenge I often turn to metaphor, in this case, through the Hua-yen Buddhist tradition of Indra’s net. The art critic Theodore Cook in The Curves of Life (1979) describes this net as having a crystal at every knot, stretching multi-dimensionally, through space and time. If you arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, you will discover that in its polished surface there is reflected all the other jewels in the web, infinite in number. And each of the jewels reflected in the one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is, in David Loy’s (1993) words, “infinite reflecting process occurring” (p. 481). In Workshop, linearity is like any individual jewel, the through-line/plot amongst participants and facilitators and their collective experience. Circularity is the multiple stories and creations that individually emerge during this journey, one story/experience reflecting from, and building upon, each other. To illustrate this, let me turn to my experience as a participant in a recent workshop. It was an online collective storytelling activity with about twenty artist practitioners from around the world. The facilitator had selected images to inspire the telling of the story. The first image was shown, and the facilitator began the story. As each participant’s turn came up, a new image was shown to inspire the continuation of the story. The designer/facilitator of this activity explained after the story was told that she had selected images for this activity based on three elements: . Plurality—mixing persons, images, animals, challenges, obstacles. . Randomness—which enables creativity to emerge as our brains ‘fill in the gaps’. . Instinct—Letting feeling emerge as she watched the images inspire how to order or place them.

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We were a group who had been exploring creativity online every week over several months. There was no theme provided; the story emerged as each of us, inspired by the images, told our part of the story. What emerged, though, was a constant through-line or plot, of an exploration that had brought us together through weekly meetings: ourselves as artist practitioners slowly becoming a community. Thus, this was a reflection on our collective experiences. On the other hand, this process can be used with a specific theme and connected to the purpose of the workshop. If there is a specific objective or theme for the workshop, then the choice of images emerges from that. But framing the choice of images based on the conditions of plurality, randomness and instinct enables Workshop to be a creative story form. There is another aspect to form. Because we see Workshop as a form, any workshop can be as short as one hour (as the above storytelling story was), or as long as several days. The principles can be used in any process where the participants are creatively telling a ‘story’ through their creations. Thus, Workshop goes beyond the qualification of a dance or theatre ‘workshop’ because it intermingles those art forms. There is a different aesthetic because you are not necessarily doing something for anyone outside the room. (Even if you are going to present to the output of a workshop to an outside audience, then the product reveals the group’s expression and creations during that workshop with the aim of heightening that group’s experience.) Therefore, the performance is not for an external audience. Workshop depends on participants fluidly adapting themselves to roles as performer and audience. All of this is within the circle of Workshop. Therefore, what matters is what the people in the room do. As Enzo (in Gee, 2001) shared with you, “One thing leads to the next and the next” (p. 43). The tension between process and product enables creative exploration. Workshop as a form creates conditions for playful creativity. I use theatre games as part of workshop as they serve what I, drawing from arts educator Mary Ann Hunter’s (2008) work with refugee youth, call a ‘safe enough’ space to step out of oppressive relationships. Hunter calls this liminal space a process and place to encounter risk and messiness. It is “less about prescribing conditions and more about generating questions” (p. 19) about how participants are invited to collaborate, risk and explore in the name of expanding imagination, possibility and creativity. The Workshop form provides the space where participants can begin to question habitual thinking; as they become aware of these habits, they become better equipped to take appropriate action. What is appropriate depends on embodied knowing which means becoming actively attuned to, and in, the world. The neuroscientist Francisco Varela (1999) calls our lived situations “microworlds” (p. 10). By this he is referring to our repertoire of habitual behaviours that enables us to act in lived situations, which involve interactions with other people. Because we are constantly moving from one situation to another, being ready to act is part of our identity; the corresponding lived situation is the microworld which invites us to act. Thus ‘who we are’ cannot be separated from the world and people we are in relationships with. The point is not to evaluate these microworlds, but to

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notice their recurrence, and to become adept at responding to them. It is that noticing that is one of the principles of Workshop. Workshop is an ‘out of the ordinary’ form in that it is separate from, yet connected to, daily life. When we are forced to confront the unfamiliar, the new experience, with all its emotional and sensory fullness, becomes generative. There is a crossover in the significance of the unknown. These moments where the participants (and leader/facilitator) have opportunities to explore, either physically or mentally, beyond their habitual patterns leads to innovation, and also to a more generalized wellbeing. Drawing from Paulo Freire’s (1968) notion of “generative space”, Workshop provides “a generative space of possibilities, a space wherein tensioned ambiguity newness emerges” (Aoki 1996/2005, p. 318). An aspect of creating this generative space is helping people transit from their outside worlds into a mental and emotional place that allows them to be open to learning.

Warren, I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment expressed in your last sentence. As you state, “open to learning”, this is the aim of Workshop. It reminds me of a section in my very first Workshop Interview with Wendy Greenhill, who was then head of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s outreach department. She talked about how the structure of a workshop has a porosity and the facilitator takes an awareness of that porosity into a workshop. In other words, a workshop facilitator is open to the uncertainties inherent in a complex system in which novelty and freshness will emerge. Here are Wendy’s (in Gee, 2001) words on porosity: It’s to do with structure really and having a structure but that structure being loose enough for participants to genuinely make a contribution so they take things in a different way and push the structure to develop a little bit more in one area than it might do in another area. If the structure is porous it has holes in it, which things can leak through and yet there is a vessel there, I suppose that’s my image. It’s to do with the confidence and the experience and trust. Trust in the form, trust in the event, in the encounter that’s happening. You as the animateur are guiding something but your control is not too tight. I call that porosity. Another image—as an animateur it’s my responsibility to have the map and to know the map well but not necessarily to have decided beforehand exactly which part we are taking, or which path we are taking, or which detours we are going to make. The Michelin Guide—3 stars merit a journey, and 2 stars merit a detour. I have to know my map of the area that we are aiming to cover in the workshop. I have to have a picture of it. So that then whatever is coming from the group, wherever their energy is, where their dilemmas are, what they are actually giving out in terms of body language and spark, what they are saying—all this helps decides when to spend more time on one road than another, go along one path rather than the path opposite to it. So that’s what I mean about knowing the map but not having sorted out every detail of the route and that’s sort of connected to the idea of porosity. There has to be holes in my structure for contribution from the participants. (p. 14)

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3.4 Workshop as a Form of/for Research and Inquiry Arts based research describes an epistemological foundation for human inquiry that utilizes artful ways of understanding and representing the worlds in which research is constructed. (Finley, 2008, p. 79)

Thank you for that definition, Warren. It certainly is applicable to every workshop I have ever run. In the process of creative production there is always an element of research and inquiry. We investigate the materials we are using and explore the relationship between different materials in order to express meaning of some sort. As in the workshop I described earlier in Hatu’s Dream. The materials were story, puppet and the dynamic of a group of artists and, from those materials, fresh insights and new potential for practice were developed. In a workshop, the core material is the dynamic created by those present. Thus, there are specific qualities in a workshop that mean that every authentically participative workshop is a form of research and inquiry. The specific qualities though of Workshop is its innate flexibility. There is fluidity. These two 9-year-old girls gave a succinct summary of Workshop to their teacher. Teacher: What are you making? Girl 1: We’re making pigs. Girl 2: Actually, we’re creating life The two girls were standing next to each other making pig puppets to put on a show with the whole of the rest of their school. They were simultaneously makers of their own creations and witnesses of each other’s creations. Their conversations were all about identity. The identity of these new beings that they were making and, in turn, thoughts that their busy hands and minds conjured about life outside the bubble of the workshop. This relationship between what is being done and the social context of where it is being done and the people doing it and their lives outside this time and space continues throughout each phase of the workshop. This is a workshop’s specificity. It is a dialogical, relational and participatory form that points towards making meaning. We, us humans, are meaning makers. When the meaning making is with others and creative then it has specific qualities. Because we are in the world, we are condemned to meaning…We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, yet nobody knows better how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves this network of relationships. (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, pp. xxii–xxiii)

Perhaps, Warren, it might help if you give this perspective a more theoretical context?

So Tony, in preparing our proposal for this book, we had many discussions and debates about how workshop as a form of creative inquiry is both a space and process of research. This book is part of a series on arts-based educational research but,

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as arts educators Taylor et al. (2007) point out “educational researchers are still trying to precisely define what we call arts-based educational research” (p. 8). The methodologies give form to methods that are always in the process of creation. When we then begin to unpack the role of workshop as a specific arts practice and space in this journey, we are led to a series of doorways into different worlds of arts-based inquiry. Educational researchers Savin-Baden and Wimpenny (2014) explore arts-related research as a general concept defining it as “research that uses the arts, in the broadest sense, to explore, understand and represent human action and experience” (p. 1). They then outline sub-concepts of arts-inquiring pedagogy, arts-based inquiry, artsinformed inquiry, arts-informing inquiry, arts-engaging inquiry and arts-related evaluation. In locating arts-related research they refer to social constructionism where “the world is produced and understood through interchanges between people and shared objects and activities, so that hidden or private phenomena such as emotions gain their meaning through social settings and practice” (p. 3). That seems to me applicable to Workshop, as it is that place, time and process which enables such production and understandings. James Rolling (2010), an art educator, has noted that six sources: “body of beliefs and values, laws, and practices which govern” (Carroll, 1997, p. 171) his form of research, have many characteristics that intersect in arts-based inquiry models. While all six are important, three in particular are relevant to note in the context of this book: arts-based research is performative and improvisational, experiential and pluralistic. These are reflective lenses which enable us to look at our stories of Workshop.

3.4.1 Reflective Lenses of Arts-Based Research Lens 1: Performative and Improvisational Workshop includes performative aspects, even if the product is not displayed or performed for an external audience. Performance becomes the ‘rubber hitting the road’, the goal or outcome of the creative development that came before. In classroom settings, this might simply mean showing, not telling, the product of exploration. It doesn’t matter whether the goal is to provide answers about a particular problem or situation, or experiment creatively with presentation. Performance becomes an improvisation of various possibilities of knowing—a bringing home of the story (Brook, 2005). Lens 2: Experiential Philosopher John Dewey (1934) recognized that human experience is the site of felt intuitive meaning that precedes verbalization. Artsbased research methodologies “lend themselves to the study of the relationships between what we know and what we believe” (Rolling, 2010, p. 107). Psychologist Gregory Bateson (1972) in his model around learning, writes that sometimes reflection happens “beyond language”. His daughter Mary Catherine writes that this emphasized the role of the unconscious and the aesthetic, saying that learning entails the double involvement of “primary process and conscious thought” (Bateson, 1977, p. 61). Transpersonal psychologist John Heron (1992) calls this stage of

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learning “imaginal” where immediate personal and collective experience is reflected on through the creative arts. As he notes, “it generates imagery of our worlds through perception, memory, dreaming, extrasensory perception, visions, creative imagination” (p. 138). Lens 3: Pluralistic The philosopher William James (1890/1952) wrote that texts of meaning proliferate in exchanges, interpretations and blends in a “theatre of simultaneous possibilities” (p. 187). Rolling notes that “the effective conduct of pluralistic research is not that I am a writer, or I am a visual artist, or I am a researcher and never the twain shall meet” (p. 108). Rather we are all of these things all at once and use multiple methods all the time.

Thanks Warren. That expands on both your short opening definition and my tale of the two 9-year old girls. There can be a perceived dichotomy between ‘work’ and ‘play’. I remember after one workshop we ran at a university that an international Masters student came up to us and said that ‘it was the best single day she had had in her university career.’ We told the professor who ran the course and he responded, ‘Just because they had fun doesn’t mean they learned anything.’ His conclusion correlates with a judgement by teachers which I have heard at the end of workshops in schools over the last thirty years. ‘That was fun now we have to do some real work.’ Recently, I tested this judgement by asking the participants what they thought was happening in the workshops. In a recent workshop, I asked participants in one class who were making their puppets, ‘Is this more than fun?’ Instantly, all the hands in the class shot up in the air. I randomly picked out a girl whose arm threatened to burst through her shoulder socket if she was made to wait one iota longer before being able to give her response. Yes, this is more than fun”, she said, ‘because when I am making the puppet a whole story is coming into my head about the puppet’. There were a lot of hands to get through, so I thanked her for her insight and pointed to a boy who was a little more modest in his hand-in-the-air efforts. ‘Well, I was thinking that we are learning that we can make things for ourselves and even though we may not make puppets again, it is good to know that in our lives we can make our own things.’ Many more insightful answers ensued from the raised hands in front of me but those first two had encapsulated the core of what makes a good arts workshop such a potent form of inquiry. Both these comments illustrate how the ontological (self-knowledge), and the epistemological (knowledge of the world), are entwined in the Workshop process. The first comment is about new knowledge about ‘story’ and how it unfolds internally; the second talks about learning a skill and how that can be transferred to other parts of one’s life. This confluence of the ontological and epistemological happens when the entwining of collective and creative processes is effective. Effective meaning when form and content of a workshop are in harmony, which they are when a large group

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of young people are breathing new life into a creation myth: a story that describes the creative process. Not only did their answers give insight into their experience but they also gave me a reason as to why I dropped my performance practice and concentrated all my arts practice into developing my work as a workshop artist. If I was making a puppet for myself, my focus would be entirely on the process of making the puppet and its function in a show. My focus has to be in two places at once as a workshop artist. In order to hold the group through a creative process, I have to cultivate my awareness between what is happening for the group and the process of puppet making—in other words, their invisible inner journey and the manifest unfolding of their puppets coming into being. The art of the workshop is neither the manifest expressions nor is it the narratives that are unfolding within the participants as they make sense of their encounters and experiences. It is both processes. And the two processes entwine and unfold simultaneously so my focus as workshop artist has to be on the creative and collective processes at the same time. I have to develop a dual focus—facilitating the work and guiding the story of the group. On the one hand there are the ‘things’ that are being learnt, and on the other hand there is the ‘we’ who are doing the learning. Both are being examined within the participatory experience. What is special about Workshop as a form of arts practice and as a form of inquiry is that the actor, agent and observer in the moment are identical. There is no separation. This quality of Workshop is epitomized by Wendy’s story in which all twenty-five participants make a choice, directly engage with material and witness each other in a single moment. The presence of an observer within any process of inquiry has the potential to change the material that is being observed. In Workshop the subject that is being inquired into is inseparable from the changes that are being made through that inquiry. This inseparability of the inquiry and change as it emerges through that inquiry is a matter of ownership. At the beginning of a workshop session nobody knows what is going to happen. There is one person who knows the aims of the session, but this person doesn’t know how these aims are going to be reached. (Enzo in Gee, 2001, p. 43)

Workshop is radically creative, a pedagogy of not-knowing. Workshop deals with uncertainty. This is not an excuse for laxity in facilitation practice characterised by the oft-cited phrase ‘the process takes care of itself’. The practice takes care of itself when the facilitator takes care of the process. This requires specific skills, clear intention and rigorous preparation. Workshop is a complex system. In other words, a system that has the ability to respond to itself as it unfolds and to make and allow productive change to emerge.

Our journeys over the earth are experienced directly. A day spent dodging rapids and rocks will seem a lot longer and more different than a day spent sailing over a calm lake. We are creatures that flourish in the intimate interactions of life. . . The river is a dynamic living organism . . . Just as there is a constant dynamic relationship between the river and the

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Tony, as Hooley McLaughlin points out, travelling is an experience, and it is this travelling through that forms the over-arching metaphor of this book. The search for Workshop involves us travelling through with you the reader, enabling you to see this journey through your own eyes and bodies and practices. We engage in all kinds of journeys through Workshop: Arts-based research This has become an overall term that incorporates performance, process and investigations through art forms of a wide range of issues and contexts. Workshop incorporates all these as sites of exploration. Arts-based inquiry This involves the development of meanings through artful practices. It looks to creative expression in contexts of lived situations in communities and individual lives. It is “a process one undertakes to transform prior understandings and misunderstandings through the manipulation of material and symbolic tools and the reconstruction of social and cultural meaning” (Kraehe & Brown, 2011, p. 491). Practice as research This involves artist-researchers exploring, testing and extending a diverse range of creative methodologies and working across diverse contexts—exploring the relationship of creative interventions to both making and understanding the world. Performative Inquiry How we make meaning of the world through creative practice. We perform different methods of inquiry through artistic experimentation and treat art-making as a mode of research. Research creation An approach that combines creative and academic research practices and supports the development of knowledge and innovation through artistic expression, investigation, and experimentation. The creation process is situated within the activity and produces critically informed work in a variety of art forms. All five of these frames occur through Workshop. However, I feel looking at Workshop as research creation is key. Communication studies professors Chapman and Sawchuk (2012) have sub-categorized this further into ‘research-for-creation,’ ‘research-from-creation,’ ‘creative presentations of research,’ and finally ‘creationas-research.’ Each category overlaps with the others as they all involve creative processes and research. These categories are united by conceiving them as instances of familial resemblance—in other words they may use different lenses, but they are ways of practicing research-creation. The categories are intertwined by both what makes them different from each other as well as by what makes them similar. Although Workshop fits into all four categories as the concept can apply in any creative process for and through research, the one that I think best fits workshop is ‘creation as research’ as this means where ‘creation is required in order for research to emerge’. When we think of the multiple workshops we have devised and facilitated, the creative process can only be fully understood and demonstrated by engaging in it. In addition to the distinctions between different forms of research-creation, what also distinguishes these forms of research creation from other forms is that they all involve the facilitator researcher as guide rather than as the holder of knowledge who

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imparts that knowledge to the group. Workshop is a social phenomenon that happens in a social and collective environment. Chapman and Sawchuk (2012) write that the social is “presented in the same way that an instrumentalist interprets a musical score, an actor delivers her lines, or a dancer enacts a piece of choreography” (p. 15). So, Workshop as a participatory form and structure involves collective research as well. Mol (2002) notes that as an ethnographer and philosopher she believes but that “like human subjects, natural objects are framed as parts of events that occur and plays that are staged. If an object is real this is because it is part of a practice. It is a reality enacted” (p. 44). Workshop not only involves the person in interaction with others, but it also involves the making and presenting of artistic/creative materials. So, the form emerges through the complex relationships of all its parts. Chapman and Sawchuk (2012) point out that ‘Creation-as-research’ is also ‘creation-through-research, in terms of expanding what “is” in the world by revealing new layers, permutations of reality, or ‘experiences to be experienced.’ This is a funny way of saying what Heidegger explains, also somewhat incomprehensibly, when he argues that our use of things brings out their ‘thingness,’ meaning all that ‘is’ (i.e., Being with a capital ‘B’), can only be brought into greater degrees of ‘unconcealment’ by being employed or deployed in ‘hands-on’ situations, in addition to being analyzed and interpreted. (see Heidegger, 1975, 1977, p. 17)

(After reading the above quote, I am thinking here, Tony, of puppets which come to life through the making and performing of the objects from cloth, newspaper, glue and other materials). Within this process, thinking is not separate from, but is part of the creative process and the resulting product or embodied performance is the material of thought. In other words, it is through research, and through creation, the very phenomena (what happens in Workshop) we seek to explore are brought into being in the first place. As Enzo Cozzi (in Gee, 2001) underlines, “every Workshop is a story and it’s an original story and it’s a story. It’s written there” (p. 43). Tony, as you stated earlier, engaging in Workshop is certainly engaging a complex system where the whole workshop is more than the sum of its parts; it is a set of relationships between many elements. It is a form in which one is following what emerges on many levels or, as you call it, “a pedagogy of not-knowing”. Creative arts therapist Shaun McNiff (1998), in his primer on research-creation, writes that to solidify the innovative view of research-creation investigators must master the tasks of embracing the qualities inherent in artistic knowing: mystery, faith, emotional precariousness, open-endedness, transformation and cultivating curiosity as to which research methods and questions might richly reflect the artistic experience. As he further delved into these methods, he realized that, in fact, experimentation with, and learning about, method may in fact become a primary outcome that can aid further application (McNiff, 2008). McNiff adds that research-creation as arts-based research starts with questions, allows methods to emerge from a research situation, and encourages an open mind throughout the process. Rather than standard steps, a researcher undertakes an “immersion in the uncertainties of experience” (p. 15), uncovers a personally meaningful way to conduct the research, and moves through the mystery of the exploration

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process until there is an emergence of understanding. The process requires “openended interplay amongst different areas of knowledge with the researcher returning again and again to the images and the process of expression as the foundation of inquiry” (McNiff, 1998, p. 47). An example of this interplay of process and content is in dance. Patricia Leavy (2015) notes that dance has long been a subject of inquiry, but it is also a “methodological device” (p. 185), a data collection method, and a representational form. In the same way, this book will explore Workshop as a form of inquiry. New possibilities of engagement open up as knowing emerges through a variety of forms of creative play where Workshop is simultaneously the medium, subject and re-presentation of the work that emerges in and through Workshop. Through these examples, we see that when we engage in research-as-creation, no matter the content or focus, we are, through workshop as form and frame for story, fostering and crafting the creativity of a specific population in order to investigate and discover something about our world. Maybe the Sufi poet Farid al-d¯ın Attar sums up the emergent nature of inquiry during a workshop, “Step on the road and do not quibble. The road will tell you how must you go.”1 (F. Keshavarz-Karamustafa, personal communication, August 24, 2021). So, what are the conditions to enable this journey into inquiry? Let’s have a look in the next section on devising at several inter-related and vital aspects that need to be considered in engaging in Workshop: Facilitation, Group, Creative Agency, Uncertainty, Safety and Risk, Motivation, and Presence.

References Aoki, T. (2005). Imaginaries of ‘East and West’: Slippery curricular signifiers in education. In W. Pinar & R. Irwin (Eds.), Curriculum in a new key: The collected works of Ted T. Aoki (pp. 313–319). Lawrence Erlbaum. Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and epistemology. University of Chicago Press. Bateson, M. C. (1977). Daddy, can a scientist be wise? In J. A. Bateson (Ed.), Brockman (pp. 57–76). E. P. Dutton. Brook, P. (2005). The open door: Thoughts on acting and theatre. Anchor Books, Penguin Random House Inc. Carroll, K. L. (1997). Researching paradigms in art education. In S. D. La Pierre & E. Zimmerman. (Eds.), Research methods and methodologies for art education (pp. 171–192). National Art Education Association. Chapman, O. B., & Sawchuk, K. (2012). Research-Creation: Intervention, analysis and “family resemblances”. Canadian Journal of Communication, 37, 5–26. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc. 2012v37n1a2489 Cook, T. A. (1979). The curves of life. Dover Publications. Dewey, J. (1934). Art as experience. Perigee Books.

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Translation from Divan of ‘Attar of

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Finley, S. (2008). Arts-based research. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspective, methodologies, examples and issues (pp. 71–92). Sage Publications. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogia do oprimido. Facsímile digitalizado (Manuscritos). São Paulo: Instituto Paulo Freire. English edition: Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Trans. M. B. Ramos). Continuum Gee, T. (2001). The workshop interviews (Unpublished manuscript). Gee, T. (2003). Workshop a moveable feast. Dartington Press. Goorney, H. (1981). The theatre workshop story. Eyre Methuen. Heidegger, M. (1975). The origin of the work of art. In A. Hofstadter (Ed. & Trans.), Poetry, language, thought (pp. 15–88). Harper and Row, Publishers, Inc. Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology. In M. Heidegger (Ed.), The question concerning technology and other essays (pp. 3–35). Harper and Row, Publishers Inc. Heron, J. (1992). Feeling and personhood: Psychology in another key. Sage Publications. Hunter, M. A. (2008). Cultivating the art of safe space. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 13(1), 5–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569780701825195 Hyde, M., & McGuiness, M. (1999). Introducing Jung. Icon Book. James, W. (1890/1952). The principles of psychology, 7. Henry Holt. Kraehe, A., & Brown, K. (2011). Awakening teachers’ capacities for social justice with/in artsbased inquiries. Equity & Excellence in Education. 44(1), 488–511. https://doi.org/10.1080/106 65684.2011.610682 Leavy, P. (2015). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice (2nd ed.). Guilford. Loy, D. (1993). Indra’s postmodern net. Philosophy East and West, 43(3), 481–510 (1993). https:// doi.org/10.2307/1399579 McLaughlin, H. (1999). The ends of our exploring: Ethical and scientific journeys to remote places. Malcolm Lester Books. McNiff, S. (1998). Art based research. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. McNiff, S. (2008). Arts-based research. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspective, methodologies, examples and issues (pp. 83–92). Sage Publications. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Éditions Gallimard Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. (trans. C. Smith). Routledge and Kegan Paul. Mol, A. (2002). The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice. Duke University Press. Rey, A., & Rey-Debove, J. (1989). Petit Robert 1. Dictionnaire de la Langue Francaise. Les Dictionnaires Robert-Canada, S. C. C. Rolling, J. H. (2010). A paradigm analysis of arts-based research and implications for education. Studies in Art Education, 51(2), 102–114. https://doi.org/10.1080/00393541.2010.11518795 Savin-Baden, M., & Wimpenny, K. (2014). A practical guide to arts-related research. Sense Publishers. Shakespeare, W. (1595/2016). A midsummer night’s dream. Simon & Schuster Paperbacks. Taylor, P. G., Wilder, S. O., & Helms, K. R. (2007). Walking with a ghost: Arts-based research, music videos, and the re-performing body. International Journal of Education & the Arts, 8(7), 1–27. Varela, F. (1999). Ethical Know-How: Action, wisdom, and cognition. Stanford University Press. Winterson, J. (1996). Oranges are not the only fruit. Vintage Press. Wordsworth, W. (1888/1999). Memorials of a tour in Scotland, 1803. VII. Stepping Westward. In The complete poetical works. Macmillan and Co. Bartleby.com. Accessed 3 Aug 2021.

Chapter 4

Devising Workshop: The Dance of Potentials Tony Gee and Warren Linds

Abstract Because Workshop is an experiential form of creative participation, there is an ineffability about what happens in any workshop. In this chapter, two arts practitioners explore the conditions to enable a journey into inquiry through Workshop. As Workshop is a complex system, it involves multiple interconnecting and overlapping elements. So, we elaborate on several inter-related and vital aspects that need to be considered in devising Workshop: facilitation, group, creative agency, uncertainty, safety and risk, motivation, and presence. The special skill of the facilitator involves the ability to manage a dual focus by maintaining a ready awareness of two simultaneous and entwined processes: the creative and the collective. When a workshop works, all who are present collaborate, using the known elements creatively so that we are best prepared to deal with the unknowns that emerge from our explorations and inquiries. The individuals as a group of people engaged in a shared creative experience amplify each other’s expressions and discoveries as they emerge. Uncertainty becomes a perspective that evolves as the group moves deeper into their work together. The facilitator enables the group to deal with the complexities of situations, so both freedom and flexibility are provided in the workshop space. There is a sense of a communal ‘whole’ that engages the individuals in that space. We share how motivation is another key element to consider for both facilitator and participants in Workshop. Lastly, we explore how continuing as practitioners increases awareness of the multi-dimensional aspects present in a workshop. As one participant at A Moveable Feast workshop said, ‘we know more than we can say’ (We have since found out that this is also a phrase used by Gestalt psychologist Michael [Polanyi, The tacit dimension, Anchor Books, 1967]). Workshop is a complex system so there are multiple interconnecting and overlapping elements. In section two we discuss in more detail the key elements of devising a workshop: Facilitator, Group, Creative Agency, Uncertainty, Safety, Motivation and Presence. T. Gee (B) Creation Myth Puppets, Devon, UK e-mail: [email protected] W. Linds Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 W. Linds and T. Gee, Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2291-8_4

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T. Gee and W. Linds

Keywords Facilitation · Group · Creative agency · Uncertainty · Safety and risk · Trust · Motivation · Presence

4.1 Facilitator Warren, we have introduced the main elements of Workshop. The most important element of any workshop are the people in the room. Why? It’s a form in which the creative process of making is inseparable from the social process of relationships between people. We can make a distinction here between the facilitator and the participants. The person primarily responsible for running a workshop can be called leader or facilitator. We discussed many terms and roles for this person. I like leader because it’s a no nonsense, non-jargonistic term. A good workshop leader is a facilitator, attender, reassurer, guide, follower: the list of roles performed is almost endless. These are the reasons why I would plumb for workshop leader over the softer sounding more Latin term, facilitator. Someone invariably initiates a workshop. That person(s) devises, plans, sources materials, introduces and guides the process. All the way through the delivery they initiate the next thing; albeit with the aim of the process of that workshop increasingly becoming the group’s process and with the objective of stepping sideways when the opportunity arises and letting the group get on with their group creating business. This role of initiating goes beyond that of facilitating. Facilitating is a part of initiating but it is a different activity. Facilitating literally means breaking something down into manageable stages. Making things simple—‘facile’. The group often sees that person who is out front or standing by them as a facilitator. But they also rightly see that person as separate from the group (as you are in your role as an artist/lecturer with students and as I am as an artist/educator in schools). However, even if you have gained their trust enough and they have enough trust in each other to not require leading, they always see that person as the leading force in the space. The group regards you as the leader. Leader is a term that can fall foul of sour connotations such as dictatorship or lack of democratic process but that is bad leadership and certainly is not what I am talking about here. The workshop leader has all sorts of functions. All those functions serve the creative and social processes of the group by guiding in the appropriate way so that what is made is theirs and made with them. To quote a young worker, who grew up in care and who was a work colleague many, many years ago in a very challenging situation working with young children in South London, “Tony, there is a soft way, and there is a hard way. You have to know how to do both.” This is true. Sometimes I dictate, sometimes I listen but, ultimately, I take responsibility for trying to ensure that the group can express themselves in the fullest terms during their time together in that space. I would call that leading. Whilst much of this leading involves facilitation, some of leading is outside the term facilitation. I have a heightened awareness of the group’s needs whilst I am with

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them. I watch each and all of them and follow their process. I lead by following. I am a host, a holder, a parent, an authority and an observer. I am leading. You prefer facilitator and, as you rightly pointed out, facilitator is the most commonly used term. Let’s stick with facilitator. The path of least resistance is often the best way to resolve a divergence of opinions and the vital matter at hand is to look at the functions of the facilitator—before, during and after a workshop. Warren, both you and I have worked in diverse settings, cultures and communities. There are, though, general objectives I have when devising a workshop. Here’s a list of some of my fundamental facilitating aims: . . . . . . . .

To devise and plan for a workshop that serves the needs of the group to: Exceed expectations Giving an introduction that opens challenging and realistic possibilities Provide stimulating materials Set up the space in an imaginative and functional way Draw knowledge and know-how from the group Take them out of their comfort zones Facilitate the stages and the encounters so that everyone will take away something new from the experience

Tony, I use the word facilitator as it encompasses different forms of leadership depending on what the group and participants need at any part of the workshop. John Heron (1999) terms these “modes” of leadership—hierarchical, co-operative and autonomous, all depending on what is needed by a group at specific times in the workshop. The hierarchical (or directive) mode. Here, I, as the facilitator, plan and direct the workshop. I take full responsibility for all major decisions and dimensions of the process. The co-operative mode. Here I collaborate with the members of the group in devising the learning process. My facilitation approach is aiming to be collaborative. The autonomous mode. I do not do things for them, or with them, but give them freedom to find their own way, exercising their own judgment without any intervention on my part. This would involve the subtle art of creating conditions within which people can exercise full self-determination in their creativity. These three modes deal with the exercise of power in the management of the different dimensions of Workshop experience. They are about who controls and influences the experience. Who makes the decisions about what people do and how they do it? Is it the facilitator alone, the facilitator and group members together, or only the group members? As an effective facilitator, I try to employ all three modes

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within the workshop as and when appropriate; and I am flexible in moving from mode to mode in the light of the changing situation in the workshop. Augusto Boal expressed this idea of shifting roles in The Rainbow of Desire (1995): Who is the ‘I’? … It is very easy to decide – in fatalistic fashion – that we are the way we are, full stop, end of story. But we can also imagine – in creative fashion – that the playing cards can be re-dealt. In this dance of potentialities, different powers take the floor at different times – potential can become act, occupy the spotlight, and then glide back to the sidelines, powers grow and diminish, move in to the foreground and then shrink into the background again – everything is mutable. Our personality is what it is, but it is also what is becoming. (p. 39)

It is useful to think of the facilitator’s role as constantly in flux. In the same way that the word Workshop is used in ways different from how we describe it in this book, I find that ‘facilitation’ as a descriptor of what we do is often misunderstood both by those participating in groups and by those who claim to be facilitating groups in workshop settings. Like ‘leader’, ‘facilitator’ is also problematic. In my research, I have discovered roots of the word facilitation. It is the English translation of the German term Bahnung (pathing), which is translated as frayage in French. The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud uses Bahnung (1895/1954) to refer to when energies flow in the brain and run into certain resistance; when the energy finds a passage, there is a permanent reduction in the resistance. That is where there is said to be facilitation. Energies will opt for a facilitated pathway rather than for one where no facilitation has occurred. Facilitation is a good word if we see Workshop as the space–time that enables creative energy to flow between participants, between facilitator and participants and inside the world of a workshop. Students in one of my courses came up with some principles in order for a facilitator to enable creative energy to emerge in a workshop: . . . . . . . .

Imagination Individuality (being your own person and building on it) Open-mindedness (limits: not too cranky, not too crazy; setting the guidelines) Patience (when the group loses control) Warmth, friendliness and respect Energy and harmony (fun, accepting, giving space) Comfort (Can you still be creative when you are not comfortable?) Acceptance of whatever emerges.

And in another class, where we explored the different roles of facilitator the students identified three key aspects: . CONVENOR: a central person with key role—inviting—engagement—providing ideas and thoughts, leading by example—checking on everybody else—modeling a task, a process, a way to relate to each other. . DOCUMENTER: motivating—instructing—directing—delegating—giving feedback—communication—guiding the group—working together.

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. OBSERVER: facilitator is listening—shouldn’t play a practical role; we should be able to function without him—support the group when needed. Here is a Wordcloud (Fig. 4.1) generated from definitions of facilitation by students in a class on facilitation: Looking at this Wordcloud enables me to reflect on the interplay between who these students are and their experiences of facilitation and being facilitated. They are in an undergraduate program called Human Relations and I have found they are often interested in being in the helping professions of, for example, youth work, social work, counselling psychology in all sorts of contexts. So, I find it natural here that helping appears so prominently. The other thing I would note is the student association in this program produced a t-shirt for the students that quoted the oft-mentioned phrase in the program ‘trust the process’.

Fig. 4.1 Wordcloud on facilitation

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Warren, I’m happy to use the facilitator label because facilitating (literally the tasks and narrative arc of a workshop and breaking down into appropriate stages) is a primary function of co-creating those spaces and passing that time with a group. The word ‘with’ is important in this context because it accurately describes the power dynamic between facilitator and participants. Workshop is a form of dynamic power sharing, about ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’. As facilitators we lend our hands to the matter at hand throughout the workshop to enable the group to do their group creating process. We host and hold the group and then we let go. As John Somers told me, The leader is creating an incomplete, potentially chaotic or maybe, actual chaotic situation and somehow the participants have to impose order on it and is the act of doing so that engages them… I would use the term intertextuality. Whatever narrative, story or meaning is being dealt with in the workshop it should have the potential to intersect with and create energy with the personal narrative of the people involved. (Gee, 2001, p. 100)

The special skill of the facilitator during a workshop is the ability to manage a dual focus by maintaining a ready awareness of two simultaneous and entwined processes: the creative and the collective. This goes to the heart of what I mean by Workshop. Put simply, a workshop is a group making something that prior to that gathering, whether it is an on-going or a one-off group, did not exist before and is manifested during the workshop. So, you have the group, and you have what they are making. In the lived-through moment these two processes are inseparable. As Yeats (1933) poetically wrote, “how can we tell the dancer from the dance?” (p. 105). Yet somehow the facilitator has to reconcile both aspects—the makers and what they are making; whether it’s in the somatic or cerebral realms. The facilitator can participate and, as you point out, participants can adopt the mantle of facilitation. However, I think there are some special qualities that differentiate participants in a workshop from facilitators. An image (Fig. 4.2) I have used to illustrate the different orbits of the facilitator and participants is based on Saturn. The outer ring and the inner intersect in the workshop but begin and end in different places. If we think of the outer ring as representing the facilitator, they start in the phase of devising and planning. There are a number of elements in planning and devising that have to be considered. An effective and simple way to start thinking about devising a workshop is to answer some basic questions: Who for? What? Where? When? Why? How? These questions encapsulate the different contexts—the people, the motivations, the materials involved and the givens of space and time.

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TWO ARCS CO - INCIDE IN THE WORKSHOP Fig. 4.2 The orbits of Workshop

4.2 Group Workshop as a participatory form offers the possibility of profound experience. This experience happens somewhere between the mix of making something and being together. I recall a part of my conversation with Wendy Greenhill: WG: I think it (Workshop) touches on the nature of identity - to bring a small idea, I believe that identity is in relation. For me identity has meaning as I, as a person, have the capacity and the desire to relate to others. We exist in relationship in all kinds of ways. TG: What Rastafarians call ‘I and I’? We is I and I. WG: It’s what Martin Buber (1970), the German philosopher and theologian calls I and Thou. And I think that is what happens in a workshop. TG: I think the success of Workshop has got a lot to do with the nature of identity. I can bear witness to that from working with young children, because they have a visible sense of identity that arises in common purpose. You can see common purpose working. It’s the stuff of shared intense experience in which we get to know each other in a deeper way over a short space of time. Like an encounter when travelling to a foreign land, it is time outside everyday life; a bubble in which we can imagine a world and

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bring things to life in a way that can serve us back in our everyday life either as a memory or as a new skill or a new way of seeing things. The potential exists in a workshop for individuals who are participating to amplify each other’s experiences. We are social beings, and, in a workshop, we can be just that. As a psychotherapist, Malcolm Stern, said: This should be how we operate in the normal course of events, but because we don’t, we set it up artificially as a workshop, so that we can actually create what’s possible for people to communicate sanely. (Gee, 2001, p. 6)

When a workshop works, all who are present collaborate, using the known elements creatively so that we are best prepared to deal with the unknowns that emerge from our explorations and inquiries. This means the individuals in a group, as people engaged in a shared creative experience, amplify each other’s expressions and discoveries as they emerge.

4.3 Common Purpose Knowing that my aim as a facilitator is to enable this, the first quality I try to engender in a group is common purpose. This can be done in so many ways. It can be stated overtly “today we are gong too...” or implied and modelled with an activity or demonstration. I referred earlier to a group who met outside a room in armchairs. I asked them to do a ‘ritual’ before crossing the threshold into the room. I used a bamboo exercise in which the group splits into two lines. I describe this exercise in The Arc of the Workshop (p. 107). They hold out their hands with the first finger pointing gun-like towards the opposite line, who mirror that line back. So that there are two lines facing each other and they move together to provide a surface of single fingers. Each line of five people (can be less or more) hold out a single finger on each hand. These are interspersed with the opposite line of five people’s fingers so a surface of twenty fingers is created on which a long thin bamboo is placed. The fingers have to support the bamboo from underneath and are not allowed to hook onto the bamboo. The two facing lines have to place the bamboo on the floor. Not as easy as it sounds! The bamboo goes up, sideways and can lead a group all over the place. It can cause much hilarity and bemusement as the bamboo seems to take on a life of its own. The point is that the bamboo will not go down until the group stops trying to work it out and begins to work together and be mindful of their individual and fellow member’s physicality. It’s a great exercise to bring a group together. The laughter and teamwork the exercise provoked worked well as a pseudo-ritual before entering the space on that day.

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4.3.1 Conceit Conceit in a work of fiction is the underlying fictitious assumption which must be accepted by the audience with suspension of disbelief so the plot may be seen as plausible. Putting a bamboo on the floor when framed as an entering-the-space ritual is a conceit. It’s just an exercise but the use of conceit is useful to bring people into the social bubble of a workshop. Warren, the outside world intrudes! I have to run a puppet workshop this morning with international students on an Arts and Education Masters course. Authentic creative process and production are inherently uncertain—“one moment leads to the next to the next...”—and we facilitators go in with some sort of structure and aim in mind but exactly what emerges during the course of a workshop is unknowable—it is emergent. My imminent workshop is with a group of people from all over the world whom I have never met before. I am acutely aware, as I have never met these people before of the question: How does one plan to enable creative agency to emerge and flourish among participants with whatever medium they are working in and on?

4.4 Creative Agency Thanks for that Tony. Your situation makes me recall a workshop years ago in a high school with students I had never met before. The school had given me the wrestling room; a dark basement room with wrestling mats all over the floor. I had never worked in such a room before. But I wanted to do the workshop and enable the students to be creative. I prepared by going into the room a few days before. I walked around and around on the mats for a few minutes. I was uncertain as to how this unusual floor material would affect creativity and engagement. Would the students discover their creative agency? I need not have worried. We were all in the same situation, together in an unfamiliar environment and this added to the creative opportunities. So, what is this process called creative agency? The anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup (2007) writes that it brings the unprecedented into effect by way of imaginative power and thus expands the community’s awareness of itself. The expansion is possible due to the inherent flexibility of the social. (p. 200)

I used to teach a course in the Facilitation and Leadership of Small Groups. Many of my students, aged between twenty and fifty, told me that they didn’t see themselves

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as ‘creative’. If we see this notion of ‘not being creative’ as not only a perception but also a pattern of interaction, then we wonder how one might change this pattern. Ralph Stacey (who applies a complexity perspective to groups and organizations) points out that we can’t change people or the pattern of their interactions, but we can change the conditions in which people interact. Maybe that’s why the unfamiliarity of the wrestling room added to the creative opportunities. So, what conditions enable creative agency? In 2012, I asked the students after a particular class, where we explored creativity through arts work, to outline what these qualities might be. They came up with a long list: Planning Plan-organize the flow of activities in advance (methodology, sequence) Start small, tackle things bit by bit Invite people to get to know each other Provide an outlet for creativity Materials (being prepared, ensuring they are appropriate) Facilitator Being prepared Clear instruction & goals Have a dynamic facilitator Tone of voice (animated) Help (when it is needed) Clear explanations Get everyone onboard Acceptance of new ideas Non-judgemental—to promote diversity Examples to provide clarity Space Giving people space to work on their own (autonomy & freedom) Proper, solid workspace for task Environment Music, joyful atmosphere Humour, simplicity—to promote laughter Creating a welcoming, fun and friendly environment Relaxation Playfulness in learning Encouragement & Acceptance Everybody on the same track-trust the process!

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Relational Developing trust Engendering safety Activating imagination I then asked what questions they would, as participants, need answered to move forward into ‘creation’. These questions provide me as a facilitator/leader with points of reflection as I devise, and conduct, Workshop: . . . . . .

When did you feel safe/unsafe during today’s workshop? What do we have to do to be dynamic? What motivates people to put their heart into something? When do we trust ourselves to let go? When do you stop thinking about the task and focus on the process? How do you balance unrestricted and restricted creative processes?

How did your workshop go Tony?

4.5 Uncertainty Thank you, Warren, for asking. My workshop went very well. If you were to have walked into the room after thirty minutes of the workshop had passed, you would have seen fifteen young graduates from different nations, nattering away to each other, cutting up card and admiring each other’s nascent beings. You might think nothing more than: ‘Oh they’re making puppets.’ And you would not be wrong, but the facilitator’s job is to prospect below the surface. I liked your tale of the wrestling mats and the connection you draw between creating environment and creative agency. At the International Congress for Theatre and Education in 2001 in Bergen, I participated in a session on how the space was the first element of a workshop but was often ignored element of participatory practice. We were asked to stand outside the room in silence, close our eyes and imagine what was on the other side of the door. We were then asked to enter slowly with eyes shut and take our time to open them again. I found myself in a large university classroom. The furniture had been up turned every which way into a chaotic bedlam. The workshop consisted of us exploring the space in different physical ways. The workshop drove home how vital space is as an active element in a workshop and how it must be treated as such. I always think about the space, how it will be set up and how the participants will enter that space. One of my first questions when devising a workshop is: When do I want

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them to begin? Do I want the participants to think about something before they enter the space, at the threshold of that space? Do I want their experience to be special, or nothing special when they enter the space? As facilitator, I exert a certain control of what manifests at the beginning of the workshop. All sorts of examples come to mind. When we do the school residencies where we make puppet shows with the children, we always get in early and set up the space so that it is like a palace of possibilities for the children. Ever since I began devising and purveying workshops in schools, we have had one trusty friend—a magic carpet. This is a faux version of the sort of carpet you might buy in an Arabian bazaar. We got the idea from reading an account of Peter Brook’s African tour of ‘Conference of the Birds’. This prop has served over a thousand times to transform spaces. Sometimes a carpet is irrelevant but setting up the space is always a matter of determining what the space looks like. I think of the space as a laboratory of imagination so I am always thinking how I can play with expectations of what might happen there. The facilitator’s journey into a workshop starts at a very different point from that of the participants. The facilitator has the most influence at the beginning of a workshop. The participants, though, don’t necessarily simply start at the point of walking into the space. Warren, you have also got me thinking about my planning process and all the different aspects. What a wide topic! It got me thinking about the roots of my reflective practice as a workshop facilitator. The first root is my on-going practice as facilitator and participant in workshops. The second was conducting The Workshop Interviews. The third was through applied action research with many other facilitators; particularly, over the years of running Moveable Feasts with many artists. As I cast my mind back, it alighted upon a memory of this quote from an interview with Enzo Cozzi: At the beginning of a workshop session nobody knows what is going to happen. There is one person who knows the aims of the session, but this person doesn’t know how these aims are going to be reached. So, the extent of the knowledge is pretty thin, there’s not much. (Gee, 2001, p. 43)

Enzo’s words encapsulate the paradox of devising a workshop. Namely, one is scheming an event that will create its own shape. If one thinks of a painter or a writer with a blank canvas or paper, then that is what it’s like each time a workshop is on the horizon for a facilitator. Of course, like any artist, we have a toolkit of techniques which we develop over time but there is a crucial difference between the workshop artist and a painter. Their canvas will not move around the room of its own accord or decide it needs a comfort break at a crucial moment. As facilitators, we are creating with autonomous, conscious organisms who will arrive in the space with their own expectations, motivations or, in some cases, even without motivation and out of compulsion. This is hard. It’s like starting a first day in a new job each time. Maybe more for me than you as I am now entirely itinerant, and you have a stable job. Anyway, the question then is where does a facilitator begin to devise a good workshop?

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Of course, the reality for a facilitator is that their starting place might suddenly be an image of an ending rather than a beginning or thinking of a tale or exercise that could really work for a group. Back to the workshop I just ran with the Masters students, watching what emerged for those students, reminded me of a keynote I gave about puppet workshops to a puppet symposium in Tampere, Finland. I tried my best to evoke my role as facilitator and the qualities that I look for when devising and delivering my puppet workshops. These are my notes for that keynote: Uncertainty – the world presents itself in uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen next. This unpredictability is mirrored in the creative process. There is an embracing of uncertainty that is the artist’s commitment in living a creative life. In a world of constant measurement, uncertainty can be seen as a weakness, but it is by acknowledging uncertainty that the artist’s creative process and life unfolds. Invitation – this uncertain world offers opportunities to the creative spirit, but one has to listen and be receptive to pick up the invitations on offer. This means that sometimes the artist can notice, and offer, invitations that others who choose safer paths might not recognize as invitations. Invitations come from unexpected places, such as a little voice many years ago in a big hall saying, ‘that box of eyes is sacred.’ Signature – we cannot avoid our cellular signature. Our story is written on the first cell that becomes us and inevitably multiplies and can be seen on everything we create. We all have our own way of doing and learning. We learn by doing. Making and playing with puppets is a special sort of signature. When someone makes a puppet, especially one that exceeds their expectations, they bring a being to life. This is a being that is not that person but is of that person, crafted from their subconscious. This new being is a special sort of mirror, proof of the maker’s inherent creativity – a story of self. It tells of the person who made the being, and it tells the maker, ‘you are creative and enjoy being creative.’ This is a crystal memory that, even if it gets buried, can resurface again when it gets the chance. Relationship – puppets, like humans, need the air of others to breathe. When the puppets meet each other, they are freed from the rules of normal human existence. They are not human but, like masks, they are humanesque and, like masks, they can speak stories in ways that are hard for us to speak as humans. They are unfettered by psychological complexity. The language of the puppet is direct. Ecology – we tend to think of ecology as systems outside of ourselves – the Amazon, the Ozone Layer, the Arctic – but we are part of that ecology. Our most imminent ecology is our relationship with each other. The social systems we create can be simple systems – systems that maintain an order but can’t stimulate transformation or its opposite, complex systems from which newness emerges. Working with many people making puppets revealed an aesthetically astonishing complex system – it is a workshop. Pudding Proof – the workshop is transformative, complex and proves itself by creating new meaning. Puppets are an excellent media for providing the transport for this journey of discovery to make whole universes of story that are made then and there. This bubble, although it can be shared, is the participants’ experience. It is resistant to colonization from outside the bubble. Dual Focus – the workshop focus of the artist is a dual one: as much on the unfolding of the social or group process as it is on the creative process and product.

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T. Gee and W. Linds There is transference of ownership – all material brought into the workshop by that leader, facilitator, story-guide is an invitation or provocation for the group to make something that is theirs. The aim of a workshop is that nobody is in the same place when they leave the room as when they entered. Fluidity of roles – in a workshop, one moment a person can be maker or performer and then a moment later they can be witness or audience. Absolute specificity – everything is made then and there by them. So, each workshop is unique and has its own porous structure. The facilitator has the intention to guide a group on a journey, but the route is theirs and the end often does not correspond to the facilitator’s original idea. A pedagogy of not-knowing – nobody knows exactly what is going to happen. It is a journey into the unknown, of discovery – a pedagogy of not-knowing, a creation myth in action and, at its best, a journey from I can’t to I can (that description came from a child in a workshop).

If the first story a puppet releases is a story of self, then the second one is that of the relationship to others and the third is a tale about the world. I mentioned above ‘The Sacred Box of Eyes’. This is how that was born. It was in a huge one-day workshop I ran called ‘The Guests of Chance’. Fourteen puppeteers ran seven workshops with two hundred and fifty people. At the end of the day a show was performed. I looked at what had been made. It was like standing on top of a mountain gazing on a beautiful panoramic view that just blew the words right out of my mouth. I asked myself how was it possible to achieve this in one short day? On that day, two hundred and fifty people united in a common purpose, united by the puppets they made, united by the will to create a story and perform it—and it was their puppets that made that so accessible and unthreatening when another two hundred packed in to watch them perform. When we were making the puppets that day, I had a box with eyes in it. We always kept the eyes until last because when the eyes go on, the puppet comes to life. In those days it was a rather modest box. These days, the antique wooden box with an enamelled name plate is full of exotic treasures—thousands of eyes of all sorts. When the moment came, I gathered all the makers together and introduced them to the modest box. I don’t know what I said but a small voice piped up and said, ‘that box is sacred’. I responded, ‘yes, it is’. Then two hundred and fifty people spontaneously chorused back at me in perfect unison, ‘oh no, not the sacred box of eyes!’ That chorus of, ‘oh no not the sacred box of eyes’, created a climactic moment to the puppet making. A moment that has since been shared by too many to mention. The invitation came from that one small voice in a huge hall. That moment epitomises why one artist I worked with called Workshop, “The Art of Anomaly”. Planning a workshop, we plan for what we can and then try to listen to the unexpected invitations that are offered. That small, long ago and now anonymous, voice gave me a gift that has served me over more than a quarter of a century. The Sacred Box of Eyes is now an omnipresent moment, the eyes that breathe first life into all the puppets we make in workshops and a climatic theatrical moment in each workshop. Oh no, not the Sacred Box of Eyes!!

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Well, Tony I like your concept of anomalies. I think these elements are always present within Workshop. We know something will happen when a group of people create together, but we don’t know specifically what will be created and what meaning will emerge from these creations. I once was in correspondence with a potter whose stance prior to making a pot was similar to mine as I prepare for a workshop: “I try to push myself to be open to the reflective process in order to be more responsive to what the material/situation is going to tell me so that I don’t impose my tools and ideas on the material in Smismatched way”. Similarly, the Indian religious teacher Swami Satchidananda wrote (in Kabat-Zinn, 1994) “You can’t fight the waves, but you can learn to surf” (p. 54). This means preparing for a workshop by observing everything including how the participants enter the room, becoming skilfully mindful as activity responds to the sensed need of a particular situation. The idea of planning that intersects and overlaps with emergent knowing leads me to the exploration of where knowing and unknowing interact. The novelist Hugo von Hoffmanstahl [1603] in Calvino (1988), puts it this way: “Depth is hidden? Where? On the surface” (p. 77). Similarly, facilitation of workshop is a process of divining (working from above) and diving (working from within) workshop. We can do all the planning required, but there is so much we don’t know. The embodied action of Workshop is often beyond words. But words do have a role. They are part of the process of divining, an unceasing pursuit of things, an approach not to their substance but to the infinite variety of things below the surface, out of vision. To divine is to become a “reader-of-hidden meanings” (Hyde, 1998, p. 112). So, the facilitator must be an observer, but one who is using all their senses as they observe the workshop unfolding in participants’ bodies. For example, I often use Complete the Image (Boal, 1992) as way of teaching a tool for storytelling. This activity requires participants to place their bodies in poses in relation to each other as a frozen-in-time’ story. Complete the Image is a story-building narrative that begins with partners and a simple handshake, a transfer of grounded energy, eyes looking at each other, with a frozen snapshot of two people shaking hands. One person moves out and a participant jumps into what is now one person with their hand pointed forward. The new person ‘completes the story’ with a different pose. And on it goes. A simple handshake can say different things with the ways we use the rest of our bodies. If we begin to interplay, we may notice the use of the eyes, the face, the stance of each other. In addition, the handshake becomes a metaphor for my engagement as facilitator with the group. After the first image, the known is image work, the unknown is what story will be told through the image.

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Almost every time I do this work the first response by participants to an image is: what is the person in the image trying to say? Then the inevitable “guessing” begins. This happens even when I begin with the “Complete the Image” handshake. I emphasize that there is no right or wrong answer. I add that the image I show at the beginning allows everyone to “read into it” their own story. Despite these assurances, I feel the inertia and habit of “playing charades,” of “guessing” what someone is trying to say remains so ingrained that participants cannot trust to let the image be, to come into its own meaning. I was leading the activity as part of a conference presentation to education researchers. Participants were rapidly replacing one another as they completed the image, the theme emerging from their bodily (inter) actions. I had done this activity dozens of times so I knew ‘something’ would emerge. This was the known. The unknown was that I didn’t know what would emerge in this particular instance. Just before another participant jumped in, I said the image/story would now be about “Education”. She stopped on her tippy toes, unsure what to do next. Unknowingly, I had created a moment of freefall, a moment when her next action would mean something more than just her body in space.

4.5.1 Freefall Freefall is an embracing of unexpected moments that happen when what we do challenges us. These events regularly occur in our lives, but often we are not aware of them when they occur. I was introduced to this concept by Johanna Haskell, who was in graduate school with me, and had led outdoor education courses for many years. She wrote (2000) that we needed to open our senses and welcome these moments, which “stop interaction and provide a freshness to perception” (p. 19). This requires “a balance of skill, trust, risk and flow of interactions” (p. xxvi). This notion of freefall in the gap between knowing and unknowing is best expressed as an embodied metaphor: I was crossing a narrow gap between rocks on the coast of British Columbia at a place I had been many times before. As I jumped, I felt a brief moment of being on the edge of any abyss, a void. An ever so brief sensation of ‘what if?’ I lose my balance if gravity takes me down the narrow rock … A loss of control that only lasted a micro-second but seemed much longer. Feeling on the edge, feeling just slightly in control. (Linds, 2001, p. 155)

In these moments of freefall, there had better be something connecting me to certainty, someone on the ground, serving as an anchor, ensuring there is security as I develop an interweaving between the rock (or the workshop) and myself. This is a liminal, in-between space between knowing what is happening and not knowing what will emerge from that happening.

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4.5.2 Diving Since what is below the surface is hidden from the facilitator, how do we become aware of it? In several workshops with Augusto Boal, he remarked that workshop is a place and time to encounter what is invisible to everyone. Using the metaphor of the shark, he described the fin and the ripples it creates as indicating but at the same time concealing something below the surface. The invisible or the not-knowing the unknown, is hiding from us. Diving happens in performance inside Workshop in the actions of participants. As Gadamer (1999), the philosopher of hermeneutics, writes, “It is in the performance and only in it – as we see most clearly in music – that we encounter the work itself” (p. 116). And that performance involves me as a participating facilitator being ‘inside” the workshop. I remember facilitating a forum theatre workshop with high school students who were creating a play about relationships. I was asked to play the part of a boyfriend who is angry at another student for ‘looking at his girlfriend’. But he is having trouble getting angry at the guy—having difficulty showing his jealousy. So, the teacher of these students asked me to show/model how he might show his jealousy. I agreed, hoping that this would move things along. And it did. But I had a moment of dread about finding my own feelings. In this school in 2000, I was transported back to my high school on the other side of the same city in 1970, and, for a moment, had an inkling of what was going on for these students in this workshop space in their here and now. Past, present and future collapsed into one breath, as I became a 17-year-old actor responding to other teenagers as they goaded me to fight. Wisps of unease passed through me. No chance to test the water, just dive in. No chance to count down to begin the dive; an instant before I was a facilitator of a workshop divining about what was going, now I am facilitator who is diving in.

4.5.3 Safe Uncertainty Puppets facilitate creative agency. I like that the first point in your notes for your keynote was Uncertainty. Barry Mason’s (1993) concept of safe uncertainty is one I use to develop an understanding of the need to develop conditions for creative agency. This expands on the notion of uncertainty to also consider safety in Workshop and, paradoxically, space for both participants and facilitator to engage in taking risks. Safe uncertainty involves finding new ways of interacting and is consistent with a notion of a respectful, collaborative relationship where new explanations can be put alongside, rather than instead of, or in competition with, different opinions of the group. So, this position is not fixed. It is one which is always in a state of flow. This notion moves us away from certainty to what ‘fits’ at this moment in time. Safe uncertainty is not a technique, but a perspective that is evolves as the group moves deeper into a workshop. The facilitator enables the group to deal with the

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complexities of situations. The political power of the facilitator shifts in response to what is happening—from directive to collaborative to autonomous forms of leadership according to the context of learning through creation. An ultimatum is given. In movement, behaviour, words and not necessarily from the participants in the group. Sometimes the ‘facilitator’ opts out of leading. Knowingly handing over responsibility for holding a session to the participants can be a challenging thing to do. Uncertainty involves taking risks, both for the facilitator/leader and for the participants. I spoke to a student in a class I was teaching. He said he was initially resistant to the idea of the group facilitating. His background was in directive leadership, so he couldn’t see the point of involving the group in making decisions. He voiced doubts about whether I had the authority to teach this class but, after looking up my background, was willing to try to learn these different forms of leadership. A series of workshops transformed his views. Three months into the course he became the one most willing to take risks in his learning process. He now had the confidence to exercise his own authority in taking these risks of handing over a position of authority. When I think of this notion of planning for uncertainty, I recall learning how to mountain climb. Richard Mitchell (1983) has some vivid descriptions of planning, safety, inspiration, and information collection in this endeavour. Where some guidebooks provide a ‘wealth of information’ which are “claimed by some to reduce much of the uncertainty in mountaineering and are decried as ethical intrusions” (pp. 4–5), the degree of precise planning that must happen for each mountaineer is still a critical part of the journey. Preparation for sudden changes of weather, challenging terrain, appropriate equipment, adequate sustenance, and unexpected emergencies not only makes it matter whether a journey is comfortable and safe but can even mean the difference between life and death. “Planning to travel and climb in the mountains is a joyous task, with serious implications” (p. 3). However, planning for uncertainty in climbing a mountain is both creation and calculation. It involves forecasting as there is an enumeration of possible outcomes and preparation for contingencies. This parallels well with the idea of guiding a group through unknown psychological and relational territory as it involves traversing the in-between zone between planning workshop and then carrying it out. As in mountaineering, it is a process of “fantasy and dream, of imaginatively constructing future and potential experience” (p. 3), all necessary for the teamwork necessary to summit, or, in this case, to create and share the story together that will emerge through, and in, a workshop.

Thanks Warren. I like the climbing metaphor. You capture that flying by the seat of your pants feeling one can have as facilitator. You also point towards the way

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one applies intuition and how one prospects beneath the surface. The writer Russell Hoban (1992) called it “the moment under the moment.” This makes me think of a workshop where I was given two agendas that seemed difficult to pull together. You were there too. I was the facilitator, and you were one of the participants. The second agenda was about data analysis, succession and team communication. The aim of the workshop was to provide organizational development for a health research team that use the arts to research and improve the wellbeing of indigenous youth. One agenda I was given was for the group to have the opportunity to play. As I pondered what to offer the team over the two days, I was pulled in two directions. I wanted to use the arts to walk the talk of the health research team. I looked at the list. There were ten things and they looked like a deadly serious agenda for a sit down and thrash it out meeting. My primary aim was to serve the group and I wanted to avoid the material of previous years when running these two days. And so, I ruminated upon the dilemma: “How could I devise something that worked in new directions for the team and provided two days of playful arts engagement?” A moment came to mind. Two years earlier, I had made puppets with a group of Indigenous youth who created shows to open a symposium about arts—based research. The delegates wanted to question the puppets after the show. A puppet with bright blue feather hair was asked how she felt. Without hesitation she responded, “I didn’t even exist yesterday.” That memory was the switch for how to tackle the two days of organizational development. I looked at the agenda and realized that through the apparent mist of agenda items the unifying factor of all the ten points was the concern to tell the story of the project. I also discerned that the crucial issue for the group, as it was coming to the end of a big cycle of development, was succession. The missing link for me was how to tackle this narrative and key concern artfully. The memory gave me a working title that immediately worked on lots of levels: ‘The Symposium of People Who Don’t Yet Exist’. I could see a creative thread that would serve the group. We would make the delegates of an imaginary symposium and they would tell us what they thought about the agenda. We would use the arts to research. I could write a whole book about the results. The results were both more than I expected and nothing like I expected. It exceeded expectations. The two days required me to be observant of what was happening for the group, allow time for things to unfold, follow leads that emerged within the group and remain flexible. The resemblance between the schedule before the two days and what emerged in the metaphoric language the puppets produced needed reading. Images and story were produced that realized the original intention behind the agenda. At the beginning I had an idea of where I wanted the group to get to, but I had no idea of the routes they would take to get there. Over the two days, as facilitator I was constantly watching, guiding those two entwined processes—the creative one of making and performing the puppets and the group process of looking at an agenda of futurity for the project. So, I am noting this moment before a workshop when one is looking for the ‘switch’—the moment when the inner sense of an imminent workshop clicks for the facilitator. And then there is that ‘reading’ and ‘holding’ of the group and the process

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that we do. In a workshop, in the words of a youth, we are making something that didn’t even exist yesterday. In our last chat you were talking about the tension between safety and risk. What did you mean?

4.6 Safety and Risk Tony, that tension lies between freedom and organization or put another way, flexibility within structure. The anthropologist and social scientist Gregory Bateson (1972) defined flexibility as the “uncommitted potential for change” (p. 505). The illusion of wholeness provides a safety net for creative agents to experiment with form. For example, Bateson shares the parable of the acrobat on the high wire. Imagine they’re walking on the tightrope. To maintain position on the wire, the acrobat must be free to move from one position of instability to another, and the arms must have a maximum of flexibility to secure the stability of other parts of the body. If the arms are not free, the walker will fall. When the acrobat is learning to walk on the tightrope, a safety net is necessary; this gives freedom to fall off the wire. As Bateson points out, “freedom and flexibility in regard to the most basic variables may be necessary during the process of learning and creating a new system of social change” (p. 506). Similarly, both freedom and flexibility are provided in the workshop space. There is a sense of a communal ‘whole’ that engages the individuals in that space. Here is an example of where that happened. I taught a course called Leadership in Small Groups for twelve years at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. This is a year- long course to develop the facilitation skills of students majoring in Human Relations and other disciplines taught in the second year of a three-year Bachelors in Human Relations. There are students attending who are taking a post- secondary certificate in a relevant discipline such as Community Service or Family Life Education and others who are taking a minor along with a major in another subject like Sociology, Business Administration, Dance, or Psychology. In most years’ classes, there were thirty-four students ranging from twenty-one to fifty-five years old. Since the course is taught at night, many of the students come directly from their jobs. Although there are a few full-time students with part-time jobs, a large percentage of the class are working full time and studying part-time. Students come into class with the notion that learning happens through concepts and words. Taking them into the creative space involves risk on my part as a facilitator because learning becomes uncertain.

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The foundational approach to the course is based on John Heron’s (1999) work on facilitative leadership. One key point he outlines is that ideally the responsibility for learning should rest with the learner, with the facilitator guiding them. In order for this to happen, learning has “four interdependent forms which, in many different ways, complement and support each other” (p. 3). These forms are in order: experiential, imaginal, conceptual and practical learning. Therefore, the course aims to use these four stages to help student-facilitators to understand and develop their own personal style of facilitation. This is done by providing the essential foundations for developing, through an experiential approach (Kolb, 1984), effective facilitative skills that suit a facilitator’s personality and also to enable them to closely match their skills with the situations they encounter. A good way, Tony, to reflect on your process is through the observations of, in this case, two students, who participated in your puppet making workshops in this university class. We planned and facilitated the class to explore the notion of creativity in facilitation. At the end of the year, students remarked that the puppet workshop was central to their emergent skills as facilitators. They commented particularly on how they ‘discovered their creativity’ when they had thought they were not creative. One student commented in his final paper when reflecting on the workshop with Tony that ‘his objective wasn’t to teach us how to make puppets out of newspaper. It was about the creative process and what it entails’. He read your interview with Bronwen Gwillim (in Gee, 2001) where you discuss with her chaos and creativity being linked, as chaos enables openness. The student felt this was his experience in the puppet workshop. At first, he found he had so many options at his disposal he “lacked the confidence in executing any of them.” In this sense there were too many possibilities, so he was uncomfortable, but it also forced him to push his own capabilities. So, he had an ‘aha-ha’ moment at one point where everything clicked: I almost randomly stuck some tape on my puppet and gave it a certain shape. I instantly saw his chin and my mind began drawing the puppet out. Each piece of tape that was added to the puppet gave it shape and life. Bronwen Gwillim speaks of transformation as being “the essence of the creative process, that’s what creativity is, it is making something that has never existed before” (Gee 2001, p. 67). I became invested in Willy (my puppet). I felt a sudden need to have him come to life, give him a voice and present him to other members of the workshop. This instant confidence came about as I started to trust myself and trust the process.

For him, this was a connection between chaos and control, as he drew a connection between being given a map and a compass: He noted that “a map (or in this day and age, a GPS system) would have told us exactly which streets or roads we would need to take to get to our destination. The compass simply pointed to where we needed to go in order to achieve our objective.” In this way, the general objective was to give shape to a puppet through the materials we had, but it was up to the participants to put their puppet together. A second student summarized what she learned about creativity and facilitation:

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T. Gee and W. Linds All the while, the mood was upbeat, imaginations were at work and the air of the room was relaxed and non-judgmental. I found the ground was set for some wonderful exploration. I learned how the group could be managed in a busy and action-packed environment. I saw how easy the task became was once it was broken down into steps, as otherwise I would have been overwhelmed.

So, what is this notion of creativity that happens in the workshop space, or more properly, in creative spaces? The specialist in conflict resolution Lederach (2005) suggests that, by engaging with the participants’ “imaginative mediative capacity” (p. 95), the “seedbeds of cultural creativity are found ‘betwixt and between’ the normal regulatory structures of life. It is in these liminal spaces that ‘new models, symbols, paradigms etc. arise” (Turner, 1982, p. 28). Helen Nicholson (2006), who works in applied theatre, points out that transforming highly regulated spaces into creative performance and workshop spaces is not just an interesting artistic challenge. It involves reconstructing how space is conceived, temporarily overlaying its codes with alternative spatial practices. (p. 129)

Let us look at the agenda for the workshop conducted in the class I was teaching, and Tony was facilitating. We began with the bamboo exercise which we have already described. Through this activity with a simple goal, the group experienced a task and had an experience of taking risk. After this activity, puppets were made and performed. Then groups generated questions and themes on creating conditions for creativity in workshop settings that resulted in inquiry questions for further investigation. Through this agenda, we explored two processes that come together: a collective dynamic process and the creative process. These can be brought together in any activity; inquiry into these and creating meaning is not a fixed thing and it can change in any group. Use of the puppets involves working the special magic their creation involves. The making of the puppet and the puppet themselves ‘facilitate’ and become a guide to creativity in facilitation. There is a transference of skill from facilitator to participant and a transference of ownership at the same time (both to the participant, and to the puppet itself!). Lastly, creative inquiry (like asking what the conditions are to use in facilitating creativity in groups) becomes a way to create a collective, and individual, document, a concrete take-away that becomes a re-membering of the experience. This has a life after the workshop.

Warren, it’s always wonderful to see people making puppets for the first time and watching their reaction as new beings emerge and manifest from their unconscious into their hands. On reading the students’ comments, I have a response. I am never sure about the cliché ‘trust the process’. Watch the process, understand the process, follow what is emerging from the process but never stop moulding it. There is an

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ineffable synergy between maker and made, and the creative process is inseparable from the creator. You have only to have to try and get a class to hand in their puppets at the end of a session to see how much they have identified with what they created. Because what they created is re-creating them as it emerges. As Apache Elder, Benton Lewis (in Basso, 1990) shared, “Stories go through you like arrows. Stories make you live right. Stories make you replace yourself.”

Tony, this happens because the use of puppets creates a safe enough space in which to explore together. In order to further understand this notion of safe enough spaces, it’s worth looking at an occasion where a space wasn’t safe enough. I had many years of guiding workshop through Image Theatre work. In this instance, I was running a class where students were exploring ethical dilemmas that would lead to identifying themes that they needed to investigate in an inquiry process. I was using a technique called Pilot/Co-pilot. Here, an image of a key moment of a story is developed with participant’s bodies in relation to one another after the teller had shared the story with another student. Separate images are then constructed by each of the two: the teller and the listener, and then the teller decides which image more authentically expresses the key moment of the dilemma. Intent on watching and observing the images and their exploration, I made a key error by not looking at the two images from the vantage point where I would be able to see both the images and the audience at the same time. At some point it became apparent to the audience that the story was about the ethical dilemma where the storyteller had had an affair with her best friend’s boyfriend. She stated that the dilemma was why she hadn’t shared this with her best friend. At that moment I heard behind me a woman crying, and then she shouted, “that best friend was me.” She explained she wasn’t the person in the story but that her own best friend had betrayed her by having an affair with her husband. She was very angry and sad. This wasn’t a safe space for her. The activity had taken place about a half an hour before the end of our work together. On reflection, I realized that I was seeing the activity simply as a modelling of a storytelling tool; I hadn’t seen it as possibly leading to something ‘real’, something important that had meaning. This wasn’t a safe enough space. I had asked them to take risks, without realizing how risky it was. However, this ‘missed take’ enabled me to learn. Indeed, if we adhere to the maxim that ‘we make our way by walking’, then one knows we only learn to walk if we allow ourselves to fall from time to time. And learn from that fall. There was another instance where I experienced a safe enough space using image work. In this instance, I decided that it was appropriate to explore something immediate and useful.

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A class in the fall of 2009. Two students were discussing a reading as part of a group activity. I joined them. As they were talking about something different from the reading, I asked them what they were talking about. They shared that they were concerned about something that had happened in a cohort activity the night beforeand asked me to find a way to enable the whole cohort to discuss what had happened. During the lunch break I thought about my pedagogical approach which involved exploring students’ experiences as the basis for my pedagogy, and then considered how my design for the afternoon might be made congruent with this approach. My approach to teaching ethics is that the content of the class comes from the students, but that any design had to be coherent with a “spiral model of learning” (Arnold et al., 1991, p. 38) that enabled an analysis, using theory, of particular student experiences and this analysis leads to action. In addition, I am not there to change the patterns of interaction among people, but rather to concentrate on creating the conditions for these changes to occur (Stacey & Griffin, 2005). Another goal is to model this process in my teaching. I had initially planned to do an activity about challenging situations they might be facing in their personal or professional lives. I asked myself: Does an exploration of what had happened in the cohort the night before fit with my goal for this particular class? I decided to adapt my activity and ask them the question: What were your feelings last night when the incident of conflict emerged (the past)? What are you feeling about what happened then, right now (the present)? What can be learned and applied from this discussion (the future)? I often use Image Theatre (Boal, 1992) as both an embodied representation of, and as a catalyst to, explore issues and experiences. As participants recall an incident, or experience, they have had, they create a series of static body shapes or ‘images’ to represent that experience. Imaging enables the participant to fill the body shapes with feelings and thoughts that come from the interplay between the physical shape and experience. Thoughts and words emerge initially from the individual’s awareness of the static body in the image and the world around the image. Images can then be activated into motion, movements that arise out of the interplay between the physical shapes of bodies and their interpretation in words and action. Through sculpting their feelings into a body image, we found common images and put them together as groups to create a group image of the value that was challenged when they had that common feeling. The inquiry process continued to deepen an understanding of what was going on in the cohort. The formed groups of images were viewed and decoded and interpreted. I asked those viewing each image to name the value they saw in being challenged, and then asked the group making the image what value they were portraying. I then asked each group image to make an image of the opposite of the value that was challenged. Lastly, we engaged in a discussion of the images and interpretations and what values were emerging as being challenged and affirmed in the relationships in the cohort. So, Tony, what does this story have to do with safety and risk? Well, one student wrote me after the class, “you mentioned that you were taking a risk and that was the best modelling of all. Much of what we will be doing as [consultants] will have some level of risk. It was great to see risk in action and have a successful outcome.” This response underlines what Varela (1999) points out, “we always operate in some

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kind of immediacy of a given situation. Our lived world is so ready-at-hand that we have no deliberateness about what it is and how we inhabit it” (p. 9). For some reason, the safety of the tool of image that uses the body rather than words enabled students to take risks which they wouldn’t have taken if they had just described what had happened the night before. In other words, they were motivated to be creative.

4.7 Motivation Warren, motivation is a key element to consider for both facilitator and participants. Many years ago, I taught a module on workshop practice to degree students from Drama, Dance, Music and Literature courses at Dartington College of Arts. The course began with looking at the motivation of each student for wanting to run workshops. The cohort were all budding and talented young artists in the business of honing their specialities. They saw Workshop as an adjunct of their main practice; a pragmatic way to supplement their income as a jobbing artist. Of course, the financial imperative is strong but making money out of arts workshops is not going to produce a sustainable practice. My hunch is that, as a main motivation, economic stability would sustain a practitioner for one to five workshops before they quit. My premise was then, as it is now, that Workshop was a distinctive form of arts practice. As such it demands the same sort of application and imagination that any other arts practice demands. To sustain an authentic practice, one must know one’s motivation and constantly revisit it and this is why. These talented arts students specialized in visual, literary, dramatic and musical fields. Many said that they wanted to run workshops to support their ‘real’ work. We revisited that idea after we had considered what it took to create and run a good workshop. Every year the group decided that the ultimate criteria for the facilitator was a real passion to practice workshop well. So, they each ran workshops on something they were passionate about, which was not necessarily directly about the arts discipline they were studying. I will come back to relating the result of that course but to be more general, when creating a workshop, a world needs making, and the space is there to be played with. There’s the facilitator then, with the knowns at their disposal, plotting some future workshop and, somewhere else, in a class or in their homes or at work, a group of disparate or connected prospective participants are busy not really thinking about the nature of the narrative arc of the workshop they are going to do. We are starting the workshop at different junctures. My aim is to find a structure that serves that group and builds a satisfying narrative arc. The knowns I have to work with are the allotted time and, where a visit is possible, the space allocated and, give or take a few, how many people there are in the group. Those are the ‘knowns’ as

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my guides as I search for some keys to unlock the ‘Pandora’s Box’ of that workshop that I am plotting. I am looking at a way to frame the theme of the workshop, how I might scaffold or facilitate or introduce the different steps involved in whatever the process might be and, here’s a big one, the initial introduction.

4.8 Devising the Introduction The first moments of meeting a group are analogous to a new universe beginning. We tend to come from cultures whose stories are that of a single origin theory, God or a Big Bang, so we tend to think of ‘the universe’ being made once. Consequently, we tend to think of the universe as a singular entity. As Samuel Beckett (1930) wrote when speaking of Proust, “the creation of the world did not take place once and for all time but takes place every day” (p. 8). Proust was possibly not conscious that many Indigenous peoples had been telling their story of no single origin, way before the Big Bang or single origin mythologies had been expounded. Naming a workshop gives it an initial frame—a hook for devising and a clue for what’s in store for the participants. Some workshop titles that I have used include: ‘The Guests of Chance’, ‘The Palace of Possibilities ‘or ‘Making Worlds’. When ideas arise, they can enfold themselves within that frame. Naming a workshop is particularly useful when contacting a group. Every year, I run a one-day workshop on a college course called ‘The Rhetoric of London’ for international undergraduates from American universities on a semester in London studying aspects of the city. This one-day workshop at the end of their course is a reflection on their experience of London through personal storytelling. Because the cohort are used to a very different sort of learning technology than a storytelling workshop, I give them a pre-workshop exercise. They get an invitation (Fig. 4.3) the week before headed ‘Telling Tales’. It’s the genius of the group I am trying to tap into in my workshop plan. I look for a point of entry that hooks the participants into a frame by intuiting the right pathways to explore and to realise the aim of that workshop. Through imagining the group, different combinations in which they can work, use of the space, utilising the time frame, looking at how to break down the content and finding innovative ways to introduce the different elements of that content I am trying to find the possible key to open that group genius. Enacting any imaginative plan only happens effectively by being responsive to the uncertainties of the present moment. At the beginning of any workshop, I am aiming for a meeting of motivations. The group will be on a spectrum between highly motivated and expectant, to not sure and waiting to see, through all the way to, ‘why have we been put in here with this guy?’ The moment arises when we meet and expectations, aspirations and level of togetherness need a quick assessment. What the group will encounter and measure in this instant is the motivation of that person or people who are going to guide them across their journey. Can they be trusted? So, what is the decisive quality that the group are looking for in the facilitator? My suspicion is that what holds the group, and the space, is the authentic passion of the facilitator. In those first moments of

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THE TELLING TALES SESSION AN INVITATION Would you please bring two objects with you next week? These objects should be symbolic and can be anything. The objects are to represent the two sides of London from your perspective. These are subjective objects that symbolize your relationship to this city. The first object should embody something of the quality or element that you most like or enjoy or had the most impact on you in London. And the second object should represent that which you dislike or could be better or you have found oppressive in London. For example, you might like or dislike the food so you might bring a spoon; or the fact that a fire in baker’s shop in 1666 may have lodged itself in your mind and suggest a health and safety risk to watch out for – bring a bread roll; or you may like the architecture or conversely hate it – a key. It’s your imagination and your call. Two Objects. Try not to spend hours fretting over them. Sometimes it works to pick up something simple within reach and then find something it might represent. Keep your choices to yourself.

Fig. 4.3 An invitation to a workshop

a workshop, several motivations need to become present in the space: group and leader need to meet each other; the individuals need to become present with each other; they need to become present in the space and they need to become present with the workshop’s content, aims and materials. Working towards this meeting of motivations—Who is this? Why are we here? What are going to do? How are we going to do it? Who are these other people?—is crucial to engendering a sense of common purpose. The baseline to achieving this is that the facilitator understands their own motivation. At the beginning of the workshop course, I talked about earlier, I asked the students to look for a subject which they had a passion for and use that for their workshop. I had planned the course to mirror the arc of a workshop: the meeting of motivations to full immersion in the material and finally, presenting a new creation. The request to look at their personal passion was novel and challenging for the students because it was an invitation and permission to go outside the boundaries of the confines and conventions of their courses in drama, dance, music or literature. Instead of imprinting a system of knowledge upon them, this invitation asked them to draw on something meaningful

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from their own experience. The resultant workshops they ran over those four years were inventive, startling, and extraordinary. There were workshops on curry, funk, the M¯aori Haka, massage, comedy, funk music, storybooks, award ceremonies, silence, musical theatre, and football chants to name a few. I remember one particular student’s workshop. She had familial links to Japan. We were greeted at the entrance to the space by three people with bowls of warm water who bathed our hands for us. We were told that this was a silent workshop. We entered to the sound of soft Shakuhachi music; the floor decked with marigold petals. We participated in a meditation on the space. Similarly, each workshop cast a spell over the participants. Presenting their first workshops in this way made me conscious that what held the group was every facilitator’s motivation to convey their passion to the group. The authentic passion had a magnetism that fitted all facilitation styles and the diverse personalities of the facilitators. The students understood that running a workshop was not about telling the group about their passion but involving them in an immersive experience that enabled the group to experience that feeling in their own way. That first type of motivation, the one that underpins your practice, is the one that sustains you as a facilitator. The second type of motivation for the facilitator is context dependent. This requires the fine lens of looking at the challenges posed by the situation at hand—the space, the amount of allotted time, the nature of the group, the requirements of the commissioning or funding organisation, the content, how to use what you know to best advantage, how to set the pitch, what the challenge might be and much more. Some people say that ‘the process will take care of all that sort of stuff’. ‘Trust the process’ is a workshop cliché. Clichés are clichés for a reason. They contain simple truths and become clichés through overuse. I think of the circle to introduce everybody to each other can work but it has become a workshop cliché. It’s lazy practice if you automatically employ a circle because that is how a workshop starts. Every workshop is different and needs approaching as such. I can remember instances when an opening circle was the best way to make a group feel uncomfortable and ill at ease but used because ‘that’s what you do. “The facilitator has manifold responsibilities that precede the moment before that group in that space can trust that process. It is the facilitator’s job to” set the tone, provide the initial environment and introduce the workshop. Moments are relative things, and they are all in relationship with each other, some containing, some contained by, others. The present moment, for example, contains, or enfolds, all past moments…Memory and time are almost synonymous as far as experience is concerned. Memory is the way we know that time has passed. (Bohm in Rawlence, 1985, p. 154)

The art of the facilitator, built through motivation and practice, is to be able to read and guide the unfolding moments of a workshop. The use of the arts is not art for art’s sake. It is art applied so that each person gains from the process—a learning media not a subject. When we make puppets together, we are not making puppets to become professional puppeteers. The puppets are conduits to luminous experiences and encounters. Luminosity being a metaphor for insight, novelty, meaning, esteem and exceeding expectations created collectively. This luminosity and amplification

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happen when becoming present in a space across time with each other becomes a unifying force. The first other(s) in this process is invariably the facilitator. If trust is created, then people feel safe to take risk and go beyond their comfort zones. The glue that cements that presence is being together across time. Time being each moment that enfolds each other to form the moment of that workshop—then and there.

4.9 Presence When we speak of presence, we mean a state of mind in which one is present with one’s senses. (Adriansen & Krohn, 2016, p. 23)

Tony, you work primarily with puppets as a story medium of Workshop. I work with, among others artistic approaches, Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) workshops. TO has within it work experiences that enable us to re discover our senses through feeling what we touch, see what we look at, and listen to what we hear. There are over two hundred of these three sense exercises in Boal’s book, Games for Actors and Non-Actors (1992). The continuing development of my own mindful presence in this work means developing new activities or experiences and enhancing those aspects that are already present in these activities. In order to do this, at some points I will be facilitator; at another point a participant. Every year, I experience a workshop as a participant in order to feel what happens to me as participant/facilitator. For example, a few years ago I participated in workshops led by Augusto Boal. I was there as a participant, but part of my mind was evaluating where I might take these exercises and the adaptations to them that I might make. This ‘reflective’ stance as participant enabled me to notice what was happening to me. We engaged in an exercise called Brown’s Blank Character. My partner was to become a ‘blank character’ and I was to choose an oppressor, someone in my experience who had power over me and become that person. She would create her ‘oppressed’ character in reacting to me, so I tried an experiment. I didn’t have a clear idea of who my ‘oppressor’ was, so I watched her reaction to the little I did know, and we fed off each other as we watched each other. A conversation was created in a flow from just using the eyes, then the whole face, then the entire body, then the body in space, then dialogue with gibberish, rhythm and sound, then dialogue with words and improvised sentences. At first my oppressor was vague. This enabled me to construct that oppressor from the gradual building up of gestural, then physical, then verbal dialogue. I saw the reaction to my oppressor in my blank character opposite me and the oppressor/oppressed emerged in dialogue with me. She was no longer a blank from the first instance she

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acted or re-acted to me. Engaged in a “dance of understanding” (Fell & Russell, 1994), we emerged in a dance of becoming characters. I was fully aware in Brown’s Blank Character, experiencing the moments of spontaneous (inter)action in the same moments with the facilitator and with my fellow participant. Through this process, set off by a facilitator’s suggestions, our evolving characters co-emerged. My learning for presence comes through such active participation. When that happens, I find myself interwoven with/in the situation, absorbed in, and encompassed by, embodied interplay. Being present means, ultimately, being open to the possibilities where being, knowing, and acting come forth in dramatic reflection all at once.

Warren, I like your sentence: “Being present means, ultimately, being open to the possibilities where being, knowing, and acting come forth in dramatic reflection all at once.” Your sentence is a good summation of what we are trying to create in a workshop—to paraphrase the Bard’s words, bodying forth in a local habitation. You mention in your above piece, moments of presence. Presence, Warren, makes me think of bringing the group present with each other, in the space, with the material and with me as the facilitator. This opening moment varies so much from workshop to workshop and is so important. In the puppet workshop yesterday, I didn’t have any device like the bamboo or ways of entering the space. I did though get into the space a full hour before the Masters students for the puppetry workshop. I rearranged the desks, set them out with materials—sticks, cardboard, masking tape, scissors, pencils and paperclips. I set up some velvets as a stage and got a flipchart ready. I also set up a table with hot glue guns and The Sacred Box of Eyes. There was another table with many colours of tissue paper cut into appropriate sizes and by the sink, glue brushes and plastic pots containing acrylic glue mixed with water. Finally, I rigged up my small Bluetooth speaker and put on some suitable music. As each student arrived, I could see their look of delighted surprise. This was not what they expected. I aim in a workshop to exceed expectation. Workshop is not a form about succeeding or failing. It’s a form of exceeding. This happens through embodied focus and mindful presence.

Tony, when you speak of mindful presence, this relates to the notions of safe enough spaces for presence to be possible for both facilitator and participants. Drama educator Mary Ann Hunter (2008) has probed into what the notion of safe space

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means. She suggests that ‘safe space’ is a euphemism for the messiness of people working and negotiating work together. She adds, “it is also about the way in which risk and tension were absolutely necessary for productive creativity to be realised and for the work to make meaning beyond the time and space of the workshop itself. In the process, not only ‘presentations of self’, but recognition and respect for the other, became paramount”. In this creative space there is risk, risk of getting it wrong. Hunter also explores the idea of ‘moments of presence’ necessary for the facilitator to “provide a welcoming space that is simultaneously safe and risky?” She asks: How to create the conditions for positive tension when latent and sometimes eruptive conflict is present? How to facilitate genuine collaboration that might lead to more sustainable coexistence? She uses the term ‘cultivation’ in the title of this article to draw attention to the “asyet unexplored temporal dimension in this safe space dynamic” (p. 17) in moments of presence. Lefebvre (1991) calls these moments ephemeral ones that “pass instantaneously into oblivion, but during their passage see all manner of possibilities often decisive and sometimes revolutionary [stand] to be both uncovered and achieved” (p. 429). The two students I quoted earlier both wrote about these ‘moments of presence’ in different ways.

Warren, this notion of presence is inseparable from being in space and time. Despite many years of reflection and research, I still find the quality of presence that inhabits me as a facilitator, and that I witness grip participants essentially mysterious. For example, it’s still baffling and bewildering how cardboard and sticks becoming puppet characters has such a transformative and compulsively engaging effect on person after person. Workshop time is as much about a moment as it is about the passage of time measured by a clock. A moment of presence. I remember a friend telling me about a workshop he ran in a school in Italy. The teacher said to him afterwards that it was great because the children are always having to strive to progress forwards, but his workshop was like “time sideways.” Time Sideways—presence which goes in and out of focus in the different moments of the workshop. Presence in the moment only begins to make sense in a specific space and time. Equally the moment only makes sense in terms of memory. It is through memory that we make sense of the moments of our life. We recall memories and create new ones. The quality of presence is at the heart of what the facilitator is trying to develop in a workshop, and what a workshop is about. That is, bringing people present in a moment to create a memory. What do these three intrinsically entwined, and essentially mysterious, concepts—presence, moment and memory—mean to me as facilitator? The simple answer is everything!

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Theatre director Peter Brook (1985) has this to say: The ‘present moment’ is astonishing. Like the fragments in a hologram, its transparency is deceptive. When the atom of time is split open, the whole of the universe is contained within its infinite smallness.” He goes on to address his audience: “Were it possible to release into the open, into the arena of this hall, all our hidden imageries and motions, it would resemble a nuclear explosion, and the chaotic whirlpool of impressions would be too powerful for any of us to absorb. So, we can see why an act of theatre in the present which releases hidden potential of thought, image, feeling, myth and trauma is so powerful. (p. 81)

Brook uses the word ‘theatre’, but it could be replaced by the word ‘Workshop’ and absolutely retain the same sense. Perhaps this is a pointer to a certain theatre that pertains to a workshop? Certainly, there is a sense of performance in the act of facilitation and of being with others as they create and watch you create. Presence and the Roles of Safety, Risk and Trust Safety, risk and trust (the necessary third of that trinity) are the keys to unlock the heart of a workshop and fundamental to the facilitator’s role. Finding ways to make a group feel safe so they will take risk involves creating an ambience imbued with a sense of trust. Enzo put it succinctly when I interviewed him. EC: The groups generate everything and really you are there as a guarantor, that’s how I feel, that groups need a sort of guarantee, they need money in the bank, they need to know that they’ve got capital, and if they feel they’ve got capital, then they can get on with their group creating business. TG: So, it’s about group creation really? EC: Yeh, and then all you do is provide that guarantee, you are the money in the bank. They know that as long as you are there, and you are sort of happy with what’s going on. Then the workshop must be going somewhere. (Gee, 2001, p. 38) And from another interviewee, Paul Goddard, Arts Council England coordinator: Risk is a workshop leader’s word. It’s not a participant’s word, but unless the leader is taking risks both in terms of pushing their work and taking risks in not being able to predict the outcome, it’s not a workshop. All it is a wall. Trust is a participant’s word. (Gee, 2001, p. 27)

So, what sort of presence is required by a facilitator to be that trust capital, that money in the bank? This is where I plunge into areas that I find philosophically mysterious and only resolve themselves when potential manifests in creative production in a specific time and place of an actual workshop. Such as when a First Nation youth goes to the creek at a Tipi Camp, comes back with some buffalo bones and shapes the bones into a puppet of a tourist from the Bronx who is coming to see what “the natives do”. The moment becomes present and is not mysterious whilst it occurs but when you step back and look at the chain of moments that unfold to become the tourist from the Bronx, it is simply bewildering. Peter Brook (1985) writes about such moments: A workshop (note: my replacement for ‘theatre’ in the original) is a flow, which has a rising a falling curve. To reach a moment of deep meaning, we need a chain of moments which start on a simple, natural level, lead us towards intensity, then carry us away again. Time,

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which is so often an enemy in life, can also become our ally if we see how a pale moment can lead to a glowing moment, and then turn into a moment of perfect transparency, before dropping again to a moment of everyday simplicity. (p. 83)

So, to return to my original question, what sort of presence can we embody as facilitators? And as imagination bodies forth… (Shakespeare, 1595/2016, line 1844)

Tony, to me presence requires being present with others, being aware of what others do and being present myself as facilitator in improvising by responding to what happens moment to moment during the workshop. Being present means being able to have an embodied memory of each activity and each workshop. How can this presence be cultivated? One way to begin this process is related to realizing what your expectations are even before you have begun the workshop. Of course, I have a story that explains this. In November 2011, I happened to receive an email from a group in Italy who were conducting a workshop on the Joker in Theatre of the Oppressed work. I had met one of the organizers in 1998 at an International Theatre of the Oppressed festival in Toronto, Canada and had found out that he put on training workshops regularly for European Jokers. (A Joker in Theatre of the Oppressed is responsible for the logistics and planning of workshops that often lead to a Forum theatre interactive performance.) I had always lived by a credo that to facilitate workshops one needed to also experience ‘being facilitated’, not only to learn new tools, activities, techniques, and approaches, but also to be, as we say in French, dans le peau (skin) d’un participant. Even thirty years into my praxis as a theatre workshop facilitator, I adhere to this idea. This keeps me on my toes as well as keeps my work vibrant and flexible. So, Tony and I had been talking about re-uniting again for this workshop and book project and so the Joker workshop in Parma, Italy seemed to be an opportune time to get together and continue our journey in the same place. I had never been to Italy and, aside from that one encounter with the organizer in Toronto thirteen years before, didn’t know any other TO practitioners in that country. So, I accepted the invitation. On my way to the Montreal airport, I took a taxi, and the driver happened to be an Eritrean who had lived in Italy as a political refugee (Eritrea was an Italian colony from the late 1800’s through to the early part of the Second World War). He spoke good Italian, and taught me a few words, and expressed opinions about Italian drivers, the various regions of the country and food. He talked to me about

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the different accents of Italian in the country, “Rome is pure Italian; Naples is not understandable; Sicily even worse; the North is something else entirely!” When you organize a workshop, much of the work happens in advance. But I am not talking about planning the agenda, whether in detail or as a big picture, which all facilitators have to do. I am speaking here about getting into the ‘peau’ (there is that word again), or body of the facilitator. This is not necessarily a rational, analytical practice, but more of embodied visualization. That journey to the airport was not just the prelude to being in Italy; I was already on the journey through the conversation with that taxi driver. After a long overnight journey through New Jersey, Germany and Milan, Italy I finally arrived in Parma. Luckily, I had planned to arrive a full two days before the beginning of the workshop, so I had time to get over jet lag and get to know Parma. I arrived at my little pension early in the afternoon of the Saturday and the workshop was not to begin until Sunday night. So, I wandered the streets, went to a couple of museums, and marvelled at the old architecture. I love prosciutto and Parmigiano cheese. Since Parma was the capital of these culinary delicacies, I asked my host at the pension where I could have a traditional, but low cost, meal. He directed me to a little restaurant called Zinga. This was a family run restaurant, and the clientele were mostly locals. I looked at the menu and saw a prosciutto appetizer, so I ordered it, expecting a few slices as I had seen in Italian restaurants in Canada. Luckily, I didn’t order much more, because I recall a full dinner plate of maybe twenty slices of prosciutto along with bread. Like my experience of this meal, expectations are also part of the initial part of a workshop. Participants come with expectations, and so do the facilitators. The organizer of this particular workshop had set up a plan and he had expected people to come with a similar level of experiences in Forum Theatre processes. This did not happen. I, as participant, expected to get into a deep exploration of the workshop facilitator as Joker as embodied by the organizer and his colleagues in the facilitation of our learning in the workshop. Sometimes these expectations were fulfilled, and, at other times, they were way off the mark. Tony, the first thing I think that happens when contracting to lead a workshop is thus to be aware of your expectations. Then the key is to be as ‘present’ as possible just before the ‘official’ beginning of the workshop. Easy to say! However, I learned a particular approach to meeting and greeting participants at a workshop I attended at the annual conference of the American Association for Theatre in Higher Education. The workshop was going to bring together the acting training techniques of Sanford Meissner with the movement work of contact improvisation. Both forms of embodied inquiry are challenging to our comfort level with our bodies as they ask us to engage in unusual ways of interacting. I was surprised to find that, whilst people gathered, the facilitator of the workshop talked individually with each participant with a heartfelt and attentive presence. She was getting to know each person, where they came from and, more importantly, getting a sense of each person in the informal time before the workshop began. A community was being formed through this person-to-person networking, not only by gathering everyone together but through the facilitator as a common connector.

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The workshop is an odd space—it is separate from the world, yet part of it. We come in with all our baggage, our shadows, our feelings. We use creative inquiry to reflect in a metaxic process (Boal, 1979; Linds, 2006), where the world of the workshop and the world outside the workshop is ever-present in all bodies. The workshop is also part of the world we are exploring, probing, questioning, and challenging. This facilitator I hadn’t known, and probably will never meet again, had our lives in her hands for this brief moment of a two-hour intensive workshop. My take-away from this memory was to find ways to be ‘present’ from the moment I approach the space we will be working in, and continue, this presence throughout the workshop all the way to leaving the space. How does this happen? In planning the workshop, I imagine the experiences we will engage in as a journey. Taking time out to engage in a breathing exercise for a few minutes and being mindful of all my senses. The first activity I often lead with a new group is what I call “mingling” where we explore the space together. I ask the participants to get up and walk around the room at different speeds and in directions that they choose. They get to know each other through greetings using only (in sequence on direction of the facilitator) the eyes, heads, upper body, full bodies. We encourage play through these different greetings. In addition, I use sociometric and grouping activities to emphasize the point that we are all different in different ways; sometimes we connect to someone on the basis of what we are wearing on our legs, without specifying what categories to use, or based on identity categories on a subsequent day. We are also getting to know the space we will be working in over the next period of days. I suggest everyone participate at the level they are comfortable with, but also to try new things. I also ‘mingle’ inside this activity, interacting with everyone, doing what I am suggesting others do, observing what others are doing and suggesting these to participants as models or examples. I note the energy in the room and, at the same time, try and deepen or extend the experience by making each guiding suggestion a little bit more difficult. At the end I ask participants to talk to one other person and share their experience, but not to use a language the other person would understand. This forces people to use gestures as well as tone of speech to convey their feeling about the experience. Tony, you suggested that we connect games such as the above to their intention and process and, therefore, call them ‘Games of Presence.’ As you note, “Games of Presence stem from games that performers use and are particularly useful in creating a ‘ready awareness’ amongst a troupe” (Gee, 2015, personal communication). These games enable participants to be present at the same time with each other, with the environment, the adult facilitators, the participants’ own bodies, and the material and content that the workshop will explore. By virtue of being centred in the body in motion in a collective space, such games are inherently risky play as they involve challenge, trust, vulnerability, touch, contact, physicality, strategy, while simultaneously inviting autonomy and collaboration with the group. So, for me, it is important that I, as facilitator, also play some of these games in order to be present throughout the workshop.

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I experience the notion of presence through my work with the substance and tool I am most comfortable with—the bodies of people as ‘intelligent clay’. Intelligent clay is a sculpted person who fills the shape she/he/they are in with feelings and thoughts that come from the interplay between the physical shape and the body/mind/spirit. Thoughts and words emerge from an awareness of the individual’s awareness of the static body in the imager and the world around that image. The goal of the tool or material is to tell a story through the body, rather than through words. Much like clay, the story is not static. In potter’s clay, a successful form results from an artist regarding the clay as “a living thing with needs and feelings of its own and to let the material direct them as much as they direct it” (Schön, 1964, p. 127). The difference from potter’s clay is that I am working with ‘thinking, feeling, acting’ clay (bodies) where each person’s dramatic telling of a story through changes in terms of emotions, feelings, thoughts or action, depending on when and how it is told and by whom. Presence for me means I am reacting to those non-verbal, kinaesthetic images that I see in front of me. It speaks to me; I feel something, and I respond by asking questions of those inside it or making suggestions for further exploration within that image. Quick and spontaneous transformations occur in these interactions as the invisible is made visible. We become engaged in a conversation, an encounter where we are “communicating with each other in a primary, intuitive manner by speech or gesture…becoming one – uno cum uno” (Moreno, 1960, p. 15). Many images are produced and erased and called up again at other moments. Participants begin to ‘remember’ these images, their bodies in interaction with each other, the stories and feelings recalled. In the same way, I remember these encounters, but that memory is not only in thought, but also an embodied memory of all the feelings I had at that moment. These memories call up a set of actions I have had in the past to these varied situations. This is a combination of structured method, with certain thematic or physical boundaries, and improvisation, where many things interact and change at once. Structure becomes co-dependent with the freedom to experiment, and to venture into new places, new landscapes. In this context, facilitation of, and in, Workshop can be seen as a constant improvisation in which each person becomes a spontaneous actor, writer, audience member, director, craftsperson and critic. This is in contrast to having a master plan, with preordained roles according to some script. Missed-takes, mis-cues and forgotten lines are part of the playing.

Warren, you have described well the key element of improvisation as part of embodied presence. This happens through all phases of Workshop—the before, the during and the after. My suggestion is that we now move into ‘during’, the visible part, the delivery of a workshop.

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To my mind delivering a workshop breaks down into three overlapping but distinct phases. The classical phases of telling a story: Beginning, Middle and End. Would you be interested in investigating our workshop practice in these terms. To be more explicit: . What we facilitate at the beginning of a workshop and what participants might experience . How participants might move towards more autonomous inquiry of the subject matter of that workshop and how we stand by them whilst that happens. . How we wind up together at the end to make the most of what we have created together. Maybe you see it differently?

That is a good idea, Tony. I would adjust the wording a little bit, though. I see Workshop as creating landscapes for storytelling, be it fictional, non-fictional or in the in-between or overlap of the two. To me, the beginning stages involve entry into the space (broadly defined), crossing the threshold between the world outside and the emerging world inside. This liminal space is part of the workshop. The middle is when we are immersed in the work, whatever it may be, where participants are learning the tools of creativity to tell their story and the ending is the time where we all look back at what we accomplished. This might be a performance inside the workshop, but it could also be looking back at the story we have created together. There is another threshold to cross at this stage where we are deciding what they are going to share with the world outside the workshop, which means crossing another portal back into whatever world we are exiting into.

Appendix Workshop Toolkit The toolkit is a simple formula that entails applying the following six basic questions: What? When? Where? How? Why? Who?

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Phase One Pre-Workshop Proposal This ranges from responding to a telephone enquiry to writing a whole document for scrutiny by a committee or organization Research Looking for clues that release ideas and materials. A lot of these can come from tangential sources. Devise Shaping the idea, finding the impetus and sequence to create a structure for the prospective participants. Plan The nuts and bolts of liaising with relevant contacts, looking at times, get-ins and use of space. Prepare Assembling and packing all that you need for others, whilst also being mindful of your own needs.

Phase Two Delivery On site—meeting the people who might be supporting you and setting the space. Give yourself time. Entrance This is about presenting: how you present the space, how people enter and what they see. Beginning Bringing those people present in the space, with you, the material and each other so they have a ready awareness. Their creations and construction in process, through action, towards Middle meeting collective and individual challenges. Exit As the common ground emerges, there comes the closure at the end of the workshop. Set Up

Phase Three Post Workshop Reflection

How you and the group can be assisted in digesting the work, to expand, deepenand develop it. Evaluation Telling the rest of the world about it by reports and documentation of all sorts. The key question here is ‘Who for?’ Recovery Looking at your needs and how it has affected you. You have led, facilitated, and participated. What is left in your memory? Document This is a tool that can be used for reflection, evaluation or recovery.

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It is worth considering what your needs might be after the workshop. Remember this at the outset whey you are devising and planning. Adapted from Tony Gee (and the thoughts of 1000 workshoppers) (2005).

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Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice Hall. Lederach, J. P. (2005). The moral imagination: The art and soul of building peace. Oxford University Press. Lefebvre, H. (1991). The production of space. Blackwell. Linds, W. (2001). A journey in metaxis: Been, being, becoming, imag(in)ing drama facilitation [Doctoral dissertation, University of British Columbia]. Linds, W. (2006). Metaxis: Dancing (in) the in-between. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion (pp. 114–124). Routledge. Mason, B. (1993). Towards positions of safe uncertainty. Human Systems: The Journal of Systemic Consultation and Management, 4, 189–200. Mitchell, R. G. (1983). Mountain experience. University of Chicago Press. Moreno, J. L., et al. (1960). The principle of encounter. In J. L. Moreno (Ed.), The sociometry reader (pp. 15–18). Free Press. Nicholson, H. (2006). Applied drama: The gift of theatre. Palgrave Macmillan. Polanyi, M. (1967). The tacit dimension. Anchor Books. Rawlence, C. (Ed.). (1985). About time. Based on the Channel 4 series. Jonathan Cape in association with Channel 4 Television Company. Schön, D. (1964). Invention and the evolution of ideas. Associated Books. Shakespeare, W. (1595/2016). A midsummer night’s dream. Simon & Schuster. Stacey, R., & Griffin, D. (2005). Introduction: Researching organizations from a complexity perspective. In R. Stacey & D. Griffin (Eds.), A complexity perspective on researching organizations: Taking experience seriously (pp. 1–12). Routledge. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. PAJ Publications. Varela, F. (1999). Ethical know-how: Action, wisdom, and cognition. Stanford University Press. Yeats, W. B. (1933). Among school children. In R. J. Finneran (Ed.), The Yeats reader: A portable compendium of poetry, drama, and prose (pp. 103–105). MacMillan Publishing Company.

Chapter 5

The Arc of Workshop Warren Linds and Tony Gee

Abstract Delivering a workshop breaks down into three overlapping but distinct phases: beginning, middle and end; or, introducing, forming, and presenting. As the narrative arc of the phases unfold, the group’s state of presence changes and the facilitator has to lead and follow accordingly. We investigate our practice through these terms. What we facilitate at the beginning of a workshop and what participants might experience; how participants might move towards more autonomous inquiry of the subject matter of that workshop and how we stand by them whilst that happens, and how we wind up together at the end to make the most of what we have created together. Beginning is when we as facilitators move from planning and devising into the moment where our design comes to life. We arrive in a specific location allocated a given amount of time to create with an often unknown, group of people and put our workshop plan into action. The group have hopefully become familiar enough through the introduction with the central elements of the workshop. When they have a handle on the core elements then the group starts to form and shape the material in a way that will become theirs. Three principles which we apply to the end of our workshops are realisation, revelation, and crystallisation. The end is where the group realises what has emerged in their work together. This enhances the potential for insights, which are, in turn, opportunities where the creative joy in a workshop has become crystallized in the memory of all who took part. Keywords Autonomous inquiry · Facilitation · Planning · Devising · Creative joy · Leadership

W. Linds (B) Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] T. Gee Creation Myth Puppets, Devon, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 W. Linds and T. Gee, Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2291-8_5

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5.1 Beginning—Interaction 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, 1999, p. 40) Through the material something unexpected, new, unique, will happen. (Gee, 2005, p. 20)

Warren, we’ve arrived at that moment when we as facilitators move from planning and devising into the moment where our design comes to life. We stand and deliver. We arrive in a specific location allocated a given amount of time to create with an often unknown, group of people, and put our workshop plan into action. Between us we have diverse examples to draw upon. My proposal is that we choose a small selection of how different workshops have begun and discuss the logic we have tried to apply in those initial moments with the group. Maybe a good place to begin is with what I call the ‘bread and butter’ workshops—in other words, the workshops we most commonly run. I suppose in your case they would be the sessions you run with undergrad and graduate students, and in mine they are the puppet spectaculars that we create with whole elementary schools. My reflection begins with two quotes. There is a reason for both. The Frayn quote resonated with me when I first read it in his novel about Dutch painter Pieter Breughel. It makes sense because my friends are impossible to slot into a category. I can tell the stories but can’t explain exactly how we became friends; a wide and motley crew that connected at different moments across our lives. In terms of a workshop, the Frayn quote points towards the microscopic and manifold ways we read each other plus, as the group enters the space, they read the spaces and situation in ways that defy even the most “detailed description.” Holding this in mind has stood me in good stead for that ‘prima vista’ moment when the individuals in a group come to certain conscious or unconscious conclusions about what they have let themselves in for. Given that the first meeting is impossible to encapsulate in words, in facilitating a workshop what is the main aim of my initial introduction? This leads to the second quote, which is from A Workshop Handbook (2005) and compiled from spontaneous reactions and reflections in individual logs kept across three Moveable Feast residential workshops by more than one hundred artists—a body of wide ranging, grounded, action research into the art of Workshop, its social function, and the role of the leader. Their anonymous logs were collected, returned afterwards, and collated to create a workshop handbook: a sort of Tao of Workshop. The above quote from that handbook captures the initial feeling I aim to instil in a group when a workshop begins—something new is about to be created. In this respect, the puppets have brought me good fortune.

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Tony, those quotes you shared connect to a thought I have had since I began facilitating workshops. Namely, that a workshop is a story, and that story begins as conversation between the facilitator, the participants, the space and the personal stories, the life histories the members of the group bring into the room. I once looked at the Latin roots of the word ‘conversation’, ‘con versare,’ i.e., to turn together. And when you begin a conversation, only the first word or line is planned. Everything that follows in that conversation is improvised in that the response to the first line or word continues the emergent conversation. So, the beginning of a workshop is like that.

I welcome your interruption, Warren. It reflects the turning together of starting a conversation analogy with the beginning of a workshop. Some workshops are more about a process and others more about a skill. In my opinion, at the far end of either end of that spectrum, the event ceases to be a workshop. At one end they are ‘a happening’ and at the other ‘a lesson’. As you pointed out in our last Skype exchange, beginnings can permeate so many different points in the workshop. When I run my big residencies in elementary schools the beginning of the conversation is more than a word or a sentence. It is a honed introduction that serves many functions. Here’s a picture of how the big school workshops begin. There are usually between one hundred and fifty and four hundred children involved who are aged anywhere between 4 and 11 years. We arrive with a team of four of us and set up two areas—sometimes these are in separate spaces and sometimes in the school hall. Given the amount of material we are going to make and the scale of the final event we need a big space to work in. I always negotiate this beforehand and, where possible, do a site visit. The best use of our workshops is to give them a space that is central to the school because this builds a feeling of integrating the work into the school community and involving the whole school. We set up a stage which is a sumptuous, crushed, velvet screen and we set up our materials and various tables. I set up a sound system and play appropriate music from the culture we are about to explore. No longer is the hall just the hall. It has been transformed into a place of expectation, laden with visual and aural clues that mirror the cultural tone of the story that the children are about to be told and recreate as their own.

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These events tend to last a week, depending on scale, but always begin on a Monday morning. The children arrive and can see something is going on that is out of the ordinary. The phrase “making the ordinary extraordinary” is one that has arisen many times when I have led workshops for artists that are inquiries into workshop practice. In their school, the children are finding just that happening. The day begins, and the children in the grade groups involved in the workshop, sometimes a whole school, shuffle into the hall. I stand at the front by the screen with a flipchart next to me. In front of me is ‘the magic carpet’, the omnipresent workshop prop that I talked about earlier. The rest of the team are usually busy setting up the making space. Four of us have spent a good hour setting spaces to be inviting, exciting, functional, and safe. When the children have all taken their places on and around the carpet, so they are facing the screen at the front, I welcome them. There is a hosting aspect to facilitating workshops and, even though this is normally their space, I welcome them all as if they were all guests to a party of creativity. The team introduce themselves, or I introduce them if they are getting materials ready at the back of the hall. Now the children have settled into this familiar space now made different and have seen that they have four friendly folk who are going to attend to their needs, but why is all this stuff and people in their hall? My next task is to set a challenge and enthuse the group, so they are motivated to meet the challenge together. The thing here that is vital for the facilitator in all workshops is to read the energy. When the Moveable Feast Workshop Co. was operating, we would run regular gatherings to look at our practice. We called the gatherings The Nine Diamonds. There is an explanation for that name, but I am going to leave that hanging for now. In one of these Nine Diamonds, we decided to look at the Workshop process in detail and create a video of our own terms. We invented our own Workshop dictionary of terms to describe the facilitation process from starting to finishing a workshop. (The full dictionary is in the Appendix to this section.) The term we invented for the moment when you first meet a group was Appropergy. Appropergy begins to arise when we become ready to meet the group. We know that there is an appropriate way of being and this only shows itself to us on the moment of meeting. It is the sensing of the energy emanating from the group in order to measure your performance. So, if the group’s energy is low. you might decide that you need to pitch with high energy or that they need to be led softly towards the aims and tasks of the workshop. It is that delicate balance between what you, as workshop artist, bring with what is brought into play by the participants. This is unknowable until you meet.

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Thanks Tony. Our conversation is becoming like the turning together that happens in a workshop! To me, it is similar to what one of my graduate school professors, David Jardine (1999), underlines as an event that incorporates all its relations, a vast, roiling, ambiguous, contradictory, generative network of multicolour interdependencies and unanticipated histories and contestations. It summons up worlds full of dependants, both off springs and ancestors. (p. 97)

Where to begin the beginning? I would say with getting a sense of what I call the ‘landscape’ of the workshop as a system. This includes who is there and also where they have come from. I recall two experiences in two very different places that I learned from. August,1999. Toronto, Ontario. Annual conference of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE). In a rather large hotel, I was attending a workshop that would bring together, in a small room, the acting training techniques of Sanford Meissner with the movement work of contact improvisation. Both of these forms are challenging in terms of our comfort level with our bodies interacting. I knew no one in the workshop and I sensed very few people knew each other. Nor did many people know both of these acting forms, one quite verbal and intense, and the other silent movement between, and amongst, people. I was surprised to find that, while people were gathering, the facilitator of this workshop was talking individually with each participant with what I saw as heartfelt and attentive presence. She was getting to know each person, where they came from and, more importantly, getting a sense of each person in the informal time before the workshop began. A community was being formed through this person-to-person networking, not only by gathering everyone together, but through the facilitator as a common connector. The workshop is an odd thing—it is separate from the world, yet part of it. In this case our common interest was these theatre techniques. There would be no work beyond the workshop but the workshop itself was an exploratory space. We came in with all our baggage, our shadows, our feelings. We use workshop and the creative arts within it, to reflect on the world outside but in a metaxic process, where the workshop is also part of the world we are exploring, probing, questioning, and challenging. In this workshop, the facilitator I hadn’t know, and would probably never meet again except in this writing, had our lives in her hands for this brief moment of a two-hour intensive workshop. A series of activities that required both the presence of us, the participants, and the facilitator/leader who would guide us and in who, we would we put our trust. May, 1991. Near Toronto, Ontario. I am attending a workshop about participatory research and development at a retreat house in the rural countryside. Gathered

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together are community development workers from Latin American and Canadian communities. For the opening session of this three-day workshop, we gather around a bonfire and are led by Reg and Rose Crowshoe, members of the Peigan Nation of southern Alberta and northern Montana. Reg began by noting it was their tradition to “circle a campsite before leaving, to make sure they don’t leave behind the shadow that is their spirit. Upon arriving at a new site, the Elders make contact with the earth to introduce themselves, and community members assemble and call out their names to help their shadows find their way home” (from the record of the workshop, 1991, p. 1). We call our shadows which we have left behind in our communities so we may be fully present in this retreat, this workshop, and not be worrying about problems and situations we may have left behind.

Warren, as the workshop starts, we try to begin a story, initiate a group narrative that will make sense across the arc of the workshop and be carried back into our lives outside that time and space. I need to just finish my tale of my elementary school workshops and then it’s back to you! A tangential tale. The Workshop Dictionary workshop worked very well for a group of practitioners as an inquiry device to look into the details of our practice and break it down into discernible moments in which our energy shifts in the process of facilitating. It went so well that, when I was asked to run a two-day workshop with a group of artists at the Royal College of Art, it seemed like a good idea to do it again. The idea of that workshop was to develop a workshop handbook for the artist facilitators who worked on the RCA’s outreach programme. The first day of that workshop was fantastic. It ended with an exhibition of artwork (which looked fantastic to my eye) that was an expression of the artists’ work as facilitators. It was playful, skilful and insightful. When I said that we could look at it in the morning again as a starting point for the group, there was a rebellion. This was not the quality of work that this cream of postgraduate artists wanted to be seen by any passing fellow students or tutors. It had to come down. I was confounded and disappointed and their work came down and was gone. Early on the next day we began work on creating a ‘Workshop Dictionary’. The rebellion though had not been quelled and the idea of inventing new terms was unpopular. Three points here. Firstly, there are many ‘beginnings’ during a workshop and they all require similar attention. Secondly, I had misread the group and the energy of beginning early on with further invention was inappropriate energy—inappropergy! Thirdly, difficult as it is for the facilitator, discomfort and a rough ride do not necessarily equate to a workshop making no sense. It is impossible to know what sense and meaning is being extracted by each member of the group.

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Back to the main narrative—the beginning of our big school workshops and ‘appropergy’. Over the years one develops an intuitive sense that allows one to sense how much enthusiasm and passion one has to exude and how much one needs to rein in the energy. The assembled group in the hall have met us. It’s superficial but it’s a start. Next is the matter at hand—an invitation into the substance of the workshop and the challenge it presents. In the case of our bread and butter, big show workshops this means that two hundred plus children are going to make two hundred plus puppets; devise, write and rehearse a show and perform it on day five to up to three times to as many as a thousand people. And it’s not going to be rubbish, it’s going to be magnificent. The challenge is not a pretence, it’s real. To meet it, they need to believe in what is being asked of them. The introduction works in three stages. The first is the story they are going to make theirs and bring to life. The stories we use come from all four corners of the globe. Typically, they are creation myths. For two reasons. Creation myths are big stories with lots of characters being created—enough to accommodate an enormous cast. And creation myths, or myths of emergence, are tales about how something is created so there is a resonance—often alluded to by children when they are making their individual puppet creatures for the show—between the process described in the story and the process that they are involved in. The mystery that all creation myths address: how nothing becomes something, the relationship between the finite and the infinite. Following the story there is the introduction of puppets and puppetry. This is vital because, apart from illustrating some basic but necessary puppetry skills, it relaxes the group (and this is equally true of adults), it hooks the group in, and it pulls them together. I bring on two characters. The first I work in full view of the audience. He is an Arabian Fisherman. He is simple in design but an effective character. Even though he is made from toilet paper, the audience have no problem recognising his display of a range of simple emotions. They are captivated and unanimously agree when I ask them: “Are you looking at me or the puppet?” In a very brief moment, the fisherman has shown a few things that a puppet can do, how it does it and how the performer is not exposed. Public exposure being something that frightens a lot of people. There is one more step to model: the entrance. The word for entrance is the same as the word for en-trance. A realisation that was first revealed to me in the final presentation of the first Moveable Feast workshop as three spontaneously created wise men joined me on stage to introduce the final event of the four-day workshop entitled: The Great Workshop Adventure. After three days of exploration and inquiry into the nature of workshop practice, the forty-two artists present had created a smorgasbord of workshops for public participation for all ages. The theatre was full. There was little time for practice, and we told the audience the story of a maze. The audience’s challenge was to participate in all the different workshops and find a way out of the maze for us all. There were three wise men who had hurriedly constructed characters, high paper hats and clutched a large book between them. When I asked what was in the book, they answered “everything.” I asked them if it had the word ‘entrance’. They spent a comically long time shuffling through the pages and then looked at me and said, ‘no’.

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“But I thought you said it had everything.” “It has the word en-trance.” And with that revelation, they exited the stage. That moment was part of an introduction to a large audience who were going to be participants in the Great Workshop Adventure. It was also a moment authored in our workshop inquiry into workshop practice. The introduction serves the purpose of en-trancing or at least has that potential and is best conceived with that en-trancing potential in mind. Entrances in the puppet theatre the children are going to create has a parallel potential that is fantastically affirming for the self-esteem of these performers when they raise the roof by holding up their troupe of puppet crabs or parrots or people or giraffes. I demonstrate to the assembled group in the school hall that when I go in and come out from behind the screen that it’s not very interesting but if a puppet comes up then it has a surprise element. They don’t know whether the puppet will be a witch or a giant turtle or a kookaburra. I go behind the screen and act out a short comic sketch. I enter behind the screen explaining how I will demonstrate a puppet theatre entrance until I am interrupted by the gruff and invisible tones of Wilberforce—a pompous medieval baron with a high sense of entitlement, no manners and an arm that refuses to obey him. He invariably has the audience in stitches. This shows that puppets can have a big effect through simple and accessible live cartooning and also pulls the whole assembly together into a single unit. The final part is the most important and what the rest of the introduction, from the greeting through the telling of the story and ending with the puppetry demonstration, is building towards. This is where the group begins to make the workshop theirs. A transference of ownership happens at this point. Up until this point, I have controlled proceedings and it has lasted about 15 min. Now I ask the group what they are going to have to do to make something magnificent that they can present to others in four days of creativity. The recall is always incredible. They remember all the details of the story and they name all the puppets they are going to be making (and in all our myths these are a minimum of 20 different models ranging from small rodents to immense sky gods), they name the processes that need engaging with and they identify the qualities they will need to bring to realise this serious challenge: listening, imagination, and teamwork. Everything is noted in large on the flip chart so that, over the days we have their check list, that can be ticked off as it is achieved. The group are now ready and primed to begin their workshops. Warren, that is my bread-and-butter workshop introduction. It has been honed over years. I recount it here because it is a clear evocation of the different phases that I attempt as a facilitator to bring into play at the outset of a workshop. The beginning is so important and so difficult to recover from if it is not given the right attention. I can immediately recall two instances where the very beginning had gone wrong. On the other hand, beginning is not something that simply happens at the outset of a workshop. It is an aspect that the facilitator needs to be mindful of all the way through as different parts and phases of the workshop unfold. Of course, this kicking off aspect of facilitation is context specific. My example was in an elementary school setting with a large group and with the aim of empowering the group to make a spectacular production. I shall write about some other examples, but the principles

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of en-trancing and transference of ownership are common to every workshop I run. What is the best way in?

Tony, I like the word play of entrance and en-trance. (As you know I love playing with words.) Before I even read your missive above, I was already thinking of Baz Kershaw’s point that “drama and theatre do not exist without entrances and exits, and of course, every entry is an exit into somewhere else” (Kershaw, 1998, p. 81). Like you, Tony, I am nervous when beginning any journey. Beginnings are so difficult. Stepping out. Taking a chance. Wondering where it will lead. This is doubly true in beginning a Workshop.

Warren, there is indeed a nervous energy about going into a new situation, meeting new people and being in a strange culture. My pre-new workshop sleep is often a broken one. I remember a poet speaking at one of the Moveable Feast events. He said, ‘the thing is that I don’t know what I’m going to do until I do it.’ This is the excitement, curiosity and fear around that not-knowing thing before people and place are met. I worry around imagining how it will go and whether I have planned the right ingredients. Sometimes the beginning needs immediate adjustment in the moment of meeting the group. This is that porosity concept in the workshop structure that Wendy Greenhill introduced us to.

Tony, I am partial to circles as a way in to the life of the Workshop. A life of individuals interconnecting and interdepending on each other. This comes from 10 year’s experience as part of an Applied Theatre and arts research team working with Indigenous youth in southern Saskatchewan exploring wellness. We worked primarily in high school gymnasiums with Indigenous youth in an area of Saskatchewan, Canada that

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encompassed the reserves governed under Treaty 4 signed in 1874 at Fort Qu’Appelle by representatives of the Crown and chiefs from eleven First Nations including the Cree, Saulteaux bands of the Ojibwa peoples and the Assiniboine. We were working in partnership with the First Nations run health authority youth program to explore what wellness and wellbeing meant to the youth living in various First Nations communities, the youth would file into the gymnasium coming from their classrooms where they sit in rows listening to the teacher. Our space was different. We all sat in a circle which became a transitional space between the school classroom and the open space of play. Following Indigenous protocols from this area, we began our programs with prayers and guidance from a community elder. Then we introduced ourselves and the project. In the circle, we asked participants to share something about themselves. To establish a sense of equity and to ease the youth into the day’s activities, we ask neutral, nonthreatening questions, for example, ‘What is your favourite music?’ Youth participation is often limited to a few words by those who respond. Yet, although the young people are reluctant to speak in discussions, they are enthusiastic about participating in theatre games where they can express themselves physically and move around the space. We emphasize that what is said in the circle remains in the circle. This acknowledges and values the cultural protocols present in Indigenous communities and links the youth to their heritage, spirituality and language, while bringing those links into the workshop space. We do this at the beginning and end of each day and sometimes when we debrief an activity or need to calm the group. As adults we model sharing in the circle because often, initially, youth are reluctant to share. We emphasize with the youth and ourselves that this ritual is not a prelude to, but an integral part of, our practice of working respectfully together, of being present in the particular space, and in developing healthy relationships. While the context might differ in a university classroom, we feel it is important to have some sort of ritual that sets the tone in an embodied way. We found that often people are quite reticent in the beginning, unsure as to what to share, what to say, what to open up to and from. This itself is an adventure, as well as the beginning of the adventure of this workshop. Where to begin? There is a quiet of anticipation in this space as I begin to speak as I hold a talking object in my cupped hands… I mentioned shadows earlier to refer to the worlds that participants (and I) leave behind when entering the workshop space. So, Tony, another way I approach beginnings is with a set of introductory prompts to begin our work together that links the world of Workshop to the world outside Workshop. This was drawn from the work of Albany Park Theatre Company in Chicago, and then shared in an online ‘playground’ exploring the adaptation of Theatre of the Oppressed approaches for online workshops by Mark Weinberg of The Centre for Applied Theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Like many activities, the family tree of any activity can be vast and large!). I do this often with a group of people who know each other but also have done it when a group comes together after a period of absence of working together with each other. In order to connect the shadows of the world participants come from to the

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present of the workshop and the context and desires of what the participants hope to experience, learn and sense from working together there are three prompts, always shared in the same sequence of people. I come from…. (done by everyone and then done again in the same sequence two more times…this allows participants to both choose what they want to reveal and how deep they want to go. I have found that by the third time, most participants go deeper). Sometimes I … I wish … Not only are participants getting to know each other, but we, as facilitators/leaders are getting to know both ourselves and what we want to share, as well as getting a notion of the emerging culture of the group; how much are they willing to share, what they are sharing, and their comfort they feel being part of the circle. These circle activities and sharing are not a prelude to the work; they are part of the work of workshop itself.

Warren, I agree. Every moment of a workshop is part of the work of that moment. At the same time, there is this first moment, and it sets a tone. Warren, you mentioned the circle, I have talked about the idea of the near ubiquitous workshop opening circle being a bit of a workshop cliché. In that first workshop at Fort Qu’Appelle my view was altered. A few years earlier with The Moveable Feast Workshop Company we ran a workshop with youth who had a very hard time growing up through the social care system. The workshops ended up with a disparate group creating a multi-media performance called The Island. It was as challenging a three-days as I can remember. There were fights, tantrums, sabotage and refusal but also some immense creative output honed by the youth from some hard knock, lived through experience. At the beginning of that workshop, one of our team asked the youth to stand in a circle. There were groans and protests. “Please, don’t make us do this,” one youth pleaded. The facilitator carried on regardless with their icebreaker intentions to do some simple games and name exercises. It did not last long. I could see it was not going to work but I was not the leading facilitator at the time. It had been done because ‘that’s what you do’. Before then I was aware that groups are often uncomfortable in these early workshop ice breaker moments and those exercises can have an opposite effect to their intention of warming a group up. I felt lucky in the more natural progression that happened in my puppet workshops. Where the group coalesce around a presentation and then by getting to know each other whilst they made their puppets together. There was nothing forced about it. So, for a long time there were no circles for me. Then we arrived at Fort Qu’Appelle.

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We had worked in Regina with the group of facilitators and created a workshop for the Indigenous youth at the Fort about ‘bullying’ which was our prescribed theme because of our funding. Our structure was for the youth to choose and move about through different workstations we had made and explore the theme. I can’t remember all the workstations, but I recall you doing image work, I ran puppetry and there was a visual art station. My job, as I understood it, was to start the workshop. We set up the space and the youth and some elders gathered, and everyone milled around chatting. One role the facilitator has to fulfil is timekeeper, and time was doing its thing, marching on, and this inveterate workshop artist was getting a little edgy. I remember asking you Warren, “Can I get this started?” And you answered, “You can’t start it, the elder has to do that.” It was as you described earlier in your description of circles in workshops with First Nations youth. There was nothing cliched about this circle. It was the first time that I saw the circle in its cultural setting. Peter Brook talks about the role of the storyteller to bring the story home. To make the tale specific to the audience. This circle absolutely did this and was a revelation for me as a facilitator. It no longer was in my mind one of those awful and compulsory ‘icebreakers’ which can make a group squirm. When the elder stopped talking, you took out a stone and told the story of where it came from and passed it around the group and invited them to say something or anything or nothing about themselves. After that moment I saw the use of circles in a different light. I have many workshop tales about the stone I have since brought to workshops. Such as the privileged students who paid no attention to its beauty; or the group who each looked at it deeply; or the homeless, ex-addict who found so much meaning in the stone wouldn’t let it go and when he released it back to me, the stone had changed colour—its contoured striations were gone. It was black. Over time on a shelf, it regained its former markings. I even wrote a song about that stone and those experiences. In an opening circle I sometimes ask the group for the story of their names. For example, my name is Tony Gee. But Tony was not the name I was given. My name is Anthony…etc. There are many ways I can tell how my original name has been adapted over time and by different people from different parts of my life. Similarly, Gee is an adapted name and was changed from a Polish name by my grandfather. I give the group a little bit of an example and then they pass the stone and tell their story. It is astounding the stories people have around their names. This simple request serves many purposes. It is an invitation to speak that is not too challenging and does not carry too much weight. It allows everyone to be a storyteller. It is often quite revelatory to the teller and the audience and story is an excellent mnemonic device. I don’t always use circles to start a workshop. I don’t believe they are always a democratic form. The most important thing as a facilitator is to read the group and provide an opening that is relevant and inspiring. Inspiring being not necessarily

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anything too grand but infusing and enthusing the group with a sense of who is accompanying them, and how and what they might be investigating and creating.

I remember that workshop, Tony! It was incredible. Often in those workshops where I have co-facilitated, the exploration of relationships between people moving in the space is in our first game after the circle, ‘mingling’. I ask the youth to get up and walk around the room at different speeds and directions that they choose to walk. They get to know each other through greetings using only (in sequence on direction of the facilitator) the eyes, heads, upper body, full bodies. I encourage play through these different greetings. In addition, we use sociometric and grouping activities to emphasize the point that we are all different in different ways; sometimes we connect to someone on the basis of what we are wearing on our legs (without specifying what categories to use) or based on identity categories on a subsequent day. We are also getting to know the space we will be working in over the next period of days. Everyone, including “adults”, is expected and encouraged to participate in all the activities, so that all present contribute to the diversity of people at the workshop. The elder or elders typically observe, moving in and out of the workshop spaces, available to all workshop participants at any time for conversation. The activities I use are traditionally seen as a prelude to theatrical exploration. However, in the context of an exploration into well-being, such kinaesthetic-based approaches are part of the development of well-being which emerges in theatrical work and can inform every level of the creative process. As I have worked collaboratively with participants over the years my perception of the role of activities such as this in arts-based research has changed. Michael Rohd, a Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, considers theatre games such as the ones we use as activities that “get a group of people playing together in a safe space, energize that space, and create a sense of comfort in the collective doing of specific and structured activities” (Rohd, 1998, p. 4). He adds that these activities have nothing to do with ‘issues.’ In fact, one could argue they aren’t even ‘theatre.’ They simply aim to get people out of their seats and interacting in a different way and to prepare them to participate as the work gets deeper, more focused, and more ‘theatrical.’ It’s all about creating moments where participation is impossible to resist, moving forward into the process you have set up, and having fun along the way. (p. 4)

This explanation of the purpose of games, addressed to potential workshop facilitators and directors, highlights the complex aspects of these games and exercises (as well as the issues that emerge from them). My initial approach was similar; the games were the way to get to the real work, that is, the stories and creative work of the participants. However, I have since seen that participants are drawn into the activities of workshop

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through the playfulness of games. In the dramatic space created by the games, they lose themselves in the fun and their bodies are able to let go and move beyond the tightness of day-to-day relationships. They sense what it is like to be a leader and to make decisions. “As they experience the joy of freedom to be, they are challenged to think creatively, to express themselves and create their own meanings.” (Goulet et al., 2011, p. 59) When I am working with emerging facilitators, they seem to have the impression that you have to ‘do’ an icebreaker to begin the workshop. It seems the only purpose is to warmup people for the ‘real’ beginning of working together. I counsel them that any beginning should not only welcome participants but also should involve an activity that embodies one of the themes or methods that the workshop will explore. For example, an activity that we often use early on in a workshop is Colombian Hypnosis (Boal, 1992). This game, played in pairs, creates an opportunity for participants to connect with one another one-on-one in a way different from their day-to-day interactions, and to practice power and trust (Johnston, 1998, p. 120). In pairs, the leader moves their hands in front of their partner’s face and the partner follows as they are led around the room in various positions dictated by the leader. By following another person, participants are required to adopt postures that may have been unusual to them, breaking from comfortable patterns, and using their bodies in new ways. This brought the focus to the body and emotions, and then opened participants to new ways of being. Then each follower becomes a leader, and the leader becomes a follower. The leader has to pay attention to the possibilities and limitations of their following partner. Since each person gets to try out being both leader and follower, they become aware of their responsibility as both leader and follower. I find that the ‘rules’ or ‘structure’ of the activity enables a safe environment to be created as both leader and follower negotiate risks in relation to each other. Then, after a period of time, we ask them to work together: both lead and both follow. Generally, participants are confused by this direction and stop, then each puts a hand in front of the other’s face. But when we state that you aren’t changing your role (i.e., the hand is still in front of the follower’s face and the face follows the hand) we would like you both to lead and follow, this seems to transform things. How does one now work in a relationship of respect? How is power a collaborative force? Debriefing this activity, I ask whether participants preferred being a leader or follower and why, and how notions of the power residing in the leader links to the idea of being responsible for someone else and their movement. Participants who prefer being a follower comment on being responsible for themselves instead of just ‘going along’ when a risky movement is required by the leader. A sense of resistance by either leader or follower is also commented on. There are a whole set of games that I use to engender a sense of community. These games are not just for the group, they are for me to become part of the community that will be working together as we begin exploring the chosen theme (or it may be a theme that emerges from our work together). One game is known as ‘Pass the movement’ (Rohd, 1998). Here participants are challenged to adapt to one another, learning to co-operate with others. In this game, the group stand in a circle with one member starting a movement with an associated sound. The others repeated the movement

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until another participant spontaneously adapted their pattern. Through this evolution of shape and sound, a transformative process began. Some ‘followers’ resisted the new leader’s pattern. Some students tried to change the movement right away. There is often a lot of nervous laughter as participants try to teach the movement to the other. “The key point here is that by just being in the circle, they are participants. Because they are making a choice one way or the other, they are involved” (Rohd, 1998, p. 11). The same could be said of me as facilitator. The drawbridge has been dropped. We enter the work together. A doorway opens into deepened exploration of themes already broached, or new stories unfolding.

Warren, as you rightly point out, the beginning of a workshop is not separate from the rest of the workshop. It is though the catalyst, the spark plugs that rev that workshop’s engine. Sometimes it’s a very soft touch needed and sometimes a certain force of energy and intention is required to bring people present. At this point, reading the group is vital. There is an actual moment when the group is brought together in the initial presentation of self, selves and with the material in the space. As you say we come out of our social worlds and into the liminal space of the workshop. Each of us begins entering that space at different moments. Part of the facilitator’s role is to recognise and address the diversity of starting points in a group. Thinking about beginnings Warren, I am recalling the first leg of our collaborative inquiry which began with our participation in a five-day workshop in Italy. We decided that as seasoned facilitators, participation was a good starting point. The workshop was about the role of The Joker in Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. (A Jokerin Theatre of the Oppressed is responsible for the logistics and plannng of workshops that often lead to a Forum Theatre interactive performance.) The group was an international cohort of diverse practitioners who were strangers to each other. We gathered in a large, wooden floored studio and the facilitator of the event welcomed us. He then asked, ‘would anybody here like to offer a starting exercise?’ A woman immediately came forward. She said she had taken part in a workshop the previous week and it began with a great introductory exercise—an icebreaker or game of inclusivity. The woman commanded the group to assemble at one end of the studio. We were then invited to come out, one at a time, and sing our name to the rest of the group. I did as I was asked but found it excruciating and worthless as I was so wound up at having to sing my name to a group of strangers that I hardly listened to anybody else’s rendition. It did serve one purpose though. It hammered home that to pass the introduction over like this is an abrogation of facilitator responsibility.

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There are times when one has to lead from the front. However brief, the beginning is one of those moments.

Tony, your example of what I would call ‘laissez faire’ facilitation at the beginning energizer of the workshop is one example of something to be careful of in beginning a workshop. I also recall another instance of this in the same workshop. The facilitator said that he wanted to form groups to create short little Forum plays that would then serve as the laboratory material to explore the role of the Joker in facilitating the performances. I suggested to the group that we needed to be intentional about how groups were formed; that perhaps we could form groups based on themes or a particular area of interest because that is what I do in workshops, Forum Theatre development or otherwise as this is the best way of serving the varying interests of participants and deepening small group conversations. Because this facilitator had a more laissez faire way of facilitation, he didn’t seem to have a plan to how to form groups. So, he just said, ‘I welcome ‘suggestions’. A participant stepped in and said, ‘Anyone who wants to work with me, join me’, and others form groups. And the moment had passed as there was no more opportunities to discuss the formation of groups, which I thought was one of the roles of the facilitator in workshop work.

Yes, Warren. I have also been a party to some sticky beginnings. One such moment was quite literally, ‘sticky’. After a zany and theatrical introduction in which we passed each other an extravagant furry, purple top hat; we then moved into another space and did the bamboo exercise at the beginning of The Imagination of Laboratory that we ran together. To explain, a few years ago I was fortunate to be invited to a skill swap group for participatory artists. I learnt an exercise in which a group splits in half and holds out their index fingers so that a long bamboo can be rested between the two lines they have formed. The bamboo is 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

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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 was that there would be an initial struggle with task, laughter, a little frustration and then the group would sort themselves out and find an agreed method. In the workshops we ran as part of our Workshop Inquiry Project (Mindfield) 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 Laboratory of Imagination in Montreal with facilitators and life coaches. In that final workshop, 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 we had tricked them and weighted the bamboo in some special way. In short, the group dynamic was quite wild and there were a few who felt that this exercise was trickery on our part and the idea was even voiced that we were trying to make people seem foolish. Apart from the usual hilarity and disbelief that the 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. In the workshop with the youth who made ‘The Island’, I witnessed them do this task very efficiently. When I say difficult, these were young people in care, who 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 group member 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 had never seen the task done so well until working with the indigenous 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 the bamboo. The level of spontaneous and embodied collaboration and understanding was extraordinary. At Concordia in Montreal, with a group of participants who were coaches and facilitators, one or two absented themselves from the exercise and walked around the outskirts looking thoughtful and trying to fathom what was happening. And when it ended, there was a general clamour for explanation. I told them what I knew and have learned, from witnessing the bamboo in action. I said that blame is inhibiting.

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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 youth at The Fort 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 a couple of the facilitators as an 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. Our idea in both 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 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, our collaborative 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 there was a deep connection to the people we encountered. Over twenty-five days, we worked with eight different groups in five different communities and with over two hundred 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. In Workshop, the proof of the pudding is in the eating and in Workshop if we do not eat together, and 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. In the case of our Laboratory of Imagination at Concordia, we failed in our introductions to read the group and apply the appropriate energy. We assumed that there might be a clue in the name of our workshop but perhaps our purple hat routine was too leftfield and maybe left a few in the room feeling that we were not taking them seriously. Perhaps we had gone too far away from the expectation in a university setting of the gravity that should be given to a subject at the outset? We had set ourselves up as playful, even tricksters of sorts before the group were ready for it. Certainly, it was a workshop in which individuals within the group did not feel they were being taken seriously. Knowing me, and knowing you, this simply is not how we take people at all, but, as facilitators, we did not give that group on that occasion the necessary ‘capital in the bank’ and provide the right space for them all to take ‘safe risk’. We make mistakes. We are human and we err but hopefully, with good intentions! As Malcom Stern in one of my Workshop interviews said that Workshop feels like a place where we explore sanity within a transient community… This [workshop] should be how we operate in the normal course of events, but because we don’t, we set it

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up artificially as a workshop, so that we can actually create what’s possible for people to sanely communicate in a way that includes conflict, openness, trust and awareness. (Gee, 2001, p. 6)

Yes Tony, that last workshop, The Laboratory of Imagination, on that Canadian leg of our Mindfield project did go askew for some of the participants from the beginning. We could call it our ‘purple hat moment’! And as you say, sometimes we get it wrong. That experience reminded me of something I had learned many years earlier. It was the need for ‘scaffolding’ the workshop process, so that we lead the participants slowly into the imaginative and creative processes. So, a part of the beginnings of workshop is teaching a tool that will be integral to enable participants to tell their story and inquire into it. This involves learning a non-verbal language that then leads to Image theatre, where bodies in relation tell the stories of the participants in multiple ways. Image theatre is based on the idea that “a picture is worth a thousand words” (Jackson in Boal, 1992, p. xx). (I use the capitalized Image when referring to the particular theatricalized use of bodies in frozen motion. When uncapitalized it refers to the actual ‘still’ photos of bodies to express a story or relationship). It enables participants to create collectively static group ‘pictures’ that represent a moment in their lives. This enables relationships of power to be discussed through an interactive process between facilitators and participants. Each image can represent the past story or the present situation, or the hopes and fears for the future. Images can be played with so that we see the larger community of influence, or the smaller details of a relationship. They can also be a preparation for a full-length story so that a ‘storyboard’ of images can be the sequence of a story. To further explain, image is an embodied language that emerges through using our bodies to tell a story or a relationship. A person tells a story and others silently make pictures using their bodies to tell the story. They then freeze in a position to stop the story at one particular moment. Once the image emerges it can be manipulated in multiple ways. We can play with it as if we had a remote control—fast forward or rewind to events in the past. All these techniques allow for a manipulation of time and space and story. Image is my primary tool of enabling the stories of participants to emerge on whatever theme we want to explore (or that we have been asked to explore by the person or structure who has invited me in). It is as if I have this clay in front of me that participants can play with. The work is a form of both wrighting and writing, which I call wri(gh)ting. Wrighting is more often thought of as creating something,

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like play wright or ship wright or mill wright. But if we think of it as being the act of crafting any form of language, then I the facilitator/inquirer must depend on my senses to wright worlds of imagination, enabling stories and analysis to emerge through, and in, a form. This form in turn provides us with the opportunity to read it. Augusto Boal (1995) writes that, through image, “knowledge acquired aesthetically is already, in itself, the beginning of transformation” (p. 109), so the facilitator as wrighter is working alongside the participants to strengthen the potential of change. As Brunner (1996) notes, though bodies act, react – and though bodily inscriptions are always reporting some mode of being, thinking, acting on the world – the special moment of ‘mime’ calls attention to this literacy and iterates loudly the sometimes unconscious thoughts and feelings that are verbally incommunicable. (p. 13)

So, you may ask, Tony, what does this have to do with beginnings of the workshop. Well, to me, introducing a new language of interacting and exploring requires an introduction to that language. And of course, this happens through embodied exploration itself. Yet the process is not just an introduction; it is also the beginnings of probing into any theme that has brought people together. I begin to teach the tool or craft by going into the middle of our circle of participants, arms outstretched, hands up. As I move around showing this, I ask participants to shout out what they think ‘my’ story is. ‘You are pleading for something’; ‘You are offering something to someone’; ‘You are a priest blessing his flock’. Many stories emerge from what they see. I point out they all see multiple stories in the same image. I then turn around and state, just before I show the same image, ‘one more log for the log cabin’. When I ask them what they see they tell me the same as before. I then comment that the first image and response is central to what our image work will be together, so that we always show without movement nor words an aspect of our story. I build on this by asking two participants to come to the centre of the circle and to shake hands. I note that this is the frozen image. It tells a story. But if one person moves out and the other person keeps their same position, participants can come in and tell a new story by placing themselves in relationship to the person there with the outstretched hand. Someone may, for example kneel in front of the person with the outstretched hand and I ask the circle what do they see? Then the person with the outstretched hand leaves and someone places themselves with pointed figure to the one who is kneeling. This goes on for several minutes. There is constant movement back and forth between the circle and the centre as participants move and out of the frozen image. Depending on how effective the group is in terms of energy and moving in and out of the image, I may then ask participants to form pairs and replicate the activity again in their pairs and then ask several pairs to share their mini-stories that emerge. On the other hand, if I sense a readiness, I might throw in a side coaching direction when we are all together to ask the next pair to be about a specific theme which we have been brought together to explore. With students, I may say ‘when the next addition comes in, make the image about ‘life in school’ and immediately we have

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begun exploring non-verbally simple images of the theme or prompt. At some point I may also in the initial stage or after a theme is introduced ask a third and fourth and fifth person to enter into the image story and now, we have a more complicated story with many characters, frozen actions and relationships of power. Again, I will ask the viewing participants to share what they see and the relationships therein. I have always found that this activity gives participants an idea of a new nonverbal language, and that suddenly the stories start emerging accompanied by a serious intention to the playfulness.

Yes Warren, I remember Raymond Williams (1976) in his book Keywords, which looks at how the meaning of words have changed as socio-economic conditions shift across time, showed that the sort of divide we now assume between work and play is a relatively recent development. The play of the material and around the theme of a workshop, the playing by the participants and the play, as in elasticity, of the inquiry that is the work of a workshop. It is this elasticity of the form that makes what happens uncertain. The skill of the facilitator is to guide that elasticity as it happens by having a plan, adapting or abandoning that plan and acting in the moment with the aim of the group getting the maximum from their experience, encounters and the story they create across the event.

Thanks Tony, and a second way I explore Image in the beginnings of the workshop is what I call ‘sculpture garden’. Here I ask individuals in pairs in turn to ‘sculpt’ their partners into any frozen image they wish. But there are only three ways to do so, which I call the ‘three Ms’: . Moulding, here the sculptor, after asking permission (and verifying whether there are some physical constraints they should be aware of) to touch the ‘intelligent clay’ (the sculpture who is ‘intelligent clay’), moulds parts of the body into whatever thing they want them to be. . Modelling, whereby the sculptor shows their sculpture a particular detailed position to be in. . Marionetting, whereby using imaginary strings, the sculptor might show what the eyes are focusing on, or raising or lowering arm, hand, leg or foot.

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Again, I am teaching the ‘tool/language’ here so I recognize the first sculptures may be not as good as the sculptor wants them to be. So, I ask the sculptors to ‘smoosh’ the clay into a ball to enable the sculptures to relax and shake off the tension in their body. Then I ask the same sculptor and sculpture to repeat the exercise. Once that is complete, I ask the sculptors to step away to the other side of the room and view the now dispersed sculpture garden, to look at how we may put the sculptures together in relation to one another to tell a story, any story. In a group of fifteen sculptures we might have 3 stories. Sculptures are constantly moved around until the group is satisfied with the stories told. And the group of sculptors are then asked to interpret, or describe, or give titles to the stories with my guiding questions. Here I am an observer like anyone else, noticing things and pointing out particular details or asking the other observers to notice things and my questions are based on what I have been observing. Even though these sculptures in relation are random, often the stories and interpretations that emerge from the observers are related to the theme we are exploring or a new theme that is just emerging that emerges from below the surface. Using imagery to express something that cannot be presented in other ways allows us to explore many coexisting and conflicting opposites. It is the visual contradictions in the image (for example, a sculpture smiling while doing something an observer wouldn’t think would result in a smile), that provide complex prompts that open up questions for further exploration. Chris Johnston (1998) in House of Games notes that once the visual language of image is learned, the relationships between the individual and the collective become fruitful spaces to challenge a group in the exploration of a theme. Ronnie Lipson Lawrence and Craig Mealman (1999) state that the storytelling space is “fertile soil where the collective knowledge takes root” (n.p.). So, I as facilitator am both a teacher of this particular visual language of storytelling but, also, via this teaching, use the visual language to shift the group into another level of exploration. It is also interesting to me that I am a participant in this flow of storytelling through my own embodied reactions. I am constantly aware during this period of what is to come in the workshop and how these beginnings form the foundation of our work together. The potter Ellen Schön (1998) wrote to me on an action research forum, that, when working with real clay, “I try to push myself to be open to the reflective process in order to be more responsive to what the material/situation is telling me so that I don’t impose my tools and ideas on the material in a mis-matched way” (n.p.). This is perhaps one of the challenges of facilitating at this stage. The poet Anne Michaels (1995) writes that “the senses bypass language: the ambush of a scent or weather. But language also jump starts the senses; sound or image sends us spiralling into memory or association” (p. 178). Though I am focused on working in the present and presence of these stories and storying bodies in front of me in image, I work from my body, I work in my body, I work through my body. I am constantly aware of the role of my senses, listening, hearing, playing with the images in front of me as tactile forms.

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For example, when I conducted workshops to investigate racism, the image form was used to tell, and give representation to, the stories of the participants. One technique, Pilot/Co-Pilot involves one participant telling a story to another. Then each of these two participants create an image of a critical moment in the story by the storyteller first placing themselves in an image showing their relationship to others. Similarly, the story listener places themselves in the other image as they saw it from the story they were told. The original storyteller then chooses which image best expressed the story and we work from there. (I would say 70% of the time the listener’s image is selected as they seem to have crystallized the moment in the image while the storyteller was hampered by the complexities of the situation.) I use two types of imaging processes, one that starts with a theme which is then visualized; and the other starts at the image and arrives at a verbal title based on what observers see. These both enable a circle of imaginative creativity and verbal expression, so that those comfortable in the world of words can dialogue with those in the world of visuals. What I have seen is epiphanies from the participants where suddenly something becomes clarified; there has been some undefinable and unexplainable link to the unconscious, emerging from memories that were lost. Meaning is found through engagement. The image process transforms the participants’ feelings and experiences into a specific language that they then can hold up for critical examination by manipulating them. In other words, it is a tactile embodied process rather than a verbal discursive process. Participants can then step back from these memories to explore the experiences, their ramifications (on others in the image, and/or on the world of experience outside the workshop), and possible transformations. Not only does image make thought visible, it also enables imagination and imaginary worlds to emerge. This leads us to become mindful of things on the hither side of words, those mysteries evoked through image that move us. Another visual tool I often use is the Six Part Story Method. It is, again, a visual tool which enables the creative telling of story. It involves using a deck of fifty-two artist cards to tell a story by using a specified structure. In order to use this method, I must introduce the tool by giving participants time and space to practice it. This is necessary because though most people know how to tell a story, this specific method has a process and structure where randomly drawn cards create visual prompts for a story. One caution, though. Almost every time I do visual work using Image, the first response by participants to an image is: what is the person in the Image trying to say? and then the inevitable ‘guessing’ begins. This happens even when I begin with the ‘Complete the Image’ handshake. I emphasize that there is no right or wrong answer. I add that the Image I show at the beginning allows everyone to ‘read into it’ their own story. Despite these assurances, I feel the inertia and habit of ‘playing charades,’ of ‘guessing’ what someone is trying to say remains so ingrained that participants cannot trust to let the image be, to come into its own meaning. A particular instance of this was when I was working with Social Work students where, accessing their ‘helping’ side, they consistently wanted to know what the ‘true story’ of an image was. But this in itself was helpful to me as I had a glimpse through that interaction

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into the world of Social Work that would enable me to craft further work with them from this beginning. To conclude, Tony, the boundary between beginnings and middles of workshop are ambiguous and constantly shifting. I would say that, when speaking of image, it is when I find participants have become comfortable with whatever tool I am using throughout and start to go below the surface of their stories by exploring them more in depth. Each step we take through activities and image work plays in the tension between form, craft and content. There is no one sudden moment where suddenly crafting for ‘product becomes paramount. But each step I take within workshop brings me closer to direction and further away from formless play. Learning the visual language of image (and its association with the oral language) is one such step. Stepping into image work doesn’t leave the other senses behind. It deepens it.

Your conclusion, Warren, takes me back to the course I ran for the first fifteen artists when we founded the Moveable Feast Workshop Company. It also makes it clear that, although whilst every workshop has a beginning, there is no one way to begin a workshop. As another interviewee said, ‘Workshop is context, context, context.’ It can begin with a circle, a story, image work, games, movement, a stone or a short lecture. It can be quite an intricate affair with nuance and clues as to what lies ahead, which as you point out, can run as a thread throughout the workshop. Workshop has such wide applications that its diversity is unsurprising. When I first ran Moveable Feast as an event for workshop artists, I worked with a team of two other lead artists. We spent many days planning the overall shape of the workshop and then how we would introduce all the elements. We had the run of a range of the studios that constituted a whole theatre department and a good grant from Arts Council England. It took us a whole long day to set up each space. The beginning went on for most of the first day. It was all neatly planned and then inexplicably, the day before the book I needed for an introductory story just disappeared. I say inexplicable because this book was and is such a constant companion that it was like the kitchen sink suddenly not being there. When I finally gave up, my hand fell on a book (Clarke, 2001) about telling the Arthurian myth of Parzival. I flicked through the book and fell upon an essay at the back. In this essay there was an agenda for the twenty-first century (Fig. 5.1). I no longer had my trusty old book, but this agenda suggested a direction. I made a transparency and projected it onto a wall during that first day of beginnings as a stimulus but without any conscious forethought. We had planned to split the group of thirty-nine artists into four groups. Somehow, and to this day I am not sure how, the groups decided to split so that each group took an agenda as a theme. The loss of

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the need to renegotiate the balance of power between the masculine and feminine principles (and not only in outward relations between the sexes, but inwardly, as aspects of our individual being, whatever our gender) the need to renegotiate the relationship between civilisation and the natural order (in particular, the need to recognise that renewal often comes out of the wilderness, and sometimes in ways we do not consciously desire) the need to renegotiate the balance between the ambitious claims of the ego and the larger, more exacting claims of the soul the need to renegotiate relations between conscious awareness and the neglected resources buried in the dreamworld of our unconscious shadow-side. (pp. 208-209)

Fig. 5.1 An agenda for renegotiation

a book, the accidental discovery of an essay, the projection of the agenda had ended up setting a subtext to all that was created in those studios. Beginning, like the whole arc of a workshop, can emerge from accident and anomaly. Five years later, Moveable Feast had transformed from events into a company. There were fifteen artists in the first intake. As we have said repeatedly, a workshop is a story and, as a storyteller, I like to start with a story. One person I interviewed was a poet and artist called John Moat. He became a friend, and we met every so often to have a chat and talk about Workshop. The last time I got to chat with him he said that the closest he could get to defining a workshop was that “a sort of collective dreamng goes on there.” The aim of the workshop about Workshop was to establish a common methodology which a diverse group of artists might adopt. The premise being that Workshop is a form of applied, creative practice that crosses conventional art disciplines and media. And that this cross-art form practice was strengthened by collaborative workshop practice by a group with specialisms in different areas. Story is at the very heart of this practice and serves as the connective tissue between our diversity. As one workshop artist said, “questions are my rocket fuel.” I prepared folders for each participant with a design and names on the front, introductory questions, a tale about the events that led to the formation of the company and some articles. The workshop was entitled ‘Making the Invisible Visible.” I spent weeks imagining how it would begin. I had two large theatre studios to work in. I set up one with pillows and bought some coloured, led tea lights. I blacked out one of the studios. There was just enough light to see a small area but not enough to see beyond one’s personal space. The night before the workshop began, I had a dream about a festival and telling someone the story of the Rainbow Serpent, an Australian aboriginal creation

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myth, whose message to humans was (in the words of a 10-year-old narrator in one of our workshop residencies), “Dream and respect. Your dreams are what made you so follow them and listen to them. Your dreams made the world, so respect the world because the world is made out of your dreams.” I had the ingredients for a starting point. A dream, a story and cushions on the floor of a darkened room with a small amount of light. There was still an element missing. On the opening day, I arrived early and made certain everything was in place. I felt a nervous anticipation. I rang home: something I do to touch base and often before embarking on a workshop. My wife said she’d just been reading about the floods in New Orleans. Her words were, “Now the invisible will be visible.” The missing piece—social reality. As you say Warren, workshop is a bubble but the people who enter that bubble come from and bring with them their social realities. As my train of thoughts (not called a ‘train’ for nothing) progressed along its own tracks, I needed reminding. The Making the Invisible Visible workshop began with quality beverages (important, as are all the breaks) in the foyer as the artists arrived. Then, one by one, I lead each artist into the darkened space, ambient with quiet and soothing music. They were set down gently with cushions and coloured lights, until they were all in the room. I told them tales of my dream, the Rainbow Serpent, and New Orleans as I introduced our course. When the lights were slowly raised up, they found that they had been lying with their heads connected in the centre of the room. None of them knew. As they stretched, I guided them to slowly move in the space and took them into an exercise that I got from Joanna Macy and Molly Brown’s (2009) Coming Back to Life. Practices to reconnect our lives, the world. The exercise illustrates how an open system operates. The group is moving about and finding a space in the room. If they see an empty space, then they move into it. They are told to freeze and to silently choose two people in the room. Then the group is to move and keep those two people at equidistance from themselves. Each individual, having secretly chosen two others, moves and shift. As soon as anyone moves, they move the whole group in unpredictable ways. Our relationships affect each other in uncontrollable ways. Everyone in the room keeps moving in their attempt to find equilibrium. Equilibrium is only a brief moment in the ever-shifting dynamic of relationships. After this exercise and a short break, the group were invited to invent their own introductory games using darkness and small torches. The whole morning was the beginning. Like you said, Warren, there were then many beginnings across the week as we collectively authored a new company into being. If this sounds a little ‘off the wall’—it was, but we are artists and we play. It certainly would not be how I’d begin any old group. I think our business as artists is to be professional children. As the painter Henri Matisse (1954) wrote in his final essay, which was entitled, Looking at Life through The Eyes of a Child: The effort needed to see things without distortion takes something very like courage: and this courage is essential to the artist, who has to look at everything as though he saw it for the first time: he has to look at life as he did when he was a child and, if he loses that faculty, he cannot express himself in an original, that is, a personal way. (p. 3)

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To conclude, the beginning matters. It’s the moment when the facilitator has most influence. It can be a moment that is almost indiscernible from days of facilitation moments as a group do their own creating. It is a moment that is integral to all the other moments of the workshop—‘one moment leads to the next to the next to the next’… The crucial thing is to figure out what might work for that group then and there with an aim in mind. And then, upon meeting that group then and there, to deliver or adapt or abandon the plan accordingly. Warren, shall we move into what might emerge as the group takes over and makes for themselves. To finish my contribution about beginning a workshop, here’s a little more from the poet John Moat from my first ever chat with him: When you see a group’s work, you suddenly realize that actually the imagination is this limitless store of endless unlimited invention, mysterious, indefinable which is the common source of all imaginative product. And we, as individuals, have intercourse with that in a funny way. Out of that experience we have the gnosis of making something, so there is always this element of this shared store. (Gee, 2001, p. 116)

This quote is one that reappears in different chapters across our dialogue. I want to say something about our rationale for those echoes. In 2006, Moveable Feast ran a workshop for fifty fellow artists at Exeter University. We devised a Workshop Zodiac (Fig. 5.2) with each artist taking responsibility for a sign. We were positioned around the walls of a large drama studio. Each sign had qualities that we had thought about beforehand. The participating artists revolved around our ‘zodiac’ and contributed their thoughts and creations. These creations combined to create a magnificent multicoloured web, which was raised on a central pole to create a canopy above us. I want to talk about sign number 4—Echo, which was an exploration of how echoes work in a workshop process. In our book we have attempted to both describe and reflect Workshop, so themes and experiences reoccur and repeat. As in life, themes occur and reoccur, a foundation that is built upon across a workshop, as a group creates and explores the content of the workshop through whatever media are employed. This has happened in our dialogue because it mirrors the structure of an experiential workshop as the unique story of that group then and there unfolds. This dialogue is our unique story and we have followed a dialogical route. This process is analogous to storytelling. Resonant images are revisited and developed towards a resolution—‘echo’ is a natural part of experience as one encounter brings to mind a previous encounter and forms the basis for the next one. The power of Workshop is its openness as a form to the contributions and creations of all who are present. And as we spend time with each other we can mirror, amplify and create a positive echo chamber for those moments we are together. Hopefully, as our dialogue has progressed, our ‘talkshop’ has echoed Workshop. Venturing further into the shared store that John talked about in his repeated quote:

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11

12

1 2

10

3

9

4 8 7

6

5

1. Planning

2. Resources

3. The Arc

4. Echo

5. Golden Fish

6. Bounce

7. Transformation

8. Leader

9. New Language

10. Physicality

11. Anomaly

12. The Unknown

Fig. 5.2 The Workshop Zodiac

5.2 The Middle—Infectious Energy If speaking for someone else seems to be a mysterious process that may be because speaking to someone does not seem mysterious enough. (Cavell, 2002, pp. 67–68)

Good morning, Warren from a frosty cabin in a Devon garden. We are at the heart of the workshop. That moment when the group embark on their own journey. I think this is the most difficult part of our writing. As we have both stated numerous times, it’s always different and runs deeper than the linearity of the written word. All these individual journeys are in a time and space that make sense in terms of their own social and conceptual framework, which potentially coalesces into a single narrative that becomes the whole group’s journey. Warren, apart from beginning, middle and end, another way to characterise the narrative arc of a workshop is introducing, forming, and presenting. As the narrative

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unfolds, the group’s state of presence changes and the facilitator has to lead and follow accordingly. I have talked about how I see the introduction and this section is about that middle section, forming. The group have hopefully become familiar enough through the introduction with the central elements of the workshop. When they have a handle on the core elements then the group starts to form and shape the material in a way that will become theirs. The concept of introducing, forming, and presenting solidified when the Moveable Feast Workshop Co. was running workshops for youth under the banner of a nationally funded scheme to widen participation in Higher Education called Aim Higher. Sadly, this was doomed to be one of the first raft of initiatives cut under a new Conservative government in 2010. We worked with youth under the disability strand of Aim Higher. Four artists from different art forms—for example, musician, puppeteer, digital media, and dancer—collaborated to facilitate and empower a group to research and express their aspirations in an imaginative way. The projects lasted three days. On day one, the participating youth had a taster session of each of the art forms. They then chose one of the art forms and spent a longer time with that artist. By then we all had some idea about each other, and new material was beginning to emerge from the group. The group would reflect on their first day’s experience and the artists discussed what they had discovered over that first day. From that information, we went into deepening the exploration on day two before it began to be given a definitive shape that could be shared in some sort of presentation. We ran many of these workshops over four years beginning with the Impaired Teens Don’t Have Impaired Futures. The workshops resulted in many wonderful creations about their aspirations by youth who had been shunned, excluded and abandoned. From arriving with inhibition and shyness, the many youth wrote and recorded songs, performed to audiences, and created all sort of expressive representations of themselves. It was a beautifully luminous experience and every now and then, years in, I hear an anecdote of how those three days were seminal in a youth gaining confidence to follow a course of action that led them to change in a positive way. After we had run a couple of these workshops, I began to conceptualize the process in a different way. In particular, reflecting on the experiences of the youth over the three days. The first phase of the workshop seemed to be about us all getting to know each other, finding out about what was on offer, and considering what was going to be done—becoming present. Then the group could become immersed in making their own work. This middle part of making something of themselves was the heart of the workshop. As their state of presence changed, the facilitators had to relate to the group in a different way. At first, we were leading and then as the group took over our leadership became more a matter of following their lead. At the same time, all the facilitators were professional artists who had expertise to offer so it did not serve the group if they became falsely humble about the skills they could lend. It was a matter of the appropriate intervention at the right time. This is part of the art of purveying a workshop and, like all art forms, it is not finite. The process of learning for the facilitator goes on, group by group. The inquiry is symbiotic. My inquiry as a

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workshop facilitator is always about how I can facilitate better. Each project furthers that inquiry.

5.2.1 Listening, Witnessing, and Observing I want to note two moments in this middle section. They both involve a certain listening, witnessing and observing by the facilitator and are about finding the key that moves the workshop into the final phase. One of these moments was with a group of artists who were reflecting on their workshop practice. In the middle of the workshop, each artist (there were about twenty-five taking part) was sitting in their own space in the room with a notebook. I asked them to quietly reflect upon the process of the workshop we were involved in. After about ten minutes of watching the energy drop in the room and the group sitting emptily gawping at their notebooks, a buried memory emerged from some forgotten recess in my mind. They were Isadora Duncan’s words, which Gregory Bateson (1972) had evoked to show a major flaw in the epistemology of Western Sciences, that illustrated how the performing arts are a valuable and valid way of producing knowledge. Duncan’s words were, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it” (p. 137). I suggested to the group if they were feeling stuck, perhaps they would like to represent their reflections by making something from the materials and resources we had brought into the space. There was a two-minute lull and then suddenly an explosion of creative energy took over the room. The energy completely changed and not only that large room but the whole building was transformed into an instant museum of representations expressing how these workshops artists felt about workshop. My old friend John Moat once said to me in one of our many chats about workshops, “sometimes there’s a moment in a workshop when it feels that Hermes has invisibly flown across the room.” Other interviewees in the Workshop Interviews alluded to that special moment, which I have come to call the Golden Fish Moment for reasons I will talk about elsewhere. One anecdote was from Rachel Griffith (in Gee, 2001), who was the coordinating artist at the time at The National Theatre in London, RG: Yes, there are a couple of extraordinary moments of clarity. Moments of seeing what was being taught actually taking place and realizing that ‘that’s what was being taught’. Because most of the time you didn’t actually have any idea of what was being taught and then suddenly seeing it, which I think is one of lovely things about workshop: you are learning by observing other people. It’s experiential learning but actively and passively, you know what I mean. TG: Yes, I do RG: There is one particular moment. It was about a very tall girl who was doing some work with, ironically, the teacher who was a relatively short bloke, and the tall girl was nigh on a 6ft (tall) Canadian and she used to stand a lot like a giraffe. Giraffes stand with their legs very wide apart, just to make herself shorter and she always moved around with one arm out here and it was basically a denial of the fact that that was her shape, she was enormous,

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fantastic, beautiful. And she was doing something one day and he said, “Stand up”, and she said, “What do you mean”, and he said, “Stand up straighter” and she said, “I can’t” and he said, “why” and she said,” I’m too tall”, so he just placed his hand above her head, about 4 inches above her head and she just straightened up and her head did touch his hand and she just grew, and we were all in pieces. It was just a sort of moment of safety. I suppose, the environment being safe enough for her, in front of 15 people, to grow like that and to say, “this is who I am, I am actually this tall”. And it was only working in that environment really because he didn’t tell her what to do, he just placed his hand above her head. It was a quite profound, well it’s healing. (pp. 129–130)

The second of these moments was leading a workshop, and here I have to use that term rather than facilitating because I was the lead artist with a team of six others whom I was training in Ireland. We were following the process that I have been discussing of introducing and then forming. The six Irish artists were running workshops for one hundred children from two elementary schools. It was a very diverse group, and the title of the workshop was “Hidden Worlds”. All the while, I had this dual role of leading the artist group and being one of the facilitators, when appropriate in the workshop. On the first day, two of the Irish artists couldn’t make it and so we were overloaded. I offered to take groups of children off their hands and do some story creation outside the main space so as to lessen their load. The first group decided that the hidden thing we should look for was the imagination. I took another group, and they were full of enthusiasm and ideas about how we might search for the imagination and the characters and scenes that could be involved. It was very energetic, and hands were shooting up. One young lad though was very quiet and had not spoken. I stopped the hands for a moment and addressed the boy. I said that if he had any ideas that we would be happy to be quiet so that we could hear them. The group were very good and did supress their slightly wild enthusiasm for an instant. The boy looked like he was about to speak and then didn’t. The group couldn’t sit on their ideas any longer and the hubble bubble of ideas began again. I quieted them and said to the boy that it looked like he had something to say. He said he did but then thought it was stupid. I said we would like to hear it and the group were sensitive to his discomfort and speaking. He said, ‘It was just that I was thinking that I haven’t got an imagination. So maybe the story could be about me getting my imagination.’ At that moment, the rest of the workshop had a shape. The boy had brought the story home. He had made it specific. The whole group went quiet, and we had found our story. In the middle of the workshop, I am listening to the group to find the heart of their story; aware that it can come from anywhere. From throwaway comments or attempts to sabotage or the quietest and least assuming person or a seemingly unimportant

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object or creation or it can come from a consensus. There is no telling from whence the story arrives because every workshop tells its own unique story.

Tony, when I think of workshop as containing a middle, it is not only the important part where the tools are applied, but it is also the part where the facilitator discovers their application through the responses of the participants. Back before social media, I was in communication about creativity on an action research mailing list with potter Ellen Schön. As cited previously, at one point in our email thread she wrote, “I try to push myself to be open to the reflective process in order to be more responsive to what the material/situation is telling me so that I don’t impose my tools and ideas on the material in a mismatched way”. In her view, the artistic process involves simultaneously, a process of making (I do), and reflecting on that intuitive making in the process of developing form (I observe what is going on). The resulting product is often the only evidence of the intuitive actions that occur between facilitator and participant in the middle part of a workshop. Implied in this process are my judgements and standards as to what has worked, or not worked in the past, and choosing processes for the next stages of working together. We don’t think about what we want to do, but, rather, experience the situation and that experience draws our ‘doing’ out. Those experiences build up one upon the other and we draw on them the next time a similar situation occurs. This is common in artistic creation. For example, the process of “painting is an intimately communicative affair between the painter and (their) painting, a conversation back and forth, the painting telling the painter even as it receives its shape and form. (Schön & Rein, 1994, p. 167)

Whatever part of the workshop process we are in, each part of the process informs and is integrated into the other. And other experiences we have had emerge through a similar reciprocal process, full of surprises and accidents (unintentional results to be noticed and made of use the next time). There may be no clear end point to the process. Ellen Schön works with clay. A successful form results from an artist such as her being able to, as her father Donald, a prominent writer about reflective practice, notes, “regard the wood or the metal as a living thing with needs and feelings of its own and to let the material direct them as much as they direct it” (Schön, 1964, p. 127). I can think of one instance in a workshop with a graduate class. We were looking at investigating situations participants had faced where they had an ethical dilemma, where their beliefs and values were not aligned with their actions. In this particular case, I was asking students to explore through Image theatre their own ethical awareness of power. Here there was a ‘stop’ moment for a student that eventually

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resulted in a question that asked me to think about my intuitive actions as facilitator. I had stopped the construction of an image that had five students in it in relation to one another. I then had asked the student observers to stand behind and then replace the person in the image or tableau that represented or resonated for themselves. The student wrote this email to me after the workshop: Those tableaux were powerful to me yesterday. I’m left intrigued on how you chose to stop us at that one tableau where we all chose a position in which to insert ourselves. Why that specific place? What struck you? You’ve unlocked something for me. I just don’t know what yet.

This simple question (how did you choose to stop us and probe more deeply at a particular moment?) from a student, who was also an experienced facilitator, asks me to delve into something I was thinking about even before I got the email. Could it, though, even be possible to determine what helped me figure out what path to take in exploring the image? However, in an effort to explore what happens in the decision-making by facilitator in the middle point of workshop, I want to sketch out a few themes. Decision-making is based on having led dozens and dozens of activities with different groups, different demographics, different purposes and different contexts, not to mention different lengths of time. And those experiences gave me the confidence that enacting and exploring Image would lead somewhere, without knowing where. And not knowing how it will affect people.

5.2.2 Use of Creative Tools Image/tableau is a tool. As I said in the Beginnings section of this section, I usually introduce it as an alternative language to represent, explore and transform experiences or particular moments in participants’ lives. It can be used for analysis, or simply to create a series of live ‘photos’. My purpose in starting with Complete the Image followed by Image Gallery in almost every situation is primarily to introduce the body in relationship to other bodies. So, much like puppetry where you use a series of tasks to build a puppet, I slow down the process of image making through several steps. For example, I use the sculpture method to craft sculptures as particular emotions or attitudes. Then creating ‘team’ sculptures of similar emotions, without naming them. Or doing other things, like The Wheel, where there are two concentric circles, outer person sculpts inner person opposite them as, for example, youth, and then outer circle of people move three to the right, and then sculpts themselves as youth worker.

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In the case of this particular class and activity, I noticed something about the sculpture that was being developed as ‘acting ethically’. There was enough divergence of status and feeling that I felt that there was a story. Furthermore, I ‘guessed’ that each person in the class could identify a sculptured pose in relationship with their own experience. I wanted to test that invisible hypothesis. Was there a resonance in the room with what had been done? I asked each person outside the sculpture to stand behind (in the same pose) one person in the sculpture. I then replaced the original people with those people and asked the people in the original sculpture to choose a character that resonated with their own experience. Now we had groups. I always want to have a minimum of 2 people per group and so I suggested that if there was only one person in a group that they make a second choice and join that group. This wasn’t needed in this case. Another thing on reflection I watch for is the engagement of those outside the sculpture, the intensity in the room (hard to measure, but easy to feel), and the speed in which those outside the sculpture make their decision. I sensed that people were engaging quite quickly, indicating a resonance that was occurring. I met the student after the email and had a further conversation on what the hunch was about. She asked, was it Intuition Instinct Flow Emergence Embodied planning? What enabled creativity and a deeper probing to happen? (She suggested that she trusted me in the journey into Image and what ripples it would create; perhaps she felt it was feeling I was trusting the group as well in dealing with the journey we were on. Perhaps I was acting more like a side-coach on a journey which the participants were already on?). These questions stopped me, caused me to pause, to think. All these possibilities!

Good questions, Warren. I think one way to address this is to look at my practice of puppet making, i.e., the ‘bread and butter’ puppet making workshops I do with pupils. The heart of these is where, typically, each group of thirty get their own workshop and we run between four to fourteen of these workshops depending on the size of the cast. Either way, we have to dig deep to ensure each workshop and puppet is a special experience. The story and theatre of each workshop is vital. The process we prepare works across these stages. We set up a space.

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The carpet and screen are in place with the flipchart. This is going to be the area where the nascent puppet makers are going to receive instructions. Because of the diversity of humans as a species, instructions are a slippery business. An oft cited instruction to facilitators is, “give clear instructions.” I have found the way humans make sense of the sound known as words carried invisibly between one vocal mouth to receptive ears or eyes vary hugely. Sense is made at different paces, with different affinity to different words, pitch or intonation, with different sensitivities and sensibilities and all this and more with mysteries of a shifting group dynamic and individual motivations. At the epicentre of this swirl, what can the facilitator do? Story. Story with its use of image is tremendous for engaging a diverse audience. Everything has a story. Sometimes it is a tale told and others are tales that unfold. For example, a tale invariably told in our puppet making workshops is the green garden cane and the paperclip. Back at the very outset of my life facilitating workshops, two guys sat in their studio trying to work out the best way to do puppet making workshops. Over three days of imagining different techniques and models of puppets, we made one of the best discoveries of my life. A paperclip fits over a garden can (sizes of both can be adjusted accordingly) in a way that allows you to connect cardboard puppet heads or bodies so securely that you will have instantly created a puppet that you will be able to leave to your grandchildren. This technique is so simple that if you engage your intellect whilst doing it then you are likely to get in a tangle. Simple, but to get a group of small children to all watch and observe whilst I hold up a green garden cane (aka: split bamboo; aka: pea stick) and paperclips a device is needed. Here’s a script that gives an idea of that story that I told to a group in front of me. Holding up a cardboard tube, which is the first stage in making the head of the puppet and green cane, they have all made theirs and have left them at their workstations. (Bringing puppets to the instructions area even at this seemingly early juncture has proved itself as a way of courting attention disaster) ME: Now we need to connect the head to a stick. How can we do that? THEM: Tape. Use tape. ME: Good thinking but look [Holds up puppet sticks green stick with tape. Flaps around a bit and head drops on the floor. They laugh] These puppets you are all making are going to be in a show, so we don’t want their heads to drop off. We need something stronger. Metal. [Holds up paper clip] Who knows what this is? THEM: A paperclip! ME: [Holding paperclip in one hand and green stick in the other] Yes but what you don’t know is that the person that invented the green garden cane may have lived next door to the person who invented the paperclip. Because the paperclip fits perfectly onto the green garden cane. [Demonstrates]

This little tale, which in theatrical terms is called a conceit, grabs their attention and lodges in their memory. It’s not enough in itself. I demonstrate the technique in more detail. And, to finish, I ask for volunteers to demonstrate to the group and put the tube head I have made on a stick for me. It may seem that this is a reasonable

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strategy for children but…not true, children in many ways, are better at getting this simple technique than groups of adults. Simply because they are often more ready to be instructed and to allow their hands to master what their mind might wrestle with. However, the tale works for adults too and pulls them in to similar effect. The result of attaching the stick so securely is satisfying and transports the maker into the next phase of their own unfolding tale as their puppet takes shape in two symbiotic worlds—the material world and the world of their imaginations (see Appendix 1 for puppet diagram). These two worlds are evident to the facilitator as we attend to the needs of the group in a number of ways. Directly, by guiding the group through the technical task of making the puppet model; aiding them along the way with small conceits, anecdotes and devices so that the process of making is an event that builds and is memorable in itself. The highlight of the build, inherent in the way the structure workshop mirrors the puppet coming to life, is The Sacred Box of Eyes—a treasure trove of eyes that can be chosen to suit each and any puppet. The puppet begins as a carboard tube, gets attached to its animating stick, has features applied of card or newspaper, a cloth body, two card hand with sticks on and is then decorated in colours of the maker’s choice. The facilitators are ready behind a table, which we name as the danger table for younger souls, and we help put the finishing touches. The final touch being the puppet’s eyes. I have been a very lucky man to watch the joy of many thousands of makers as their creations are breathed into life through their new eyes. The unfolding tale of the puppet’s birth is manifest and visible. That’s why people think this is a puppet workshop. That is the concrete, evident event. Beneath this, between this and fueled by the puppetry, another less visible tale is unfolding. This tale emanates from language, both spoken and embodied. I remember working with a group of First Nation youths in a school. They were creating a show about wellbeing for a symposium that you and I facilitated, Warren. At the beginning of the workshop, I asked the group what constituted well-being for them. They gave a whole lot of standard answers such as nutrition, positive friendships, family and exercise. They then made puppets. Their creations came from entirely another universe—there was a Russian, a cat, dancers, an elder, a drummer and a slave and all ornate and surreal. Whilst they were making, they chatted to each other about their lives at home, animated their puppets as they came to life, commented on each other’s creations and created mini shows.

5.2.3 Forming All the life that goes on around the event of making the puppet is as much the material of the workshop as the puppet making. It provides clues. I think of this middle section of the workshop when the group are absorbed and in complete flow around their creative production as ‘forming’. In the case of these youth, their conversation was much more authentic about well- being than the pat and expected answers that they

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had originally given. Their ideas were forming in the uninhibited dialogue provoked by the distraction that immersion in puppet making allowed. What happened next was the group made two shows about their culture, with minimal direction needed from me. Both were symbolic tales that were not didactic about well-being, but one told a story of the contradictions in the relationship between colonialism and traditional culture. The other was about the centrality of dance and music to First Nations culture. These themes were formed in an area betwixt and between the making and the makers, the individuals and the group, and the manifesting puppets and the stories simultaneously unwinding in their imaginations. This forming process is where my listening and radar as a facilitator need to be sharp and acute. I am prospecting for the deep clues expressed whilst the group is in flow. I tell tales and use tales so that the group’s tales can emerge.

Tony, these ‘deep clues’ whilst the group is in ‘flow’ are some of the things I was thinking of when responding to the student’s questions about my work with that tableau. So, I went, as I love to do, to the literature on intuition and praxis and connected them to my own experiences.

5.2.4 Intuition The philosophers Nathalie Depraz et al. (2003) propose that intuition is the fruit of an individual and singular experience. However, much as image making has happened over and over again in workshop after workshop, each experience of it is also unique. I realized I operate through intuition in retrospect, but intuition itself only happens in the present. “With the 20 to 20 hindsight we can easily show a causal relation of a process to the product but, at the very moment when it is happening, intuition is lived as emergence” (p. 48). As the group becomes more immersed in their work, the more we have to take ‘invisible’ cues and apply our intuition to guide, leave alone, or direct. In the moment, I cannot anticipate the results of my suggestions, but I can anticipate their form, their quality. Ralph Stacey and Douglas Griffin (2005) use a complexity perspective to understand what happens when there is a transformative process in work with groups: It is not possible for committed groups of people to intentionally change the widespread pattern of their interaction. All they can change is their own interactions, and from this the widespread patterning will emerge in ways they cannot intend or fully understand… As

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people make sense differently, they act differently, and it is in this action, in continuing interaction with others that macro patterns change in emergent ways which cannot be predicted or controlled. (p. 33)

I created the conditions for ‘something’ to emerge out of a new language (image of a story through participant bodies) that made sense of the world differently. And I could not know what would happen, or what would unfold. As Depraz et al. point out, the intuitive act is not there as something to cause an effect, in that I cannot anticipate what will result from exploring it. She puts it this way, “All you can do is try to see to it that nothing stands in the way of the actual realization” (p. 49). I trust that something is there and will happen and in order for that to happen, I must hold the use of the tool in sufficiently light hand that people will engage. How? Depraz et al. continue, “this is learned and cultivated” (p. 49). (Interesting that she puts the two together. Learning implies a skill; cultivation refers to taking care of that skill.) I would add that cultivation means adding ingredients to the creative work through provocative suggestions or additional material or directions as we intuit it will deepen the work of the group. Another element to consider is that Image Theatre involves people as ‘malleable clay’ that can be modelled and manipulated. As sculptor of ‘intelligent clay’, I may have an idea of what kind of sculpture I want to make, but, as I create it, something else emerges. I, as facilitator, am working in a symbiotic process between creating material and the material enabling me to adjust my plan. And that clay is there to tell a story, or stories. Stories of the participants that I could not, and cannot, predict. Once I decide to use this technique, this tool, I am placing my trust in the hands of the clay and the clay makers. We say in introducing the technique, the tool of image that people are ‘intelligent clay’ in that their bodies will have emotions that emerge from the sculptures. This also means that they will also have multiple stories that can be interpreted in multiple ways; stories that must be allowed to emerge. Again, I think there is a similarity in this to working with puppets, where the puppets take on a character and sometimes (or always?) take over from the puppeteers who made them, an experience I have every time I make a puppet; even when I take down one of the puppets I made in a workshop with Tony and put them on my hand, or manipulate its arms, I feel this takeover once again. Perhaps this is the sense of Workshop taking over as well when one is in Workshop? ‘Intentional’ Praxis. I have become fascinated recently by the notion of ‘intentional praxis”. Remember, Tony when we were planning a workshop way back when and you asked me who or what we were, and I said we were praxologists, and you then asked me what do we do and I said, praxing praxis? Well, recently I was reading that Theatre of the Oppressed work was defined as working within intentional praxis. The writer never clearly defined this term, but I understand it from Paulo Freire’s (1970) notion of praxis as “reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (p. 36). The key word in this definition is “in order to”; in other words, praxis has an intention, and that intention is transformation. In the case of the sculpting there was a transformation of notions of language and a transformation through sculpting of our understanding of a couple of words

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‘ethical practice’ into a symbolic representation, becoming conscious, making our experience and thoughts visible (making the invisible visible). I remember a similar thing happening (in the same class, but in a different year): My espoused theory of teaching ethics was that the content of the class comes from the students, but that any design had to be coherent with a “spiral model of learning” (Arnold et al., 1991, p. 38) that enabled an analysis, using theory, of particular student experiences and this analysis leads to action. In addition, my espoused theory is that workshop provides a structure or clear limits are what gives a group freedom or liberty to explore and create. I am there to concentrate on creating the conditions for creativity to emerge. Another goal is to model this process in my teaching. I asked myself: Does an exploration of what had happened in the cohort the night before fit with my goal for this particular class? I had initially planned to do an activity about their individual ethical dilemmas. I decided to adapt my activity and ask them the question: What were your feelings last night when the incident of conflict emerged (the past)? What are you feeling about what happened then right now (the present)? What can be learned and applied from this discussion (the future)?

5.2.4.1

Response-Ability

This leads to the notion of Response-ability, which to me means the ability to respond to what is happening. When I begin exploring Image Theatre, I acknowledge to myself that I am setting ourselves onto a journey. This journey is not the path. The path is where the participants exploration of the language of images takes them. The journey is my intention for the group and the time we spend together. The group begins to tell their stories, away from my instructions. By this I mean that I ask them to share, but I do not define what they need to talk about beyond asking them to share why they selected a particular pose to respond to because it resonated with ‘something’ in their experience. I feel responsible for the group, but only to the extent that I am responding to the group to the best of my ability. And this happens throughout the arc of the workshop.

Warren, there is a common practice of handing out evaluation sheets at the end of workshops, which ask the participants to mark aspects of their experience out of 10 and to share comments. There are some obvious absurdities to this approach—such as that people process experience in very different ways, as the experience of a workshop

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is not concluded necessarily at the point of physical departure. Additionally, those who harbour the most doubts or discomfort in a situation are sometimes gaining the most. Fundamentally, we know more than we can say, so mathematizing quality is problematic. I have avidly avoided this way of doing things wherever I can. The superficiality of mathematizing experience was driven home to me after the first Moveable Feast event in which there were forty-two people participating (including the facilitators). After it ended, I was flabbergasted at the depth, profundity, surrealism and fecundity of the whole event. I went to a mathematician friend and asked him to work out the number of combinations of people that were possible in a group of forty-two. The answer was 4.4 billion. That immense number took no account of the types of interaction from smiles to discussions to creative collaborations. What is happening in that workshop was like a nuclear explosion or a big bang and we kept a lid on it with the framework of space, time and conceptualization. But a good workshop is a small new universe that will not end its expansion when we leave the room. At the workshop near Parma, Italy on The Joker in Theatre of Oppressed, we were split into different groups to make some Forum Theatre. Not being the leader, but being a participant, gave me the opportunity to observe what was happening with fresh eyes. I watched the group I was in, and it seemed that we quickly had coalesced around the purpose of making a piece of theatre into a single body. As I watched, it looked to me as if the group, like a single body, inhaled and then exhaled. It took in air and then expelled it. I wondered what signs I was reading to have reached this idea that the group as a single body were breathing in and out. I kept watching. Later when you and I compared notes on the day, I told you about my observation about the Joker having to read the inhalation and exhalation of the group. I watched the group change their physical relationship to each other—get closer together and move further apart. Warren, you added that a useful sign was to watch for the extremes in the group— the loudest and quietest voices. We both agreed that there were indications of the moments to intervene, direct or guide and other signposts designating time to step away or watch from a distance. A useful guide to discern moments of intervention could be characterised as the breath of the group. Leave the group alone when it needs to inhale. Let the group exhale and then step in if one intuits the need for intervention. I wondered then what happened to my own breath when I watched that group or when I was leading a whole workshop. Did I breathe in and out with the group? I think I did, and I think I do. When I run a workshop, I arrive and set up a space that I hope will entice and excite the individual participants so that the conditions are present for them to create and become a group. When we meet, I begin stirring the cauldron of people and content; I am breathing alongside each of them and all of them in a strange performance of myself—my me-ness becomes entangled in their them-ness. When they leave, the performance ends quite abruptly; unexpectedly because it is not forced or a false performance but rather a facet of the with-ness that has existed. There is no self-consciousness involved. Quite the opposite, that performance as

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workshop leader is created by internalising the body of the workshop. So, when it is over, it’s as if a bit of me is missing for a short while.

5.2.4.2

The ‘Stop’ as a Site of Transformation

Tony, here is a story (Linds, 2004) about an important ‘moment’ in another middle in a workshop that occurred, at this writing, over twenty years ago. I still remember it as a significant moment in my development of an ‘emergent’ facilitator. I still ponder its meaning and using David Applebaum’s (1995) notion of the stop as a moment of critical and aesthetic reflexivity that identifies the emotions, feelings, sensations there to transform action from that point.

March 21, 2000—A High School in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada A day to commemorate the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. I have been asked to explore racism through drama with a group of twenty self-selected high school students. This group of students are representative of the diverse population of the high school and are mostly in grade 11 and 12. About onethird of them are English as secondary language (ESL) students, recent immigrants to Canada from Poland, China, Bosnia, Russia, and Iran. To begin the workshop, we played some theatre games and I introduced them to the language image.

10:00 A.M.—A Stop in the Workshop I call for a break in the morning activities, and, as the students chat, I ponder my next step. How can I help students learn to use the image technique as an entry point to discuss racism? So far, the images have been general and impersonal, created without the context of these students, their school, and their lives. I want to encourage them to share in the intimacy of image work; to work closely with an image that comes from a personal story. But how to find the story? I call the students into a circle and invite them to share stories of their lives…. I see this is unexpected. There is a pause. Uneasy silence. Eyes avoiding each other. I am a bit nervous. There is a moment in which personal or cultural history stands before two diverging pathways. One leads to the repetition of the known, the tried and true,

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the old, the established. It is safe, secure, and stale (Applebaum, 1995, p. 16). I am in the in-between; I wonder, will anyone speak? Such moments awaken uncertainty, yet I am excited by the possibilities that lie ahead. This is movement that is open and fluid, a seeking without knowing when and where awareness will unfold. As facilitator I am both outside and in, standing in the in between, whilst also keeping it open. Then into this new empty space, full of meaning now, it is my responsibility to ask new questions that, through a series of moments in the embodied process of drama, probe further through thought, voice, and action. I live constantly in this liminal space, the land betwixt-and-between, a “fructile chaos…a storehouse of possibilities, not by any means a random assemblage but a striving after new forms and structures, a gestation process, … of modes appropriate to post liminal existence” (Turner, 1986, pp. 41–42). In this in-between-ness, the exploration of this land is helped by reflecting on my experiences of facilitating transformative drama workshops. I must become aware of my own role in the playing—and, in the journey, when I ask a question, I might not get the answer I expect.

10:15 A.M.—A Circle of Stories I am hoping someone will share a story that I could work with to create an image. This would show the group how images can not only be created to tell a story but can also emerge from a story-moment, where conflict or a crisis occurred. Andrea (not her real name) jumps in. And proceeds to talk non-stop for what seems like ten or fifteen minutes. The story of her life. This is the first time I have broken our wordless image-playing to invite students to speak their lives, offering a structure to help step into the in-between the known and the not-yet-known… We hear all the details of her life in China. A life of comfort and belonging. Her recent move to Canada. Her life here that is alienated and disconnected. The comparisons between the two. How wonderful things were in her home country. How lost and isolated she is feeling here. What had happened one day as she came to her high school… this high school… How she had tripped, and her books went flying and no one helped her. The laughter behind her back as she scrambled to pick herself up off the icy pavement… This experience is her/Andrea’s living in this moment of sharing her story. In telling the story, her own inner thoughts intertwined with her outward speaking, in her speaking with us. And, oddly enough, we have a sense of her disconnection with Canada through her connections with us. 10:45 A.M.—From Story to Image How do we story Andrea’s intimate telling of a moment of her life? I ask Andrea to recount again the moment of crisis when she lay on the ground and others were laughing at her. But this time, I want her not to just use words but also the bodies of her peers in a frozen position. She sculpts them into

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position, another student playing her laying on the ground, arms and legs akimbo, the others laughing or, backs turned, ignoring what was happening. I ask the rest of the group what they think the image is communicating—what is this story about? Then I ask the actors to move, step-by-step, back and forth on each clap of my hands through what would happen next, what would happen before, what would be an ideal ending, what would make things worse. Through each stage of the process, new perspectives on the story emerge. We see an image of a group of ESL students, all with different first languages, separate from the mainstream school classes. Another image has a group watching, but not acting. A girl showing concern with her eyes but blocked by a circle of boys laughing at the girl on the ground. An intertwined circle of students looking after each other. The energy of the group was now concentrated in serious play, as together we develop more and more images. The work we begin to do together is the playing; translating her story—working it out in image as the image of Andrea’s story and the story of racism emerge. On this day dedicated to the elimination of racism, the participants are themselves engaging in the process, listening to the experiences of one of their fellow students. And I, too, open up to her story, moving from facilitator to participant, watching and listening in wonderment, becoming part of the space and, at the same time, the gap within it. Realizing that the planned activity, however simple, exposes something resonating on a deeper level. The story is unfinished. It happened within the middle of the workshop, but that circle was also open as we were operating in this high school, outside the school calendar, but inside the school. We were not talking about some school somewhere else; some world somewhere else; but here and now—down the hallway, turn left, out the school doors to the parking lot. There. Here. Now. Then.

Warren, I think Andrea’s story epitomizes Workshop. When a group gather around a theme in a workshop, they bring so many stories. Sometimes tales they have forgotten but are sparked by events and encounters in the workshop. The facilitator has no idea what lies buried in the unconscious of the individuals or the collective. And that is why the facilitator has to remain vigilant, to expect the unexpected, to change course, adapt plans and follow the group. This is true from the outset to everyone leaving the room, but it is particularly true once the group are fully present. As you rightly and poignantly point out when you finish telling Andrea’s tale ‘the story is unfinished.’ Here is a paradox we work with. Each workshop or session has a discernible beginning, middle and end and, at the same time, each workshop

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is simply another moment in the biographies of the facilitator and participants. The salient point here though is that Workshop recognizes this paradox and works with it not against it. It is not a didactic imparting of knowledge from one who knows to those who don’t, but the co-authoring of an inquiry that meshes everything brought into the space through the narrative that emerges then and there. Guiding that narrative is the most crucial skill of the facilitator. If we manage to do this then that workshop becomes a significant moment, an unfinished story in the memory of those who witnessed and made the moment.

Tony, those ‘stops’ in Workshop are also I would call AHA moments. What one does when they happen is important, too. At a theatre research conference, a theatre teacher mentioned the importance of “breaking open the AHA.” Here the facilitator doesn’t let moments of realization that emerge through the work to “just happen” in the workshop and then be left “hanging,” but uses them as an opportunity to move the group (be it through dramatic work and/or discussion) further and deeper into the work the journey of transformation. Andrea’s sharing of her story (and the group’s response to it) was such an AHA, hinge point, or moment of the in-between, as the mood of the workshop definitely changed from play-full-ness to a seriousness related to the world outside the room we were working in. Was it only an AHA for me in writing about it in retrospect? Does this idea of “breaking open the AHA” also challenge me to learn to be attentive to such moments, and to take more risks to dive into them in the workshop? Another aspect that these stories lead to is the idea of the facilitator as ‘wrighter’ during the workshop. The Wrighter is who moulds what emerges from/in the work of workshop. Wright if more often thought of as creating, or building something—playwright, shipwright, millwright. But if one gives it a life of its own and then attaches it to the product that is emerging during workshop. We have a part of the leader/facilitator’s role that depends on their senses to wright worlds of imagination, crafting new modes of being and relating what emerges through whatever art form is being used. This form provides us at the same time with the very means by which it can be ‘read’ by others. Augusto Boal (1995) suggests that “knowledge acquired aesthetically is already, in itself, the beginning of a transformation” (p. 109), so the wrighting has the important role of working with whatever aesthetic form being used to strengthen the potential of this transformation. The British drama educator Dorothy Heathcote (2000) writes of the teacher as craftsperson, “a maker collaborating with the nature of the material” (p. 32). She calls this process wrighting because “it performs its intention in collaboration with the readiness of the material to receive the stimulation.” (p. 32) The interventions of the

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Wrighter are tempered through a sensitivity to the nature of the materials as, rather than a canvas or a piece of clay, the ‘materials’ I often work with are ‘intelligent clay’, i.e., the bodies of the participants. This is the heart of the challenge the wrighter faces and the reason for a wide range of strategies and negotiation skills being needed in order to play at the intersections between the flow of life of the human material and the rigour of the artistic techniques that bring it to life. Thus, the craftsperson is also a guardian—a protector of the material being worked with. The facilitator’s strategies must ensure that the participants are not in an unsafe space. This is one of the reasons there is what some might call preparatory work playing with the verbal and visual languages before beginning to craft the product of exploration. I don’t call it preparatory work, though, but one layer of the story that is continuously being developed through visual languages. The main result of any workshop is some product, performance or showing and depends on the wrighter to craft it in collaboration with participants. The Wrighter is always working in the in-between, in between the stories of the participants and the product that is emerging. Wrighting means crafting the material into a product. It involves paying attention to the artistry and is handson. Additionally, wrighting involves being mindful of what happens after the work is exposed to others. This tension within the material: between individual interpretations of experiences, and the need for stories to be presented in an understandable form (whatever that means), places demands on the material so that it may meet the “productive tension” (Heathcote, 2000, p. 33) of performance. The performance then becomes a space which makes a statement that then opens up paradoxes, struggles, and dreams for questioning and further exploration. This requires focus and concentration by the Wrighter and, in the social experience of the workshop, co(labour)ation. (I put the brackets in the word to emphasize the often-unrecognized fact that to collaborate involves work.) Boal developed the concept of the spect-actor to delineate the audience from the actors but integrate the idea that the audience member is prepared to not only watch, but also intervene in the action on stage. The Wrighter is a type of spect-actor in the development of the performance or product before the product is shown to others. The Wrighter depends on their senses to intervene so that Wrighter can mould the work, keep it open, enabling to respond to what they have seen, heard and felt from the vantage point of the spect-actor. In this openness, Wrighter keeps the text of the work open to possibility—that all has not been said or done, and that there are mysteries hidden beneath, behind and around the work that can never be seen. As the cognitive scientist and physicist Douglas Hofstadter (1979) writes of writing from an image before them: Think, for instance, of a writer who is trying to convey certain ideas which to him are contained in mental images. He isn’t quite sure how those images fit together in his mind, and he experiments around, expressing things first one way and then another, and finally settles on some version. But does he know where it all came from? Only in a vague sense. Much of the source, like an iceberg, is deep underwater, unseen – and he knows that. (p. 713)

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Table 5.1 Reflective and diffractive questions Reflective questions

Diffractive questions

What did we do?

What were the effects or consequences of the workshop we facilitated

How did we do it?

What differences did we noticed that emerged for us through the workshop? What are the effects of differences generated by our practice?

What would we do differently?

Where do these workshop practices appear to be moving us towards?

What does this experience mean? When and what differed from the expected? How can we explain it?

What impact might this workshop have on the broader communities with/in which we will work in the future

Diffraction How do we uncover what is beneath and unseen? I would maintain this requires more than a reflection on what I have done which leads me to the idea of diffraction. Diffraction, as defined by the scholar of critical technology and science studies Donna Haraway (2004), is “a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of difference appear.” (p. 70) The focus shifts from us as practitioners reflecting back on what has been done to a focus on mapping what effects are produced through different actions. Such an orientation assists me in noticing the consequences of my actions (as mirrored back by the student in her email and in subsequent conversations with me). It is this focus on the effects of practices that leads us to distinguish multiple ways of reflecting on our work that support the in-the-moment, embodied judgments we have made. Then we decide what to do in the next opportunity to lead Workshop. Recently I was talking to a student about arts-based research. She said she had never been exposed to this way of inquiring into whatever theme or situation. The first time she did it she realized that it enabled her to ‘grasp’ in one moment a knowing of something. It crystallized something for her. These moments occur in workshop. Sometimes in the beginning, sometimes in the middle, sometimes at the end, and often afterwards. The workshop middle enables us to see and experience a tiny bit of the unseen. On reviewing what I have written here, I see the need for me as arts inquirer to continuously stop and reflect, refract and diffract again (Table 5.1). I see that one moment in Workshop I have shared has led to more moments of reflection, refraction and diffraction. These micro moments in my micro-world of living Workshop become new journeys and new paths, new moments to make decisions and new questions to ask.

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5.3 The End—Bringing the Story Home Warren, I recall that Peter Brook (in Haggerty, 1989) talks about storytelling in an interview. Brook says that the storyteller aims for ‘specificity’ and what he means by specificity is ‘bringing the story home’ for the audience. In the same way, my aim as facilitator is to always do this. Just like that oft cited theatre saying, the last scene is the most important. It is the scene that is most likely to remain in the memory and draws the narrative threads together. There is a theatricality to a workshop. Being a facilitator is a performance of sorts. It’s not theatre or performance in a formal way, but it is in the way it builds narrative between moments in a specific space and time. Also, the aim of the ‘director’ (facilitator) in guiding the story of those moments aims is to help the group extract the maximum they can from their experiences, encounters and the whole event. In that respect, it’s not sufficient to just be any old version of one’s self when facilitating. One performs the role of serving the group. In The Moveable Feast Workshop Company, we had bi-weekly gatherings called “Nine Diamonds Workshops”, which processed and planned work we had been engaged to do and also, to look at our general practice. In one Nine Diamonds, a group of artists co-authored a document entitled “Shaping Narrative in a Workshop”. First, we talked about the stories we bring into a workshop and then we talked about extracting narratives within a workshop. We used ‘leader’ rather than ‘facilitator’. One reason is that, as freelancers, we had ultimate responsibility for each workshop. From this discussion we drew up some principles for shaping narrative as the culmination of a workshop: 1.

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

The workshop leader needs to be flexible to what emerges from their original aims in order to be a clear channel from which the group’s narrative can develop and a story can be born. Then the individual elements that arise can be woven into a collective telling. In order to do this, the workshop leader needs to pay close attention to what is physically expressed as well as what is verbally articulated. This process is about attending to the new creature that is created during the workshop and understanding its nature. There is often a discernible point in the workshop process: a saturation point in which the participants are ready to move from playing and exploring into shaping a new structure. Part of what is evident in the final piece is the craft of the artists because the final showing is about everybody as participant. Its quality rests on the facilitator’s skills to guide the group. The artists’ involvement in the final presentation is a matter of fine judgment. The criterion is: What makes the process/product theirs? The final part of a workshop is a microcosm of the whole event that reflects and reveals the narrative arc of the workshops. At its best it is a revelatory mirror for the participants. The final piece crystallizes to the participants that they can achieve things beyond their own self-expectations and engenders feelings in the participants of pride, self-worth and self-esteem.

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10. 11.

12.

13.

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The aim in the end is to structure a revelation. A lot of the skill in shaping the final presentation lies in the decision of what to draw attention to, how to do it and in what order to put these elements together so that new meaning is made from what has happened in the workshop. The search is for resonant metaphor/symbol/image that illuminates the process. This symbol often manifests in the workshop from the least likely place, the leftfield element, or the least expected person. Sometimes it is so unlikely that it’s like a satellite from another galaxy. Fundamental to the whole process is ownership from within the group the power which comes from being with each other, rather than from imposing upon or dominating. If there is an audience from outside the workshop then the final presentation has to allow the audience in by being recognizable so that it becomes a shared experience for all present. Then it affirms and validates the achievements of the participants. Shaping story from a workshop’s narrative requires a clarity of vision and a clear line of direction to pilot the process of the participants delivering this final phase. All of these elements are dependent on a strong creative and collective process.

Moveable Feast Workshop Company had to disband shortly after this was created because the organizations who commissioned our work were disbanded. The intention of the company was to run the company as a workshop. The workshop form permeated every pore of our practice. So, looking back at what was created above in one of the final Nine Diamond workshops, it is an excellent reflection of what we did and how we went about doing it. Three principles which we applied to the end of our workshops stand out: . Realization—An experience and event that brings together the elements of the creative process in a moment in which the group can realize all they have been immersing themselves in during the time and space of that workshop. . Revelation—As well as realizing their work and the extent of their process there can be a feeling that something new has been revealed. Sometimes this is the scariest moment for the group and requires the most holding. Its shape is revealed by the group’s creations. Often this final event is characterised as the product of the workshop but if it’s any good, it’s no more a product than any other during the workshop process but this event can reveal the beginning for individuals and the group of a potential new process. . Crystallization—The lifting of a workshop into a new dimension heightens the experience for the participants and crystalizes the whole of the experience in a moment that can last in the memory and is available to be drawn upon. For example, in the school shows I have cited; 300 children become a cast in a one-off huge experience. Those children grow up and I meet them and invariably they remember that moment. Sometimes it has affected them so profoundly that they recognise it as ‘life-changing’. This is what I mean by a ‘crystal memory’.

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What we did in the Feast Company, and I always attempt to do, is to create a situation for the group which facilitates the realizing, revealing and crystalizing what has emerged across the workshop. This way of ending a workshop enhances the potential for insights, which are, in turn, opportunities where the creative joy in a workshop has become crystallized in the memory of all who took part. Warren, do you think that the structure of a workshop is often at its most porous at its end, where we negotiate with a group an appropriate and resonant ending?

5.3.1 The 6-Part Story Method Tony, I would say as a facilitator we weave porosity throughout a workshop so that our stories of our lives interweave with the lives of our stories. One way this happens is by providing a framework that is open to the imagination. So that negotiation happens through creating conditions for the group to bring together what they have accomplished and, at the same time, to reflect on that. For me, those conditions happen through forms of storytelling. It is interesting that you end this section by talking about story and the threads that carry on. In 2012, I was introduced by a colleague, Elinor Vettraino, to the 6-Part Story Method (6PSM) which she was using as part of her doctoral research to inquire into the lives and challenges of teachers in higher education. I have begun using it as a way to reflect on the journey in workshop. As I have mentioned before I treat my class as both containing workshop as pedagogy and a site of arts inquiry and the whole course is also the pedagogy and site of inquiry. One of the last things I do in April in my last class of an 8 month long course is to ask students to think about their journey into ethical practice/praxis and, bearing that in mind, to tell a story about that journey through the prompt of cards with drawn pictures on them. The 6PSM originated from collaborative work between two dramatherapists, Mooli Lahad (1992, 2013) and Ofra Ayalon who worked with children traumatized by conflict in the Middle East. The purpose of the 6PSM was to act as a diagnostic tool for therapeutic assessment of trauma coping methods, and the model itself has its roots in the work of Alida Gersie (1997), Lahad’s dramatherapy instructor who developed the Story Evocation Technique (SET). The 6 PSM framework is similar to Gersie’s original model which contains a particular structure: 1. A character 2. A task the character has to accomplish

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3. A helpful force that will help the character undertake the task 4. A hindering force that is an obstacle or stops the character from accomplishing the task 5. Action where the character goes about coping with the challenge or problem and/or doing the task. 6. The ending to the story. This is not necessarily a conclusion but a way of understanding what happened to the character once their problem or task has been dealt with. When it comes to the end of a workshop, or series of workshops, I give the students the prompt, ‘reflect on your journey through telling a story using this structure, with the prompt being a set of six cards that you turn over one at a time’. I ask students to use the method to tell a story. Now, they have already used the cards as prompts in previous workshop settings to explore ethical practice, so they are quite familiar on using storytelling as a tool. So, I hand out 6 cards to each person and they sit in pairs and tell their stories to each other. One at a time they turn over the cards and the story emerges. In some cases, the pairs decide to tell only one story from one set of cards. Everyone tries different methods here. This is a reflexive process that crystallizes their learning, feelings and actions during the entire workshop class process. The best way to describe what the 6-part story enables is to turn to the students’ reflection on this arts-based inquiry using workshop that explored, in this case, ethical practice. I would note, Tony, that these thoughts were written after the course had ended, indicating a lasting impression about what they had explored together over the previous year. Graduate student and consultant Tejaswinee Jhunjhunwala later wrote about this experience: Espejo (2003) says that we are limited by our lived experiences, and thus our language (which is grounded in our history). I find this both disconcerting and immensely humbling. When we can deconstruct and reconstruct the meanings that we have embodied from our lived experiences, the learning that emerges can then provide us with a platform for further learning. My experience with story cards is that they help me gain clarity of thought and conscience in the how and why of my reactions, their potential implications, and how my patterns of thought and behaviour may need to adapt and evolve based on insights that surface. The story the cards surface act as a guiding thread to iteratively deepen my reflections with using this imaginal method, which Dirkx (2001) describes as a way to “make sense of emotional experiences and feelings that may arise” (p. 68) within our learning.

Another, Linthuja writes: The 6-part story method feels like the act of peeling off layers from myself, one card at a time. It provides the ability to remove the “I” from the story, and view it from a third person’s perspective, allowing for the paradoxes of realities to emerge. Both stories above allow me to access my fears, assumptions and very often, the concept of uncertainty. It is as though I am on this constant and continuous journey of learning and unlearning about myself. What is my way of being in this world - who am I, what are my patterns? It allows me to become aware that every moment in time can represent a multitude ofD truths and every moment in

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time could represent a different story - is it possible to go back to that story and access the emotions I felt at that point in time? These stories have allowed me to access my emotions that otherwise remain silenced. It is a glimpse into a moment of time, without an end point. This type of storytelling becomes a way for me to be in tune with my emotions and identity as well as allowing for the gradual unravelling of my truth. This storytelling method becomes a place to just be - it could have no beginning really, and no end. The knowing, the feeling and the learning - it is underneath it all. Why this story, what did it allow me to access, and why now? The cards represent an infinite space of infinite stories.

Lastly, Antonio Starnino, a designer, facilitator and graduate student later wrote: Lakoff and Johnson (2003) speak to a metaphor as an “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (p. 5). Metaphors provide a generative way of exploring my situation. It allowed me to go beyond the notion of a static metaphor, an object, thing, but rather a dynamic metaphor, built on the process of transitional change (Bridges, 1991). Each card speaking to the shifts in my own collective experience, and my dilemmas I encountered in each one. Individually speaking to an abstract part of my experience but collectively and interdependently giving way to a whole story.

As we see, we have found that the cards provide a space of learning, introspection and reflection on the class as workshop experience. This introspection allows for a meta-level analysis on the story where there is . . . .

Sensing what learning emerged Diving deeper into that learning Meaning Making of the experience Experimentation with other forms of reflection.

These are critical elements to use a structured process to ‘bring the story home’.

Warren, in my current practice, the most often employed form I use to end a workshop is in the puppet residencies. This emerges in large groups of children where they exhibit their creativity to the maximum. Each child has made their own puppet and are organised in bands of creatures tailored to the appropriate age range and relevant to the tale they are telling. They have also participated in making collective creations such as celestial bodies, sun and moon; scenery, trees, flowers and sea; shadow puppets; and deities, rainbow serpents, and sky gods. Everything has been made and a collective thrill runs through the assembled cast as we demonstrate back to them their creations from behind the screen. They see the empirical evidence of their collective creativity. They see what they have achieved and, by watching us do short scenes using their puppets, they have an idea of what is now possible with their creations.

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Each moment of the meta-structure of the workshop, the residency, is constructed so that it keeps building as an experience for the participants. In order for this to work, each segment, smaller workshop, and fractal of this over-arching structure must receive the same attention to detail. After one day, every child has rehearsed their parts, once for about 10 min(!), and a small group have taken the story and made the narration their own. The next day there is a dress rehearsal before an audience and then one or two performances of their story. It is impossible to express this journey across a week by a whole school, starting from nothing to performing something quite magnificent without it sounding hyperbolic. Children, teachers and parents have testified so many times over the last thirty years about the way the experience has transported and transformed them: “Better than Christmas”, “It made me more than happy”. It’s hard to describe what happens as we build together in an intensive explosion of applied imagination across a week to culminate in the final performances. One word consistently though does come to mind: joy. There is an immense human warmth in the room that underpins a communal sharing of artistic excellence that surpasses all expectations of what ‘children can do’. The first such big puppet workshop is still etched in my memory. I was amazed. I had never imagined witnessing a school so luminous with joy. Where does that joy come from? Of course, Warren, I am not implying that every workshop ends in joy or even that the aim is anything like that. The point is that children are a guiding light in my practice by showing me what is possible. What those undiluted releases of exuberance in school halls have shown is how much the end matters as a way of realising the process. Just as making a puppet is a process, if the final product is any good, the spectacular puppet performances are part of a process. The effect of the whole workshop which culminates in those performance affect the individuals involved and the whole school community. The workshops with the children showed me that using the arts is product, process, and a learning medium. As one Moveable Feast artist said, “Certainly, for me, each workshop I run provides clues for the next.” As Enzo said about a workshop in that much quoted excerpt from our interview, “it’s the one story and it has a thread and one thing leads to the next to the next, to the next to the next…” As it is in the workshop, so it is after the workshop. It leads to the next thing. The children have been invaluable research assistants in guiding me and providing a benchmark for what is possible.

Tony, when it comes to the end of a workshop, I always ask myself, how may I conclude the workshop by looking back at what we have done and, at the same time,

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how do we exit the workshop space both physically and emotionally, which then leads to the next possibility of storytelling outside the workshop space. Augusto Boal (1992) has written, In truth the Theatre of the Oppressed has no end, because everything which happens in it must extend into life … The Theatre of the Oppressed is located precisely on the frontier between fiction and reality – and this border must be crossed. If the show starts in fiction, its objective is to become integrated into reality, into life. (p. 246)

So, with this context in mind, to me there are two main purposes to the conclusion of a workshop. One is to complete the work and to review what has been learned or accomplished. The second is to prepare for leaving the space—what we are taking with us and what we are leaving behind. One way I have explored the first purpose is through what I call Collective Mural, which gets at the idea of harvesting the imaginations of participants.

5.3.2 Collective Murals I try and ‘make meaning’ with the students or participants of their experiences with an arts-based inquiry activity called collective mural. The collective mural is an excellent way to sum up aesthetically the experience of the group, be it a class, or a workshop of a half or full day, or longer. I learned this activity at a Canadian Popular Theatre Alliance Festival in the late 1980s. I attended a workshop led by several popular theatre pr/actitioners, including those from the Colombian street theatre company, Palo q’sea. The workshop began with some warmup games and was followed by an activity that involved taking one emotion (I recall it being sadness) and transforming it by crossing the room embodying it and then giving it to a new person who then amplified the emotion as they transferred it to another person after crossing the room. After this powerful experience of sadness becoming more and more silent, the facilitators asked us to draw the collective mural arising out of what we had experienced. Often when I attend a workshop as a participant, there is one activity that I am eager to adapt to my own workshop circumstances. It is this collective mural experience that led to a new creative activity that I have used since that festival experience. In this activity, each participant has a space to begin drawing something, without using words, about their experiences (sometimes I give an alternative theme). I put on some lively music and every minute I ask each participant to move one to the left and add to, respond to, or develop further the artistic work of the previous participant. I ask them to be mindful of the principle of acceptance from improvisational theatre. This means accepting and building on what was drawn before. This goes on until every drawing has ‘become’ a drawing of all the participants. I then ask the participants to walk around in silence and choose the collective drawing that speaks the most to them. I ask that each drawing have at least two participants choosing it. Normally, I then ask them to discuss what they have chosen in their group and then be prepared to report

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back to the whole group or create another art work that best represents what they have chosen. (I would underline here that the best size of group is from ten to twenty participants so that the rhythm of drawing is engaging. With larger numbers, things get bogged down; with smaller numbers there is not enough diversity of drawings to generate dialogue.) I did this particular process for many years. But then, as a result of something students did in another class, I added a new element to this closing activity. Here is an extract from my reflection on adding something new to this ending activity: It had been many years since I first participated in the collective mural activity that led to my using it in appropriate moments in a workshop. Often when one has been using an activity for many years, the activity becomes stale and predictable. However, because of my continuous reflection on my praxis, and also because I had felt an engagement with this particular group of students, I had been trying some new approaches that used aesthetic and sensory approaches that went beyond words. I had also been talking to the students about going beyond the tried and true and to take risks in their own work as facilitators. This time I remembered something that happened in a student-led workshop in another class. I had been teaching a class on facilitation methods and the students were asked to facilitate a workshop (I don’t remember the theme, but it is immaterial). Anyways, the student facilitators had a genius idea. They asked students to construct the ideal university campus. Rather than asking students to draw or whatever, they just had a table of materials that could be used to create this campus – pipe cleaners, magazines with color photos, cups, pieces of cardboard, paper, felt markers, all sorts of things that the student facilitators had collected. They didn’t specify how these materials would be used. The prompt was simply ‘make an ideal campus’. The interesting thing about this class was that it took place over dinner/supper hour. Many students had come directly from work to class; few had had the opportunity to eat their evening meal. So, guess what? Most of the designs focused on food. I remember one striking structure which had classrooms opened to a courtyard full of food courts! I then used this example another time with a graduate class. In a course at the end of the class year, I set out materials and used the collective mural activity for students to think about their year together in my class. Eighteen students surrounded newsprint laid out on tables with crayons and felt pens strewn around. I put on dance music and students would start a drawing without words. Every minute they moved to the left until all begun individual drawings were covered so much that there was a collective drawing. Then I ended the music and asked everyone to walk around and look at all the collective drawings, asking them to eventually go to the drawing that most resonated for them (remember there were eighteen drawings all collectively drawn). They then cut it out and I asked them to go away and tell their story on why they chose that drawing, what intrigued them, what story emerged, and they could then decide how they would present back the sense of that story in whatever medium they chose – poetry, dance, a song, whatever. In other words, rather than me controlling what form the product would take, the participants were controlling this. There was dance, movement, poetry and short scenes that transformed what was initially a collective drawing to an embodied reflection of what they had experienced.

Ironically, I was reminded recently about what had happened. A colleague was gathering experiences in our graduate program that would seem strange to anyone from outside the program. One story was about what happened in the above class where there was so much noise in our classroom that the security guard at the library in the adjoining building came over to ask us to quiet down. This was a Saturday night and

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a dance party in a class was just not appropriate! It was, though, a nice ending to this particular workshop story.

5.4 Sharing and Presenting Warren, I too try to ensure that there is a build to every workshop I run where I create an ending that leaves a similar lasting impression. The two consistent elements to all the endings I purvey are sharing and presenting by the group. The arts are applied, and, in whatever discipline or combination, they are also learning media. That is, art employed so that groups learn by inquiring into a theme or issue or subject. Art is engaged with to find meaning and gain insight simultaneously into their own individual make up, their group or community while at the same time finding out about the expressive form and the skills it entails. The end then is the culmination and summation of the whole process. To finish the quote from Enzo of one thing leading to the next…. It [the workshop] builds a story like in a material workshop you build a transistor radio, with little pieces or whatever that you put together and at the end you have a transistor radio, and it’s built there, and everything goes towards building that, nothing is wasted, or nothing is done just to prepare you for other things. (Gee, 2001, p. 43)

There is a distinctive aesthetic to an arts workshop ending. As in Wendy Greenhill’s anecdote below about Shylock’s speech, the arts workshop offers opportunities to explore possibilities that are not on offer in commercial situations or where the art is a product. What we produce has this dual purpose: it is art, and it is inquiry. I asked Wendy, who was head of the Royal Shakespeare’s education department, about the difference between what was created in a workshop and what was created in the main house at Stratford-Upon-Avon. She replied: In a good workshop there can be the most wonderful sense of acceptance from everyone, that extraordinary things become valid… I remember an experience working on the Merchant of Venice with upper primary [Elementary] age children in schools around Newcastle when the RSC was on a tour. I had plotted Shylock’s story and went in with bits of text. I always use the real text, very cut down, but it was all Shakespeare story. We looked at Shylock and that’s what the workshop was about without fail, and I went into about five or six schools working on this, for about half a day on each case, and complete mixed ability, mixed attitude, mixed kinds of children and mixed different learning styles. They all became really fascinated by Shylock. Because at 10 or 11 (years old) children can be very morally acute. One of the most moving moments was a class of really wide mixed ability where they were three boys who had great problems reading and in fact speaking and one of them had a

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slight speech impediment. They were very slow readers. If you are working with text, a good workshop is one where you are speaking it all so much and you’re feeding your eye so much that you don’t have to be a brilliant reader to cope, that’s part of your job. At the end of this day, they all did a truncated version of that marvelous speech, “Hath not a Jew eyes, hath not a Jew hands… Tt’s a tremendous plea for brotherhood.” I asked at the end as you do, well let’s round this off, ‘who might like to do this for us, can anybody say these words’, and the whole class recited it. I didn’t want these boys who’d struggled to feel exposed, but they all wanted to do it including these boys. It was incredibly moving, a boy who couldn’t read and a boy with a speech impediment as well, struggling to say these words it had actually an integrity and a force and a meaning that was tremendous and all the other children in the group respected that. (Gee, 2001, pp. 21–22)

Wendy’s story is a great example of the multi-dimensional aesthetic potential of the crowning moment of a workshop—whether it’s something material or a moment of sharing; this moment is what the rest of the workshop builds towards. I first learnt about the potential power of this ending moment watching groups of children gain a huge sense of collective achievement in inclusive ways that confounded expectations. The distinctive aesthetic of a workshop is as much about showing the participants and their process across the workshop as it is about the art that they create to express that process. Neither group process nor art process necessarily takes precedence. The best result is when both aspects shine in the concluding moment of the workshop. It’s the facilitator’s call to direct the balance between the processes in a way that serves the group’s need in a specific context. There are workshops, such as the school puppet residencies, in which I know that the shape of the end will be well and others in which the end is not known until it has been created by the group, such as the Museum to the Art of Workshop made by a large group of artists in a four-day workshop. How do I see my role? I have two functions: as a facilitator—one is to observe, guide, lead and attend to the group process in appropriate ways. The other is as an artist—because I run arts workshops, I have a gained a certain expertise in story, puppetry and theatre. I see my job as using that gained expertise and experience to enable the group to have the most fulfilling experience possible. All the way through, I am bringing some artistic expertise into play but not at the expense of their experience. In this respect, puppets have been a great boon because invariably individuals get a lot from creating their own alter ego, even if it’s not human, out of simple materials. Alter ego in so much as what emerges in their puppet is always an expression and reflection of some aspect of themselves. Puppets are excellent in this respect because they are so obvious, accessible to make and nearly always surprisingly brilliant. However, the biggest challenge is in helping the group forge a final expression that encapsulates the experience of the workshop. The museum, which was a multi-art form installation with participatory exhibits for an invited public and had a magnificent tree as a centre piece with Rangoli roots (an Indian form of ephemeral floor sculpture using petals, leaves, seeds and food), was an expression of all the discussions, creativity, experimentation and inquiry into workshop practice by thirty-five artists over four days.

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When I worked with the American students on the Rhetoric of London course, they created small dramas or poems or songs in small groups that fuse together aspects of their personal experience of being in London. Often these were performed outside the college building in a grand central London square. This lifts the sharing that has preceded in the workshop to a different level. There is an element of challenge that involves more exposure and vulnerability. In this case, working over a short amount of time to create some storytelling theatre with a group who are involved in a largely cerebral course. Thus, it can be a bit uncomfortable but when the challenge is met it becomes memorable. My job is to find the appropriate frame from what any group is creating that works for them. This involves a constant listening, an application of my skills and a measurement of how far the group might go. At the beginning of the workshop on personal stories with the Rhetoric group, there is no way that they would go out on the square and show each other their creations, so the facilitation is building the blocks that allow that to happen and hitting the right pitch when the time comes to make the invitation. Also, I need to be flexible to the invitation being turned down and having to adjust. Hundertwasser (in Bockelmann, 1972), the Austrian painter and architect, said a painting is like a harvest of dreams. As facilitators we are inviting participants to collectively imagine around a theme in different ways, through different media. When this moment of imagining draws to its conclusion, we are trying to harvest their dreams in an imaginative form. This form might be a spectacular show, a procession, a discussion, a closing circle, a manifesto or a museum. The list is endless. From the outset of meeting the group all the way to the end, I am looking for clues as to what that form will be. It is an art to craft a good ending to a workshop.

Appendix 1 I have often referred to the puppets we make, I thought it would be useful to include these diagrams (Fig. 5.3), which are an excerpt from a new book that I am working on with the artist, Charlie Scullion. Charlie has given his permission for us to use his artwork (all rights reserved).

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Human Level: 5+ Makers: 30

You will need: thick card/ cardboard, pencil, scissors, stapler, masking tape, garden canes, newspaper, fabric, coloured tissue, PVA /brush, gluegun, pipecleaner, feathers/fur, plastic eyes, glitter.

1. Create a tubeoutof thick card. This is your

puppet's bead, so the length and width will affect its individual character. Pinching each end flat, cut away the squared corners into more rounded shapes.

2. Attach a large garden cane inside the back of the bead. The paper-clip method works well for this (See Pg 5. 'Ways of Attaching Sticks')

3- Create a ball out of newspaper and fit it into the top of the head. Use masking tape to attach and create a smooth domed top to the head.

4. Facial features givehumans their characters, so you may want to try a few versions. a) To create ears, cut folded card.board. as pictured, including tabsfor attaching, to createmirrored ear shapes. b) For a nose, cut a triangle from folded card.board. as pictured. Position and tape in place with masking tape..Alternatively,make a ball-nosefrom newspaper. Fig. 5.3 Making a Puppet

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5. Cut a square or rectangle of fabric for your puppet's clothing. Fold into quarters and snip a small hole from the comer that is the centre of the fabric.

6. Open the fabric out and tum your puppet upside down. Slide it down the stick to the puppets chin. Make sure it is straight. Gather a little of fabric to the centre and use masking tape to secure it in place. The tape must be stuck down well to both the fabric and the stick. Tum it right way up.

7a) Cut simple mirrored hands from folded cardboard. For larger puppets you can even draw round your own hand. Staple them into the fabric shoulders, with the thumbs on the inside pointing upwards. b) Split garden canes with secateurs and attach to hands with masking tape ('See Page 5. 'Ways of Attaching Sticks'). For best control of the hands sticks should be attach diagonally as pictured.

9. The human form includes mythical and supernatural characters. Costumes, as well as tiny physical features all play important roles.

Using a gluegun, add feathers or fur for hair, plastic or cardboard eyes and a pipe-cleaner or tissue paper mouth. Get creative!

8. Using a PVA mix, cover entirely with coloured tissue. Add glitter if desired.

Your human puppet expresses itself through gesture and posture. One hand must always hold the central stick, operating other hands as needed.

11.

When a hand is not in use, share its stick with the with the central stick. Fig. 5.3 (continued)

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Appendix 2 A Workshop Dictionary Once a month over seven years, the Moveable Feast Workshop Company held nine Diamond Gatherings. These were workshops for the artists in the company to explore aspects of our workshop practice. The workshops got their name from a process a business development consultant for Social Enterprises and Community Interest Companies led us through in forming the company. Everybody drew a diamond grid that was divided into nine separate diamonds, which were then cut out. Each person wrote on their nine diamonds the nine elements or qualities they viewed as priorities for the company we were about to form. Examples were communication, marketing, developing our practice, sharing practice etc. We then created a single nine diamond by seeing how each person’s diamonds related to the diamonds of the others. Through discussion, rearranging and trial and error, we built a single nine diamond. By consensus we placed the diamond that had top priority in the middle and agreed on the position around it of all the other aspects of creating our company. This was a participatory inquiry process that proved immensely useful for the creation of our company. So, we adopted the name ‘Nine Diamonds’ for all our gatherings where we processed or developed work. One of the sessions was about making our own workshop dictionary. This was done through some movement work in which each of us ‘walked’ our workshop process. This is an exercise I adapted having participated in a session led by the late, great Marcea Pompeo, a Brazilian participatory artist. We then wrote on our individual nine diamonds the stages of our practice before bringing them together in a single nine diamond. From that we created our terms before making a video.1 All the terms were invented to express our workshop practice. I know from feedback that they have continued to serve the artists who were involved in making the dictionary. If you were to say to any of the twenty plus artists that were company members the words ‘nine diamonds’, their minds would go back to all those moments we spent together reflecting and developing on our practice. A Workshop Dictionary of Invented Terms (mothered by the necessity of collaborative practice) Created by the Moveable Feast Workshop Company in a 9 Diamonds Workshop 1. Inhibbled. The state facilitators get into after one workshop and before the next. We are inhibbled when we feel unsure of our abilities. It is the inevitable wobble of low confidence that induces apprehension of the next workshop. 2. Eglocate (Eglocation). In order to move out of inhibbledness we eglocate ourselves. This is a somewhat mysterious process whereby we re-inhabit our bodies

1

https://vimeo.com/17220877.

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5.

6.

7.

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and renew a sense of self—a process of coming into our bodies and hearts. This doesn’t always happen consciously. So, there is sometimes uncertainty about how to facilitate this process. Cardiability. Once we have eglocated, we feel our hearts pumping and our desire to enter the workshop space once more returns. Prospectivating. At this point we need to engage ourselves with the business of the impending workshop. This means resourcing ourselves and the workshop: finding materials, people, etc. that we need to re-enter. This and the phases from eglocation can become a series of interlocking cycles whereby we need to eglocate several times, interspersed with prospectivating before our Avago is ready, willing and able to emerge. Avago. This is that part of us that comes forward ready to engage with the workshop and all that this entails. The Avago, although part of our self, appears like a separate entity. It can be elusive when we can’t quite find the key to the next workshop. The Avago appears when the conditions are right. Appropergy. The appropriate way of being only shows itself to us the moment meeting the participants. This is the root of some of our pre-workshop uncertainty and apprehension. Appropergy is sensing the energy emanating from the group in order to measure your performance as a facilitator. If the group’s energy is low, you might decide you need to pitch with high energy or you may need to be led softly towards the aims and tasks of the workshop. Appropergy is the delicate balance between what you as facilitator, and what is brought into play by the participants. This is unknowable until you meet the group. Enposifizzle. As facilitators, it is our responsibility to enposifizzle the group. When we have got the appropergy right, then the group can begin to enposifizzle. This is when sparks of energy, inspiration and connection begin to circulate the room. When this happens, we know we are on the way towards achieving the Dandelion Effect. Ludimate. Only when the group is enposifizzled can the group then ludimate. This is when the participants play with the process, test the boundaries, bounce energy/ideas etc. of each other and the facilitator. This is a crucial part of the workshop process and, yet sometimes it is forgotten. When the group ludimate they take ownership of the process. The Dandelion Effect. The group is enposifizzled and ludimating now the seeds of the dandelion have been sewn across the workshop. Now the flowers of that workshop can start to bloom. The workshop ends and, hopefully, the participants leave feeling inspired and enlightened. The Dandelion Effect because the aim of a workshop is to plant seeds to spread and grown beyond the compass of that workshop by these participants.

References Applebaum, D. (1995). The stop. State University of New York Press. Arnold, R., Burke, B., James, C., Martin, D., & Thomas, B. (1991). Educating for a change. Between the Lines.

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Bateson, G. (1972). Steps to an ecology of mind. Ballantine Books. Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors (A. Jackson, Trans.). Routledge. Boal, A. (1995). The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy. Routledge. Bockelmann, M. (1972). Hundertwasser - regentag, rainy day, jour de [luie. Bruckmann. Bridges, W. (1991). Managing transitions. Addison-Wesley. Brunner, D. D. (1996). Silent bodies: Miming those killing norms of gender. Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, Spring, 9–15. Cavell, S. (2002). Must we mean what we say? A book of essays. Cambridge University Press. Clarke, L. (2001). Parzival and the stone from heaven. HarperCollins. Depraz, N., Varela, F. J., & Vermersch, P. (Eds.). (2003). On becoming aware: A pragmatics of experiencing. John Benjamins Pub. Dirkx, J. M. (2001). The power of feelings: Emotion, imagination, and the construction of meaning in adult learning. New Directions for Adult and Continuing Education, 89, 63–72. https://doi. org/10.1002/ace.9 Espejo, R. (2003). Social systems and the embodiment of organisational learning. In E. MitletonKelly (Ed.), Complex systems and evolutionary perspectives on organisations: The application of complexity theory to organisations (pp. 53–69). Pergamon. Frayn, M. (1999). Headlong: A novel. Picador. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogia do oprimido. Facsímile digitalizado (Manuscritos). Instituto Paulo Freire. English edition: Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Continuum. Gee, T. (unpublished). Making worlds: The creation myth puppets handbook. Gee, T. (2001). The workshop interviews (Unpublished manuscript). Gee, T. (and the thoughts of 1001 workshoppers). (2005). A workshop handbook. Tools, tips and tales. Self-published. Gersie, A. (1997). Reflections on therapeutic storymaking: The use of stories in groups. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Goulet, L., Linds, W., Episkenew, J., & Schmidt, K. (2011). A decolonizing space: Theatre and health with Indigenous youth. Native Studies Review, 20(1), 35–61. Haggerty, B. (1989). An interview with Peter Brook, Paris, October, 1989. In 3rd International Storytelling Festival Souvenir Program (pp. 7–12). http://www.thelcis.org.uk/LCISARC/wosas/ p98.htm. Accessed 8 Aug 2021. Haraway, D. (2004). The promises of monsters: A regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others. In D. Haraway (Ed.), The Haraway Reader (pp. 63–124). Routledge. Heathcote, D. (2000). Contexts for active learning; Four models to forge links between schooling and society. Drama Research, 1, 31–46. Hofstadter, D. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden thread. Basic Books. Jardine. D. (1999, Spring). “Being-in-the-world is not present-at-hand”: An eco-biographical review of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. JCT, 15(1), 95–99. Johnston, C. (1998). House of games: Making theatre from everyday life. Routledge/Nick Hern Books. Kershaw, B. (1998). Pathologies of hope in drama and theatre. Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance, 3(1), 67–83. https://doi.org/10.1080/135697898 0030107. Lahad, M. (1992). Story-making in assessment method for coping with stress: Six piece story making and BASIC Ph. In S. Jennings (Ed.), Dramatherapy theory and practice 2 (pp. 192–208). Routledge. Lahad, M. (2013). Six part story revisited: The seven levels of assessment drawn from the 6PSM. In M. Lahad, M. Shacham, & O. Ayalon (Eds.), The ‘BASIC Ph’ model of coping and resiliency: Theory, research and cross-cultural application (pp. 47–600). Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980/2003). Metaphors we live by. The University of Chicago Press. Linds, W. (2004). Stopping in-between: (Inter)playing moments of a theatre workshop. Educational Insights, 9(1). https://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/975044/1/linds.html. Accessed 3 Nov 2021.

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Lipson Lawrence, R., & Mealman, C. A. (1999). Collaborative ways of knowing: Storytelling, metaphor, and the emergence of the collaborative self . http://www.edst.educ.ubc.ca/aerc/1999/ 99lawrence.htm. Accessed 8 Sept 2021. Macy, J., & Brown, M. Y. (2009). Coming back to life: Practices to reconnect our lives, our world. New Society Publishers. Matisse, H. (1954, February 6). Looking at life with the eyes of children. Art News and Review, p. 3. Michaels, A. (1995). Cleopatra’s love. In T. Lilburn (Ed.), Poetry and knowing: Speculative essays and interviews (pp. 177–183). Quarry Press. Participatory Development Workshop. (1991). Summary proceedings of workshop held October 15–18, 1990. Rohd, M. (1998). Theatre for community, conflict and dialogue: The hope is vital training manual. Heinemann. Schön, D. M. (1964). Invention and the evolution of ideas. Associated Books. Schön, D. M., & Rein, M. (1994). Frame reflection: Toward the resolution of intractable policy controversies. Basic Books. Schön, E. (1998). Online conference on Donald Schön’s Reflective Practitioners. ACTLIST response, 27 March. Stacey, R., & Griffin, D. (2005). Experience and method: A complex responsive processes perspective on research in organizations. In R. Stacey & D. Griffin (Eds.), A complexity perspective on researching organizations: Taking experience seriously (pp. 13–38). Routledge. Turner, V. (1986). Dewey, Dilthey, and drama: An essay in the anthropology of experience. In V. Turner & E. Bruner. (Eds.), The anthropology of experience (pp. 33–44). University of Illinois Press. Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Croom Helm.

Chapter 6

Recovery Tony Gee and Warren Linds

Abstract A workshop no more ends neatly at the dispersal of the participants than it necessarily starts at the moment when they arrive in the room. For the person or people who put the event together, and for the participants, the sphere of influence of that time together continues beyond their physical parting. It may be that there are formal tasks to complete such as documentation and evaluation. And there is, however briefly, a moment of reflection, but none of these three words—documentation, evaluation, reflection—quite encapsulate the afterwards of lived through creativity and collectivity. We explore in this chapter this visceral, emotional and mental retracing which we call recovery. Documenting involves sharing what had gone on and what we had noticed. Noticing through our senses and writing that down enhances, and brings forth our experiences in the world, compelling us to not simply feel, listen, or see but to bring heightened consciousness of these actions, in language and emotion. By reflecting on what a workshop is, we can explore our motivations and methods as facilitators with greater clarity. The path we tread Does not lie And there But between Here and not-here (Gee in A workshop handbook. Tools, tips and tales. Self-published, p. 22, 2005) Keywords Documentation · Evaluation · Creative reflection

T. Gee (B) Creation Myth Puppets, Devon, UK e-mail: [email protected] W. Linds Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2023 W. Linds and T. Gee, Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-2291-8_6

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6.1 Recovery from Workshop and Re-Covering the Ground We Have Traversed We began our collaborative inquiry into Workshop in a project called Mindfield. We ran many workshops together with the intention of creating A Workshop Atlas. This would have visited the geography, methodology and finding from each site and then we would extrapolate the general principles of Workshop. Despite valiant efforts by both of us on respective side of the Atlantic, we failed to create this book but, as the workshopper quoted above alludes to, many years later we found our journey led us back ‘here’.

6.2 A Workshop Atlas Warren, many years have passed since you Skyped me to tell me that you were on a sabbatical year from your university, and we should write a book together about Workshop. I answered that, although I’d love to, as a freelancer the financial imperative was such that I would have to find a way to make it pay. Our motivation to write the book was a shared conviction that reflecting on Workshop as a form would be a strong platform for practitioners. It would enable them to reflect on why they were facilitating workshops and how they were going to run them. We had several Skype conversations about how we could realise our aspirations and came up with a project which we named Mindfield. I would apply for funding to run a series of transatlantic, collaborative workshops with you and multiple diverse groups, and we would create An Atlas of Workshop based on our reflections extrapolated from our workshop experiences. Here is the beginning of my report to the Arts Council about Mindfield: Mindfield began in earnest at a surreally seedy café near Parma, Italy railway station. The café was full of dealers and users who lurched and lurked around the bar. Warren was awaiting my arrival and sitting with Dorothy, a drama teacher from Malta whose story (like so many encountered across the last year) could in itself be the subject of the rest of this tale. She had arrived first at the bar. I could not really believe that this was the venue chosen as the rendezvous for international participants at The Role of The Joker course. (A Joker in Theatre of the Oppressed is responsible for the logistics and planning of workshops that often lead to a Forum theatre interactive performance.) It was that sort of course – full of surprises. Warren and I were about to embark on a collaborative journey, which would take us across 11 workshop locations. We had decided to begin as participants. We were open to all that occurred as we had a dual purpose in attending the course – to learn about the Joker’s role and to reflect upon the arc of the workshop participant’s experience. This was a five-day course at a co-op that runs trainings and projects around Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. The course was for advanced TO practitioners. It attracted people from across Europe and further afield. In my first research into Workshop a practitioner said that the purpose of workshop was to allow people to communicate sanely. Certainly, when it works, it creates a bubble around,

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and between those there. Thus, it connects them through common interest and purpose which is profoundly sane (to those there anyway). It also is hard to recount as visual joke – ‘well, you just had to be there.’

Tony, I wrote in my report (Linds, 2012) to the university on what I had accomplished during my sabbatical: During the sabbatical year I began to collaborate on a practice-based research project with Tony Gee, a colleague in Devon, England who runs The Moveable Feast Workshop Company. We are exploring Workshop as a creative journey of discovery. Workshop is a distinctive form of creative practice with story at its heart – an imaginative environment in which transient communities enable the emergence of phenomena or meanings that have never existed before. In this way, each workshop tells its own story of both journey and destination. Yet what, in essence, is Workshop? In The Atlas of Workshop, we will explore the centre of this crucial question as we explore devising (and planning), delivering, evaluating and the implications of the work in groups and communities. To start the project, we attended a week-long European Applied theatre leadership workshop near Parma, Italy in early March and then spent time planning and leading a 5 hour long pilot workshop for artists in Devon, England.

It is interesting that I remember that encounter in that café in Parma, and I also remember the workshop we developed and co-facilitated in your home in Devon. Recently, I received via Facebook one of those ‘remembering’ posts they send when there is a photo on a certain date. It was 6 years ago, and the photo was of a dinner after a workshop session. I didn’t remember any of the people, but I do remember a room full of boxes and threads and all sorts of workshop materials completed by participants. I return to Attar’s (F. Keshavarz-Karamustafa, personal communication, August 24, 2021) line from one of his quatrains in Divan of ‘Attar,1 “the road will tell you how you must go.” This ‘road’ now becomes the memories but also the embodied experiences of Workshop. Nick Bantock (2014) warns us in The Trickster’s Hat. A Mischievous Apprenticeship in Creativity that there are no shortcuts to originality, but, [o]n the other hand, if you’re willing to be led hither and thither down unlikely paths by a fellow of dubious reputation, if you’re prepared to keep a sense of humour and not be fazed when he plucks the unexpected out of a mischief-stuffed hat, if you’re ready to zigzag, detour, and wander in search of a better understanding of your artistic core, then please feel free to slip-slide further into these pages. (p. 1) 1

Translation of

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While I am not sure we are fellows of “dubious reputation,” I do resonate with this advice as we, too, have zigzagged and wandered and detoured in our Workshop practice and we have attempted to take you, the reader, on these pathways which we have separately, and together, followed. Bantock ends his book with this hint, “a sensualist is a person who lingers on, and in the brink” (p. 187). He concludes with his thoughts—“Step back, stay composed, breathe, and watch the larger rhythms—don’t push against the river, go with its flow, and let it carry you to sea” (p. 188). Thoughts, Tony?

Thoughts? Yes, plenty, Warren. It’s such a vivid memory that beginning of our first project on Mindfield. The first of eleven workshops but the only one we observed as participants rather than facilitators. All that we have now written in this dialogue is very much born out of the dialogue we had over that year of intensive collaboration, observation, reflection, and discussion. And indeed, the notes and essays we have sent backwards and forwards to each other. In a sense we are re-covering that ground—and reinventing it too. We had three reasons to begin there in Parma. One, we wanted to embark on our journey from the same place. Two, we both wanted to learn more about the role of the Joker. Three, we wanted to start our journey by reflecting on what it is to participate in a workshop. Every night, and it was nighttime when we got back to our digs, we would sit down and run back through the events of the day. The course was a rich experience, and our collaborative re-runs of the day were similarly useful. We would dig stuff up out of our memories and combine our recalls of the day. Our dialogue over the previous chapters mirrors the re-covery that follows the facilitation of a workshop. We are re-covering workshop territory we have visited and mapping it out, an atlas of sorts. To reiterate, there are three phases to leading workshop projects. The moments before you enter the space where the foundations for the event and it encounters are laid down—all the preparation, planning and plotting. That moment before the first meeting with the participants when you are seeking inspiration, looking for that vital spark, or, if it is a workshop you are used to delivering, just putting the various bits in the right order: The Devising. Then there is the phase that is most talked about. This is what is commonly called a workshop. It is the visible bit, but it is not the whole thing at all. It is easier to agree on a single word to attribute to this phase: Delivery. Delivery is a good word for what the workshop leader does as there is a good deal of midwifery involved in the role. All the planning can get cast to the wind and you start re-jigging everything

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to respond to emerging and unexpected moments. One way or another you try and assist in the birth of something new for the individuals and the group. After it’s done and dusted, well it isn’t, is it? However, the workshop no more ends neatly at the dispersal of the participants than it necessarily starts at the moment when they arrive in the room. For the person or people who put the event together, and for the participants, the sphere of influence of that time together continues beyond their physical parting. It may be that there are formal tasks to complete such as documentation and evaluation. And there is, however brief, a moment of reflection, but none of these three words—documentation, evaluation, reflection—quite encapsulate the afterwards of lived through creativity and collectivity. The best description I have come up with for the visceral, emotional and mental retracing is Recovery. In the initial Moveable Feast Workshop Company course for the first group of artists, I decided that it was unfair to ask the participants to do tasks that were challenging to them without me also going outside my own comfort zone. My workshop leading comfort zone includes puppets, drama and story but excludes singing or knitting or…dance. So, I went outside my comfort zone. I ran a small dance workshop. I pulled a muscle in the warm-up, but the compass of this workshop was small enough for the pull not to matter. The idea of my workshop was that the participants, having warmed-up, without muscle pulls, were to work in pairs and in turn would dance (move to background music) their workshops from waking up in the morning to arriving home at night. Confounding expectations, it seemed to work. One device we also had on this course was what we called ‘A Noticing Book’. This device was derived from my rough understanding and interpretation of Goethian science. In my rough understanding, Goethe advocated that each natural phenomenon has its own unique qualities that can be discerned through acute observation and by employing all our senses. And as we do this, we can see in our mind’s eye the metamorphosis—for example, from one leaf to the next on a stem. Then we use our imaginations to ‘see’ how those invisible changes might occur and what the relationship between each leaf might be. That is my understanding, and I liked the idea even if it was a misunderstanding and thought it was worth trying in a workshop. After all, Workshop is a social ecological system, the invisible betwixt and between of relationship and the potential metamorphosis that can occur. Only we more often call it transformation. So, across this, and subsequent courses, we had a ‘Noticing Book’. One participant at any time could drop out of activity and become a witness. Easier said than done, not always advisable and a tricky convention to establish in the right way. In this first instance on that course some time ago, it worked and during my experimental dance workshop, one of the participating artists, a dancer as it happened, sat on some raked seats above the studio space in which people danced their workshops, witnessing and making notes and sketches of what she perceived. The exercise consisted of one person (A) dancing their workshop day to the other (B) and then B played back to A what they had just watched. There was a discussion between the pair about what had been seen, felt, noticed and arisen from the dance. Then the pair reversed roles. As the participants were dancing a whole day and naturally some would be ‘out of the front door’ in twenty seconds and others could

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take the full ten minutes. I set a time limit of 10 min for each piece. I also had in mind some obvious moments that I could suggest such as ‘you begin to pack what you need’, or “the participants are coming into the room.” Judging when, and when not, to say something was a matter of deep focus on the group as they danced their workshop process to each other. One artist was still nudging someone “out of bed” whilst everyone else was “arriving at the destination of their workshop”— there is always a delicate balance between holding the group together and allowing individuals the freedom to do things their way. When all had played their way through their workshops, we gathered as a group to share what had gone on and what we had noticed. At this point the dancer with The Noticing Book fed back what she had observed. As it happened, a lot. And it was revealing to have a remote outside eye to report back. “One thing stood out,” she said, “and that was the moment when you all finished your workshops, and the participants left the room. The whole atmosphere changed. It dropped. There was a deflation—almost a sense of loss. A loneliness.” Perhaps it is not much use to write that I have never quite got to grips with what happens to me after the immersion of leading a workshop. The closest feeling I can compare it to is jetlag. It is the feeling of having travelled a long distance in a short time and allowing myself what is needed to fully arrive back. Long ago I remember going away from home to run workshops with an entire school. I used to always do this by myself. That truly was a lonely business. Returning home though was the most difficult part. I would simply crumble. I know that this crumbling is not what happens to all workshop artists, but it still leaves me perplexed. The answer to this post-workshop reduction is simple—rest and inhale. The ingredients of that crumble though are often more complex. If we follow Shakespeare’s Midsummer words, and I do, what happens is that “the imagination bodies forth and finds local habitation and a name”, then perhaps we can find clues as to what goes on from that moment when everyone disperses. What that dancer with our Noticing Book had seen when we all danced our workshop to each other, was an unanimity of emotion at that point. In that room back then, there were fifteen workshop artists who were attempting to make the invisible visible to each other. They serendipitously arrived at the end of their workshops in unison, and they no longer had a group or a collective process to hold. They got to the moment of not-holding, and they deflated. They could breathe out in a big collective visible “phew!.” Shakespeare is accurate. The imagination does body forth. As I write and the next word is imagined, I am sitting, and I am typing, and my body is the vessel through which the imagination can find shape. I point myself in a direction without quite knowing what it is and through my body, my hands—a moulding occurs, and something emerges. In a workshop this is amplified and the person or people initiating that imaginative bodying are holding it. For those holders there is a kind of paradox. They are holding a body outside of their own. The invisible but nevertheless all too real body of activity of that workshop and so when we were told how deflated we looked when the participants left in our imaginary dance, we talked of how there was a moment of feeling deserted.

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Part of the recovery phase is to recover your own body. The other part is to recover the ground travelled by the body of the workshop. This book is the story of our workshop journey, and it goes well beyond the boundaries of Mindfield’s eleven workshops. It began in earnest during the workshop journey together in Parma, Italy. In order to recover my own body after a workshop, I have to relive, rewind and release the body of that last workshop—all those met and all that made then and there. Next project. One thing leads to the next to the next. A penny for your thoughts Warren.

Thanks Tony. I liked the idea of the Noticing Book that we used as well in our Mindfield workshops. Let me situate this as a form of both good artistic praxis but also good research praxis. Our work is arts in research (Wang et al., 2017, p. 15) whereby as insiders and as artists we are actively collaborating in producing the artistic work so that “the act of creating is also the act of researching” (p. 15). We are also involved in socially engaged artistic practice. In other words, we are people who confront the experiential world “by means of a craft” (Leavy, 2009, p. 19). These approaches require us to find some way of ‘stepping out’ of our work. You remember, Tony, that in that weeklong workshop near Parma we had a unique way of reflecting on what had occurred each day? You and I were staying off-site, and the majority of the other participants was staying in the rural home that served as the workshop space. The others were in the workshop space/time all the time, while we and some others were on a journey each morning and afternoon throughout the countryside. Aside from the joy of seeing rural Italy, and the accompanying stories we got, it also gave us space to reflect outside of the workshop space. This idea of a ‘space for reflection’, even if it wasn’t organized or formal, but just a consequence of the logistics of to-ing and fro-ing from a workshop space, is important. I also link the mention of The Noticing Book to something I use in my Workshop praxis, The Discipline of Noticing, as articulated by a mathematics educator John Mason. The basis of this is what do we experience? In this structured process, we learn to pay attention to situations as they evolve. We learn to write descriptions of experiences without interpreting them (what Mason [2002] calls accounting-of: “it is helpful first to get agreement about the ‘thing’ to be analyzed, the phenomena to be explained” [p. 40]), and then step back from the writing to see what has been noticed. Therefore, that which is noticed in practice, or that which attracts attention for noticing, is closely allied to understandings of the problem. Mason offers practical and conceptual insights into this relationship:

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It is almost too obvious to say that what you do not notice, you cannot act upon; you cannot choose to act if you do not notice an opportunity. Noticing requires sensitivity. (Mason, 2002, pp. 7–8)

If something is not noticed, then it is unlikely that a response will be forthcoming. Therefore, that which is noticed, and how and why, influences not only the nature of reflection but also the action(s) as a result of reflection. As the educator in social ecology and drama David Wright (2005) puts it, [w]ithout some consciousness of my own becoming – my own transformative experience of being, which exists in part through my naming of it – it is impossible to appreciate any becoming or transformation beyond my self: indeed, to appreciate change and the systemic boundaries within which change occurs. (p. 89)

Noticing through our senses and writing that down enhances, and brings forth our experiences in the world, compelling us to not simply feel, listen, or see but to bring heightened consciousness of these actions, in language and emotion. “This is the initial movement in the feedback system we encounter and identify ourselves within” (Wright, p. 90). Reflective analysis helps us to capture the types of experience we have and “the dynamics of the activity that could have been responsible for its emergence” (Hauw, 2009, p. 347). We used this in our work with Indigenous youth and the arts. At the end of every workshop, we wrote down what had just happened. We had an advantage. We were doing Workshop in an area about an hour away from the city where we were staying. So, I remember being driven down the highway as my colleagues shared what had happened and I was busily typing it all down on the laptop as they spoke. Another way to do this was, as you said Tony, to have an observer. In our case we were three main facilitators in our work with Indigenous youth along with several others who worked with youth and lead some activities during the Workshop. Not everyone would facilitate at any one time and so we always had someone to give feedback on what they noticed in terms of youth interaction or energy, or commitment, or engagement. I am sure, Tony, this also happened when you did your big puppet shows and had people assisting you. I actually saw this aspect in action in the performance of a play at a theatre festival. There was a performance by a Guatemalan theatre company Teatro Vivo where the actor embodied the growing corn stalks in such a way that, through her movements, we could visualize corn growing from seed to crop to harvest. There were precise actions all the way through the scene. Corn was living in front of us. This required incredible physical discipline. I had taken a workshop with the director of this scene and learned how to physically transform my hand from pointing to the floor to pointing to the ceiling. He had asked us how many movements would it take? We all replied one movement. But no, as he took us through the exercise, we began to notice the details of the hand turning and turning and transforming its position. This is what I mean by noticing. Cultivating this acute awareness of all the things we do in Workshop is a difficult process. We have tried to do this here in this book.

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I engage in embodied theatre practice. Hard to capture as much of it involves movements and physical activity. I learned a particular way of documenting this through Multi-modal analysis (Jewitt & Kress, 2003). This simply means looking at a video recording of a Workshop and noticing what we see occurring in a particular activity. Most transcripts of things that happen in an artistic activity put an emphasis on the artistic products and their interpretations. In multi-modal analysis those looking at the evidence of a workshop decide what they are looking for, i.e., more than the speaking or the product and more of gestures, movements, gaze, sound, and visual. Here is a quote from an article (Linds et al., 2018) I co-wrote on in one workshop on wellbeing with Indigenous youth: We video recorded with a static camera the workshop and then selected an example of an embodied theatre game called See-Saw (Boal, 1992) where pairs of people face each other, holding arms and, while bracing each other feet to feet, one rises as the other stays seated, and then lowers as the other rises. This activity was part of a series called Pushing against each other, which introduced participants to improvisation and developed playful relationships through the push and pull of emotions and strategies. This is the game we refer to in the following analysis. As researchers, when we viewed and transcribed what happened in the See-Saw game, we noticed that one thirteen-year-old male student showed that he saw this game as a challenge. It required him to cooperate with his partner (a girl about the same age and size) and balance with each other so that they could accomplish the task. Together they had to coordinate their bodies to co-create actions that would lead to success. Over and over, they did it again and again (his partner was out of the frame so we could not see her expression). Each time they were able to rise up to standing from the crouched position he looked over at the facilitator with a big smile on his face. (pp. 44-45)

Interesting Warren, your thoughts on ‘noticing’ bring several things to mind. My first job after qualifying as a Youth and Community Worker in the mid 1970s was as an Assistant Playworker on a very tough, inner city playground. Playworkers are specialized workers trained in the importance of play, protect and develop the children’s playground environment, stimulate and provoke child-led play opportunities whilst observing and, where needed, exert authority over group dynamics withing the child user group. I had an unintentionally ironic job title as I was the only worker on site. As I say, there were all sorts of challenging situations for a newly qualified, twenty something young man working without any support. I asked the association who employed me for support, and they sent down an experienced playworker for a night. This was not much use for my general, solo existence in a volatile and sometimes hostile environment, but it did have some value. The guy spent the night observing the kids and commenting on the meaning of the social dynamics that were unfolding in front of us. When he left, I thought, that’s what I want to be able to do.

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More than forty years have passed. I have never forgotten that central London night or stopped observing social dynamics unfold in workshop after workshop. Because a workshop is all about relationships between participants, facilitator and participator, participants and the space, the timespan and the material and the resources provided. A large part of a facilitator’s job is to notice and respond to the invisible and the inbetween. How does a facilitator do this? The closest description I have heard is that we apply our intuition. Applied intuition is a faculty that is nurtured and developed through practice. In itself, it is invisible and unprovable, but it is a radar of sorts that one develops from exposure to emerging relationships and the motivation to understand and guide those relationships in creative directions. This excerpt from an interview with Philip Robinson, who is a musician, evokes the ephemerality of Workshop as a form: TG: You can’t go out and see relationships like a lamppost at night. In a way you’re working with things that you’re learning to perceive that are intangible and all to do with how people are relating. Our business is looking at how things coincide. So, they are to do with coincidence, which is an oft maligned word. I think the tool that people, and I am speculating again, this tool, and we have to look at that is our intuition. I wonder what you have got to say about that. Do you feel you use your intuition, and you deal with that which is betwixt and between? PR: Yes. I think it goes back to not being interested in getting it right getting it wrong stuff. It is that grey area in between. That is the area to explore. When I work in a workshop, I work intuitively. I think to do a good workshop, you have to work intuitively because if you are not, then you have decided about what you are going to do. It’s not the kind of workshop we are talking about. You have to work intuitively, and you have to work with these relationships between individuals in the group and the relationship that the group has to the staff that might be with it in one way or other and then to you. So, you are always dealing with these relationships. If you want to call it ‘the in-betweenness’. You’re dealing with how things coincide, you are dealing with accidents, and you are dealing with emergencies, it’s an accident and emergency situation really. But that’s great, that’s wonderful and if everybody is in there working with that as well then there is that kind of electricity. It is that, and it’s shocking, it’s dangerous, that’s great to have it dangerous but it is working off that intangibles and ephemerality that for me particularly when it comes to music, that is part of its beauty, that’s part of its purity, it’s gone. (Gee, 2001, p. 114)

This is part of the aesthetic of Workshop. We make it, we share, and the moment has passed. The only place it can be held is in the memory of those who were present. Like you Warren, I have co-created literally thousands of works in workshops: manifestos, plays, poems, multi-artform creations, installations, songs and of course hundreds of thousands of puppets. The list is fairly endless. The point is that they were not made for anybody else except those present. This does not make them superior or inferior as a creative aesthetic, but it does make them distinctive. It also means that they are not produced for intrinsic commercial gain. The real problem comes from the fact that outer world and inner world are interdependent at every moment. We are simply the locus of their collision... and whether we like it or not our life is what we are able to make of that collision and struggle. So, what we need is a faculty that embraces both worlds simultaneously. A large, flexible grasp, an inner vision which holds wide open, like a great theatre, the arena of contention, and which pays equal respect to both sides. This really is imagination. This is the faculty we mean when we talk about the

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imagination of great artists. The character of great works is exactly this – that in them the full presence of the inner world combines with and is reconciled to the full presence of the outer world. And in them we see that the laws of these two worlds are not contradictory at all: they are all one inclusive system. (Hughes, 1994, p. 150)

This ephemerality, these invisibilities, those unproveables of Workshop point to a politic. What are your thoughts about this Warren? Before I shuffle off this contribution to our duologue, our mode of working in this book reminds me of one of those story creation games that are played in workshops such as ‘What Happens Next?’ It is a technique from Keith Johnstone, who was one of the key figures in developing improvisational theatre. In pairs, one person says a short phrase such as, “One day I was writing.” Their partner asks, “What happens next?” And the first person responds such as, ‘I wrote the word “magic”.’ As long as complexity, blocking (such as, ‘then I died’) are avoided and simplicity is used, then the story ball just keeps rolling. I like using it in workshops, especially when there are a few people doing it at once and the questioner does actions to reflect what the teller has just said. It’s one of those workshop exercises in which the room bursts into life and everyone is surprised at how easy stories come to them. I’m reminded of this by our duologue because what we are doing is waiting to see what comes up next and responding to it. This means we do not always follow a straight line, sometimes we unconsciously throw our partner a curve ball and the ebb and flow of our writing emerges from each other’s latest post. I like it because our duologue mirrors what happens in Johnstone’s What Happens Next, but also it mirrors the bigger process of a workshop. In a workshop there is a wonderful symbiosis between control and letting go and allowing things to emerge. As facilitators we get to watch and try to notice what lies beneath the visible moment of human moments such as a room spontaneously bursting with unexpected tales of ‘what happens next’, authored by people who had very little notion that they could tell a story at all. We workshop facilitators educe, draw out the moment without knowing what it will bring. It sometimes requires the lightest touch, and at others, a great big heave to get a group into action. And, to finish, applied intuition is not just for the actual workshop moments when we are together, but is also a faculty that we need to engage in all phases including devising and re-covering. After that little postscript, it’s back to you Warren.

I am not familiar with that word—educe which you used, Tony. So, of course I looked it up. One definition is that it is the act of eliciting something. So, it is appropriate for me to respond to you about two elements you have drawn out for me—the betwixt

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and between of Workshop and the Keith Johnstone game, which is, at its heart, about improvisation. First of all, about the game. There is a game called What are you doing? where participants go into the middle of the circle and do an action or ritual like brushing your teeth, or mowing the lawn, or whatever. The next participant walks in and asks the first ‘What are you doing’ and the first participant says something completely different from what they have been doing, like ‘baking a cake’, etc. Retitled, whatcha doin’, the Indigenous youth I worked with would experience this game as a challenge to try and ‘catch out’ their peers by saying something ever harder and harder, like ‘parachuting on the moon’ or ‘taking a crap in public’. The game provides ample opportunities to explore and expand the imagination. The youth love to come up with outlandish actions for each other to do but at the same time, rescue the person ‘on stage.’ (After we go through the line the first time, we then reverse the order so that there is a different set of people on stage and then ‘rescued.’) Even though this causes much laughter, the laughter is with each other and includes the fun of mimicry. The fun and laughter create an atmosphere of freedom—freedom to use their imagination, to take the risk and move the body in accustomed ways. In addition, this game enables the youth to explore their culture in a fun way, like “I am collecting sweetgrass,” or “doing a jingle dance” (done by a man, when it is normally done by women or girls). We found it a wonderful way to find out more about the rituals of their community. They would correct each other when they didn’t dance ‘pow-wow’ properly. Or they would use it as a moment to show someone how to properly collect sweetgrass or offer tobacco to the willows we were going to cut for an art project. I share this because inside this game there is both imagination and freedom within chaos, the essence of Workshop. Now to betwixt and between. As I have said before, Workshop is of this world, but also outside it. So, it is a liminal space. Turner was looking at rites of passage in traditional societies. Drawing on previous work on these phenomena, Turner explored liminality, the transitional state between two phases, where individuals were ‘betwixt and between’: they did not belong to the society that they previously were a part of, and they were not yet reincorporated into that society. Liminality is a limbo, an ambiguous period. One of Mexico’s Indigenous people, the Nahuatl, call this nepantla, which means “in the middle,” or “middleness.” (May I turn to Wikipedia for a fuller explanation: “In the arts, nepantla is a creator’s imaginary world that encompasses historical, emotional and spiritual aspects of life. Nepantla as a term might also refer to living in the borderlands or being at literal or metaphorical crossroads” [Wikipedia n.d.]). This again points to the transformational aspect of Workshop. Having gone through multiple Workshops I could say that I have been changed by each one I have conducted or participated in. I became something or someone else. And I would argue that it is the chaos within the structure that enabled that to happen.

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As for the notion of applied intuition, I would say that it is, at its core, an embodied phenomenon. I recall here the words of the famous first lines of Tommy where The Who sings about seeing, touching and healing.

And there you have it. You have epitomised exactly what makes Workshop such a potent form. I suspect, Warren, that there was no conscious intent in you evoking The Who. It certainly isn’t a thought I had consciously had before but your final quote from Tommy has provoked a buried memory. The Who were a big part of my teenage days in London. I saw three straight nights of Who concerts in a row at Wembley in the mid-70s. This was close to a religious experience for my 16- to 17-year-old self. There was one moment that topped all the others. And it was in see me, feel me. Having been in the dark for over two hours and held in the thrall of Townsend and the band sweating, swaying, thrashing and howling out the tunes, suddenly huge spotlights beamed on the audience turning us into a human ocean of luminosity and Roger Daltrey said to us: “Listening to YOU I get the music, gazing at YOU I get the heat, following YOU I climb the mountain, I get excitement at your feet.” This made a visceral, and total, sense to me. And now you mention it, Warren, the connection is made—co-incidence. That moment, which I saw The Who create at least twenty times all over the country, stuck with me and informed the facilitator I was to become. Workshop is about connection, coincidence and co-authoring. It is by listening, watching and following the group that we as facilitators can climb the mountain. Nice memory and very workshoppy too. One thing leads to the next to the next… In turn, two points are provoked by that memory. The first is that it may appear that I am being a bit esoteric in talking about Workshop in the context of the religious experience of a youth viewing a live rendition of Tommy, the Rock Opera. Far from it. This is not a call to just let the process take care of itself. This is rather an appeal for strategy. Strategy in designing a workshop, the facilitator has to be imaginative, creative and pragmatic to compile the right stimuli for the group and strategy when delivering the workshop in how one notices, listens, follows and guides. Leading workshops is not about letting the process take care of itself, it is about taking care of the process. There is a politic to what we do as workshoppers. We live in a mathematized world with attainment targets, metric tests, SATS and standards at the heart of our training and education systems. It is not that these principles are bad but if pursued as the only way then we get to the territory described by a Scottish Education Advisor on the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum (1999), “If you only think there is one answer, then you will only find one” (p. 35). Whether the workshop we run is

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more skills orientated or an inquiry process, it is, by its nature as a participatory form, research through exploration and learning by drawing upon each other’s insights and skills. It is inherently uncertain. Guiding this process towards a satisfactory end requires a rigour in our practice as facilitators. It is not laissez faire, even though sometimes it requires us to step back and disappear. So, Warren just as you unconsciously evoked a relevant memory of mine so in a workshop any participant can evoke a response or reaction to another, and this shapes and shifts the dynamic and direction of the group. It is, as we have said, an open system that develops through practice—one workshop develops the next. As facilitators we learn from actively engaging in the form in same way a carpenter or painter or tennis player learns. We learn by doing. As the educator John Caldwell Holt (1976) wrote: Not many years ago I began to play the cello. Most people would say that what I am doing is ‘learning to play’ the cello… But these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exist two very different processes: (1) learning to play the cello; and (2) playing the cello. They imply that I will do the first until I have completed it, at which point I will stop the first process and begin the second. In short, I will go on ‘learning to play’ until I have ‘learned to play’ and then I will begin to play. Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes, but one. We learn to do something by doing it. There is no other way. (p. 13)

I would maintain that the relevance of our discussion across this book to practitioners is akin to a cellist knowing what a cello is. By reflecting on what a workshop is, we can explore our motivations and methods as facilitators with greater clarity. The next step is to do it. To bring this or that workshop to life. And that is why, having dissertated and interviewed on the subject, I established The Moveable Feast Workshops for workshop practitioners—to develop practice through practice.

I feel that is the key, Tony, ‘practice through practice’. You know how we both love tennis. In fact, often when I am going to run a workshop or teach a class, I know whether I will do well if I play a tennis match beforehand. Or, the inverse, if I run a workshop and then play tennis, there is a carry over of energy and presence. Now I acknowledge that tennis is a competitive sport, but it is also totally embodied. I was once working with a tennis pro who was helping me improve my serve because it is, I would say, the most important stroke in the game. It is the one shot that can give you full control of what is to happen in the point. Everything else after the serve is dependent on the response of your opponent. This tennis pro underlined for me that the second serve is the most important to practice. He was teaching me a second serve that would disguise where the ball would go. Since a player’s second

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serve is usually the weaker one, placement of the ball is important. The pro had commented that most the of the players he watched just hit the ball with the same motion and grip as the first serve, but slower. He suggested I change my grip to one that disguised where the ball was going, until the second I struck it. The trick was just to flick my wrist at this last moment, so that when I turned my wrist one way the ball would go more to the left, the other way, to the right. That moment is what I would call the hinge point—the place with the most potential to surprise my opponent. I look up at my opponent on the other side of the net, see where s/he is leaning, my body memory remembering his weaker stroke from either our histories of playing together or what had happened when we practiced together before the match. I bring my racket back and up and, at the same time, toss the ball in the air, bring the racket forward and, at the last moment, flick my wrist one way or the other. The more I try it, the more confident I become, adding more oomph to my serve. This is embodied intuition resulting from the development of skilful practice. The hinge moments are spontaneous, where the shape of things can be changed. Just a touch of the structure of the serve keeps improvisation from wandering. On the tennis court, the task is to fool my opponent. In the Workshop it is to move participants on through their artistic storying. I call this hinge moment, the moment of the AHA where things can change. We break open the AHA and this challenges me to learn to be attentive to such moments, and to take more risks to dive into them. Of course, just as taking dives depends on the temperature of the water and the amount of time it takes to dry off, my own sensitivity to those constraints in Workshop determine whether or when to play with/in the possibilities of such moments. Another thought about playing tennis/facilitation as embodied intuition comes to mind: Tennis involves a lot of balls in the air. High lobs and serving into the sun (if you are playing outdoors). Courts are often placed along a north–south axis. In early fall, the sun starts dipping into the southern sky. The trees are losing their leaves and their stark skeletons cast shadows on the court. Serving into the sun one becomes aware of the ball, without actually seeing it as the glare of the sun makes it disappear. One has to have the confidence of your habitual stroke and trust that you will hit the ball where you want it to go. A good approach shot at the net brings a response of a high lob over my head. I attempt to hit the ball, finding it somehow and it goes either into the opposite court or the net. We switch sides. Without thinking I can recall those moments of blindness and my response. I don’t have to think ‘hit the ball high into the air’. Now, seeing clearly, I can embody response to the opponent on the other side of the net. I can sense what is like on the other side of the net, but this is not an intellectual feeling I am sensing; it is a bodily landscape and sky memory of what it was to be on the serving into the sun side of the net. ‘Knowing’ that feeling, because even though it took place just seconds ago, I am no longer in that space of blindness; but, somehow, I can recall it. To me this is embodied intuition. The facilitator as story guide is both listener and teller, switching back and forth as is required.

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The philosopher George Herbert Mead (1934) suggested that communication takes the form of gestures made by one person evoking responses from others. Therefore, there is no meaning in the gesture, but in the gesture and its responses. Improvisation is collective and in relational and spontaneously responsive activity. In Workshop we deliberately foster spontaneous interaction between everyone, with the arts as the joint task. It is then through artistic creation that people begin to recognize themselves, each other and their work in new ways. I am thinking now of an early experience I had with Forum Theatre. I was the joker in a performance by high school students performing a scene about bullying. They were all in a make-believe car (but it was real to them). The driver got out of the car and started harassing a young woman on the sidewalk. Someone in the audience yelled ‘stop’ and replaced the woman on the sidewalk to deal with the harasser. She tried something out, and at that moment, this young man, passenger in the car, who had been very silent and passive during the workshop preparation of this play, locked his eyes on me as a facilitator, as if asking for permission to intervene. Without nodding my head, I gave my assent. Now this was not according to the rules normally set out in a Forum Theatre show, but, knowing him and how he interacted in the workshop, I felt this was an important moment for him to get out of the car and approach the bully. It doesn’t matter whether he was successful (he wasn’t, one word from the bully ensured that), what mattered was that he tried. This was truly a moment of improvisation, both on my part, and on his. He later shared in our closing circle how important this moment had been for him. “Intuitive responses don’t appear by magic – as on a wing and a prayer (although it might look like it) … It is action that arises through capacity to listen, observe and respond with the ‘confusion’ of the moment—in that context, at that point in time” (Preston, 2016, p. 68). Applied responses require a strong sense of objectives and intention and an alignment with the values to underpin them. Therefore, it is not just a ‘gut feeling’, there are all sorts of cues and clues that provide information, we just have to be open to them.

Well Warren, we have covered a fair amount of ground over our duologue including applied intuition, emergence, form, presence, structure, narrative arc, risk and trust, context specificity to name just a smattering of the sites we have visited by bouncing off each other’s thoughts and ideas about Workshop. One thing we have in common, and there are quite a few including our on-going tennis matches, is our choice of Workshop as a form when we have selected to use in our teaching and research. To qualify the last sentence, I would contend that the idea of choice is overplayed in our social and economic structures constructed around individualism. As an artist, I

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feel as much chosen by what comes my way as me making a choice. Receptivity is the other side of the creativity coin. The reason Workshop became my main form of practice is expressed in the quote with which we started our conversation. “Every workshop builds a story and it’s an original story. A story written then and there. It is completely new, and it’s never been thought of before and it can never be repeated again. It is the one story, and it has a thread, and one thing leads to the next to the next, to the next to the next. It is built there, and everything goes towards building that – nothing is wasted” (Enzo Cozzi in Gee 2001, p. 43). It is problematic to quantify what happens in a workshop and impossible to meaningfully standardize workshop practice. Workshop is pudding proof because the full sense of any workshop is only available to those present. It is therefore a form resistant to colonization and standardizations. The puddings can’t get in. This means there is a certain freedom to explore in a workshop but conversely, it makes it challenging to prove to anybody outside the experience the worth of what happened—especially bodies and institutions that want figures rather than personal testimony. Experience happens in hermetically sealed individual and collective moments and is resistant to proof. More happens in a moment than we can speak of or for that matter, write. Often, I look back on a workshop and think I could write a whole book on what happened there but, before I can blink, the next one rolls up and I am plotting, planning and purchasing the wherewithal to make the next workshop happen. That workshop-to-workshop process was my year in, year out practice for over thirty years. And, for my part, the reason why it was so difficult to find the space to write anything substantial about it. For the past twenty years, I have also been the artistic director and lead artist of two workshop companies—Moveable Feast Workshop Co. and Creation Myth Puppets. You and I ran Mindfield nearly ten years ago with the intention of creating A Workshop Atlas that would be a graphic account of our journey over 11 workshops. Our intention was to use those workshops as our research material to draw out the principles, elements and qualities of Workshop. The main reason why we never fully realised that intention was that we were too busy doing Workshop to find time to collaborate and write about it. It got to the point, when I thought I should write the book about why I am not writing the book! There was just too much happening. On March 18th 2020, my workshop-to-workshop process came to an abrupt halt. The context changed. COVID had arrived in the UK. The year before at a company gathering, the company had produced this manifesto (Fig. 6.1) for our work: Back in March 2020, Creation Myth Puppet Company artists had gathered to finish a large on-going Arts Council project funded entitled ‘First Person Plural’. The project was designed in response to a headteacher’s request to create a project to unite two schools in a common community. This involved a total of more than seven hundred children aged 4 to 11. We began the project by bringing fifteen children from each school, representing all the age groups involved, together for two days of story creation. We told them the story behind the one-thousand-year-old epic Persian poem, ‘Conference of The Birds’. This is the story of how the birds of the world go on a long and arduous journey to find a spiritual answer from a mystical and magical bird called the Simurgh. The children analysed the structure of the story and then

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Fig. 6.1 Creation Myth Puppet Company manifesto

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re-wrote it to represent some of the challenges they decided we face in the world today. These two days, which were just the beginning of a much larger project, would warrant a book in itself. The children, and these were a wide cross section of each school community, organised themselves into smaller multi-age range democratic decision-making groups in a way that was breathtaking. There were six groups of five children. No two groups worked the same, but each group ensured that everyone had a voice. To coin an English expression, it was gobsmacking. Then the groups went back into their school groups of fifteen and wrote a version of the story as a gift for their partner school. We spent two weeks across the two schools, making more than seven hundred puppets with the seven hundred plus children, writing scripts with them, devising and rehearsing before performing a show in each school. The two shows were filmed and relayed back to the school which had authored the story. They were viewed live by packed audiences of parents and relatives. And neither of the shows was quite complete because the story could only be completed when both schools came together in a single final performance of nearly seven hundred performers. A new Guinness world record for the biggest amateur puppet show on earth. Despite copious attempts to locate a suitable sized auditorium for this final event, we ended up in a park between the two schools. And it rained. The local BBC and network television, newspapers and radio all went mad for the story and just before seven hundred children were about to perform, the storm blew the rain away. And we did it. In March 2020, which was five months after that final spectacular, the company gathered to co-create a workshop for the children to reflect creatively on their experience. This would be evaluated by a highly experienced arts evaluator and documented in a film. The structure we had was to invite the children to create a newspaper called The Crow’s Nest. A child’s eye view and edition one would be the children’s perspective on creativity and imagination. Our idea was to make a crow’s nest installation in each school with the potential of being a puppet stage for bird puppets they had made. The two nests would be lined with their thoughts and drawings on paper. These would be collected by a group of children who were the reporters and put into a newspaper form by other children who were the editors. We had trains and accommodation booked, all the materials were bought, everything was planned and then the guillotine moment of the first lockdown for the pandemic was announced. Our work ceased. It is going to be at least eighteen months from that day before I am in a space doing a workshop with people. I have run two zoom workshops. One with the Rhetoric of London and the other with the International Masters students. Both of which I have talked about. So, Warren, our duologue has ironically been made possible by the absence of workshops. We have talked about whether we should refer to the person who leads the workshop as a workshop leader or a facilitator. We settled on facilitator. The main reason for settling on that term was its common usage. However, I think a more accurate and specific term is Story Guide. Why? Because that is the overarching role we perform as leader or facilitator in a workshop. We guide the group by directing,

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facilitating, listening, suggesting, attending and shaping their narrative across the arc of the workshop. I hold sway with the old Yiddish saying that “God made people because God loves stories.” We fiction our lives. We are story makers. This is not exclusive to a culture or a type of person—even if, like the child in Ireland who said, “could the show be about me finding my imagination?”, we don’t believe in our own creativity. This too is a story. We are how we tell ourselves. I believe the imagination is an integral quality of being human. I suspect the imagination is like a muscle, if you don’t use it then it will go flabby. At the same time, the paradox is, whilst we create circumstance through how we imagine it to be, we are also creatures of circumstance and mediators between heaven and earth, between the conscious and the unconscious realms, between our perceptions and our environment. I am an advocate and agent of Workshop because it is a form that embraces these paradoxes and the inherent uncertainties that is life around and within us through the imaginations and the story created by the people then and there. And that story can be to find new meaning, make something new or discover something. Enzo’s quote sums this up and that is why it is planted at the top of our introduction. There is another quote though that resonates throughout my practice as a facilitator. This is from Peter Brook’s (1995) lecture called The Golden Fish: We can follow this better if we think of a fisherman making a net. As he works, care and meaning are present in every flick of the finger. He draws his thread, he ties the knots, enclosing emptiness with forms whose exact shape corresponds to an exact function. Then the net is thrown into the water, it is dragged to and fro, with the tide, against the tide, in many complex rhythms. A fish is caught, an uneatable fish, or a common fish good for stewing, maybe a fish of many colours, or a rare fish, or a poisonous fish or at moments of grace a golden fish. There is however a subtle distinction between theatre and fishing that must be underlined. In the case of the well-made net, it is the fisherman’s luck whether a good or a bad fish is caught. In the theatre, those who tie the knots are also responsible for the quality of the moment that is ultimately caught in their net. It is amazing—the fisherman in his action influences the quality of the fish that lands in his net! (p. 84)

I want the best for people and whenever I design and deliver a workshop, I am looking to net that ‘golden fish’ (the AHA moment). I make the net, cast it into the ocean of imagination and then try to guide the story of those people then and there so that they catch their golden fish. So that they can take their fish home and keep it in a bowl or have a feast or whatever their fish means to them. Many of the people we work with do not get the best. They do not get the opportunities to catch a golden fish, they are often socially, emotionally, culturally or economically deprived; sometimes they are subject to abusive behaviour, abandoned or discriminated against. But Workshop is not just for the deprived. It is for everyone. I go back to the words written and spoken by the young girl at the Rainbow Serpent workshop: The Rainbow Serpent said: “Remember the laws. Try to break them and they will break you. Follow them and you will live happily and peacefully on Earth. These are the laws. Dream and Respect. Your dreams are what made you, so follow them and listen to them.

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Your dreams made the world, so respect the world because the world is made out of your dreams.”

At 4 a.m. in the highest town in Britain called Shaftesbury, I conducted my first Workshop Interview in a twenty four hour improvisation workshop with a community theatre maker named John Oram (n.d.). He said: “The aim of a workshop is to break the myth that people are not creative.” I run workshops to make work that exceeds expectations. I run workshops to guide others to make work that is theirs. I run workshops to be an environment where people have opportunities to dream their stories and respect each other. This is the politic that underpins my praxis.

Tony, along with the aim of enabling creativity to emerge through people working together, I feel that my praxis is about enabling ‘the power of the multiple’. The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche (2009) talks about the danger of the single story as it “creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story”. This is why I so love using Image Theatre in Workshop where many meanings can emerge from one single image. Additionally, as Hollis (2004) writes, “we are imaginal creatures; through images the world is embodied for us, and we can in turn embody the world and make it conscious.” (p. 31) I was in an online workshop recently with Theatre of the Oppressed practitioners. One small group of four had developed a five-image story of their experiences of power. After the group had shown the images to the rest of us, we captioned each image and told the story as we saw it. Afterwards, one of the presenting group wanted to clarify that one aspect of the images had been misinterpreted by the audience. She said that the story involved characters who were all dealing with someone outside the image story. After she spoke, the rest of the group disagreed with her, saying that one character in the story was actually the antagonist, the one with power over the others. I share this because these non-verbal images were up for interpretation by both the audience and the group performing them. So, there were multiple stories told, and a site of tension and conflict was identified that would be fruitful to explore more. The second ‘politic’ I would underline is the politic of a process that is based on participant life experience. They bring that life experience into the Workshop, explore it through the creative processes I guide them through and then take it back out to the world outside. The key term here is metaxis (Linds, 2006) which I wrote about a few years ago. Metaxis is about the in-between, where the world of Workshop is the Workshop of the world. What grounds this experience is the spiral of knowing. I will take you back to where I learned about this:

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It was back in the summer of 1983 where I would say I began to name my practice as facilitator/popular educator. I had been working in education about international development for the past 6 years. For the past 3 years I had been working in Saskatchewan for an organization funded by the Canadian government’s aid agency (CIDA) to educate Canadians about international development. There had been a network of such organizations in the prairies of Canada and dozens of people working in that field. So, I and a colleague were organizing a training retreat for these workers at a summer camp in the Qu’Appelle Valley east of Regina, Saskatchewan. We had heard about a couple of Canadians who had spent several years working in Latin America with an organization using a method called ‘popular education’ and so we invited them to be the key resource people for this retreat. I had been exposed to the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire over the previous years. Whilst I was working as a group leader with a Canadian cultural exchange leading seventeen to twenty year old Haitian and Canadian youth in Haiti, I had met a literacy worker working through a liberation theology framework with Haitian subsistence farmers. His approach mirrored Freire’s. I had also met Paulo at a conference in Canada the previous year. But I had never understood how the educational processes developed, in what was called at the time the developing world, could be applied in Canada. So, hosting this couple was my first exposure to how this might be applied in a Canadian context. So, my origins for Workshop are rooted in a particular Canadian and work context. What Bev Burke and Rick Arnold (the names of the couple) brought to this retreat was what they called the ‘spiral method’ (Fig. 6.2) and it is this method that has stayed with me in my Workshop and facilitation practice over the years. It is the spine of my work in devising, forming and framing Workshop practice. The spiral involves starting with the experiences of participants, looking for patterns, an analysis of those patterns, a discussion of a plan for action and then taking action which then becomes another spiralling cycle where that action becomes a new experience to explore. The first sections of this spiral are what Workshop focuses on, although other elements can emerge in further sections of the spiral. The key aspects in order to begin this devising are the objectives or purpose of the work together and the ‘guiding thread’ that links to what you, Tony, call the spark. The guiding thread is the central idea or ‘axis’ around which all activities revolve. It is the core issue or perspective that kept in mind, keeps us on track. “It is the golden thread if you will, that is woven throughout the fabric (of the Workshop), which all other threads complement” (Arnold et al., 1991, p. 38). Whilst one as a leader or facilitator can develop and use this thread in advance (based on what you have been contracted to do by a funder or a research goal) this thread also changes as things emerge in the Workshop. But the idea of this golden thread helps me as facilitator reflect on all that is happening in the space of interaction, making, and performing that is Workshop. Augusto Boal often would talk about Theatre of the Oppressed through the metaphor of a tree. All aspects of the tree contributed to his praxis. In the same way, we have explored the practice of Workshop, yet not only does it have context and elements and experiences, it is also rooted in many life experiences. We have

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(Arnold et al. 1991, p. 38) Fig. 6.2 Popular education spiral of learning (used with permission of Between the Lines) (Arnold et al., 1991, p. 38)

shared ours here, so we ask the reader to also think about their own history of creative inquiry and exploration. Here I have taken us back at the end of our journey to one of the roots of my journey. The end is the beginning ….

We have worked together, and separately, and discussed endlessly for nearly twenty years our take on Workshop. We have batted ideas back and forth and invented all sorts of workshop constructions from the toolkits we assembled over the years. The starting point for all this interaction and collaboration was our agreement that Workshop is a specific form of practice. There are many areas where our individual practices or praxis overlap. We both draw upon Boal’s work and we both use puppets. We even co-facilitated a two-day symposium, which began with getting all forty delegates to make simple brown paper bag puppets. The room filled with these newly made characters greeting each other. It was the sort of scene that one can hardly imagine unless one sees it with one’s own eyes. The symposium was on one side of the Big Pond in Saskatchewan and,

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on the other side, in Devon, we ran an experimental workshop on praxology with artists called Image of the Hour which drew on a Boal exercise. We worked in different communities, across diverse fields of practice and pursued varied avenues of inquiry. Our motivations to run workshops also coincide. We believe in people, are unafraid of the inherent uncertainties, enjoy the unknown emerging and get joy from seeing the joy in others. If our workshops increase the agency of individuals or enable a group to gain skills or find meaning, then we are both happy facilitators. Workshop enables the emergence of a community-in-the-making, what Victor Turner (1982) called communitas, the camaradie where roles are suspended. He identifies three types, spontaneous, which is temporary and intense; normative, which is a preservation of the spontaneous but with a system of rules; and ideological, which involves a blueprint for the reform of society. The focus of Workshop bridges the gap between spontaneous and normative and provides an ‘As-if’ world of creativity. This gap is the in-between of liminality, “where it has the potential to free up human capacities of cognition, affect, volition, creativity, etc.” (p. 44) from normal boundaries, thus unfolding new possibilities. We both aim to engage the imagination by creating liminal bubbles, mirrors that enable participants to engage with their imaginations and reflect back on their lives. To quote two creative souls, Kurt Vonnegut (1962) wrote, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” (p. v). We are the great pretenders but what we pretend in our workshops is very real. We invent worlds inside our workshop bubble so that we can reinvent the world outside that bubble.

6.3 Afterword We included in Appendix 2 of The Arc of the Workshop chapter a Workshop Dictionary. Another invention created in a workshop that was an inquiry by practitioners into their workshop practice was The Rules of Praxology.

6.3.1 Praxology The first workshop we ran together on our Mindfield project (which led to this book) was experimental. We spent a couple days discussing our practice as our path into devising a workshop for other practitioners. We decided that we would explore the notion of praxis. The workshop borrowed its title from a Boal (1992) exercise: Image of the Hour. The conceit we used to begin the workshop was that we introduced ourselves as two praxologists who were interested in exploring the idea of praxology. Through a series of embodied exercises across a single day, the group looked at their own practice to see how they were praxologists. They combined the findings from

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their inquiries into a small rule book for praxologists. This is what those artists and workshop facilitators created: Rules of Praxology2 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Praxologists are always authentic, even when fictioning Praxologists are always in the in-between—on the threshold of a dream Praxologists swim in the sea of imagination Praxologists always attempt, as circumstances permit, to practise praxology (this rule is the most important) Praxology is always relational in all aspects of praxis3 Praxologists are passionate Praxologists don’t know Praxologists seek threads There is no rule #9.

6.3.2 Our Definitions of Workshop Having journeyed across many years of inquiry into Workshop practice, collaborating with each other, spent many hours together in conversation about what it all means and finally compiling this duologue; perhaps it’s time for us to have a final word on the big question we’ve tried to answer: What is Workshop? Ok Warren, here is my contribution: Workshop: an imaginative, participatory environment with a facilitated porous structure, which aims to guide a group through an inquiry into a process or skill so that they reinvent their story and discover something new.

Tony, here is mine: Workshop: an approach to arts-based inquiry that enables the stories of participants’ experiences to emerge through multiple senses. It provides the conditions for creativity and imagination that guides the group through at theme, process, or skill so they can both individually and collectively tell the stories that emerge.

References Adiche, C. N. (2009). The danger of a single story. Ted Global. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimam anda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story/transcript?language=en. Accessed 2 Nov 2021.

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None of this and all of this is easy. “Praxis is the reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it” (Freire, 1970, p. 36).

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Arnold, R., Burke, B., James, C., Martin, D., & Thomas, B. (1991). Educating for a change. Between the Lines. Bantock, N. (2014). The trickster’s hat: A mischievous apprenticeship in creativity. Penguin. Boal, A. (1992). Games for actors and non-actors (A. Jackson, Trans). Routledge. Brook, P. (1995). There are no secrets. Methuen. Freire, P. (1968). Pedagogia do oprimido. Facsímile digitalizado (Manuscritos). Instituto Paulo Freire. English edition: Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Continuum. Gee, T. (and the thoughts of 1001 workshoppers). (2005). A workshop handbook. Tools, tips and tales. Self-published. Gee, T. (2001). Report on Mindfield project to the arts council (Unpublished report). Hauw, D. (2009). Reflective practice in the heart of training and competition: The course of experience analysis for enhancing elite acrobatics athletes’ performances. Reflective Practice: International and Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, 10(3), 341–352. https://doi.org/10.1080/146239 40903034671 Hollis, J. (2004). Mythologems: Incarnations of the invisible world. Inner City Books. Holt, J. C. (1976). Instead of education: Ways to help people do things better. Dutton. Hughes, T. (1994). Winter pollen: Occasional prose. Faber and Faber. Jewitt, C., & Kress, G. (2003). Multimodal literacy. Peter Lang Publishing. Leavy, P. (2009). Method meets art: Arts-based research practice. The Guilford Press. Linds, W. (2006). Metaxis: Dancing (in) the in-between. In J. Cohen-Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion (pp. 114–124). Routledge. Linds, W. (2012). Report on sabbatical 2011–2012 to Concordia University (Unpublished Report). Linds, W., Hyslop, M., Goulet, L., & Juárez, V. E. J. (2018). (2018) Weechi metuwe mitotan: Playing games of presence with Indigenous youth in Saskatchewan, Canada. International Journal of Play, 7(1), 41–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/21594937.2018.1437340 Mason, J. (2002). Researching your own practice: The discipline of noticing. Routledge. Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self and society, From the standpoint of a social behaviourist. Edited with an introduction by C. W. Morris. University of Chicago Press. National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education. (1999). All our futures. Scottish Department of Education. http://sirkenrobinson.com/pdf/allourfutures.pdf. Accessed 9 Aug 2021. Preston, S. (2016). Applied theatre—Facilitation: Pedagogies, practices, resilience. Bloomsbury. Turner, V. (1982). From ritual to theatre: The human seriousness of play. PAJ Publications. Vonnegut, K. (1962). Mother night. Fawcett Publications. Wang, Q., Coemans, S., Siegesmund, R., & Hannes, K. (2017). Arts-based methods in socially engaged research practice: A classification framework. Art/Research International, 2(2), 5–39. https://doi.org/10.18432/R26G8P Wikipedia. (n.d.). Nepantla. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepantla. Accessed 2 Dec 2022. Wright, D. (2005). Embodying, emotioning, expressing learning. Reflective Practice: International and Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives, 6(1), 85–93. https://doi.org/10.1080/146239404200032 6815