While we'd done our best to keep the momentum flowing from one workshop to the next, the day of the last workshop we had only 3 people showing up. Cheena and I both wanted to cancel, but Dana from Forward Together said, let's roll with it. It ended up being intimate and awesome, and I left feeling so glad to have continued on.
Folks came back and shared what they'd created - which was super compelling and beautiful. I was again pleasantly surprised with how raw and real people were willing to get. Since there were so many fewer participants, we really had to improvise and toss out much of our plan. I felt really good about being transparent and asking where people wanted to go next, and also about our ability to adapt. We ended up doing a big group activity and improvised poems with one another's language while doing another embodiment exercise.
Mostly, I feel like the work that we started moving towards in this workshop is life long work. We took on a huge question: how to reinvigorate arts with
movement work and movement work with cultural work? Of course this question
wouldn’t be answered in two workshops. Of course it is a question that’s been
being asked for a long, long time and will continue to be asked. With amazing guidance and support from Forward Together we framed
the whole workshop as an experiment, but also took the work seriously, it both
relaxed my concerns and allowed us to see the things that were arising from the
workshops in useful ways.
A few days after the workshop we went to a Forward Together staff meeting to report back on our workshops and talk about what might be useful things to think about for the Strong Families Initiative. In a moment of appreciations, one of the staff described an egg that was broken, and explained that this idea of arts and organizing meeting towards culture shift is really about putting back two pieces that broke apart and that need one another to be whole. That struck me as exactly the right metaphor for this whole process. It has been strange and difficult and filled with the emergence of the intense tension between organizing and art spaces both external and internal. But it has also been an incredible learning experience and felt, often, like little steps towards integration.
Hope all of you are finishing the semester well.
Love,
t
