Convenings
Past Learning Exchange Reports:
Minneapolis, March 8–10, 2002
Andrea Assaf
2002
Heartspace/Headspace: Moving From Personal to Public in Arts-based Civic Dialogue
Through creative movement, story-sharing and dialogue, Animating Democracy staff member and artist Andrea Assaf facilitated a multi-layered session exploring the challenges of moving between heartspace and headspace, and from private to civic, engaging questions such as: How do we make the transition from the heartful, personal response that art evokes to the public space of the civic issue? What is the public space of emotion, and how does affective learning function in dialogue? Are personal and public, emotional and rational, private and civic useful distinctions? How can we open up feeling and thinking, and encourage people to articulate from both? What is the unique power of art in creating the potential for new kinds of civic dialogue?
Below is the outline of a “Text & Movement” process leading to dialogue, followed by a transcript of the discussion that followed. The structure of many of these exercises are derived from training with Celeste Miller and Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. The co-facilitator for this session, dialogue specialist Sherry Cottom, was ill and not able to lead the dialogue section.
Exercise
- Warm-up: Name circle with movement / gesture
- Free-write (3 min): A time in your life when you witnessed something that left you speechles: unable to talk at that moment, or for a period of time. Go where you need to go; could be something small, a fleeting moment, could be something monumental; you choose. Could be personal experience, real-life event, or work of art. Describe the scene, event, or what was witnessed; what happened; how you felt; details of the environment; who was there, etc. Keep writing until the facilitator calls stop.
- Snapshot: Look at what you wrote. Take a moment to re-read it, decide what you might share later, and what you'd prefer not to. Underline or circle images, metaphors, striking phrases. Choose a moment in the story, and take a photograph of it in your mind. A snapshot. Notice everything in that picture, zoom-in on the details. Make a list of 6-8 details
- Movement: Choose your 4-5 favorite details. Make a movement for each. (Facilitator models possibilities). Remember them and put them together in an order; make them flow into a phrase. (Practice with music).
- Find a partner: Without talking, share your movement phrase with your partner. AFTER both partners have shared movement, you can talk. Tell your partner one thing you liked about what they did. Tell your partner what happened AFTER you were made speechless by the event you witnessed: What did you do? How long did it take you to find words again? Have you ever spoken publicly about what you witnessed? (Your choice to share or not to share what the actual event was; you have the right to keep it private.) [Facilitator’s Note: because of the unexpected emotional content/ level of engagement of some of the participants in this section, I allowed more time for it than was originally planned.]
- Group sharing of the movement phrases only: split room in half, with music. (2x, at the request of the participants)
- Full Group Brainstorm: Group generates a list of Civic Issues—that you have worked on, are currently worked on, will or hope to work on in the future. Facilitator records list on board. Group discussion/ editing of list. (Facilitator may intervene if necessary: Is that a civic issue? What is the civic aspect of that topic?)
- Column writing: Choose one of the civic issues from the list (yours or someone else’s—whatever is most intriguing to you at this moment). Draw a line down the center of your paper, dividing it into 2 vertical columns. On the left hand side, you will write about a personal experience you have had relating to this issue (story, memory, incident; what happened how you felt, details, etc). On the right hand side, you will write about facts, statistics, rules, laws, policies, social systems, etc. ie macro things you know about this issue. You will begin writing in the right hand column. You MUST switch columns when the facilitator calls SWITCH, even if you're in mid-sentence. You will be told to switch several times. Go.
- Read what you have written. Read HORIZONTALLY across. Notice new images, phrases, unexpected things that appear. Circle the juicy stuff. What did you notice or discover? Full group - share a few at random. Edit what you have written into a piece of text, a few sentences or phrases long (or just words/ images). Make sure you draw from both columns, in combination.
- Put it together: Layer the words, your text, onto your movement phrase. You MAY NOT change the order of the text or the movement; Just layer (trust the process). You may edit the words; play with timing, repetition, placement, etc. Rehearse (with music). (Because we were running overtime for this section, this final art-making step was really quick – 5 min. Half the group wanted to complete this process, half the group wanted to skip straight to open discussion.)
Full group showing: quick round-robin, those who wanted to show the final text & movement piece did.
Group discussion
Because Sherry Cottom, the group facilitator, was very sick, this portion wasn’t well moderated. Open discussion went where the participants wanted to go. Andrea handed out questions from artists in designing the exchange as conversation starters, questions on the table.
Sandy Augustin, Intermedia Arts: By having to move through something (in the exercises we just did), you made something personal into something public. It can be difficult to find the right words when you’re immediately asked to react to something you saw. Liz Lerman’s critical response is a good way to approach this difficult situation because they ask what stuck with you.
Diane Burbie, NCCJ: I have to have some level of clarity of what I think or feel before I can express it, and art plays a wonderful role in discovering what my thoughts and feelings are.
Treva Offut, The Kitchen: You have to think about having the proper resources—often we don’t think about the resources we need, or that we don’t know we need, to go deeper. It’s part of making it a safe space. People coming in need to feel that they are taken care of.
Marty Pottenger, artist: Emotional hurt keep us from doing our best thinking and being in a place where transformation is possible. A key challenge in the work is to figure out how to negotiate that.
Sandy: In doing an event about where people feel safe, we worked very hard and thought very carefully about taking care of people. We had chances for people to get there/build up to it, and chances for people to get out of it. How many hits does it take to create change? People need to feel like they can come back again after experiencing an event.
Andrea Assaf, Animating Democracy project associate: How does this idea of safe space relate to artist risk-taking?
Tressa Varner, The Andy Warhol Museum: In art I see artists’ safety, but dialogue facilitation is very risky. I didn’t know who people were that I was working with, I had a new group every day. It’s really scary.
Treva: In terms of the artistic merit of the piece that the dialogue is shaped around—one model is to throw out all the issues in the piece and then talk about them so it’s like a big therapy session. But there are so many other models to use, like Wendy’s session yesterday. It organically created a safe space because you’ve moved through a process that is revealing but not intimidating.
Barbara Schaffer Bacon, Animating Democracy co-director: Not everyone in the group is at the same place (heartspace/headspace). For every person who wants to talk about something emotional, there’s someone saying “I don’t want to hear you have that revelation right now.”
Diane: Often, people of color, when given the permission, talk about racism at the emotional level; and white people are expected to talk about it at the cognitive level so that others can determine if they are worthy to be in the conversation.
Shirley Mae Springer Staten, Understanding Neighbors: Example: With the group, talk about a time you felt different, and that gives you some common ground to start from.
Marty: Issue of perspective: We offer perspective; lay it out, before we engage in dialogue. No right or wrong thinking, no villains or losers.
Diane: The best entryway to dialogue is not verbal. If the dialogue begins in a non-verbal way and reflects and draws on something creative for that reflection, what they want to talk about is different, and the conversation is richer for it. We’re not re-hashing the same material.
Sandy: The environment needs to allow for a range of expression. When we talk about creating a safe space, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t yelling at each other.
Shirley Mae: I want to hear more about safety, because that’s come up a lot in my project.
Treva: Ask: what would it take you to get in the room? In talking about audience, think about what audience you want to attract, and the singe factor (Jan’s session)—how many times can we get burned and come back to this? Pre-dialogue about assumptions on both sides. These assumptions are what are stopping these sides from coming together. And then you can talk about goals.
Andrea: In your projects, do you find people getting confused about what are the emotional aspects and what are the civic aspects? Do you get confused? Do you find it helpful to make those distinctions? Is that helpful to the public in doing civic dialogue?
Treva: For us, the institution needed to spend more time addressing the issue, and resources. For me, it kept things on a certain level, and it could have gone deeper, further. The institution could have taken more responsibility, had we had the foresight to do more preparation, discussions related to the civic issues, more connections with people working in the field. These were missing from the process.
Sherry Cottom, YWCA: Partnership is so important between the artists and facilitators—recognizing that they have their own areas of expertise and respecting the expertise of the group.
Tressa: What we found the hardest was not letting your passion for the issue take over. You want so bad to see the group make the move to the next level and you want to move them forward, but you have to let them do that on their own. As the facilitator, you can’t take over. I don’t get heart-ful about anything other than this—they are so directly connected.
Armando: I am struggling with the assumption that everyone speaks the same language. Until you identify the culture of the group and lay that as common ground for the dialogue to begin; this dialogue here that is taking place is foreign to me, and no one has checked in with everyone to see if they’re engaged. Culturally, there are different ways to address it, and it can be so diverse. The assumption that we’re all on the same page culturally is overriding.
Sherry: That is my job here today, but I’m not really able to do it.
Armando Gutierrez: Yesterday had that feeling, too. Yesterday, the directive came from the person in charge, and once you have framed that as the format, I am already somewhat disengaged. And that keeps people out of the dialogue.
Sherry: Model that the Warhol Museum used—use different vehicles to engage. Know what medium works for you personally.
Armando: When you have an overarching question, there is going to be a struggle. Everyone needs to take responsibility for keeping it safe. Everyone has a certain tolerance for when you start to feel unsafe, and acknowledging that is critical—everyone is taking care of each other.
Paul Myers, MACLA: I normally work in dyads, and I think that dialogue occurs in photos, because that’s my art form. You guys take it to a whole other level.
Sandy: You have to work under the assumption that everyone is an expert in their own mind and their own belief system. There is some information that has not been shared about where this Minneapolis Exchange came from. People may not understand why are these people facilitating—it’s because certain people were asked to share. You need to give that background so that people have all of the information to make the choice about whether they want to participate.
Marty: Sometimes people just need to be really upset. You don’t need to turn the whole group to that, though. How do you design it so that it’s not the whole discussion?
Diane: The communities I work with have forced me to think differently because they ask: “How is this suppose to be beneficial?” “How does this fit? How does it help or change?” “How is hearing the voices of individual people a structure that works?”
