First we create a language within English for the day. This determines how we will speak about things. As we will be delivering instructions for participants to follow, the language we use will be part of the mechanism of understanding. It will influence responses to requests by the workshop leaders and the way in which participants respond to these requests. It will be a language common to the room on this particular day, with specific meanings beginning to circle like wisps of smoke around us. We will say things in ways meaningful for the particular people creating the culture there in the room on that day.
The language is nested in the ways we use it in those first minutes. Sometimes this means we should be speaking off the cuff, other times it means we should be reading something carefully composed. It helps to find the most helpful words to use, something shaped for access, opening windows and doors for letting in and out. Sounds like breathing. Through the words we use, in the way we use them, a chain of meaning builds a sense-making machine with its very own determination of what it means to “make sense”. A comment, joke, or story as well as a sound, a concept, or a specific movement or action will recur as part of that sense-making built in the day’s language in what becomes a series of interlinking call backs.
It’s a pleasure to watch people find something they didn’t know they were looking for. With opening new avenues of thought or allowing oneself to be surprised comes a sense of inspiration. Inspiration tricks ideas out of hiding. The task becomes which ones to follow. The workshop is a journey from spark to connection and the flood of thought triggered by the body working in motion with the mind. This is followed by prompts offering the confinement of structure. Some of the dismay of decision making and questions about rightness and what not to include are streamlined by fitting the material into the confinement of a structure.
Some workshops are for participants who are students at a university or sixth form, some have been for the staff members of an educational institution, or a theatre, dance, or performance company. Some are for the general public with a mixture of interests and experience and with different reasons for being there.
This one had a mixture of faculty, PhD candidates and students. There were only 8 participants and they were all very different. The youngest was the most enthusiastic. This is not always how it works.
Sometimes it is difficult to see what is going on in a making process. People often rush to understand what they are exposed to. This happens within their own minds and follows the rules they already know. There seems to be a need for familiarity in order for people to really see what they are looking at or hearing. If a novel, or new, way of seeing or an unfamiliar idea or item of material comes into the mix this tends to bring discomfort and dislike. It’s part of a defense mechanism. Workshops are the perfect place to slow down the critical mind and tolerate unknown territory.
Sometimes people only see what they have already seen or what they ALWAYS see as an automatic default. This leads to an inability to see what is right in front of them. There is an internal translation software that works in the background protecting them from the strange or the unfamiliar. Some people can see something new right away. Sometimes this inspires everyone else by example. Sometimes inspiration comes from being trusted to be capable of responding to what is being asked for. Affirmation begets a kind of confidence to be fearless with ideas and to relax into a sense of comfort in which ideas are free to form.
Sometimes in a workshop we are trying to imagine difference, different ways to breathe, move, communicate, to work in different scales, in a different colour, with a different brain. Sometimes in the pursuit of understanding other minds we find out that, like an octopus, we have a separate intelligence in every arm.
