We Workshopped
As part of the epic adventure which is Squeeze Box 23, I have been so fortunate to work with an amazing applied creative team to deliver conversation-based workshops in Manchester. After seeing on social media that Dr Tony Gee's (with co-author Warren Linds) Workshop: The Art of Creative Inquiry has been released, their book on the magic of workshops, it feels apt to share with you my reflections and learning from time spent in an extraordinary creative space with brilliant creators. These workshops were designed to be a devising/research mechanism to share practise and to learn from the disabled community – to add weight to the voice amplification in Squeeze Box and to learn from the lived experience of disabled people living in a city, feeding their experiences back to the wider communication. The weekend however totally transcended this; a reminding (if one ever needed to be reminded) that the art of workshop is a unique and powerful process in itself, not an add-on, nor a parallel process. It is rather a performance/journey/creative expression that probably can’t be matched by any individual artform or platform. Thank you so much to Longsight Art Space, Chi and Chris, the artistic team, and of course the participants.
Featured in this image are exhibition art work by Akinyemi Oludele www.akinyemioludele.com/.
We arrive. Some quite exhausted after a long day’s travel. Others arrive from nearby, welcoming us to Manchester at large. The Devon team is me, the guru of workshop facilitation herself, Clair Sergeant supported brilliantly by Winnie Guy and Jennifer Noice. The Manchester gang, Gemma Nash, amazing sound artist and disabled rights activist supported by inspired dj and sound techy, Kristian Gjerstad. We were also joined by a bubbling and wonderful BSL interpreter, Emma Jane Heap.
Some nervousness as we meet new people and comprehend the task ahead, but this evaporates quickly. Energy and excitement of the space combine with sheer creativity emanating from the team – a shared language, some identify with the workshop’s ‘target audience’, disabled/neurodiverse, but all get the possibility of making with participants the next day. We plan. Weeks of anxious and meticulous stress about trying to plan the perfect workshop narrative fade away in the confidence that the people in the room are the ones to make the story work and we just need light touch framework for the flames of creativity to be lit. I sleep well in my hotel room, soothed by the passion and expertise of my co-facilitators and how they asked the right questions to cement the plans for the morning to come.
We workshop! Before this though, we complete the set-up of the space, tables to make a square where each can see their fellow.
Featured in this image are exhibition art work by Akinyemi Oludele www.akinyemioludele.com/.
The tables covered in making material, a perfect stimulus for chatter, the hands seem to be unable not to stick or doodle, note or craft. Participants floating in. Setting expectations of working in a deprived area, where people are less confident in participating, we are over-joyed as three, four, five people join us. The expectations of these tight-knit communities, where levelling up seems beyond a joke, which wasn’t funny in the first place, is familiar to the lived experience of Torbay. A perpetual narrative, this community has been rejected, forced to not be present or feel ridiculed if they do attend creative spaces. Organisations like Proforma are left to try to make a difference. They do… but the will to spread culture and arts to those who deserve it the most, that is exhausting. Probably not sustainable – maybe never sustainable in the first place with chronic lack of investment across the board.
After introductions, biscuit grabbing, ice-breaker games and settling in, we workshopped in earnest.
Throughout the session, we added thoughts and feelings to create a collage of our ‘tree of hope’.
At the top of the tree, two questions are written in green, guiding our collective creativity.
Individually we create little ‘anon figures’. They represent positive identities. Maybe physical appearance, or things that matter to us – friends/family, hobbies/professions/interests … or access requirements/impairments … or something more abstract, how identities merge with each other and how what is our identity is determined by external factors and influences our sense of being. How can one be a dancer if there is nothing to dance about/embody story through movement?
We begin to attach things that represent our identity with string, and later on discuss the horrifying prospect of having to lose different elements of ourselves. That feeling I’m being squeezed. In the workshop, the literal cutting of identities is a chilling representation of how disabled people having support and funding cut from their lives and watching their identities fall away.
We changed the narrative. The original plan was to literally cut identities off the figures people create, but empathy is present, we don’t need to go there, so we jump to another exploration. What if we change the assessment process so community members do not go into assessments feeling dread, and come out feeling worse …?
Our tree grows. In two groups we discussed what our world would look like if assessment processes fit around people, rather than the other way round. Main points on this discussion end up on our tree … Ideas around having a base layer of access, around disabled people by putting the support in place without any reprimand* with the support was not quite right for them and how the system of that deliver care are not built on the foundation of care – they seems to be built on systems to support those who already have resilience.
And this was just the first day! We repeat on the second but everything felt unique, the story was new and we relived every minute with new participants adding!
In between, we were lucky enough to be invited to another kind of workshop. Local artist opened their studio and sharing what they were making. Paradise Works is an extortionate space and we soaked it in. From a safety bunker design with literal safety blankets covering the wall… to a crisis of masculinity man-cave, littered with giant beer cans… to a cupboard box with eyes which followed you around the room – I mean the box was on wheels and it made a sad, automatic journey around the space, bumping into walls and awkwardly recovering, only to get stuck by next the wall. Paradise Works was brilliant, although I definitely brought the average age up which is a new experience and one I’m sure I will learn to love!
I learnt so much over this magical weekend! In the workshops, I lent heavily on my co facilitators who hold the space and this might have felt uncomfortable to a younger Hugh. The typical workshop leader is in control of this space and maybe I wasn’t at times but that is my practise right. Creating conditions which rely on people….risky? experimental? Modern? Post-modern? Failure? I don’t know… why don’t we start a conversation??
*too many benefits give individuals one shot and if you show signs that you might need that support in a given month, it is taken from you. Access to Work pays for a support worker in your profession (self-employed or/and PAYE), but if you ask for say 10 hours a week and discover you may need only eight, there isn’t an easy process to reduce – if you don’t need that allocation, you are most likely to lose it all. Also, vice versa, work and life fluctuates but it is very hard to ask for more hours.