Artist response to the Bridges process by Ellen Marie Hinchcliffe

Something feels left open but in a good way, like my back door banging in the wind on Kenwood Avenue.  I could hear it from my bed at night and it always spoke of possibility. In my city, in my bed I liked to think on the backyard, on the alley with its tangle of forsythia and concrete that spilled out from between two garages like a rock formation; our best games happened on the concrete rock.  All the places I ran and played all day and then at night I liked to think about them still there, wild and free without the people, just being. Bridges is like my childhood neighborhood – it breathes when I am running through it, when I am crouched on the concrete rock under the buzz of bees in the forsythia and it breathes as I sleep, it wakes me like the backdoor banging in the wind to shake down dreams, words and images, questions, landscapes we are, just being.

Last night the waxing moon tilting back to receive the bright star (was it Venus?) after a long night of “rehearsal” I hugged Jess on Lake Street and walked to my car held by the moon, her welcoming shine.  So good to see her in that deep velvet night to know where I am/ we are in the turning, turning, turning.  There is so much traveling going on inside of Pangea.  It’s not distance we cover.  This collaboration is rising and falling with breath in the belly, with healing in the panza, dressed in desire and covered in red dirt, she/he is easy on the eyes…and we are laughing and crying and talking and talkie, talk, talking and circles and circles. Thinking again, as always about Paula Gunn Allen and her insistence that it is not about a circle, or making a circle whole it’s about circles, it’s about more not less of who we are.  What a challenge, what an honor, what a joy.

Photos of the Bridges artists in the Pangea Studio as they begin the Open Space Technology workshops to create the Bridges performance

Artist response to the Bridges process by Baraka de Soleil

Curator J. Otis Powell! talks about the 2009 Bridges process

Bridges has used Open Space Technology as methodology for our work since the program was conceived in 2006. OST assumes the resourcefulness of the artists we invite into the circle and encourages them to teach each other and us (the curators) how to arrive at points of theatrical productions. We “journey together” as Dipankar – curator and artistic director of Pangea World Theater is fond of saying, through this technology as a vehicle. We use Open Space Technology because the hierarchy of conventional theater is like the structure of Western Civilization and we want another paradigm for our work. We want form to follow content and our substance desires different shapes. Meeting in openness and gathering in a circle are ancient and simple ways of acknowledging the value of our associates and working together as collaborators is how we believe the world was made. So we begin this way again to remake it like it was before it went astray.

J. Otis Powell! – Writer, performance artist, educator, curator, producer, consultant and arts administrator. He is a practitioner of Open Space Technology and has used OST for more than seventeen years with notable success in various productions, in educational scenarios, in administrative consultations and as a means to resolve conflicts.

Artist response to the Bridges process by Jessica Huang

Andrew says, “I feel like you’re in a cocoon.” He says this on Friday night after I shower, but before I weep with the weight of exhaustion and change.  He says this sitting on my couch after ordering pizza, watching me in my speechlessness.

And I agree. I am in a cocoon. In the process of metamorphosis, in a state of becoming. Whether I feel this way because of Bridges or if I found Bridges because I feel this way is irrelevant.

My blog post is twofold. The first, a testament to the way Open Space has already become a part of me, the second, a reevaluation of this word unfolding: me.

Before embarking on this journey, I arranged to start a writer’s group with the community theater in the suburbs where I grew up. Chaska Valley Family Theater is interested in fostering new work, and I thought a writer’s group would be a key in it finding it’s footing in that world.

Oh, the plans I had. We were going to work on structure and character, how to build a play, the key components. And I – with a bachelor’s degree in Journalism  – was to be the teacher. This was settled in a board meeting, arranged via facebook and emails and all set to start this past Saturday.

Then Open Space happened. I know I’ve been given a unique gift – the opportunity to participate in Bridges during this, my current state of becoming. But I didn’t know how much I had already been influenced until I called our writing group to order Saturday afternoon. I first noticed that I was speaking with more confidence and articulation then ever before. I didn’t apologize after every sentence; I owned my space in the room.  More specifically, my opening statement wasn’t “this is what The Writer’s Playground will be.” It was, “I want this group to be for you whatever you need as a writer.”

No, it’s not Bridges 2.0. But it does represent a drastic paradigm shift for me. I came to the writer’s group prepared with what I wanted to accomplish, sure, but my energy was focused on collaboration – even in the forming of this collective of scriptwriters in the southwest suburbs.

I know my experience with Open Space is limited and brief. I know I’ll continue to grow as I continue to make connections, as I find my voice within the group. I also know, as I absorb and incorporate the philosophies behind our process, that I’ll continue to share my limited understandings with everyone I meet. Or at least with The Writer’s Playground.

And now for Act Two.

My high school defined me as “the ballerina.” In my yearbook, my superlative was best dancer. And rightly so – at least as far as labels are concerned, which is a whole other conversation – I studied ballet since I was 4, spent at least two hours a day, six days a week in the studio, practicing my pliés and my grand jetés. And then I found theater and did that and I was an “actress.” In college I was a journalist and a director, perhaps, and certainly a playwright.

But the more time I spend with Pangea and Bridges, the more I’m learning, transitioning…

….metamorphosing…

…becoming…

Jess.

A whole being that encompasses all and more of those identities. A person who can do art for her life, and use not one, not two, but all the manifestations of the artist within. And I feel like you, all, are not only accepting that, but encouraging it.

Encouraging me.

Artist response to the Bridges process by Stacy Lee King

We’ve gathered together. We’ve embarked on our journey in search of BRIDGES. The Open Space Technology was logistically daunting at first, but magnificent to flow through. Whoever is in the circle, are exactly the right people in the circle. Whatever happens is up to us… not by political maneuvering, but by the realization of our gathering. I’m apprehensive to attempt to name things, write things, so early, but want to open it up. Incomplete thoughts. Incomplete sentences. So far we’re discussing (with our bodies as well as words): memory, conjuring, ancestors, alchemy, ritual. After only two days we’ve begun to crack open the circle, see into each other a little better.

We asked each other, “Really, why are you here.”

“Really, why are you here?”

“Pigeons.”

I should have said, “Pigeons.” But maybe I was flustered, or still a bit shy. (keep working to trust the moment) We did share a moment of pigeons. A truth. But I wanted to explain, to be known, to say something to identify myself to the group. Maybe I was holding too tightly to the cultural location question I entered the circle with. With overwhelming gratitude I chant the lineage of teachers who have passed the teaching of Buddhism from individual to individual through India, China, Japan, California, Minnesota… to me. I perform the rituals of Soto School Zen, honoring and respecting the teachers from Japan who taught my teachers. I’m constantly supported and inspired by my teachers and friends in the practice. I am young as a Zen student, I don’t presume to create a prescription for all of American Zen, but I’m working to give into the practice in my specific individual self while discovering the cultural heritage, and the universal. I’m also concerned with appropriation in a consumerist culture of restaurants called Zen and lattes called Nirvana.

These are fears and philosophical questions I arrived with. The reality of what is happening, in this open space, is an opportunity to work honestly from my center with the group. I feel very encouraged to experience each moment and to find my own practice and our practice. I’m thrilled to be able to work with these questions beyond the Zen Center.

Vital Wheat Gluten and Mock Duck are two ways of looking at the same thing. We’re looking at the vital reality of our joining together. Appreciate that nourishment. We don’t need to mock something more familiar.

by J. Otis Powell!

This thang do us like we don’t belong. This thang hang around like weather fronts and stall above us making it snow, rain and storm making rivers, lakes and seas rise up and rebel against land and everything and everybody on it. This thang got so many names we can’t point a finger at it and identify it well enough to get help putting it down. Duke Ellington found a name for it; the miasma of the oppressive culture is known as Transbluesency, defined as “A blue fog you can almost see through.” We live our lives in that fog as Imamu Amiri Baraka says in Funklore “That’s why our spirit make us the blues – we is ourselves the blues.” Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, called it “resistance of the object,” a conscious intention to resist as well as unconscious resistance to dominant cultural ways of being and knowing simply because they are values of the oppressive culture.

The Ways Ensemble found another name for this thang while workshopping our collaborative performance event for Pangea World Theater’s Bridges program. Our ensemble worked from a point of departure with the his/tory surrounding a diagnosis for what was considered a mental illness. Researching the “disease” known as Drapetomania led photographer Bill Cottman to the phrase A Disease Called Freedom on a web site about an art exhibition of 18th, 19th and 20th Century Material Culture of the African Experience in the Americas from the Collection of Derrick Joshua Beard. Bill adapted the phrase for our use by altering the use of capital letters and sent it around to the ensemble for a vote. Though we had already voted on several other titles for our project a Disease called Freedom garnered more support than any other title on our list. The workshops that preceded our selecting a title for our collaboration were as egalitarian as the vote for the title of our production. We experimented with concepts proposed by each member of our ensemble and every idea got air time; many of them got floor time as well.

This was messy work but we (as least most of us) believed that practicing democracy and exercising free will were more important than efficiency. All of us, accept bassist Michael O’Brien, had background and training in Open Space Technology. Michael is a career jazz composer and musician and OST is like a first cousin to jazz if not a sibling, or perhaps a descendant. Process and relationships were dominant over content; in our case content followed form and the form was open, amorphous and free. After all with a Disease called Freedom as our rubric we needed to be infected with it to express it through our work together. But I’m getting ahead of my story, let me digress a bit. The Ways Ensemble came together in bits and pieces long before Disease; I mention this because much of what happened in the process of our collaboration was due to long standing relationships between members. Frankly, the oldest relationships
In the ensemble were among the Cottmans: Father Bill, Mother Beverly and daughter Kenna Serge. Other creative relationships among members went back fifteen years, ten years, five years etcetera; the common connector was Bridges curator and ensemble member J. Otis Powell!.

The amalgamation of this collective had come together essentially a year earlier to produce Ways of Knowing in Pangea’s studio laboratory as a work in progress. That group included vocalist, composer, performance artist Mankwe Ndosi, choreographer, poet, dancer Roxane Wallace, multi-instrumentalist, choreographer, poet Tom Kanthak, Drummer Steve Hirsh, dancer, storyteller Beverly Cottman, photographer Bill Cottman, composer, bassist Michael O’Brien and writer, performance artist J. Otis Powell!. By the next year saxophonist Rene Ford and choreographer, musician Kenna Sarge joined The Ways Ensemble and creation / production of a Disease called Freedom was afoot. Bridges curators Meena Natarajan and Dipankar Mukherjee, who are also executive and artistic directors respectively of Pangea World Theater decided to include Ways as a main stage performance project for their 2007 season. “It made sense,” Dipankar said “that such an ensemble as Ways would be part of Bridges because the collaboration embodied the principles of the program already.”

Now back to our narrative; LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka now, wrote in an essay from Home (Social Essays) titled Hunting Is Not Those Heads On The Wall “Art is like speech, for instance, in that it is at the end, and a shadowy replica, of another operation, thought. And even to name something, is to wait for it in the place you think it will pass.” Which for me validates process as the verbing of making art or as Baraka called it “Arting, Goding,” which are more important than the product produced. He went further to say that “and even the artist is more important than that.” We named it and worked our way toward opening night confident that we would perform whatever the process gave us and the process had given us ten subtitles to use as points of departures by then. An ensemble of ten artist created motifs named: Changing the Course of Everything, Drapetomania Of The Andoumboulou, Improvised Woman’s Jam, Peace Piece, Ode To A Drum, Roxane’s Duets, Somebody Said Freedom and Looked It Up, Praise, What We Gon’ Do? And Like A River. Each section held space for improvisation and ghosts visitations so the performance was different every night of our four night run.

The ways we worked were consistent with how many jazz musicians collaborate on performances except we played more than music; we played spoken words, stories, dance, lyrical songs, projected images and the amalgamations they produced. One of the most difficult artistic challenges for Afrocentric American artists has been to conform to an aesthetic that assumes that one knows what they have to say before they begin to speck. Though three of the ensemble members were not African American artists they work in an Arfrican American musical tradition and embody similar aesthetic values.

We were two days from opening night and we couldn’t defer conflicts anymore so manure was hitting a ceiling fan. Everybody’s metal was being tested; we were in the thick of it. Nobody really loves this part of the process but we couldn’t get to where we were going without going through it. I kept holding my tongue when I could and dancing with it when I couldn’t. Grace was what really mattered, I thought. We are required to be bigger than we actually are in situations like this, some rise and others fail when the challenge comes, every survivor grows. Maybe this is too cryptic but I hope you see what I’m saying. It’s never about exactness but people want it to be, it’s always about metaphor. Paint it and simply leave it in the air; it will dry and you can move on. I keep telling myself it’s not personal no matter how much it hurts because it’s not about me; it’s about metaphors we leave drying on the stage every night. I trust that everything that matters between us is in there and that’s what this is really about; the things that matter between us.

Every night of our brief run things that mattered between us seemed to matter to our audiences as well. They went with us whenever they could be and watched from a distance when they couldn’t. The culmination of our work together was shared with our community, inviting them into our intimate dialogue about a Disease called Freedom. Our hopes included infecting them with what we had been infected with to see if they had cures for diseases many of us won’t admit we have. It was clear to our audiences that we had decided to improvise and our choices multiplied each night as we made different ones every performance to reflect our growing comfort with our material and ourselves. By opening night we were not only like we thought we were; we were like we thought we used to be. Aesthetically and philosophically we had grown a mutual understanding, weather it was spoken or not, the past we represent doesn’t repeat itself but it paraphrases itself into our present condition. Our process, production and our expression was not merely metaphor we were, we are The Thang Itself; we were, we are a Disease called Freedom.

(originally posted May 3, 2008)