New Jammers Participant Blog
Entry 3 - 27th June 2015
Reflecting on the New Jammers programme, I feel really lucky to
have had this opportunity to explore CI facilitation in such a nourishing and
stimulating environment. I felt a huge amount of engagement and support from
everyone involved in the programme, which has helped me to develop my ideas and
approach to facilitating in a way that would not otherwise have been possible.
The collaboratively led jam at the end of the programme made it
clear to me how much we had come together as a group and learnt to listen to
each other; for me it was a great lesson, as well, in trust and giving up
control – as we were only responsible for 5 minutes of the warm-up each – which
I hope I can take away with me and make part of my facilitation practice in
general. This final jam showed me how rewarding and enjoyable collaborative
creative tasks can be when there is this level of trust, support and listening;
I hope to continue to be part of activities like this.
The last two New Jammers sessions, where we each led a half-hour
warm-up, were a fascinating glimpse into the different perspectives that
everyone in the group was coming from, which highlighted to me that there is no
one perfect way to facilitate, no limited set of ideas or themes that has to be
used. The possibilities are endless. This also helped me to give up (here’s
hoping, anyway!) some of my perfectionism about facilitating; there are just so
many ideas and exercises to choose from and dream up and all that matters is
that they serve their purpose within a warm-up and hang together coherently. I
loved having this opportunity to try things out – without it having to ‘work’ –
in a safe space. This is what I feel the programme was about, for me, all
throughout: it created a unique space to experiment, receive expert guidance
and share ideas and experiences with people all going through a similar process
and asking similar questions.
---
Spider diagram exercise: 23rd May 2015
Following a mentoring session with Tom, all New Jammers were asked to complete the exercise below as a way to focus and articulate their interests and enquiries.
Entry 2 - 12th April 2015
Following a mentoring session with Tom, all New Jammers were asked to complete the exercise below as a way to focus and articulate their interests and enquiries.
Entry 2 - 12th April 2015
For me, the jam included in this session’s exploration of Nancy
Stark Smith’s UnderScore was one of the most full of surprises, free of
physical and mental effort, and in the moment – and I’m curious as to why.
This experience, for me, seemed to grow from the UnderScore
warm-up phase that each person goes through at their own pace, particularly the
stages involving exploring the skinesphere and kinesphere. Here, bringing my
attention to the sensations already happening in my body, and then exploring my
range of movement without ‘stepping out’ from where I have planted myself on
the floor, gives me a sense of ‘pre-doing’: moving without fully moving. In
this way, I feel my intention and desire to move is heightened. When I actually
do start to ‘travel with the kinesphere’ (one of the stages marked in the
underscore), somehow there is more to the movement – intention, pleasure,
presence – and less effort.
At the opening circle, as we threw around ideas about what defines
the underscore, the concepts of ritual and ‘participatory theatre’ (to me, seeming
to signifying the same thing, although I’m not familiar with the work of Nicolás Núñez, who uses the latter term), and heightened
intention seems to chime with this idea. Ritual magic can be (and has, anthropologically, been) understood
as mentally projecting something desired, and thus effecting the thing desired.[1]
In addition to what happens specifically in the skinesphere/kinesphere
exercises, to me it seems that having to take personal responsibility for going
through the warm-up process demands a heightened commitment to each element, as
there is no facilitator to move you on to the next element, ‘letting you off
the hook’ if you hadn’t engaged particularly deeply with a certain exercise.
You have to work through what that
element is about before moving on.
That this heightened intention is experienced collectively
again brings ritual to mind, as does Nancy Stark Smith’s term ‘glyphs’ for the
UnderScore symbols. I find this really interesting, as hieroglyphs in Egyptian
temples tell the stories, or myths, of the gods and describe the rituals
enacted in those temples. As such they consecrate the space as sacred and give
form to what happens there, helping to make the experience repeatable. The
glyphs of the UnderScore give external, symbolic form to the movement that
already happens in a jam, but as with the hieratic, esoteric language of many
archaic rituals, their ‘meaning’ speaks to the already initiated; a few words
denote broadly the sort of activity these symbols refer to, but ‘understanding’
them, I think, happens on an embodied, experiential level. They become the myth
that accompanies the physical performance – never fully comprehensible on their
own, but providing a framework and container for action that heightens its
focus.
As a facilitator, I think the underscore offers a potentially really
useful vocabulary for planning and articulating exercises that can play into a
warm-up. A warm-up can draw not only on the underscore’s warm-up phase (which
itself distils many commonly used warm-up techniques) but also on the various
‘grazing’ interactions represented in its ‘roadmap’ (as one New Jammer put it)
of symbols. I also like the attention it gives to a collective ending for the
whole room, which sometimes happens in jams but isn’t (usually?) prompted.
Maybe a facilitator could play with this and invite a coming together, or just
generally direct attention to the composition of the whole room, at the end of
a jam…?
[1] I’m
reminded of a story a friend told me about the night before she went
sky-diving. She was absolutely terrified. That evening, she visualised being an
eagle soaring through the air, to the point that she could feel it physically.
And when she jumped out of the plane she wasn’t afraid; she had ‘become the
eagle’.
---
Entry 1 - 15th March 2015
For me, this session began by highlighting something that
keeps coming back to me (and I keep losing, and having to rediscover), about
contact and facilitating: the importance of listening to what my body is
telling me.
Penny invited us to do our own warm-up, whatever we needed. Having
to take responsibility for my own warm-up made me notice how I felt my mind was
floating away from my body, high up into a taut, cerebral space. I realised
that I needed someone to press my feet firmly into the floor, and enlisted a
fellow New Jammer to do this with me.
I was quite amazed by how powerfully this
helped release the tension I was carrying. It was exactly what I needed, and
brought home to me, again, that acknowledging and addressing my own warm-up
needs has to be my starting point as a jammer as well as a facilitator.
I really liked how we shared our stories about how we came
to CI with the rest of the group while standing, then sitting, in a circle,
warming up the people to either side of us. I felt connected to the group – the
two people on either side of me that I was warming up, and by extension, the
rest of the group as we formed a kind of linked chain – in a way that I may not
have done if we had just gone round in a circle telling our stories.
We use circles
with connecting touch a lot in jam warm-ups, but not really in settings where
people share things about themselves; this crossover was interesting to me and
made me appreciate even more the impact that being physically connected in a
circle can have.
The main exercise of the session was responding to the
questions that Penny had laid out around the room on big sheets of paper for us
to write on, and then discussing the questions and responses. The same kind of
language seemed to appear on each paper: themes of listening, openness,
exploration.
As we discussed the questions – ‘What is a warm-up?’, ‘Do we need
facilitators?’, ‘Are there particular qualities that make a good jammer?’ and
others – I felt increasingly happy and lucky to be there with this group. The
atmosphere felt warm, supportive, fun, generous – four hours just flew by. I
felt we shared a language.
The following weekend at UKCITE (UK Contact Improv
Teacher Exchange) I got a taste of how this language is even more widely shared
within the CI community. This first session feels to me like the start of an
exploration of how to take the things I love about contact that are intuitive,
felt and embodied and externalise and name them, build up my vocabulary in this
language and develop an overall toolkit (as someone referred to it in our
discussion) for facilitating.
Being on this journey with such a lovely group
already feels like it’s having an impact on me, working to demystify the
facilitation process as we learn together and from each other.