Part Two: COMMUNITY ART MAKING
THIS IS PART TWO OF AN INTERVIEW WITH MARKUS SCOTT-ALEXANDER, PHD
BY PETER MAI, MD
AT THE EUROPEAN GRADUATE SCHOOL
JUNE 30, 2018
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Q: How do you find the balance in doing community art work? On one hand supporting the unfolding of the group members and on the other hand not being too much a leader and facilitator? Patronizing would be the other extreme.
The skill is to sense what is wanting to happen there. The improvisational artist, whether he is with others or alone, doesn’t want to impose the unfolding. My skill is to sense what is the just-right-next – for me, what’s moving toward something celebratory – and to encourage enough letting go, enough chaos, for there to be spontaneity and playfulness, as well as enough listening to instructions so there’s enough shaping and framing, so that people are not frightened or feel like they don’t have a clear enough leader for the group. To find that constantly changing balance of setting the frame and then taking my hands off, stepping back, and then saying, now it’s time to come back in to reset the frame because it’s starting to get a little wonky, a little too wild. So that constantly changing balance of opening up the space, letting go for exploring and stopping, and giving the next set of instructions which would either be more opening or starting to shape what we have, because that’s enough opening.
I’m not even thinking about trying to be creative. Sometimes people spin off and try to be creative and then lose their connection to the group. That’s when I might give more instructions and actually say don’t try to be creative; just explore what’s happening, what’s moving within you, between us and around us. I keep coming back to that energy of exploring and the quality of wonder.
Some people lose their ability to hear instructions because they get so excited, and I have a lot of compassion for them because I’ve certainly been there. As kindly and intelligently as I can, I bring back the people who get very excited. As kindly and intelligently as I can, I woo people who get a little excited by the chaos – because I’ve been there, too. As well as possible, I pay attention to the spectrum of people who are so happy to just let go and the people who are concerned that they could even physically get hurt because there’s so much wildness. I take care of that frame so that people are able to believe that I have the ability to set the frame so that they’re safe, while at the same time not having the frame be too tight for those who are so eager to let go.
Q: Do you remember a community art event where you suddenly noticed that you were moving too fast, that people were too scared or shy and that you had to change?
When assisting Paolo, yes. I tend to err on the side of conservative, but Paolo can be beautifully courageous at pushing people’s edges. He has worked with me as a kind of choreographer for his direction and he may come up with an idea that is really outrageous and I think, this is not physically possible. So as choreographer I’ll take what people say is crazy or too wild and as choreographer I’ll find a way to add the element of skill for how to begin to say, “Oh, I can do that”. I find that when people feel this is too much, rather than tone it down, to bring in the level of skill-building. “Ok, so you need to build your skill a little bit.”
Q: You, find a grounding at first and build from there.
Yes. Bring them back to the possibility that with a little bit of skill they can let go a little bit more. “If you ask me to let go into that which feels at this moment too much, I need something: either bring it down or teach me a way to match that level.” So in the pressure of working with Paolo, who I think is really quite brilliant, my ability to step up to the challenge has grown; to take that risk of a little bit more letting go and on the spot for me to come up with some skill-building to match that level of letting go.
Q: I remember very well when I came across community artwork for the first time in my life and went to EGS in 1996. I saw the chance, joined in, and thought ‘what is going on here? This is really wild, but it’s joyful and it’s fun’. Then I went back home to hospital work and I fall to the ground, and I thought, why am I here? So, they are different realities and so apart from each other. I can’t connect anymore. So, I’m asking what are the consequences of doing community art with a group of people you don’t know? How does it affect them? How do you find sustainability would be the next question of my doing into a group of the unknown and then the sustainability? Is there anything that I want to help them to continue in the future?
In the 90’s – and I do remember in 1997 – we learned that it cannot just be about the experience. We must take care that the experience not be a bubble of respite from the world or a way to get away from all the difficulties of the world and immerse yourself in something joyful. Rather, it was a teaching of how to return to the difficulty with joy or how to return to the pressure with more ability, and more and more gradually addressing the question, “How will this affect your life?” – maybe not during the community art but then later in the workshops – to end the time with “What is it that we can do that will increase the chances that this experience will not be in a bubble?” Can you name specific challenges that this will be helpful for? Can you name specific times of the day that you want to remember this kind of lightheartedness? How might it affect your relationships? Will it cause you to want to dramatically change certain things in your life? The teaching was to create the time to contextualize, before people left the event. I would say as we have moved into the 21st century, contextualizing what we do in the symposia or in community art or in any of the expressive arts work has grown.
Today we have the new program in Malta where Expressive Arts and Global Health emphasizes contextualizing and we spend at least half the time talking about how we can apply in the world what we learn there. Since the 90’s I have developed a strong structure that says you leave the ordinary life, you come to a symposium or EGS, you have an extraordinary experience, and then you go back to the ordinary in an un-ordinary way because of your heightened awareness. Paolo and I developed this structure as we moved into the 21st century to insure that people know that this is not about becoming addicted to the extraordinary, but rather about being inspired and about building skill to go back to the ordinary in an un-ordinary way because of your heightened awareness.
Q: That’s a beautiful formulation. Thank you. It touches me very much because I was of two minds. On the one hand I was shaken in a way, coming from a very structured response to the work-life as the doctor of intensive medicine and here I can let go. It was a catharsis for me and was wonderful, but then going back, my question was what do I do now? In response, I came back to EGS and it worked very well for me, actually, but I thought for other people that might be a difficult situation. The contrast is very challenging.
It is, and that’s why we’ve taken to really naming what we do as a de-centering. We’re very transparent that you will be thrown off your usual modus operandi; you are stepping out of the usual; you’ll be thrown off center into new areas of you, into new areas of interacting, and new ways of being. You will be thrown off center. You must pay attention to do the best you can when you go home in order not to go back to your accustomed self and quickly try to go back to your old center, but rather to let that decentering experience help you find a new center that is actually more suited to you, more suited to your life.
Pay attention to this ‘wobble’ so that when you re-center it’s more in a genuine core. Some people are centered but they are centered on a quality of life that is accommodating to others and others’ needs. They become somebody closely based on themselves but not themselves, so they find themselves saying, “This decentering is more ‘me’.” It is hard to completely sustain that new sense of self and the new desire to be truer to one’s self, but you can know to hold that in your awareness as you come back to your everyday life.
It’s possible to have new values, which means that your hierarchy of value will for some people be turned upside down and for others just slightly changed, but give yourself the chance in your life to effect change that might occur based on this wonderful decentering. You can decenter from your accustomed self in order to have a new way of finding, with your values and your way, how you can still be functional in the world, be useful, be available, and discover what new skills you need to learn in order to be in this new center which is a more correct center for you.
So we address that more, not only at EGS but also at the symposia. “Take care. This has been a decentering. Do the best you can not to go back to your habitual self, and yet let this disturb in a good way when you do go back.”
Q: That brings me to the next question about communication of the community artwork. Are there groups or situations where you wouldn’t do it?
Yes. In some situations it is best to work in small groups. That choice is partly intuitive in that I sense the readiness of the group. For example, I was asked to work in a school in Canada where about 90% of the students were aboriginal and about 50% of the students’ families had been murdered. There was an enormous amount of violence in families. Literally, 50% or more were murdered along with about 75% experiencing everyday abuse and violence. When they would have assemblies and gatherings in large groups, violence would break out so the school stopped having assemblies; there were no assemblies for seven years.
At last they decided to take a risk and to bring in a man whose son was murdered, along with a First Nation’s man who was the guardian of the child who had murdered that son. Those two men became friends and were touring around Canada giving talks about the importance of not moving into violence. They gave their talk in the morning and it was my job to step in afterwards to create a kind of assembly with the students, not just sitting and listening, but doing something instead so that they couldn’t just turn their backs on the talk; so that they could feel the effects of this presentation and not shut down.
So I came with seven of my senior students and we created community art. It was good that we did that because when I spoke to the man who gave the talk and showed the film he said that it was the first time ever that when he gave the talk and asked if anybody wanted to say anything or if there were any questions, no one raised their hands or said anything, They had been told so clearly that if they misbehaved there would be severe consequences. They were so tight and literally frightened to move or utter anything that no one said anything.
There was a lunch break and then I facilitated something again with my students in which I did a bit of homework. I asked about the resources there and found that there was a group of young people in a drumming circle which the rest of the school had never heard because there was never an assembly. So I said, “Let’s have all of you around the room creating a circle with quiet drumbeat.” They were thrilled. That circle started creating a safe frame in which to take risks. It ended up being so much more letting-go than any of the teachers were comfortable with. They were really scared.
I used the entire budget that they gave us for buying huge pieces of colorful fabric. It was so joyful; what I saw was release and joy, and there was not one thing that resembled violence. So it was quite successful. To describe it phenomenologically, there was a lot of energy and my task was to create a safe frame, not just for the release of that energy, but also to teach them certain skills for shaping the frame.
I applied what I know from psychology about a transitional object. By using the fabric, they were able to feel the tension and playfulness between them without ever touching each other. They would connect by using the fabric, which created the space and the connection. It took quite a long time, with me sort of massaging the idea into my psyche that I was going to do this, for me to come up with a unique idea for this group.
Q: Having had some experience with the community art and actually experiencing that it can create cohesion, I am wondering about evidence of that. Is there any research or evidence of that? When I look retrospectively at this group I have been working with several times, there has been cohesion. They have been coming together; there have been increased connections with each other.
The field of expressive arts, I feel, is still in its early stages; not its infancy, but moving out of adolescence which is the time of awe and the wonder of discovery. I think those discoveries are being grounded in the work of my colleagues and myself and many others who are starting to do serious research and grounding that research in physical writing.
I am a proponent of a growing new form of research called creative-process-based research, which is not arts-based research. I’m hoping that more of the doctoral students will employ this approach which is to track your progress, not just report about it when it’s over. To talk instead about what they go through to discover how to have an impact, and then to track where they sense that impact was felt and where it wasn’t. To work in a way that is evidence-based and also makes transparent that this is not about techniques but rather about gradually building skill for responding to situation-specific challenges. The evidence based for this group may not actually apply to that group.
I’m working with terms now in creative-process-based research where you make a distinction between discerning and distinguishing, and between what is more intuitive and what is more actual. I think we have been doing a lot of research but we haven’t been grounding it as well as we could. Certainly Melinda Meyer is one of the pioneers in our field for modeling the importance of grounded accountability and following it with implementation. She had been getting grants from the government, for example, to bring her work forward and that, I think, is encouraging people to do the kind of research work that’s necessary to get the kind of mainstream support that’s required for this work to actually blossom and come to the level of impact that it potentially can.
There needs to be more research that is grounded in the larger context, that is right at the beginning of teaching people what expressive arts is, and that does not make assumptions. It is about, again and again, laying out, “What do we do? How do we do it? How does it work?” I think these questions get addressed if people follow the model which we have laid out, which is have the experience, see if you can discern the theories that support that, and then see if you can discern the philosophy that supports those theories.
That is the way we are working and it is through the body that we connect with what we actually know. Then the writing is ultimately about how much we are able to discern and distinguish what works, within that.
Q: Working with patients, I notice I have difficulties in using the terminology of the arts. I resonate more with the terminology you just used of the creative process.
Quite frankly, that’s what resonates with me as a human being. For example, I really enjoy my time in the kitchen.
Q: It’s artwork.
It is literally being sensitive to color and texture, not just taste. I enjoy the creative process of remodeling my home, or when I get dressed in the morning. When I play the piano or make a painting, my enjoyment of that is simply a heightened intimacy. It’s not about a heightened ability or even a heightened creativity. Certain art forms teach me to be brought intimately into my physical form, my physical body, in my hearing. It makes my senses more subtle, so when I play the piano and become more sensitized it will affect how I have a conversation or how I walk down the street.
In that sense, my relationship with the arts is more aboriginal. In the 18th century, when the artist started to work in the courts and for the kings, a kind of specialness was afforded to art and to the artist. The shamanic tradition recognizes that you have a unique ability to interpret dreams or to make a beautiful bowl that is a sacred object for a ritual, but it is a respect of everybody’s unique ability, just like with basket-weaving. The person’s name would be Basket-weaver and if they later became a great runner, they would change their name to Great Runner.
So my feeling is not to give the arts too much specialness, but rather to experience them as a way to become finer in our unique way of celebrating our oneness. There is actually a humility and a quality of service, serving something as an artist, that is more shamanic – I use that word lightly – than a renaissance idea of becoming so specialized in something that it somehow puts you outside of your community such that your role then becomes to ‘raise’ the community. There is something in that that I feel is a little bit off.
I recognized early on that the expressive arts for me had to do with low skill/ high sensitivity. I resonated with the concept of bringing a little bit of skill and sensitivity to the process of creating a good life, rather than trying to passively follow things that were already set in place and once in a while go to the opera in order to have a little culture. I thought this is off. This is contrived. That’s not really what life should be about. Let’s come back to a kind of equanimity, whether in painting or cooking or dancing, and raise the quality of awareness in everything always.
{END OF PART TWO}
STAY TUNED FOR PART THREE OF THIS INTERVIEW