Part One: COMMUNITY ART MAKING

An Interview with Markus Scott-Alexander, PhD

by Peter Mai, MD 

at the European Graduate School

June 30, 2018

Q: How did you get into community art?

In 1994 I came to an international symposium in Leuk, Switzerland. That was my first experience of community art. I was already working as an expressive arts therapist and educator for about eight years, but it was my first time in one of these international gatherings where Paolo Knill used dance and music as a way to create cohesion in a newly formed community. Usually about half the people had been there before and those of us who were new were just pulled along with the energy of what Paolo was creating. He would create musicians from the people who were there. His choice of choreography was often outrageous with people crawling on the floor and doing things I would never consider doing that just blew my mind. And I loved it. 

I was used fairly early on to help keep the singing part of it strong because I have a big voice. So I would join in with the musicians and then got pulled into community art through singing.

The following year I went to another symposium and again had a positive experience with community art that Paolo had already been doing for about ten years and developing in how it can be effective in creating cohesion in a newly formed community. The following year in 1996 I started CAGS and that’s when I started stepping into it in small ways by assisting Paolo. The year after that I did my second year of CAGS and started teaching, stepping even more into community art. 

So I’ve really been studying over twenty years with Paolo, and in the last few years really paying close attention to his choices, touched by his skill and inspiration, and I started to relax into noticing my slightly and sometimes significant difference in how I would set the frame for community art. I started to feel confident enough in my skill to come up with ideas that were not put forth by him and slowly moved from co-facilitating to gradually taking on a little bit more responsibility, for not only helping with the choreographic elements, but also coming up with ideas. We still work collaboratively.

Q: Can you describe the difference? 

Paolo is a real outrageous risk-taker. He would have people acting like snakes and turtles and moving backwards quickly, which he called, “leading with ‘the tush’.” He wasn’t that concerned if somebody said I’m uncomfortable with this: “ just do it”. He has an artist’s sensibility, having a vision of the architecture of what will happen in the room, much more like the drama of theatrical directing. 

My style tends to be a little bit more conservative. I’m slower, spending more time warming people up and gradually stepping into the community art, based on my sense of readiness and really paying attention to if anybody is out of it; being as slow as I need to be in order to be as inclusive as possible. It takes longer for me to create that kind of celebratory feeling, but that more deliberate, gradual entering-in is important to me. Where I get to, has a lot of the same flavor of what Paolo has wanted, which is that experience of really letting go, but I would say I’m just more deliberate in getting there. 

Q: You have been a facilitator of community art for many years. How has it been for you?  Do you have an idea for the future?

I would say Paolo generally did not talk about the purpose of community art and the didactic elements while doing community art. I would add more pauses, to say why I’m making the choices I’m making. I’m already starting to say: “How many of you would be interested in facilitating community art?” If there are many or even a few, I tend to say: “I made this choice because...”, so that they feel that it’s not just for creating cohesion that summer but that they’re actually learning – especially those who aren’t in the CAGS class – some of the basics of how to make choices in doing arts-based community cohesion events. So making it more educational, more pauses, maybe with a reflection at the end.

Q: What are your favorite modalities within the community art?

My favorite thing is when there is a wide range. One of the structures that Paolo uses is that of the elements of earth, air, fire, and water. I do variations of that because people who are feeling quiet and still, can also be involved. Maybe if you’re the mountain, you come in the center and are still. Someone who is just aching to move, gets to be fire and runs around the room. The kind of community art that I like the most, is the one that embraces the energetic range of what’s in the group. It is almost impossible to do visual art when people go out somewhere else or try to do something realistic, but I have done some visual art in community art with Melinda at a symposium in Tenerife and it was quite successful. It’s enjoyable but it takes a lot of work for a set-up. I try to facilitate community art that people can say: “I can do that. I can imagine doing that.” So just simple movement, theatre-based work – theatrical, playful – seems to work the best. 

The downside or the concerns would be for introverts or shy people who have very little experience. They might say: “ I dance a lot at home but I don’t do that kind of thing in public”. To woo them in gradually or give them permission to be present enough by perhaps participating as the audience and to say: “ that’s a role, too. We need you to step back and give an aesthetic response to what you’re seeing”. Paolo actually established that years ago, taking that concern and responding creatively by making an audience. 

Q: How do you prepare and plan the community art session...especially if you don’t know the people? I imagine it is different to plan and prepare it here at EGS summer school than to prepare it for people outside, whom you don’t know.

Over the years I’ve learned what a safe risk is. If it’s an open workshop for people I don’t know, I’ve seen how to be linear, that is, how to slowly step in: simple things like having people start walking around the room and then maybe nodding to each other and then changing the pace from quick to slow. I think the key is sensing the group’s ability to go with it gradually and, to increase the chances that people are not self-conscious, to always keep it as everybody moving at the same time. Then if the group is a little more sophisticated, we might break into smaller groups – let’s say four groups – and have each group create a dance and offer it to the whole group. That would be the next level of risk. You take risks with a new group incrementally until, hopefully, you get to the point where everybody is all-in, celebratory, including the so-called audience who may be clapping along with the music or sometimes even giving them the role of musician in this low skill/high sensitivity frame. 

Very often, if I’m invited to do it, I’ll do my homework and find out who is there and use my intuition about what kind of music would be most appealing, and sometimes there are no musicians and we use canned music which often works just fine. Paolo very seldom uses pre-existing music; he certainly doesn’t favor it. I have used it much more than he has. It’s not as terrific as live music, but when you need to use it, it works fine. 

Q: What are you aiming for? What is the purpose for doing community art?

I find that if I can be in a group of people much like I am when I’m alone, I can be real and have real connections. If I’m presenting myself, then my relationship with the community is performative. For me, it’s a kind of relaxed playfulness where I become less self-conscious. I stretch my boundaries. I don’t have time to think about how to present myself and I’m wooed into a childlike playfulness, and then to gradually show up in a kind of realness, the way I really am. It is less of presenting myself to a community and; instead, truly arriving with more of the qualities of my essential nature, rather than picking and choosing how I would like to be in that community. So it’s primarily to relax, to get present. In what I do and how I step in, I pay attention to what I’ve spoken of as the vertical, first to be able to sense my self, and then the horizontal and how I connect with others. This shows that you do not have to sacrifice how you are and who you are, to be a part of the ensemble. So, first things first, in the sensitizing, in the warming-up, and in the arriving, it usually begins as individuals and then slowly moves to small groups and then to larger groups. I would say my overall intention is for somebody to feel safe in a larger group; that they don’t have to distort themselves to be present and engaged; they don’t have to do something extra and, as I say, performative in order to be accepted into the group.  It’s called expanding the play range to show that you can be quiet and inward or out and wild. So many people are told that they are too much or they’re not enough, and so community art is a way to hold as large a space as possible. Of course, in dance theatre that’s a real challenge because some people just aren’t comfortable with that, so again having a range of how people can participate becomes essential. 

Q: I can imagine that sometimes you feel carried away with what’s happening, and then you have thoughts and ideas and you have the community to guide them in this direction; that you are much more fascinated by what is happening and also what is happening in yourself and might sometimes not really be with the group you are trying to guide through. I can imagine that sometimes you could feel carried away with all that is happening within the group and within yourself. One could become more fascinated by all of this, thus making it a challenge to guide the group to something new. How then do you work with this process?

Because one of my favorite activities is setting the frame; that actually keeps me from the danger of getting drawn into the experience that takes me out of setting the frame. I’m so delighted by having the responsibility for setting a frame and taking care of the transition from one frame to the next. That actually draws my enthusiasm even more than the actual participation. Once in awhile I’ll choose to participate in order to strengthen what’s happening there by really moving into the dance, or really moving into the singing, but I do what I can and come back quickly to the role of facilitator because I actually favor that role and favor that energy more than being inside of it. I do also like being inside of it, so I can step in to demonstrate I’m capable of being all-in, but I do take care, as sensitively and energetically as possible, that my enthusiasm is for staying in touch with the changing needs for adapting the frame for the next unfolding of what’s happening there. 

Q: Could you say something about cohesion, addressing both inclusion and exclusion; and doing the cohesion work in community artwork. 

Firstly, when I’m doing something like that, I am a human being with a heart, sensitive to people’s difficulties. When someone who comes in is feeling ill and says: “ I just need to be quiet”, I really do the best I can to say: “That is so okay; it’s so good you came. Just lie down on the couch and absorb the atmosphere.”  So in general, the inclusiveness starts with my humanity, in my humanness, in saying we are here firstly as human beings who show up saying I’ll just do what I can. 

My attitude is, of course, you’ll do what you can. I don’t really use the word resistant. Either people are ready to, or not. There’s a wide range of people who are so ready to jump in and others are more tentative, so just as a human being I have a natural inclination to say just do what you can, and then as a practitioner of expressive arts community art, it’s my job to have the skill to woo people, to bring them in, and to encourage them to take a risk. I assume that if they show up and are not feeling well that just the fact that they showed up is enough. 

If I feel that someone is having one foot in and one foot out, however, it’s my responsibility to have the sensitivity and the skill – not low skill/high sensitivity, but high skill/high sensitivity – to slowly and kindly and intelligently find ways for people to take risks in order to be all-in. For some people it’s scary to let go that much, so with each group I am sensitive to how much letting-go and how much shaping I need to do and; how much letting-go am I modeling through making choices and being gradual and shaping. 

Any artist, including the community artist, has a different balance of letting-go and shaping, of surrender. What I try to do is break up the time with skill-building. I say: “Okay, now we’re going to move a certain way and I want you to really pay attention to opening your chest and the way you lift your feet.” I give enough skill so that it balances the suggestion to “just go all-in”. I would say the way to create more inclusiveness is to pay attention to this group on this day; how much do you just jump in and how much you consistently pause to teach people how to technically enter in without feeling scared or feeling that they don’t have enough skill not to hurt themselves or others, for example. 

Q: In teaching community art you spoke about the spectrum of community art and about the many layers of experience, from the superficial one into the deeper ones. Can you say more about this? 

Expressive arts often talks about working with what’s the surface. Sometimes that’s misunderstood; like ‘don’t go deep, just what’s on the surface’, but the reality is everyone is more like a tree that’s been growing its roots for a long time. Some people have deeper roots than others, and some people are ready to bear fruit on their tree and some are not, so the intention is to set a frame that embraces the range of what’s ready to surface for each person, rather than to come up with an idea for dropping anchor for 45 minutes and then pulling up anchor so that it’s just a 45 minute experience. I don’t just want to have an interesting, playful 45-minute experience. I would like people to grow their roots into their own core as a good next step for their own personal evolution as an individual and a community member, as well as to grow the community and how the community is together after these 45 minutes. So the cohesion is that I’m becoming cohesive as an individual. I’m becoming a better ensemble member in this time, and I’m growing my awareness of my effect on the community and the community’s effect on me after this time. So it is to stimulate more awareness in as many senses as possible: I see what’s happening around me, I sense what’s happening around me, I hear it more, so often using this community art in the mornings to wake the senses so I’m not only sensitive to how to reach out to the community, but also I’m awaking my ability to respond to those around me. I try to have a range of things that we do to reach out and to be reachable; listening and extending: poetry as a way to open up your ears; movement as a way to wake up the body; music-making as a way to sensitize the ensemble. I really emphasize that it’s not about those 45 minutes. It’s about a springboard for the rest of the day: to feel more vibrant in your inner life, in what’s happening between us, and what’s happening in the larger context around us. 

Q: Can you say more about how ‘confusion’ is one of the biggest challenges in the work of expressive arts?

Yes. It’s essential to acknowledge the possibility of confusion and to learn skills for not letting that confusion dominate your awareness. Learn to give little hints. If you start to be confused, just come back to what you do know; don’t focus on the part that isn’t clear yet. In general, in our lives when we have things to do, there can be so much to be aware of and we complicate something or bring our awareness to what we don’t know yet. If you find another thing and then another thing, you get into a spin of what you’re not clear about and then you tend to withdraw. 

But if you’re making something clear, rather than getting in a spin which leads to confusion, you just build on what you do know. You know to look around, breathe, maybe get hints from what somebody else is doing, relax, don’t take yourself or what the group is doing too seriously, and recognize the difference of when you’re in a spin and when you’re not, and when you’re able to hear and when you lose the ability to hear. Keep a sense of humor about how it is possible to get confused but, at the same time, build the skill to not let the horse get away from you. Instead say to yourself: “ come back”, raise your hand, and get some clarification. Being confused sometimes can move into such a drama. Nip it in the bud; catch it as quickly as possible and create clarity for yourself with the help of another: “Excuse me. I need a little bit more clarity before I can go forward.”

Sometimes it’s not possible because the horse has already gone off, but don’t lose your sense of humor and just do what you can. I think a lot of people impose the phrase ‘do the best you can’ and that’s unnecessary pressure. I don’t know what ‘the best’ is and people get confused because they’re trying to do the best they can and get frustrated, rather than saying to themselves, “Okay, you didn’t hear that part of the instructions so do what you can.” Or “You didn’t understand that part. Okay, just relax. Do what you can with this much awareness. You’d like to have more awareness, but okay, you just have this much. Do what you can.” 

Then, that not only establishes that for the community art, but for the rest of your day.  Keep a sense of humor. Remind yourself, “You don’t understand that, but you understand that a little bit so do what you can to follow this lecture or do what you can to have this experience.”  There is a significant difference between doing the best you can, which is unnecessary pressure – you’re making up a story about what the best is– and just doing what you can with the knowledge you have. Do what you can. 

{end of Part One of this interview}

Stay tuned for Part Two and Part Three.

Nature-Based Expressive Arts Therapy Training.

Markus Scott-Alexander, PhD. now offers:

Nature-Based Expressive Arts Therapy Training Intensives.

Contact us for details.

Markus' Upcoming Book

Creative Process-based Research in

Expressive Arts Therapy and Education: 

Theory and Practice of Arts-based, Body-centered Phenomenological Psychotherapy 

.....to be published by Brill Sense Publishing in the Fall of 2019

Excerpt from the Preface:

The field of expressive arts began with the encouragement of discovering our feelings. There is something freeing about expressing one’s feelings. In this book, Markus G. Scott-Alexander goes a step beyond by saying that thoughts and feelings come and go and that we can focus on what is deeper than that. That the bottom line is not what we think and feel but rather, what we know. And that giving thought to what we know in our hearts cultivates the right use of intellect. 

This research dismantles the myth of the lonely, suffering researcher as it demonstrates how many hands need to hold the work and each other, not only during the work of the dance theater research, but also as we are re-searching our lives. 

Prof. Dr. Margo Fuchs Knill, Ph.D.
Dean of the Division of Arts Health and Society, European Graduate School

Prof. Dr. H.C. Paolo J Knill, Ph.D.
Founding Rector European Graduate School
Emeritus Lesley University, Cambridge, MA

Notes from the Director - Spring 2017

I’m sitting in the Maple Leaf Lounge in Vancouver waiting several hours for my connection to Hong Kong. I’ll teach there for a week and then on to Shenzhen. I wasn’t home long. Was teaching at the wonderful Halliburton School of Art and Design’s Expressive Arts Program. Before that, in Sweden for the 30th anniversary of the EXA Spring Symposium. All of that followed a full and wonderful year of conducting training in Edmonton’s World Arts Organization which I formed about 12 years ago after leaving the EXA training program I founded and directed in New York. 

Leilah and I are now citizens of Canada and very much enjoying life in Canada. We’ve been remodelling our very cool penthouse in the coolest part of Edmonton, right on the Mill Creek Ravine.

The folks organizing the symposium in Sweden did an amazing job. Vadstena is a medieval town just filled with charm, magic and beauty. Partnering with Paolo Knill facilitating community was as exciting as ever and co-facilitating workshops with Melinda Meyer was enlivening and invigorating. Several fantastic musicians made my work easier when charged with the task of bringing together almost 100 participants together through dance. Yipes. Great challenge and so much fun.

The next Spring symposium will be in Berlin in 2018 just after Easter. I’ll be co-facilitating with Margareta Warja, long time friend and colleague from Stockholm. We co-created a workshop for several years called “The Embodied Voice.”

This was also the year that I completed my doctoral dissertation, Building the Ensemble. Was awarded Magna Cum Laude and had a ball “defending” my work. I enjoyed this 4 year project so much. I so appreciated the learning curve and the opportunity to reflect on 30 years work and distill what I love about the expressive arts.

2017 will also bring me to the new European Graduate School’s campus in Malta teaching Expressive Arts and Global Change. This is a super exciting project that has me, as usual….all in. 

Please contact me if you would like to know more about what is going on.  Hoping to see some of you out in the world or in my home town at one of our 5 Day EXA Intensives that are open to the public.

An Early Influence

Ellen Stewart:  La MaMa

One of the leading influences in the New York theatre scene in the 1960s and 1970’s was Ellen Stewart at La MaMa Experimental Theatre, where I had the opportunity to work between 1969 and 1976.  Ellen Stewart influenced me personally as a theatre artist, as well as many other artists over the years which in turn helped to lay the ground work for the birth of expressive arts therapy. Stewart lived and breathed theatre, not as an art form but as an entrance or a portal to a way of life, a meaningful way of life. This is a common theme which is also present in expressive arts practitioners, that expressive arts is about having a meaningful life not just a meaningful profession. Training in expressive arts brings a person into a way of life that includes the arts but is not about the arts.

Notes from the Director

What a delight this summer has been. Life in Saas Fee, Switzerland, for almost two months soothes the soul and enlivens the spirit. Expressive arts is alive and well in the Swiss Alps on the breathtaking campus of the European Graduate School (EGS). I had the privilege of teaching several courses on both the Master’s and Post Master’s level that left me inspired and eager to continue learning about this beautiful work. My mentor of 28 years, Paolo Knill, continues to do ground- breaking work; we co-led a course on the Didactics of Community Art and led community art gatherings throughout the summer.

Coming home to Edmonton is a blessing. The work of preparing for the coming year with World Arts is exciting; many details to attend to with space, students and all of the things involved in running an expressive arts training program. The fact that World Arts interfaces with the European Graduate School makes the transition from Summer to Fall an easy one. It’s a lovely partnership that is mutually supportive. I’ve never been more encouraged by the quality of the students in both Switzerland and here in Edmonton.

World Arts has a wonderful space at the Roots on Whyte Community Building in a great part of Edmonton. The building is new, vibrant, and it feels so healthy to be there. It’s a wonderful gathering of practitioners who do what they do with enthusiasm and gusto....we fit right in. So, off we go into another year of stepping into the Arts Lab to see what works; to see what matters and to do our best to take what we learn out into the community with as much ingenuity and passion as we can. 

I hope to see you in one of the many trainings coming up for us to create art and create community. Cheers and please stay in touch.