Judith Marcuse: Dancing Towards Change

Change the Story / Change the World Episode 97

Judith Marcuse: Moving Toward Change

00:00 - BC

From the Center for the Study of Art and Community. This is Change the Story, Change the World. My name is Bill Cleveland.

00:11 - JM

I think unless we embody sensibilities, we connect the head, the heart and the body, we don't have a complete range of experience and expression and are limited in what we think, feel and see. And so I have integrated the body into everything I've done, everything from teaching at the university to the dance making career I've had, to the research that we've done, to the forms of advocacy that I've engaged in. So, it's intrinsic to my being.

00:50 - BC

If Canada had a queen of the arts, it would have to be Judith Marcuse. As you've just heard her describe not only the expressive through-line of her life's work, but the embodied belief system that defines that work's purpose, It's clear that these words are much more than a revered artist reflecting on her art. More like a creative community organizer sharing the tenets of a rising social movement. Which, of course, would probably be a more accurate way of describing the amazing mix of healing, connecting, advocating, motivating, inspiring, teaching and learning that has characterized her long and varied journey as a creative actor and change agent in the world.

Actually, I'd have to say that if Judith did wake up one day to find herself being referred to as the queen of anything, the first thing she would do is abdicate. This is because practically everything she's done, the dance works, the festivals, the symposiums, the classes, the research and the campaigning have all been conceived, and made manifest as works of a collective creative community.

02:04

In this episode, we not only explore the genesis of Judith Marcuse's storied career, but we also dig deep into how and why she and her partners ended up inventing what amounts to a new creative practice to accommodate their unique vision of how art and artists can be a potent force for social change.

Part One: Making Safety Together.

Judith, welcome to the show. I'm going to begin by stating straight out that, because you have only about 400 chapters to your story, so it's going to be up to you to decide which ones personifies the arc of your journey. So I'll just start by asking what is it that you do in the world?

02:53 - JM

I've been thinking about that question because it's hard to synthesize everything, but I've come up with a creative animator.

03:01 - BC

Talk more about. What does that mean? How does that translate?

03:07 - JM

Yeah, it means many things for me. From the very beginning, I grew up in an activist household. I collected baby teeth when I was in kindergarten for strontium-90 testing during the ban, the bomb era, so that was my first sort of activist action. So most of my life I've been concerned about issues of social justice, environmental justice, even years and years and years ago and, it feels, except for a period when I was a performer with various dance companies, when I was focused on career, I was really concerned about integrating the arts into conversations and experiences that can lead to action for positive change. So it feels like there has been some consistency to the work I've done over the many years, and now, as I write a memoir to try to bring together and make sense of my life, I do see that pattern.

04:14 - BC

So, the thing you mentioned only briefly, which is your lifelong career as a person who is involved with movement, the art form we call dance, but much more than that. And how does that connect with the arc of the journey of social change and better communities?

04:37 - JM

Lovely question. I think unless we embody sensibilities, we connect the head, the heart and the body. We don't have a complete range of experience and expression, are limited in what we think, feel and see, and so I have integrated the body into everything. I've done everything, from teaching at the university to the dance making career I've had to the research that we've done, to the forms of advocacy that I've engaged in. So it's intrinsic to my being. I think unless we embody sensibilities, we connect the head, the heart and the body. We don't have a complete range of experience and expression. We are limited in what we think, feel and see. From teaching at the university to the dance-making career I've had to the research that we've done, to the forms of advocacy that I've engaged in. So it's intrinsic to my being and so that's how I communicate in part.

05:58 - BC

So, this intrinsic connection between the head, the hand, the heart, the body. When did you come to know that? When did that reveal itself to you?

06:11 - JM

I think in an unconscious way, that was instilled in me by my first teacher, who was my aunt Elsie Solomons, who believed in the creative capacity of everyone, who was a storyteller as well as a dance teacher, who encouraged us in every class, in the last third of the class, to make up dances about things that mattered to us, and so she celebrated the inherent creativity of the people in the room, and that sensibility has stayed with me all my life.

06:49 - BC

So I'm just going to venture from my peripheral understanding of dance education. That's not a normal thing in a dance class.

06:59 - JM

No, definitely not, definitely not. Remember this was the 50s, when things were even more conservative than they are now, when things just blossomed and opened up. Elsie had studied with someone called Kurt Jooss uh, famous, uh, expressionist activist choreographer who had left Germany. For, for England, I think around 39, 40, something like that. And he's very famous for a, uh, critical look at, at, at political sensibilities, political life. A piece called The Green Table.

07:34 - BC

Here's an excerpt from a documentary on Jooss's life called Commitment to Dance.

07:43 - Documentary Narrator

rd of July: 1932

08:29 - JM

And, like most of my family, Elsie was very progressive politically and imbued the conversations that went along with our creative process in those classes with questions around what mattered to us. So, there was a process of inquiry, which has also become essential to the work I do.

08:53 - BC

Yeah, so the whole idea of an art form as a process of research, experimentation, often posing questions that aren't particularly answerable but lend themselves to the capacity of humans to make image and form and rhythm, that can get at those kinds of questions a little better than the PowerPoint presentation.

09:22 - JM

Absolutely. I couldn't agree with you more, bill. And in the art for social change, what we call ASC work that we've been doing for so many decades, I often say, and as many others do, that the process of asking those questions and exploring them in a collective situation where we're listening to each other and feeding off each other's sensibilities really listening to the body as well as to the blah blah, the words is essential, that the process is absolutely more important than the product.

09:56 - BC

Yeah, the other thing that isn't particularly common to arts education is this idea that what you do as a maker, as a creator, is intrinsically connected to what's going on in the world around you and your ability to influence it or connect to it or even make change. Where do those two dots get connected?

10:20 - JM

Well, that's the big leap, isn't it? One of the things I really deeply believe in is the notion of coalitions and partnerships, connecting with people with whom you may or may not agree, but rather to engage in exchange that might lead to more effective collective action for change. So, to reduce the silos of activism which prevent people from having the power to do what they want to do by collectivism, by coalitions, and I've often proselytized for artists to work with other change organizations, non-arts change organizations, as I know you have.

11:08 - BC

Yeah. So now I'm just going to go back to the art form, particularly as a choreographer. The idea of a choreographer as a collective animateur rather than a director is also somewhat contrarian. So how did that play out as you began to assert your creative vision and connect to a company of dancers that you've been working with for your whole life? How did that play out?

11:37 - JM

A few weeks ago, I had some lovely hours spent online with a former dancers company going back to “84”, some of whom have been in touch with each other over the years and others who have not seen each other since company days, and we had two-hour sessions with two groups of people and from all over the world Australia, Germany, the UK, Canada, the US.

12:07

It was quite a moving reunion for both times, both sessions, and the first thing that came up when I asked what do you remember, what sensibility, what do you feel in your body when you think about your time working as a group with everyone else? And in both cases they said we were a team, they had a voice, that we had respect and trust, and we were a hugely touring company and we had all kinds of challenges on the road, and life of a dancer is not easy especially then, I would say. And so, I tried to foster in our day-to-day work together, whether it was class or rehearsal or performance, a sense that we could talk about anything we wanted to and that the hierarchy was less imposed hierarchy was less imposed.

13:10 - BC

So, Judith, when you mention hierarchy, you're talking about very established pecking order, patterns of deference and authority that truly define the dance world culture you came up in for most of the 20th century and, in many ways, continues to this day. Could you talk about how you managed to create what might be called the dance counterculture that you just described?

13:31 - JM

I went to the Royal Ballet School in London in the early 60s, 61 to 63, Beatles, Carnaby Street, all that wonderful period in the city. But I was in a Victorian hierarchical environment and that experience where I was first exposed to competition which was new to me. I had never experienced that really at home in Montreal and the sense that I was being groomed for a hierarchical situation in a ballet company which is from the prima ballerina down to the corps de ballet, that had a profound effect on me. As did being on tour with the last company I worked with, Rambert, where we went all over the place and actually touring with a lot of different companies.

14:21

In fact, I've just been writing about all the experiences I had while on tour, like going to Ceausescu's Romania, having two soldiers with submachine guns standing on either side of the proscenium as we rehearsed, having our books stolen from the hotel rooms, being told that guy over there is a spy, be careful what you say. Or going to Myanmar, to Burma at the time, the second group of artists to go into that country after the isolation of the military junta,12 years, and feeling the oppression and experiencing a lot of it in various ways. Or being in South Korea during tensions and coming back from the theater and military vehicles and seeing tanks at major intersections as we went back to the hotel. There's just so many experiences; seeing favelas, seeing slums cheek by jowl in Manila, with gated communities guarded by soldiers, security guys with guns, or working in Pakistan or West Africa or Ecuador for five years, or Japan.

15:35

All these experiences just feed into not only how we ran the company as a collective in a real sense, but how all that experience as a performer and as a speaker and a teacher and various things have informed how I do my work.

15:57 - BC

And in all of these circumstances’ human beings with the same hopes and dreams as anybody else were living in circumstances where the norm was the extreme conditions that you just described. And I hear you saying I'm going to try to do something that is an antidote to that way of being in the world and doing this.

I know you sat across the table from people who are not in the art world as collaborators. And I'm wondering, given this, as you interacted with other organizations with different ways of thinking about how to work, what some of those encounters were like. Where this collective, body-centered way of thinking connected with folks who might actually be thinking more in terms of strategy, and policy, and those kinds of things.

16:59 - JM

Yeah, great question. I'm thinking back to a fairly recent collaboration with the university in Hong Kong and, in the end, one of the exercises we did with a group of about maybe 20 students online, half of whom didn't show their faces or use their real names. One of the exercises was draw a picture of yourself in Hong Kong now and in five years, and it was really interesting that about half of them imagined themselves not in Hong Kong anymore and that was a clarifying moment for some people in that workshop.

18:06 - BC

Now you've done a lot of work with young people, some of which were very long-term, dealing with really hard issues they were facing in their lives. Could you talk about some of those initiatives?

18:19 - JM

When we did the 20 years of work with teenagers. 15- to 18-year-olds, there were three six-year projects. We partnered with youth-centered organizations across Canada. The first project was around the issues that lead to teen suicide. The second was around how youth experience violence in their lives and their perspectives on it. And the third one was around earth, social justice, environment issues. So, it was three years of workshops with young people some 400 kids in each project to elicit, to encourage them to express themselves in many ways about how they thought about these topics and the topics came from them, as it turned out.

19:05

And we partnered with youth-centered organizations across the country because we toured these productions. They were large multimedia productions, and we had an advisory, a youth advisory and an advisory of professionals, counselors and people like that. What was very interesting was in those situations the kids were far more adventurous and willing to take risks than the adults, not unexpected, even really progressive psychiatrists and psychologists and academics and youth counselors and the kids crisis line and everything else. And I guess one of the things I learned from that long period of working was that without a process of developing a sense of safety in these conversations, although nothing is really safe, that process of getting to know each other, to understand each other's sensibilities. Without that process you can't move forward, because you're bringing baggage in, and you haven't been listening to each other.

20:24 - BC

Part Two: Making Sense.

Judith, I know that this kind of ground laying and accountability is a really important part of your practice. You pay a lot of attention to what makes the most sense for the people you're engaging with. You also ask a lot of questions about what art and social change approaches have proved effective and what have not. What have you learned?

20:54 - JM

So, we had a six-year research project. It was a study of art for social change in Canada. We interviewed around 100 people who had been involved in partnerships both sides of the partnerships, what mattered, what worked, what didn't work, what was the outcome. And out of that developed a guide to the development and sustainability of partnering, and it's up on our website, people can access it in our resources. And it's up on our website. People can access it in our resources. But that process of getting to know each other and building a sense of trust so that people can express themselves in a deeper and more direct way without feeling vulnerable or feeling vulnerable and living there, seemed to me the most important part of this those relationship building processes.

21:46 - BC

I spent my life asking those kinds of questions and that issue is consistently right at the top -- -I don't care how well-intentioned you are, I don't care what the subject is, whoever is in the room, whether they're all people who have status or not --- that we're all human beings and safety is a preeminent issue for us —- as to whether we're going to show up or how we're going to show up. So, the question to you is given that the first step in the creation of a partnership or collaboration is to create a safe enough space, what did your movement-based orientation in the world bring to that that somebody who's a trained facilitator might not.

22:42 - JM

Martha Graham said, we're all dancers, some of us know it. Bringing in embodied nonverbal games and exercises some of them Boal-based, some of them theater games, some of them stuff that I've put together provides, in my opinion, another form of communication, because the body doesn't lie. So often in the facilitation work I do we don't even talk that much at the beginning, but we move.

23:12 - BC

And I have to believe, particularly when you're in other places, other cultures obviously, where some people are not even speaking the same language, it's the foundation for the whole thing.

23:24 - JM

Yeah.

23:24 - BC

The other thing that often happens, particularly in circumstances with oppressive rules and guardrails and watchers and snitches, is that artists that live in those tyrannies can make use of creative strategies that allow them to explore ideas and issues that are mysterious that are verboten, that are potentially dangerous, using creative codes, metaphors and insider memes. And that skill set is more than just an aesthetic conceit.

23:56

It becomes a survival strategy for both artists and their audiences. One of the reasons we can get away with it is a lot of gatekeepers aren't actually aware that those languages are being spoken, and I'm just wondering what is your thought about the current circumstances, and how that plays out in our journey going forward in our quasi-democracies that are trying to save themselves?

24:32 - JM

It's a really scary time right now. The rise of fascism, not just in foreign places but right at home, is terrifying. I think of a colleague from Beijing who told me that at a conference that we organized here, that his fear for his country was the ingrained self-censorship that had developed as a result of the history there. I think how far do we go in encouraging people to voice their thoughts, their feelings? Huge responsibility Do we stay within our bubbles? Do we stay within our bubbles? Creative inquiry how far does it go? And here again the coalitions become the important part, the partnerships, the conversations of people who are aware and committed to change. Otherwise, we're isolated and we're in jeopardy.

25:26 - BC

Yeah, and you're talking about two kinds of isolation. The first one is self-imposed, that silence. That's not just silence, that's what's not said, that's number one. And then the other one, which is that external recognition that there's just places we don't go, even with each other. I was thinking about that idea of the collective. People often think of it as a value-based way of working together to get the best of human collaboration and cooperation. But it's something else. There's a safety there.

26:01 - JM

Absolutely.

26:02 - BC

If we're conversant in that language, in the heart language and the trust, that's really, it's basically a trust incubator. Collective does not work without trust. It breaks completely apart. All the warning signals, the sirens go off very quickly when the trust is broken. And we've all had that experience, especially in the creative process. It's just you're so vulnerable in that.

I feel so, so sad for people who do not have access to that collective safety --- a sense that I can nod and we know what we're thinking. I mean everything from just the ability to have agency in the world to not being lonely, because I think those silences, and the sense of safety, the lack of those things, are just the epitome of loneliness.

27:04 - JM

Absolutely. I think back to those workshops with the teenagers and how, over and over again, they're surprised that other people in the group were feeling and thinking the same things, that they were not alone, and, in the subsequent expression of their thoughts and feelings through performance, how the audience wrote to us and said I'm not alone. Yes, terrible loneliness everywhere.

27:35 - BC

And a loneliness that becomes so normal that some people have a hard time even identifying themselves as lonely. That's what I found in prison. The prison community has as its norm, that's obvious lack of safety, but on all ways physical safety of course, but psychological safety, emotional safety and the actual responsibility of introducing a space that was safer, and how potentially dangerous that is in a place where everything else is unsafe. As people leave the room, I could see them putting their mask back on. John Bergman, my friend, who works in theater around the world in prisons and other places, talks about the multiple masks we all wear, but particularly in places that are so unsafe, how dangerous it can be to have a place where people take their mask off. They have to remember to put it back on.

28:41

Part Three, Really Cooking.

So, I'm going to jump a little bit here. You have worked in so many directions with your process, with your social change mission. If you could just talk about some of those that you just say oh okay, we were cooking when the miracles and the magic showed up indelibly.

29:08 - JM

The first thought that came to my mind is the joy of our most recent project. It was three years of a mentorship project where we paired seasoned Art for Social Change artists with less experienced people, and then paired them with environmental NGOs to do community engaged projects focused on environmental social justice issues over a period of six months. A national program, which we had to, very early on, switch to online activities because it was just as COVID was ramping up, so we were able to connect people in the Northwest Territories with people in Halifax.

30:00

It was truly a national and intercultural coming together which would not have been possible, and very rigorous process, with people outlining what they were hoping to get, what their processes would be down to, details of how often they plan to meet everything malleable and changeable, reporting back, interviews with the NGO hosts there were 20 of them over the course of the program.

I guess there were about 100 participants in all and what was so totally enlivening and energizing was the optimism and passion of everyone involved in this process. And so, we were like a dating service, matching up artists with artists and then artists with the NGOs, and we met every month as a collective, everybody together, and they were paid and it was just very joyful. And there are blogs from most of the participants on the website if people are interested to see the many projects that were initiated and the relationships, many of which are still extant, people still working together.

31:25 - BC

So each of these NGOs obviously have a mission that is related to climate justice, et cetera, and could you describe some of the ways in which the creative practitioners and the climate justice NGOs work together to fulfill their missions?

31:51 - JM

Well, there was a long period of exchange, and so the projects that emerged were ones that both the artists and the NGOs many of whom had never worked with artists before were excited about, and they ranged from eventual exhibitions of artwork that people had created about eco-anxiety, for example, and which was put online and other people could see it, and there were discussions around the various pieces to something called the Butterfly Project in Toronto, where there was a garden that people could walk around with performances and songs that happened at various places in the garden, to people creating plays or songs. In the Northwest Territories, families created songs about the caribou.

32:40 - BC

One of the projects that emerged from this climate-focused initiative, which was called Futures Forward was a collaboration between the musician Tanya Kalmanovich and community developer and environmental activist, Teika Newton, called the Tar Sands Songbook. The songbook is a documentary music theater work that explores the intense social, political and economic struggles surrounding the Athabasca oil sands gripping Kalmanovitch's hometown of Fort McMurray, canada. Here first, is Tanya Kalmanovitch from the project trailer, and then her partner, Teika Newton, both reflecting on their experience.

33:21 - Tanya Kalmanovitch (Interviewee)

My name is Tanya Kalmanovitch and I'm working on a new project, a documentary play with music, called the Tar Sands Songbook. For most of my life, if someone asked me where I was from, I didn't have an easy answer. Fort McMurray wasn't on the map. But a few years ago, something changed. Projects like the Keystone XL Pipeline became front page news and suddenly I didn't have to explain where I was from. I could just say oil sands. And not only did people know where it was, they had opinions about it. It's like this guy I met who said he'd gone to Fort McMurray because he wanted to see ground zero for climate change Ground zero.

34:05

This is where I was born. It's where my dad's ESSO station was. It's where my mother heard a symphony orchestra for the first time. My father moved us there to work for the Great Canadian Oil Sands. My stepfather was an engineer for SunCorp. Oil convened the people and forces that shaped my life. Fifty years ago they opened the world's first oil mine near Fort McMurray. A trailblazing industrial experiment turned Canada into a world energy leader, but it's also transformed the land and its people irreparably. I became a musician because it had nothing to do with oil. It's taken me until now to see that the things I had imagined to be separate. music and oil, past and progress, art and business, remote northern towns and the capitals of the world are in fact closely intertwined.

35:03

Oil, like music, is an elixir of possibility. As a child, music seduced me with beauty, promise and dreams. Oil, as it turns out, is not so different. There are many things we can't change, but one thing we can change is the story we tell about ourselves. So last year I went back to Fort McMurray for the first time since I was a child, and further north to Fort Chipewyan, a small community downstream from the mining operations. I interviewed engineers, indigenous activists, heavy equipment operators, elders, scientists and members of my own family. Their stories and mine are the heart of the Tar Sands Songbook. It's a documentary play with music about how we remember our life before oil and how we imagine our life after oil. We might spend a minute or two on a news article or a few seconds on a soundbite, but in a theater, audiences gather to wrestle collectively with complex issues and they're doing it together in real time. For this piece I've written songs with sparrows, propane cannons and pipelines Sounds like Mordor.

36:21

And I've also been searching for other notes, not just notes of fear, but the notes of joy and resilience. These are the songs of the Tar Sands Songbook. We've turned a corner in our conversation about climate change, but after the oil sands pass the event horizon, their legacy will be felt for generations to come. This project offers an opening. Knowing about oil and the urgency of climate change is different from entering into these issues imaginatively. I'm hoping to offer people a way to explore their relationships to energy, the choices they make and the possibilities for the future.

37:25 - Teika Newton (Interviewee)

One of the things that's so powerful about using the space that art provides us for reflection is that it's a socially sanctioned way of grieving publicly and together, collectively. I don't think we get very many opportunities to do that and for me, a lot of the connection that I made through the Tarzan songbook work was really to sit with my own grief and to hear and feel and experience the grief of others collectively and to go through that mourning process and then to come out of it with hope afterward, and I think it's hope that's born out of the connection that we have with one another and the possibilities that relationships carry for us to be creative together and to imagine something better. So I think that our work with Tanya on the Tarzan Songbook was really just like a little kernel of what's possible, and I hope we get to continue the work long into the future, because it's just so transformatively powerful and beautiful.

38:27 - JM

So, the diversity of the outcomes was part of the joy, because then that was shared.

38:32 - BC

Yeah.

38:32 - JM

So that was a really happy project.

38:35 - BC

So, I would just point to something that I've been encountering a lot, and that is the terrible conundrum of having a worldwide existential event that, by necessity, includes both grieving and celebration. “Okay, we love the earth. Oh, my God, terrible things are happening” --- in a way that doesn't break the spirit, and what you're describing and what we just heard, it's what artists bring to the conversation, above and beyond the science, of the scary thing that's happening to all of us. Does that make sense?

39:10 - JM

Absolutely.

39:12

We created a two-year master's program in art for social change at the university here, and one of the first things we did, one of the first exercises that we did at the very beginning of the process, was to ask people to walk around in their neighborhood and identify one issue that hit them as a result of what they were seeing and probably because of the mindset of the people in the class.

39:43

Many of those issues were about the environment and the experience of engaging in dialogue about these issues in a way that empowers people rather than beats them down. The making images of beautiful things in nature and then putting that side by side with deforestation and depredation of the natural world and having a conversation about it and making a song about it or a movement piece, or there's a release of energy there. There's a sense of agency that comes as a result of voicing one's thoughts and feelings. That might, if we're lucky, lead to engagement with the particular issue or other issues. So it's engendering new energy, new possibility for change, rather than getting stuck in that if there's nothing we can do, then we're doomed.

40:47 - BC

Exactly and at the very center of all this is that art making is a transformative process and some would say it harnesses the most powerful transformative process in our universe, which is human creativity and the imagination. But engaging it is not a serendipitous thing.

It's something that reminds me of there was a time I visited Penland School, which is an incredible center of craft in America in the western North Carolina hills. A ceramic artist invited us to a table with lumps of clay, with not a lot of conversation at all, and just said I would like you to make an atomic bomb. And nobody had to ask any questions like what kind or ballistic missile or anything. It was just we all have that unconscious thing in our head and people did it.

And people were weeping, it really intense, and everybody finished, and he said okay, we're changing this, we're transforming these. Now I want you to fall in love with the earth and I want you to take that thing and change it.

Every one of them looked like they were made out of metal. So, the actual act of just bending. It was an incredibly empowering thing. And then it was like the floodgates of the imagination, once that tyranny that it had on all of our hearts, once it started to move. “Oh okay, where do I want to go with this?” I'm changing this story, that story stinks,

42:28 - JM

I think, of Arlene Goldbard's notion of the world being divided into data stand and story time. And we live in Datastan and we discount stories often as irrelevant or unappreciated, shall we say.

42:51 - Arlene Goldbard (Interviewee)

I see this kind of epidemic of quantification. You know where people think that they know something real about the state of our well-being by hearing the numbers, that only what can be quantified, what can be weighed, measured or counted, actually counts as truth or useful data. But I think there's a lot of data that can't be quantified, that can only be portrayed through stories, and that's a place where artists have something major to contribute to our well-being.

43:21 - BC

the Arts, back in the fall of: 2020

43:32 - JM

And the generation of stories, the generation of imagination, the flow that happens internally when people are allowed to think in a different way, to feel and attach tangible processes to that door opening to story land. And I'm sure you've encountered this countless times. “Oh, I'm not an artist, I can't draw, I can't dance,” yeah, but you did when you were a kid. So it's inherent in us and it's an element of our being that has largely been denied in our culture. And when arts education disappears in schools, kids don't even have a sense of their own possibility for expression.

44:20 - BC

Well, here's the optimism that I bring to it. I can't tell you how many times I've been in that movie that you just described. “That's not me. I'm sitting over here in the corner, I'll watch.” And the work that you and I have been involved in our whole lives is to provide a path for that person to get out of the periphery and reintroduce them to this amazingly powerful seed that's still in them and they're ready to go.

44:50 - JM

Even if we're talking about teen suicide. I loved working with those teenagers because they were. They took risks, even though they were real deep risks, but it can be a very quick process. The light goes on and they've given themselves permission. Yeah, the light goes on and they've given themselves permission.

45:09 - BC

Part Four: Curious Listening

So, one of the things that you've done that, I think, is unique, many of the people, I think, in our field have a place where they found a home and they hunkered down in it. A company, a city, a town you have consistently been a human dot connector, I know, fueled by your curiosity and your interest and your love of the world. Some people aspire to that. They don't get to do it. You've traveled the world. You've connected to people. You've seen how the work we're talking about shows up in different places under different circumstances. What have you learned outside of the North American bubble that has contributed to your own capacity to do this work well?

46:08 - JM

I've met so many incredible people doing amazing work in circumstances where they have nothing and in circumstances where the work is dangerous, and so one of the lessons is just about. There's that word again privilege, my own privilege, which is a galvanizing sensibility. Given my privilege, what can I possibly do? I think of. I had spoken about the situation in Pakistan I mean, there's so many stories from my time there but my host, whom I had brought to Vancouver we did a big conference. There were people from many countries, mostly the global south, came together to just talk about our work over like a four-day period years ago, and so we had discovered this guy, this organization in Pakistan, and then he invited me to go there.

47:04

On my second day in Lahore, something was up. I didn't know what it was, and he later informed me that night that he had received a death threat for the work he was doing, which was about theater and self-expression of the courage and sense of possibility that people have, even in working in South Africa. Artist Proof, great organization, Kim Berman, who's been just phenomenal pioneer there in the work. At a conference in Stellenbosch a few years ago, there were people who had been working with the same communities for seven years, eight years. Actually, they're the puppeteers who did War Horse.

47:54 - BC

Oh yeah, I spent time with Kim documenting the extraordinary Artist Proof story, which, above all, is a saga of resilience and patience and humility, and I would venture some of that rubbed off on you, am I right?

48:13 - JM

Yes, I've learned to listen better. I'm a very impatient person often and I jump to conclusions. That's my instinct. I'm fast and this work has taught me to slow down and give space, and I think a lot of us who are A-types are already formulating answers to questions that are in the air, without listening to other people's answers or responses, and especially being in situations where I'm a total stranger and have to be an observer rather than an active participant.

48:47

That has taught me humility, and I think my powers of observation have probably increased over the years.

48:54 - BC

Well, you just nailed it for me. One of the things I've learned in similar circumstances, where you can't assume, because there is so much that is fragile, that what would seem like common sense isn't in play, because of the delicate nature of the social structure, or even the agreement of what's okay and what's not okay. Yeah, and so the flip side of this is, I mean, you talk about how quick to judge we can be. I think we live in a force field of quick-to-judge, where everybody's doing it all the time and the thing that we need the most, which is who are you, who am I in connection with you, and it's not so simple. And if we just go to those default assumptions, we're doomed. And I believe that your work, the work of being on the floor, moving this way, moving that way, watching, seeing --- “Oh my God, what did you just do?”

“I don't know, I just had an itch.”

“That was fabulous.”

Okay. So to be surprised, to not assume that the structure that we've all learned is going to give you the outcome that you're looking for, the serendipitous, all the cliches “There are no mistakes,” you know” Fail, fail, fail.” all those things can teach us how to be with difference in a way that is growth producing rather than deficit making. And it takes a certain level of risk taking and generosity and curiosity for that to happen, and trust, and resiliency and the understanding. You know, “We've been through this before. It's not the end of the world if we're wrong.” Right, I mean we all know circumstances in which we've invited the world to come in and go. “Ok, tell me. Tell me where I'm wrong.”

51:02 - JM

Yeah Well, one of the phrases that I'd have used a lot over the years is, “I'm not sure I agree with myself.”

51:08 - BC

I love that.

51:10 - JM

So that uncertainty is really an asset.

51:13 - BC

It is.

51:14 - JM

I think in any of these processes.

51:17 - BC

Especially these days. So, we could go on forever. But an exit strategy here is for me to ask okay, what's sparking you? What sources of wisdom, inspiration,

51:50 - JM

I'm reading a lot these days as I write, as I'm writing, I'm, I'm trying to learn from what I read. There's a Canadian poet called Lorna Crozier, who does wonderful work, And I'm currently reading her memoir, and it's a combination of storytelling and reflections in poetic language that I find inspiring as I try to become a better writer.

As I try to become a better writer, I think of Michael Cunningham's new book called Day and I was halfway through it when I started losing patience with the characters that these are self-indulgent, silly characters, and then he hits you with the internal lives of these people in really poetic language. So that's what I'm focused on these days.

But there have been so many people Bill, Arlene Goldbard, David Diamond in Vancouver, Francois Matarazzo the list goes on and on. And in doing all the teaching that I've done in post-secondary situations, I've just been amassing a lot of writing from a lot of people, many of whom, including you, who have done extraordinary work and have reported back on it. That has been hugely inspiring.

There are huge resources on our website, the International Center of Art for Social Change, ICASC , and there are all kinds of resources available on it Videos, results from our six years of research.

53:19 - BC

Great Well, Judith. Thank you again. This has been fantastic.

53:24 - JM

I've really enjoyed it, bill. It's been a lovely conversation, thank you.

53:29 - BC

And thanks to you, dear friends and curious listeners, for spending your always precious, short in supply time hanging out with us for the last hour or so. As most of you are aware, Change the Story, Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hands of the maestro Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe, Our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever-present spirit of UKE 235. So, until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. And, once again, please know that this episode has been 100% human.